Of Ships and Sandals

The travel section of Dallas Morning News featured a Kansas City museum with “walls and walls of china and other items” salvaged from the Steamboat Arabia, which sank in the muddy Missouri River in 1856 and which was found buried under a corn field in 1988.

The newspaper pictured the ship, smoke-stack still rising straight up like a telephone pole, sitting in the bottom of a bowl-shaped pit, surrounded by 45-foot walls of Missouri mud.

Another photo showed a salvage worker bringing up from the hull a wide-brimmed leather hat, looking as if it could be cleaned of mud and worn tomorrow, if somewhat out-of-style.

This reminded me of that trip to Europe in 1978 with my 13-year-old son, David. At the Frankfort airport, I got the rental car in gear and immediately drove onto one of those terrifying German autobahns and headed into the city.

With David’s help in looking for signs, we found Army Fifth Corps Headquarters in a multi-story office building built before World War II as the home office of one of Hitler’s munition suppliers. (I think it was I. G. Farben.) A military policeman came out of the building and told me not to park in front; those spaces were reserved for generals.

We were not challenged when we entered the building. I was again (after the autobahn) terrified as we faced the open door of the elevator. We jumped on a continuously moving platform; at the ninth floor we jumped off again. I marveled at soldiers who casually walked off and on that moving elevator.

David and I walked into the offices of Army Intelligence and found my older son analyzing information on the Russians. His officer gave Sergeant Karl the afternoon off, and we headed out sightseeing.

Since both my boys are nuts about military history, the first place we went was to the village of Bad Homburg. A fashionable spa around 1890-1900 – England’s King Edward VII used to “take the waters” there – it gave its name to the homburg hat. We toured the castle of the Dukes of Hesse, typical of the palaces built by minor nobility all over Europe in imitation of Versailles.

But the main reason we went to Bad Homburg was to see the restored Roman fort. In the first and second centuries A.D., this was the border of the Roman Empire. The Roman emperors built a string of forts across Germany, hoping to keep out the hordes of Germans who threatened to overrun the empire. Didn’t do any good; forts and walls never kept out determined invaders.

Various German tribes overran the entire Roman Empire: Franks into France, Visigoths in Spain, “Long beards” became the “Lombards” of Lombardy in Italy, and the Saxons became part of the Anglo-Saxons in England.

The Roman fort at Bad Homburg was abandoned and fell to ruin. In the 19th Century it was restored by Kaiser William II. Modern scholars say the German emperor made lots of mistakes, basing his restoration on German military plans rather than what is now known about Roman fort construction.

A small museum displays objects found by digging in the old Roman well. Evidently, when the Roman Army gave up on trying to keep out the Germans, the soldiers threw a lot of things down the well before withdrawing from the fort. In a glass case I saw a set of carpenter’s tools, hammers, pliers, chisels, etc, which could go into a toolbox today.

Another wall displayed dozens of sandals, original Roman ones, blackened and crushed by centuries underground along side modern duplications. A variety of designs, straps and slides, open-toed and toes covered in leather – it could have been a display you would see in the shoe department at Macy’s.

We think we are so modern. In two thousand years we have not improved on the design of tools and summer sandals. Why do we think we have improved defensive techniques? Why are we building that wall on the Mexican border? Does anyone really think it will solve the immigration problem? Remember those German hordes.