APART FROM that glimpse of tramlines and slush, the mists of the Nibelungenlied might have risen from the Rhine-bed and enveloped the town; and not only Mainz: the same vapours of oblivion have coiled upstream, enveloping Oppenheim, Worms and Mannheim on their way. I spent a night in each of them and only a few scattered fragments remain: a tower or two, a row of gargoyles, some bridges and pinnacles and buttresses and the perspective of an arcade dwindling into the shadows. There is a statue of Luther that can only belong to Worms; but there are cloisters as well and the blackletter pages of a Gutenberg Bible, a picture of St. Boniface and a twirl of Jesuit columns. Lamplight shines through shields of crimson glass patterned with gold crescents and outlined in lead; but the arch that framed them has gone. And there are lost faces: a chimney sweep, a walrus moustache, a girl’s long fair hair under a tam o’shanter. It is like reconstructing a brontosaur from half an eye socket and a basket full of bones. The cloud lifts at last in the middle of the Ludwigshafen-Mannheim bridge.
After following the Rhine, off and on ever since I had stepped ashore, I was about to leave it for good. The valley had widened after Bingen and opened into the snowy Hessian champaign; the mountains still kept their distance as the river coiled southwards and out of sight. But the Rhine map I unfolded on the balustrade traced its course upstream hundreds of miles and far beyond my range. After Spires and Strasbourg, the Black Forest scowled across the water at the blue line of the Vosges. In hungry winters like this, I had been told, wolves came down from the conifers and trotted through the streets. Freiburg came next, then the Swiss border and the falls of Schaffhausen where the river poured from Lake Constance. Beyond, the map finished in an ultimate and unbroken white chaos of glaciers.
* * *
On the far side of the bridge I abandoned the Rhine for its tributary and after a few miles alongside the Neckar the steep lights of Heidelberg assembled. It was dark by the time I climbed the main street and soon softly-lit panes of coloured glass, under the hanging sign of a Red Ox, were beckoning me indoors. With freezing cheeks and hair caked with snow, I clumped into an entrancing haven of oak beams and carving and alcoves and changing floor levels. A jungle of impedimenta encrusted the interior—mugs and bottles and glasses and antlers—the innocent accumulation of years, not stage props of forced conviviality—and the whole place glowed with a universal patina. It was more like a room in a castle and, except for a cat asleep in front of the stove, quite empty.
This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day’s doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots. An elderly woman came downstairs and settled by the stove with her sewing. Spotting my stick and rucksack and the puddle of melting snow, she said, with a smile, “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?” My German, now fifteen days old, was just up to this: “Who rides so late through night and wind?” But I was puzzled by reitet. (How was I to know that it was the first line of Goethe’s famous Erlkönig, made more famous still by the music of Schubert?) What, a foreigner? I knew what to say at this point, and came in on cue:... “Englischer Student...zu Fuss nach Konstantinopel”...I’d got it pat by now. “Konstantinopel?” she said. “Oh Weh!” O Woe! So far! And in midwinter too. She asked where I would be the day after, on New Year’s Eve. Somewhere on the road, I said, “You can’t go wandering about in the snow on Sylvesterabend!” she answered. “And where are you staying tonight, pray?” I hadn’t thought yet. Her husband had come in a little while before and overheard our exchange. “Stay with us,” he said. “You must be our guest.”
They were the owner and his wife and their names were Herr and Frau Spengel. Upstairs, on my hostess’s orders, I fished out things to be washed—it was my first laundry since London—and handed them over to the maid: wondering, as I did so, how a German would get on in Oxford if he turned up at The Mitre on a snowy December night.
