Austerlitz by Sebald

Pictured below are drawings mapping some examples of 19th-century fortifications. The fortifications of Antwerp are featured in Austerlitz by Sebald. In the book It is explained that each time a new ring of fortification was built around Antwerp, advances in siege techniques made them obsolete, so the Belgians had to commission further defences to proctect the obsolete ones. Unfortunately there complexity ensured that they would never be finished before they became redundant, at which point new walls would have to be constructed. The final fort stood useless until the second world war, when the Germans decided to turn it into a concentration camp. Below the images are two extracts from Austerlitz discussing the fortifications.

Tilbury Fort, Near Gravesend Kent

Fort Breendon and its outer rings,  Antwerp


"Yet, he said, it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.  The construction of fortification, for instance…clearly showed how we feel obliged to keep surrounding ourselves with defences, built in successive phases as a precaution against any incursion by enemy powers, until the idea of concentric rings making their way steadily outward comes up against its natural limits…"

"No one today…has the faintest idea of the boundless amount of theoretical writings on the building of fortifications, of the fantastic nature of the geometric, trigonometric, and logistical calculations they record…yet even from our present standpoint we can see that towards the end of the seventeenth century the star-shaped dodecagon behind trenches had finally crystallised, out of the various available systems, as the preferred ground plan: a kind of ideal typical pattern, which indeed…strikes the layman as an emblem both of absolute power and of the ingenuity the engineers put to the service of that power.  In the practice of warfare, however, the star-shaped fortresses which were being built and improved everywhere during the eighteenth century did not answer their purpose, for intent as everyone was on that pattern, it had been forgotten that the largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest enemy forces, and the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive…The frequent result…of resorting to measures of fortification marked in general by a tendency toward paranoid elaboration was that you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it, not to mention the fact that as architectural plans became increasingly complex, the time it took to build them increased as well, and with it the probability that as soon as they were finished, if not before, they would have been overtaken by further developments, both in artillery and in strategic planning, which took account of the growing realisation that everything was decided in movement, not in a state of rest."