Contregarde am Kienlesberg (Werk IX)

The Contregarde am Kienlesberg, Work Nine of the Federal Fortress, stands beside the Ruhetal Gate in Germany. A road, a railway line and a motorway exit crowd around it, hiding it from a passing glance. What you find is a single stretch of stone wall, just right of the small pedestrian gate. A defensive work once stood thirty metres high here, and road building has swallowed nearly all of it.

Between 1843 and 1852, this counter-guard rose under Colonel von Hügel: a defensive work laid before a bastion to protect it. The works on the city side carried Roman numerals, and this one took number nine. It guarded the Kienlesberg Bastion and swept the ditch of Courtine Eight with flanking cannon fire. The fortress's mountain front began here, its forward angle commanding the whole Blau lowlands. In the escarp wall of the left face sat the Rock Battery, cannons built straight into the stone. Its rampart piled seven mounds of earth and a tangle of angles into one defensive front. People simply called it the Seven Little Hills. A dry ditch ringed the position, and a small side gate gave pedestrians their own way into the foreground. No garrison lived here: it served the defence of Works Eight and Ten alone, with troops arriving only in an emergency. Part of it fell in 1904 for the Kienlesberg road, and the federal highway took almost everything else in 1968.

Where guns once watched the foreground, cars turn off the motorway exit. A few rock casemates survive by the railway line, vaulted chambers no one can enter any more. Behind the surviving stones sat a battery with the whole Blau lowlands in reach of its guns. Only this piece of wall still tells of it.