* * *
One of the stained-glass armorial shields in the windows bore the slanting zigzag of Franken. This old stronghold of the Salian Franks is a part of northern Bavaria now and the Red Ox Inn was the headquarters of the Franconia student league. All the old inns of Heidelberg had these regional associations, and the most exalted of them, the Saxoborussia, was Heidelberg’s Bullingdon and the members were Prussia’s and Saxony’s haughtiest. They held their sessions at Seppl’s next door, where the walls were crowded with faded daguerrotypes of slashed and incipiently side-whiskered scions of the Hochjunkertum defiant in high boots and tricoloured sashes. Their gauntlets grasped basket-hilted sabres. Askew on those faded pates little caps like collapsed képis were tilted to display the initial of the Corps embroidered on the crown—a contorted Gothic cypher and an exclamation mark, all picked out in gold wire. I pestered Fritz Spengel, the son of my hosts, with questions about student life: songs, drinking ritual, and above all, duelling, which wasn’t duelling at all of course, but tribal scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-years’ cult of the humanities.[1] With a sabre from the wall, Fritz demonstrated the stance and the grip and described how the participants were gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were upholstered from harm. Distance was measured; the sabres crossed at the end of outstretched arms; only the wrists moved; to flinch spelt disgrace; and the blades clashed by numbers until the razor-sharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed-in salt, to last a lifetime. I had noticed these academic stigmata on the spectacled faces of doctors and lawyers; brow, cheek or chin, and sometimes all three, were ripped up by this haphazard surgery in puckered or gleaming lines strangely at odds with the wrinkles that middle age had inscribed there. I think Fritz, who was humane, thoughtful and civilized and a few years older than me, looked down on this antique custom, and he answered my question with friendly pity. He knew all too well the dark glamour of the Mensur among foreigners.
The rather sad charm of a university in the vacation pervaded the beautiful town. We explored the academic buildings and the libraries and the museum and wandered round the churches. Formerly a stronghold of the Reform, the town now harbours the rival faiths in peaceful juxtaposition and if it is a Sunday, Gregorian plainsong escapes through the doors of one church and the Lutheran strains of Ein’ feste Burg from the next.
That afternoon, with Fritz and a friend, I climbed through the woods to look at the ruins of the palace that overhangs the town: an enormous complex of dark red stone which turns pink, russet or purple with the vagaries of the light and the hour. The basic mass is mediaeval, but the Renaissance bursts out again and again in gateways and courtyards and galleries and expands in the delicate sixteenth-century carving. Troops of statues posture in their scalloped recesses. Siege and explosion had partly wrecked it when the French ravaged the region. When? In the Thirty Years War; one might have guessed... But who had built it? Didn’t I know? Die Kurfürsten von der Pfalz! The Electors Palatine... We were in the old capital of the Palatinate...
Distant bells, ringing from faraway English class-rooms, were trying to convey a forgotten message; but it was no good. “Guess what this gate is called!” Fritz said, slapping a red column. “The Elizabeth, or English Gate! Named after the English princess.” Of course! I was there at last! The Winter Queen! Elizabeth, the high-spirited daughter of James I, Electress Palatine and, for a year, Queen of Bohemia! She arrived here as a bride of seventeen and for the five years of her reign, Heidelberg, my companions said, had never seen anything like the masques and the revels and the balls. But soon, when the Palatinate and Bohemia were both lost and her brother’s head was cut off and the Commonwealth had reduced her to exile and poverty, she was celebrated as the Queen of Hearts by a galaxy of champions. Her great-niece, Queen Anne, ended the reigning line of the Stuarts and Elizabeth’s grandson, George I, ascended the throne where her descendant still sits. My companions knew much more about it than I did.[2]
In spite of its beauty, it was a chill, grey prospect at this moment. Lagged in sacking for the winter, desolate rose trees pierced the snow-muffled terraces. These were bare of all footprints but our own and the tiny arrows of a robin. Below the last balustrade, the roofs of the town clustered and beyond it flowed the Neckar and then the Rhine, and the Haardt Mountains, and the Palatine Forest rippled away beyond. A sun like an enormous crimson balloon was about to sink into the pallid landscape. It recalled, as it does still, the first time I saw this wintry portent. In a sailor-suit with H.M.S. Indomitable on my cap-ribbon, I was being hurried home to tea across Regent’s Park while the keepers were calling closing time. We lived so close to the zoo that one could hear the lions roaring at night.
This Palatine sun was the dying wick of 1933; the last vestige of that ownerless rump of the seasons that stretches from the winter solstice to the New Year. ‘’Tis the year’s midnight...the world’s whole sap is sunk.’ On the way back we passed a group of youths sitting on a low wall and kicking their heels as they whistled the Horst Wessel Lied between their teeth. Fritz said, “I think, perhaps, I’ve heard that tune before...”
