"God created the earth — except for Holland which was created by the Dutch."  

In the entrance lobby of the new Stadhuis or town hall in the Stopera complex in Amsterdam there is a glass pillar filled with water. The level of the water rises and falls according to the rise and fall of the tide. At low tide the water level falls below ground; at high tide it rises to almost 7 feet above ground. This is to say, were it not for the sea wall and the city's defenses against the elements, Amsterdam would be swamped by the waters of the North Sea twice a day.  

 It is not just Amsterdam. Without human intervention almost half the country would be under water, or at the very least subject to continuous flooding. (This area would encompass your entire route through the Netherlands, once past the heathland around Breda.) The North Sea would come in as far as Utrecht. Holland covers an area of 16,631 square miles, of which about 6,000 square miles are below sea level at high tide.  

The key to understanding the Netherlands is understanding its geography. The story of this country is one long battle against the threat of disastrous flooding. This is a dual danger, coming not just from the sea but also from Holland's great rivers as they make their way to the sea. A map of Holland in the C10 would look very different from a map of Holland today. The course of rivers has been changed, miles of coastline have been lost, vast areas of land reclaimed for habitation and exploitation, and a labyrinthine network of canals has been imposed upon the landscape. This country today is the result of 2,000 years of people fighting against the forces of nature.  

The Means of Defense  The basic sine qua non of Holland's existence are the coastal sand dunes created by the action of the wind and the waves. These dunes have built up over the last 2,000 years, sometimes to a height of 100 feet. On their own, though, they have never been enough to protect the low-lying land behind them from the sea. The sea has broken through on a number of occasions — you only have to look at a map of the country to see where the dunes have been breached, most noticeably in the Delta area and Wadden islands. As a result the coastal dunes have had to be artificially strengthened. They are constantly monitored. Where necessary they are supplemented by dykes. (The governmental body responsible for overseeing all Holland's defences against the sea is the Ministry of Public Works, the Waterstaat.) The principle is very simple: if you can keep the water out you can use the land. And, as already mentioned, it is not just the sea. The western provinces of the Netherlands are low-lying fenland, under constant threat of flooding from rivers in spate. Drainage is very poor. Where the land lies below sea level, drainage is non-existent. To make the land safe, liveable and usable has been the overwhelming preoccupation of this nation throughout its history. It is an unending battle, as seen most recently in the devastating floods of February 1995. Before that there has been a succession of even greater disasters. 1,800 people died, for example, in the floods of 1953 when almost 650,000 acres of land were inundated. Over the last 1,000 years there have been about 20 floods of similar proportions.  

Land reclaimed from the sea, marshes or lakes is known as polderland. To stop flooding protective walls must be built known as dykes. Where the land is at or below sea level and there is no natural drainage the job must be done by machine. The particular machine developed by the Dutch to pump out water was the windmill.  

"He who cannot master the sea is not worthy of the land."  

How to make a basic polder  The following method is old-fashioned, medieval in fact, but effective.  

First find your low-lying fenland. Then build a dyke enclosing the area you want to reclaim. For this you need to make two parallel clay embankments. Put down a thick layer of reed mats between them, weighed down with heavy stones. Pile sand on top of the mats and then bricks, earth and concrete (or a finishing layer of grass) on top of the sand. The dyke for an inland polder needs to be at least 10 feet high and perhaps 100 feet thick at the base. You can treble these figures for a coastal dyke.  

If your polder is inland and lower than sea level at low tide, then there is no natural drainage and you have the constant task of draining off the surplus water and regulating the water level. Empty the water into ditches, pump it into higher ditches, then pump it up again and again until it reaches sea level and drains away into a network of diversion canals and thence to the sea. You do this by means of a series of windmills. (If you want to be a little more cutting edge, you can use diesel or electrically operated pumps.) The effect is the same. After 5 or 6 years your polder will be ready for exploitation. You now have land suitable for human habitation, very fertile and powerfully defended against the threat of flooding.  

The reclaimed soil of the new IJsselmeer polderlands of Flevoland, the twelfth and newest province of the Netherlands since 1986, is the richest and most fertile in Europe. This is no real surprise since the land has never been used, in contrast to the rest of the continent where the soil has been all but exhausted by centuries of cultivation. Fifty years ago this was just waterlogged fenland on the edge of the South Sea or Zuider Zee. The creation of polders is expensive but very profitable.  

Windmills and their successors  It is commonly but wrongly said that the Dutch invented windmills. What is true is that they adapted these industrial machines, from the middle of the C14 onwards, for the purposes of water-pumping and made huge advances in their technology. In the western provinces of the Netherlands the majority of windmills were put to the vital job of draining the polders. (Naturally, in the well-drained eastern provinces windmills were put to industrial uses.) There were once about 10,000 windmills in Holland keeping the country above water. By 1800 their technology had been surpassed by steam power, more efficient and not dependent on unreliable wind power. In this century steam power has itself been superseded by diesel or electrically-operated pumps. Massive reclamation projects like the former Zuider Zee or the Delta Plan have become possible. Today 1,250 miles of dykes are kept dry by 20,000 pumps. About 1,000 windmills still survive, of which perhaps only 200 are still working, mostly for preservation's sake, for reasons of nostalgia and aesthetics. The most spectacular concentration of windmills is at Kinderdijk near Rotterdam where 19 of them together used to drain the Alblasserwaard on the banks of the river Lek.  

Windmills can't say much but they do have a primitive language:  

+ made by the vanes mill at rest, ready for operation
x made by the vanes temporarily out of service or not needed
tilting slightly to the left: mourning
tilting slightly to the right: a happy event
sails decorated with flags, etc., a festival or celebration  

During WW II a similar signalling system used by the Dutch resistance indicated to the English planes flying overhead whether or not it was safe to make a drop.  

Hij heeft een kap van de molen gehad  He's been hit by a windmill (i.e., he's crazy)  

Floods
In years past, the Dutch coastline has changed considerably as a result of human intervention and natural disasters. Most notable in terms of land loss are the 1134 storm, which created the archipelago of Zeeland in the south west, and the 1287 storm, which killed 50,000 people and created the Zuiderzee (now dammed in and renamed the IJsselmeer — see below) in the northwest, giving Amsterdam direct access to the sea. The St. Elizabeth flood of 1421 and the mismanagement in its aftermath destroyed a newly reclaimed polder, replacing it with the 72 square kilometres (28 sq mi) Biesbosch tidal floodplains in the south-centre. The most recent parts of Zeeland were flooded during the North Sea Flood of 1953 when 1,836 people were killed, after which the Delta Plan was executed.

Delta works
After the 1953 disaster, the Delta project, a vast construction effort designed to end the threat from the sea once and for all, was launched in 1958 and largely completed in 2002. The official goal of the Delta project was to reduce the risk of flooding in the province of Zeeland to once per 10,000 years. (For the rest of the country, the protection-level is once per 4,000 years.) This was achieved by raising 3,000 kilometres (1,864 miles) of outer sea-dykes and 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) of inner, canal, and river dikes to "delta" height, and by closing off the sea estuaries of the Zeeland province. New risk assessments occasionally show problems requiring additional Delta project dyke reinforcements. The Delta project is one of the largest construction efforts in human history and is considered by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the seven wonders of the modern world.