LAURA BUSH put in some of the groundwork yesterday for her husband’s conciliatory visit to Old Europe by praising the hospitality offered by Germany to US troops. She did so in a hangar at the Ramstein airbase, surrounded by 3,000 servicemen and so thoroughly sealed off from the rest of Germany that it might as well have been an offshore island.

“Germany is a close friend and ally of the United States,” she said as the army families nodded and waved their paper flags. But in truth Germany, for their visiting President, is largely an abstraction.

President Bush, who arrives in nearby Mainz today, will be riding and (briefly) walking through an empty city. Yesterday, it was starting to resemble a fortress, not just because of the legitimate fear of terrorist attack, but also because of German nervousness that the President might experience some of the lingering hostility to his policies.

“We intend to make our voice heard,” a defiant Tina Kernter, of the organising committee of No Welcome to Bush, said. The anger at Iraq, at Kyoto and the repression of human rights, she said, has been enough to unite various tribes, from Attack to Pax Christi, into a huge swelling protest in Mainz today.

In fact there is only the slimmest chance of Mr Bush even glimpsing a flushed anti-American face.

The Rhine — Europe’s busiest waterway — will be blocked to traffic for the seven hours of the presidential visit. The airspace over Mainz will, in a 37-mile (60km) circumference, become a no-fly zone and, as a police inspector reminded television viewers, it is now fully legal to shoot down any private aircraft that strays across the invisible line. Trains, too, will be paralysed.

“This is not the way to make friends in Germany,” Hartmut Mehdorn, the head of German Railways, grumbled.

All school classes have been cancelled. Mobile phone coverage may be restricted. The Opel factory is to be closed for the day. “We will lose 750 cars,” a spokesman said.

Personal mailboxes have been dismantled in much of the city. Residents along the motorcade route have been told to lower their shutters and not to stray on to the balcony, even to smoke a cigarette. Police say, with a hint of menace, that this will “prevent misunderstandings”. Police marksmen can apparently get the wrong end of the stick.

A stonemason with a stock of granite gravestones 200 metres from a possible presidential access road has been ordered to remove his stock. Some 1,300 manhole covers — that is, a cover for every accredited correspondent in the city — have been sealed tight.

Mr Bush had reportedly requested a town hall meeting with the Germans to flush to the surface some of the transatlantic differences.

Instead, Berlin proposed a short question-and-answer session with bright, uncontroversial graduates dubbed Young Leaders. No walkabout, then, even though that is probably the President’s most natural form of political expression.

Friendship and conciliation is to be the mood music in Mainz and the various disagreements — on Iran, Iraq and China — will no doubt be swaddled in euphemism during the after-lunch briefings.

There was no mistaking the sourness of the German press; in the newspapers at least, the spirit of anti-Americanism will be heard. Mrs Bush visited eight wounded soldiers yesterday just flown in from Iraq. Der Spiegel magazine noted the fact and added: “The President himself does not like such visits . . . nor does he go to the funerals of fallen Americans.”

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