That night at the inn, I noticed that a lint-haired young man at the next table was fixing me with an icy gleam. Except for pale blue eyes set flush with his head like a hare’s, he might have been an albino. He suddenly rose with a stumble, came over, and said: “So? Ein Engländer?” with a sardonic smile. “Wunderbar!” Then his face changed to a mask of hate. Why had we stolen Germany’s colonies? Why shouldn’t Germany have a fleet and a proper army? Did I think Germany was going to take orders from a country that was run by the Jews? A catalogue of accusation followed, not very loud, but clearly and intensely articulated. His face, which was almost touching mine, raked me with long blasts of schnapps-breath. “Adolf Hitler will change all that,” he ended. “Perhaps you’ve heard the name?” Fritz shut his eyes with a bored groan and murmured “Um Gottes willen!” Then he took him by the elbow with the words, “Komm, Franzi!”; and, rather surprisingly, my accuser allowed himself to be led to the door. Fritz sat down again, saying: “I’m so sorry. You see what it’s like.” Luckily, none of the other tables had noticed and the hateful moment was soon superseded by feasting and talk and wine and, later, by songs to usher in St. Sylvester’s Vigil; and by the time the first bells of 1934 were clashing outside, everything had merged in a luminous haze of music and toasts and greetings.
* * *
Frau Spengel insisted that it was absurd to set off on New Year’s Day; so I spent another twenty-four hours wandering about the town and the castle and reading and writing and talking with this kind and civilized family. (My sojourn at the Red Ox, afterwards, was one of several high points of recollection that failed to succumb to the obliterating moods of war. I often thought of it.)[3]
“Don’t forget your treuer Wanderstab,” Frau Spengel said, handing me my gleaming stick as I was loading up for departure on the second of January. Fritz accompanied me to the edge of the town. Ironed linen lay neatly in my rucksack; also a large parcel of Gebäck, special Sylvestrine cakes rather like shortbread, which I munched as I loped along over the snow. All prospects glowed, for the next halt—at Bruchsal, a good stretch further—was already fixed up. Before leaving London, a friend who had stayed there the summer before and canoed down the Neckar by faltboot with one of the sons of the house, had given me an introduction to the mayor. Fritz had telephoned; and by dusk I was sitting with Dr. Arnold and his family drinking tea laced with brandy in one of the huge baroque rooms of Schloss Bruchsal. I couldn’t stop gazing at my magnificent surroundings. Bruchsal is one of the most beautiful baroque palaces in the whole of Germany. It was built in the eighteenth century by the Prince-Bishops of Spires, I can’t remember when their successors stopped living in it; perhaps when their secular sovereignty was dissolved. But for many decades it had been the abode of the Burgomasters of Bruchsal. I stayed here two nights, sleeping in the bedroom of an absent son. After a long bath, I explored his collection of Tauchnitz editions and found exactly what I wanted to read in bed—Leave it to Psmith—and soon I wasn’t really in a German schloss at all, but in the corner seat of a first-class carriage on the 3:45 from Paddington to Market Blandings, bound for a different castle.
* * *
It was the first time I had seen such architecture. The whole of next day I loitered about the building; hesitating halfway up shallow staircases balustraded by magnificent branching designs of wrought metal; wandering through double doors that led from state room to state room; and gazing with untutored and marvelling eyes down perspectives crossed by the diminishing slants of winter sunbeams. Pastoral scenes unfolded in light-hearted colours across ceilings that were enclosed in a studiously asymetrical icing of scrolls and sheaves; shells and garlands and foliage and ribands depicted myths extravagant enough to stop an unprepared observer dead in his tracks. The sensation of wintry but glowing interior space, the airiness of the snowy convolutions, the twirl of the metal foliage and the gilt of the arabesques were all made more buoyant still by reflections from the real snow that lay untrodden outside; it came glancing up through the panes, diffusing a still and muted luminosity: a northern variant (I thought years later) of the reflected flicker that canals, during Venetian siestas, send up across the cloud-born apotheoses and rapes that cover the ceilings. Only statues and skeleton trees broke the outdoor whiteness, and a colony of rooks.
