ON THE DEFENSIVE

As I breathe in the bracing air of Folkestone in March, I observe on the coast down to Hythe and Dymchurch a fine selection of Martello Towers, those flat-topped strong-points built to defend Britain from a Napoleonic invasion in the early 1800’s. They were garrisoned by an officer and 20 men and would sport an artillery piece, the flat roof giving a 360 degree line of fire. These Towers, rather like those concrete tank-traps that littered our post-WW2 beaches, were never used in anger and I fell to musing about the defensive mentality and its perils.

Martello Tower at Folkestone

The art of fortification no doubt originated with the Ancients but in the modern era the great names were the Marquis de Vauban, whose walled cities adorn France, and the Russian Eduard Todleban, the hero of the defence of Sevastapol during the Crimean War. The Germans were adept at fortification and could rely on the Hindenburg Line in Northern France in WW1, only finally overrun in 1918. The French at huge cost had already repulsed the Germans at the fortress of Verdun in 1916.

The heroic French at Verdun

The perils of adopting a defensive mentality, somewhere to hide behind, somewhere to be safe, were starkly illustrated by the French Maginot Line, that string of high-tech fortresses and obstacles stretching from the Belgian border to Switzerland. The idea of fixed defensive positions was quite sensible, given French demographic and economic realities, but in the event the 1940 Blitzkrieg by-passed the Line and the Germans invaded through the unpromising terrain of the Ardennes, where the Line was weakest. There is still some truth in the belief that the Maginot Line undermined French morale and dulled more imaginative strategies. The German equivalent, The Siegfried Line, was mocked by the British music hall in 1939, but it took a long wait until 1945 before the Allies could indeed “hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line”. Many fortresses were to see suffering, heroism, triumph and disaster in WW2 of which Tobruk, Stalingrad and Breslau are famous examples.

Just as Churchill said after Dunkirk: Wars are not won by retreats and evacuations, so it must be true that campaigns are won by advances, aggression and mobility, by energy, ruthlessness and enterprise. May the Leavers and Remainders in the forthcoming Brexit Referendum learn whatever lessons they can!

I suppose a typical defender in the wholly different sporting world is abrasive John Terry, erstwhile captain of Chelsea, not everyone’s favourite or Arsenal’s Per Mertesacker, their imposing but lumbering centre-back. In cricket the most celebrated defender is accomplished Geoffrey Boycott, who took a long time to build up his innings, often displeasing the spectators with his Yorkshire self-absorption. The all-rounder who most upset and frustrated the Australians was from a rather earlier generation, Trevor “Barnacle” Bailey, almost impossible to dislodge, his endless forward defensive strokes bringing Antipodean groans especially in the 1953 test series when England regained the Ashes.

Trevor "Barnacle" Bailey hits out

Bailey was of course a useful player in many ways but we all enjoyed much more the cavalier skills of Denis Compton, Ted Dexter or Ian Botham, who really set pulses racing!

SMD

05.03.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016.