Heart of Europe by Ralph Adams Cram

Where the immemorial Forest of the Ardennes closes in on the Moselle that winds beautifully to the Rhine, there is a little land that can give us small aid in the way of art, for the hand of man and of an implacable fatality has been heavy, and little remains, but it is a place of infinite charm and of significance as well, while in the last year its ancient name has come into the light again, even as it was some centuries ago. It has borne many names, acknowledged many sovereignties; Roman Belgica, part of the kingdom of the Ripuarian Franks, Austrasia, Lorraine, a province of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, Burgundy, the Netherlands (Spanish and Austrian), France again, both of the republican and imperial mode, then back in an amorphous Germany, and now, crushed into a tiny but concentrated state, an independent but sovereign Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, imprisoned for the moment in dark fastnesses of oppression wherefrom no word issues forth, but destined under God to a triumphant release and to a restoration that may mean a return to earlier and wider frontiers.

Luxembourg means that portion of the Heart of Europe lying between the Meuse and the Moselle, and one line drawn from Limbourg to Trèves, another from Verdun to Metz. It is now a tithe of this, but who can say what may be in the future? All its great northern portion has for long been incorporated in the eternally honourable kingdom of Belgium, and there it will remain, but there is always the old Archbishopric of Trèves with its Moselle valley, and there are the lands along the Saar and the new (and old) frontiers of France. At present, as a result of three treaties in which it played the passive part of victim, it is a fourth the size it once had under its first Duke Wenceslas; the first section was lost in 1659, the second at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the third and largest at London in 1859, but, as a Japanese guide remarked at the monastery of Horiuji, "The quality is not dependent on the numerality of quantity," and as nothing was lost but land the indomitable spirit of the people remained intact and merely concentrated itself still more intensely within its shrunken borders.