In England, the Burgomaster, with his white hair and moustache, his erect bearing and grey tweeds, might have been colonel of a good line regiment. After dinner he tucked a cigar in a holder made of a cardboard cone and a quill, changed spectacles and, hunting through a pile of music on the piano, sat down and attacked the Waldstein Sonata with authority and verve. The pleasure was reinforced by the player’s enjoyment of his capacity to wrestle with it. His expression of delight, as he peered at the notes through a veil of cigar smoke and tumbling ash, was at odds with the gravity of the music. It was a surprise; so different was it from an evening spent with his putative English equivalent; and when the last chord had been struck, he leapt from the stool with a smile of youthful and almost ecstatic enjoyment amid the good-humoured applause of his family. A rush of appraisal broke out, and hot argument about possible alternative interpretations.
* * *
There was no doubt about it, I thought next day: I’d taken a wrong turning. Instead of reaching Pforzheim towards sunset, I was plodding across open fields with snow and the night both falling fast. My new goal was a light which soon turned out to be the window of a farmhouse by the edge of a wood. A dog had started barking. When I reached the door a man’s silhouette appeared in the threshold and told the dog to be quiet and shouted: “Wer ist da?” Concluding that I was harmless, he let me in.
A dozen faces peered up in surprise, their spoons halted in mid air, and their features, lit from below by a lantern on the table, were as gnarled and grained as the board itself. Their clogs were hidden in the dark underneath, and the rest of the room, except for the crucifix on the wall, was swallowed by shadow. The spell was broken by the unexpectedness of the irruption: A stranger from Ausland! Shy, amazed hospitality replaced earlier fears and I was soon seated among them on the bench and busy with a spoon as well.
The habit of grasping and speaking German had been outpaced during the last few days by another change of accent and idiom. These farmhouse sentences were all but out of reach. But there was something else here that was enigmatically familiar. Raw knuckles of enormous hands, half clenched still from the grasp of ploughs and spades and bill-hooks, lay loose among the cut onions and the chipped pitchers and a brown loaf broken open. Smoke had blackened the earthenware tureen and the light caught its pewter ladle and stressed the furrowed faces, and the bricky cheeks of young and hemp-haired giants...A small crone in a pleated coif sat at the end of the table, her eyes bright and timid in their hollows of bone and all these puzzled features were flung into relief by a single wick from below. Supper at Emmaus or Bethany? Painted by whom?
Dog-tired from the fields, the family began to stretch and get down the moment the meal was over and to amble bedwards with dragging clogs. A grandson, apologizing because there was no room indoors, slung a pillow and two blankets over his shoulder, took the lantern and led the way across the yard. In the barn the other side, harrows, ploughshares, scythes and sieves loomed for a moment, and beyond, tethered to a manger that ran the length of the barn, horns and tousled brows and liquid eyes gleamed in the lantern’s beam. The head of a cart-horse, with a pale mane and tail and ears pricked at our advent, almost touched the rafters.
When I was alone I stretched out on a bed of sliced hay like a crusader on his tomb, snugly wrapped up in greatcoat and blankets, with crossed legs still putteed and clodhoppered. Two owls were within earshot. The composite smell of snow, wood, dust, cobwebs, mangolds, beetroots, fodder, cattlecake and the cows’ breath was laced with an ammoniac tang from the plip-plop and the splash that sometimes broke the rhythm of the munching and the click of horns. There was an occasional grate of blocks and halters through their iron rings, a moo from time to time, or a huge horseshoe scraping or clinking on the cobbles. This was more like it!
The eaves were stiff with icicles next morning. Everyone was out of the kitchen and already at work, except the old woman in the coif. She gave me a scalding bowl of coffee and milk with dark brown bread broken in it. Would an offer to pay be putting my foot in it, I wondered; and then tentatively proposed it. There was no offence; but, equally, it was out of the question: “Nee, nee!” she said, with a light pat of her transparent hand. (It sounded the same as the English ‘Nay.’) The smile of her totally dismantled gums had the innocence of an infant’s. “Gar nix!” After farewells, she called me back with a shrill cry and put a foot-long slice of buttered black bread in my hand; I ate my way along this gigantic and delicious butterbrot as I went, and after a furlong, caught sight of all the others. They waved and shouted “Gute Reise!” They were hacking at the frost-bitten grass with mattocks, delving into a field that looked and sounded as hard as iron.
