Of course, that couldn't be further from the truth. For both World Wars, most especially the first, this region saw horrific fighting, death and destruction. And that was just the culmination of centuries of petty princelings and power-hungry kings arranging borders with the blood of their people.
The memories are all around you. Motorway exits all along the route between Calais and Luxembourg are a list of past horrors: Ypres, Verdun, the Somme. Evidently farmers still plough up the detrius of the trenches. It seemed almost inevitable that one evening we ended up watching "Paths of Glory", one of Stanley Kubrick's early films featuring Kirk Douglas as a particularly sane leader in the trenches trying to defend his men from the insanity of the generals' orders.
Moving on to the next war, the Maginot Line snakes across the nearby French countryside. Now just a tourist attraction, it was once a wall, punctuated with bunkers, to keep the Germans from attacking. (It worked, sort of. The Nazis went through Belgium instead, avoiding the barrier all together.) Near Luxembourg city you'll find two sprawling military cemeteries from WWII. One for the Germans, one for the Americans. In a perverse reminder of how close the fighting was, the burial grounds are barely a mile from each other, and easily visited together.
Both are sobering, but in different ways. The American site is vast, with clean lines, bright white crosses, rigidly tidy landscape, a modernist memorial and massive walls with displays carved upon them showing the progress of the war. Amongst the hundreds of graves, one in particular stands out. General Patton, who grew to old age and died at home, wished to be buried here amongst his men. It is poignant, tragic, and causes you to thank the people who made the ultimate sacrafine, whilst contemplating the horror of war. But for oppressive gloom, you have to move to the Germans.
The German cemetery is set within a dark wood. You walk down a quiet wooded path until you're confronted with a door in a dark granite wall. Once inside, more of the requisite lines of crosses commemorating lives too short. But these are all of dark stone, in a heavier, more medieval shape. Combined with the encroaching wood, it's not a place you want to linger. But like the American site, it does its job. You walk away shaken, a bit tearful and deeply appreciative of the peace that now blankets this land.
Really, when you think about it ... how amazing is that? Just 60 years ago the place was a bloodbath, with a multiple-century history of the same. Today, it's a quiet backwater where only a few sites and signs even remind us of past violence. Could things change this fast in the Middle East? Might tourists in some future Iran or Iraq shake their heads in wonder that so much strife once took place across peaceful lands? I doubt the boys in the trenches in 1914 could have imagined today's Luxembourg. So, who knows?
All I can say is that, given these musings, two of the most beautiful sites I saw on my whole holiday were the French and German border stations on the highways in and out of Luxembourg. Both closed. Mouldering. Desolate. Utterly obsolete. Never have rotting, abandoned buildings been so beautiful. For in their abandonment is a celebration of a real peace in our time.
Let's hope it spreads.
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