Avricourt - The False Frontier
A flagrant reminder
This imposing station isn’t there anymore. For more than forty years it had been an inflaming irritation to the French and they pulled it down as soon as the First World War ended. A triumphalist, Wilhelmine structure, it was the Grenzbahnhof at the frontier where important trains – the “Orient-Express” among them – entered German Lorraine.
Conspicuous in its isolation, the station known as la gare de la frontiere allemande stood alone, a despised symbol of the artificial boundary between France and Germany declared at Versailles in 1871, a flagrant reminder of France’s defeat by Prussia.
At the right corner of the building, from the flat roof above the door, flies the Russian flag, smaller by far than the two German imperial flags drifting in the breeze above the station’s center section. We recall that the sister of the tsar, the Grand Duchess Olga, is traveling in the “Orient-Express” tonight. It is now 1:45 in the morning and the Grand Duchess is almost surely asleep. She won’t see the flag of her homeland flying in tribute to her, the pro forma royal courtesy commonly extended throughout Europe in that age of great and powerful empires and kingdoms.
Nor in her most horrific nightmares could Her Imperial Highness imagine that in a month her brother will order mobilization of the immense Russian army for a war against the country at whose frontier her train has just paused. But she won’t sleep through the sound about to greet her. Despite her lofty position among the royalties of Europe, she’ll be shocked awake by the local band of the German army playing the Russian imperial hymn, followed by the German one. Only then will the train proceed on its way, hauled now by a Prussian “S10”, the marvelous new express locomotive that has stunned the world of railroading.
Now, in the golden light of the splendid day the 28th of June actually was, we see an officer of the 9th Hussar Regiment, garrisoned at Strassburg, speaking with German Avricourt’s Stationmaster.
The leutnant is waiting for his Bummelzug, one of the very slow, short local trains that originated at Avricourt and stopped, it seemed, at every cow pasture in Alsace before arriving in the regional capital.