Stick-nail fetishism carried me to Mühlacker, all of two miles off my way, in order to get the local stocknagel hammered on, the seventeenth. It was becoming a fixation.
Of the town of Pforzheim, where I spent the next night, I remember nothing. But the evening after I was in the heart of Stuttgart by lamp-lighting time, sole customer in a café opposite the cubistic mass of the Hotel Graf Zeppelin. Snow and sleet and biting winds had emptied the streets of all but a few scuttling figures, and two cheerless boys doggedly rattling a collection box. Now they had vanished as well and the proprietor and I were the only people in sight in the whole capital of Württemberg. I was writing out the day’s doings and vaguely wondering where to find lodging when two cheerful and obviously well-brought up girls came in, and began buying groceries at the counter. They were amusingly dressed in eskimo hoods, furry boots and gauntlets like grizzly bears which they clapped together to dispel the cold. I wished I knew them... The sleet, turning to hail, rattled on the window like grapeshot. One of the girls, who wore horn-rimmed spectacles, catching sight of my German-English dictionary, daringly said “How do you do, do, Mister Brown?” (This was the only line of an idiotic and now mercifully forgotten song, repeated ad infinitum like Lloyd George Knew My Father; it had swept across the world two years before.) Then she laughed in confusion at her boldness, under a mild reproof from her companion. I jumped up and implored them to have a coffee, or anything... They suddenly became more reserved: “Nein, nein, besten Dank, aber wir müssen weg!” I looked crestfallen; and after an exchange of “Warum nicht?”s, they consented to stay five minutes, but refused coffee.
The line of the song was almost the only English they knew. My first interlocutrix, who had taken her spectacles off, asked how old I was. I said “Nineteen,” though it wouldn’t be quite true for another five weeks. “We too!” they said. “And what do you do?” “I’m a student.” “We too! Wunderbar!” They were called Elizabeth-Charlotte, shortened to Liselotte or Lise—and Annie. Lise was from Donaueschingen, where the Danube rises, in the Black Forest, but she was living in Annie’s parents’ house in Stuttgart, where they were studying music. Both were pretty. Lise had unruly brown hair and a captivating and lively face, from which a smile was never absent for long; her glance, with her spectacles off, was wide, unfocussed and full of trusting charm. Annie’s fair hair was plaited and coiled in earphones, a fashion I’d always hated; but it suited her pallor and long neck and gave her the look of a Gothic effigy from the door of an abbey. They told me they were buying things for a young people’s party in celebration of the Dreikönigsfest. It was Epiphany, the 6th of January, the feast of the Three Kings. After some whispered confabulation, they decided to have pity on me and take me with them. Lise enterprisingly suggested we could invent a link with her family—“falls sie fragen, wo wir Sie aufgegabelt haben” (“Just in case they ask where we forked you out from”). Soon, in the comfortable bathroom of Annie’s absent parents—he was a bank manager and they were away in Basel on business—I was trying to make myself presentable: combing my hair, putting on the clean shirt and flannel bags I had extracted before leaving my rucksack in charge of the café. I hadn’t fixed up anything for the night yet, they said, when I rejoined them: it was unorthodox and would be uncomfortable—but would I like to doss down on the sofa? “No, no, no!” I cried: far too much of a nuisance for them, after all their kindness; but I didn’t insist too long. “Don’t say you’re staying here!” Annie said. “You know how silly people are.” There was a feeling of secrecy and collusion in all this, like plans for a midnight feast. They were thrilled by their recklessness. So was I.
Collusion looked like breaking down when we got to the party. “Can I introduce,” Annie began. “Darf ich Ihnen vorstellen—.” Her brow puckered in alarm; we hadn’t exchanged surnames. Lise quickly chimed in with “Mr. Brown, a family friend.” She might have been a captain of hussars, turning the tide of battle by a brilliant swoop. Later a cake was ceremoniously cut, and a girl was crowned with a gold cardboard crown. Songs were sung in honour of Epiphany and the Magi, some in unison, some solo. Asked if there were any English ones (as I had hoped, in order to show Lise and Annie I wasn’t a godless barbarian), I sang We Three Kings of Orient Are. A later song, celebrating the Neckar Valley and Swabia, was sung in complex harmony. I can’t remember the words completely, but it has stuck in my mind ever since. I put it down here as I’ve never met anyone who knows it.
Kennt Ihr das Land in deutschen Gauen,
Das schönste dort am Neckarstrand?
Die grünen Rebenhügel schauen
Ins Tal von hoher Felsenwand.
Es ist das Land, das mich gebar,
Wo meiner Väter Wiege stand.
Drum sing ich heut’ und immerdar:
Das schöne Schwaben ist mein Heimatland!
Then someone put Couchés dans le foin on the gramophone, and Sentimental Journey, and everyone danced.
* * *
When I woke up on the sofa—rather late; we had sat up talking and drinking Annie’s father’s wine before going to bed—I had no idea where I was; it was a frequent phenomenon on this journey. But when I found my hands muffled like a pierrot’s in the scarlet silk sleeves of Annie’s father’s pyjamas, everything came back to me. He must have been a giant (a photograph on the piano of a handsome ski-booted trio in the snow—my host with his arms round his wife and daughter—bore this out). The curtains were still drawn and two dressing-gowned figures were tiptoeing about the shadows. When they realized I was awake at last, greetings were exchanged and the curtains drawn. It only seemed to make the room very few degrees lighter. “Look!” Lise said, “no day for walking!” It was true: merciless gusts of rain were thrashing the roofscape outside. Nice weather for young ducks. “Armer Kerl!—Poor chap!” she said, “you’ll have to be our prisoner till tomorrow.” She put on another log and Annie came in with coffee. Halfway through breakfast, Sunday morning bells began challenging each other from belfry to belfry. We might have been in a submarine among sunk cathedrals. “O Weh!” Lise cried, “I ought to be in church!”; then, peering at the streaming panes: “Too late now.” “Zum Beichten, perhaps,” Annie said. (Beichten is confession.) Lise asked: “What for?” “Picking up strangers.” (Lise was Catholic, Annie Protestant; there was a certain amount of sectarian banter.) I urged their claim to every dispensation for sheltering the needy, clothing the naked—a flourish of crimson sleeve supported this—and feeding the hungry. Across the boom of all these bells a marvellous carillon broke out. It is one of the most famous things in Stuttgart. We listened until its complicated pattern faded into silence.
The evening presented a problem in advance. They were ineluctably bidden to a dinner party by a business acquaintance of Annie’s father, and though they didn’t like him they couldn’t plausibly chuck it. But what was to become of me? At last, screwing up their courage, Annie rang his wife up: could they bring a young English friend of Lise’s family—informally clad, because he was on a winter walking tour across Europe? (It sounded pretty thin.) There was a twitter of assent from the other end; the receiver was replaced in triumph. She, it seemed, was very nice; he was an industrialist—steinreich, rolling—“You’ll get plenty to eat and drink!” —Annie said he was a great admirer of Lise’s. “No, no!” Lise cried, “of Annie’s!” “He’s awful! You’ll see! You must defend us both.”
We were safe till ten o’clock next morning, when the maid’s bus got back; she had gone to her Swabian village for the Dreikönigsfest. We drew the curtains to block out the deluge and put on the lights—it was best to treat the dismal scene outside as if it were night—and lolled in dishabille all the morning talking by the fire. I played the gramophone—St. Louis Blues, Stormy Weather, Night and Day—while the girls ironed their dresses for the dinner party and the submarine morning sped by, until it was time for Annie and me to face the weather outdoors: she for luncheon—a weekly fixture with relations—me to collect my stuff and to buy some eggs for an omelette. Out-of-doors, even in a momentary lull, the rain was fierce and hostile and the wind was even worse. When Annie got back about five, I was doing a sketch of Lise; an attempt at Annie followed; then I taught them how to play Heads-Bodies-and-Legs. They took to this with a feverish intensity and we played until tolling bells reminded us how late it was. In my case, all that a flat-iron and a brush and comb could achieve had been done. But the girls emerged from their rooms like two marvellous swans. The door bell rang. It was the first sign of the outer world since my invasion, and a bit ominous. “It’s the car! He always sends one. Everything in style!”
Downstairs, a chauffeur in leggings held his cap aloft as he opened the door of a long Mercedes. When we had rustled in he enveloped us in bearskin from the waist down. “You see?” the girls said, “High life!”
We soared through the liquid city and up into the wooded hills and alighted at a large villa of concrete and plate glass. Our host was a blond, heavy man with bloodshot eyes and a scar across his forehead. He hailed my companions with gallantry; me, much more guardedly. His dinner-jacket made me feel still more of a ragamuffin. (I cared passionately about these things; but the fact of being called Michael Brown[4]—we had to stick to it now—induced a consoling sense of disembodiment.) Perhaps to account for my lowly outfit among these jewelled figures, he introduced me to the women as ‘der englische Globetrotter,’ which I didn’t like much. Men guests who were unacquainted toured the room in the German way, shaking hands and reciprocally announcing their names: I did the same. “Muller!” “Brown!” “Ströbel!” “Brown!” “Tschudi!” “Brown!” “Röder!” “Brown!” “Altmeier!” “Brown!” “von Schröder!” “Brown!” ... An old man—a professor from Tübingen, I think, with heavy glasses and a beard—was talking to Lise. We wrung each other’s hands, barking “Braun!” and “Brown!” simultaneously. Snap! I avoided the girls’ glance.
Except for the panorama of the lights of Stuttgart through the plate glass, the house was hideous—prosperous, brand new, shiny, and dispiriting. Pale woods and plastics were juggled together with stale and pretentious vorticism, and the chairs resembled satin boxing-gloves and nickel plumbing. Carved dwarfs with red noses stoppered all the bottles on the oval bar and glass ballerinas pirouetted on ashtrays of agate that rose from the beige carpets on chromium stalks. There were paintings—or tinted photographs—of the Alps at sunset and of naked babies astride Great Danes. Everything looked better, however, after I’d swallowed two White Ladies taken from a tray that was carried about by a white-gloved butler. I helped myself to cigarettes from a seventeenth-century vellum-bound Dante, with the pages glued together and scooped hollow, the only book in sight. Down the dinner table, beside napkins that were half mitres and half Rajput turbans, glittered a promising arsenal of glasses, and by the time we had worked our way through them, the scene was delightfully blurred. From time to time during dinner, I intercepted a puzzled bloodhound scrutiny from the other end of the table. My host obviously found me a question mark; possibly a bit of a rotter, and up to no good; I didn’t like him either. I bet he’s a terrific Nazi, I thought. I asked the girls later, and they both exclaimed “Und wie!” in vehement unison: “And how!” I think he found something fishy, too, about my being on Du terms with his unwilling favourites, while he, most properly, was still restricted to Sie. (We had drunk threefold Brüderschaft and embraced in the Cologne style the night before.) When we were back in the salon, the men armed with cigars like truncheons and brandy rotating in glasses like transparent footballs, the party began to lose coherence. The host flogged it along with a jarring laugh even louder than the non-stop gramophone, between-whiles manoeuvring first Lise and then Annie into a window-bay whence each extricated herself in turn like a good-humoured Syrinx. I watched them as I listened to my namesake Dr. Braun, a learned and delightful fogey who was telling me all about the Suevi and the Alemanni and the Hohenstaufens and Eberhardt the Bearded. When the evening broke up, and Lise and Annie were back in the car, our host stood leaning against the top of the car door, idiotically telling them they looked like two Graces. I ducked under his arm and slipped in between them. “Three now!” Lise said. He looked at me with disfavour. “Ah! And where shall I tell him to drop you, junger Mann?”
“At the Graf Zeppelin, please.” I sensed a tremor of admiration on either side: even Lise couldn’t have done better.
“Ach so?” His opinion of me went up. “And how do you like our best hotel?”
“Clean, comfortable and quiet.”
“Tell the manager if you have any complaints. He’s a good friend of mine.”
“I will! And thanks very much.”
We had to take care about conversation because of the chauffeur. A few minutes later, he was opening the car with a flourish of his cockaded cap before the door of the hotel and after fake farewells, I strolled about the hall of the Graf Zeppelin for a last puff at the ogre cigar. When the coast was clear I hared through the streets and into the lift and up to the flat. They were waiting with the door open and we burst into a dance.
* * *
At half-past nine next morning, we were waving good-bye across a tide of Monday morning traffic. I kept looking upwards and back, flourishing my glittering wand and bumping into busy Stuttgarters until the diminishing torsos frantically signalling from the seventh-storey window were out of sight. I felt as Ulysses must have felt, gazing astern while some island of happy sojourn dropped below the horizon.
* * *
I followed the banks of the Neckar, crossed it, and finally left it for good. Suddenly, when it was much too late, I remembered the Kitsch-Museum in Stuttgart; a museum, that is, of German and international bad taste, which the girls had said I mustn’t miss. (The décor last night—for this was how the subject had cropped up—could have been incorporated as it stood.) I slept at Göppingen and tried with the help of the dictionary to write three letters in German; to Heidelberg, Bruchsal and Stuttgart. Further on I got a funny joint answer from Lise and Annie; there was a rumpus when Annie’s parents got back; not about my actually staying in the flat, which remained a secret to the end. But the bottles we had recklessly drained were the last of a fabulously rare and wonderful vintage that Annie’s father had been particularly looking forward to. Heaven only knew what treasured Spätlese from the banks of the Upper Mosel: nectar beyond compare. They had prudently blamed the choice on me. Outrage had finally simmered down to the words: “Well, your thirsty friend must know a lot about wine.” (Totally untrue.) “I hope he enjoyed it.” (Yes.) It was years before the real enormity of our inroads dawned on me.
* * *
Now the track was running south-south-east across Swabia. Scattered conifers appeared, and woods sometimes overshadowed the road for many furlongs. They were random outposts, separated by leagues of pasture and ploughland, of the great mass, lying dark towards the south-west, of the Black Forest. Beyond it the land rippled away to the Alps.
On straight stretches of road where the scenery changed slowly, singing often came to the rescue; and when songs ran short, poetry. At home, and at my various schools, and among the people who took me in after scholastic croppers, there had always been a lot of reading aloud. (My mother was marvellously gifted in this exacting skill, and imaginative and far-ranging in choice; there had been much singing to the piano as well.) At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary. (I was at the age when one’s memory for poetry or for languages—indeed for anything—takes impressions like wax and, up to a point, lasts like marble.)
The range is fairly predictable and all too revealing of the scope, the enthusiasms and the limitations, examined at the eighteenth milestone, of a particular kind of growing up. There was a great deal of Shakespeare, numerous speeches, most of the choruses of Henry V, long stretches of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (drunk in subconsciously and only half understood, by acting Starveling, the shortest part in the play, at the age of six); a number of the Sonnets, many detached fragments; and, generally, a fairly wide familiarity. Several Marlowe speeches followed and stretches of Spenser’s Pro- and Epithalamion; most of Keats’s Odes; the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge; very little Shelley, no Byron. (Amazingly to me today, I scarcely considered him a poet at all.) Nothing from the eighteenth century except Gray’s Elegy and some of The Rape of the Lock; some Blake; The Burial of Sir John Moore; bits of The Scholar Gypsy; some Scott, fragments of Swinburne, any amount of Rossetti, for whom I had had a long passion, now quite vanished; some Francis Thompson and some Dowson; one sonnet of Wordsworth; bits of Hopkins; and, like all English people with any Irish links, Rolleston’s translation of The Dead of Clonmacnois; a great deal of Kipling; and some of the verses from Hassan. We now move on to Recent Acquisitions: passages from Donne and Herrick and Quarles, one poem of Raleigh, one of Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of Herbert, two of Marvell; a few Border ballads; an abundance of A.E. Housman; some improper stretches of Chaucer (mastered chiefly for popularity purposes at school); a lot of Carroll and Lear. No Chesterton or Belloc, beyond bits of the Cautionary Tales. In fact, apart from those mentioned, very little from the present century. No Yeats later than the Ronsard paraphrase and Innisfree and Down by the Salley Gardens; but this belonged more to singing than reciting; of Pound or Eliot, not a word, either learnt or read; and of younger modern poets now venerable, nothing. If someone had asked me point blank who my favourite contemporary poets were, I would have answered Sacheverell, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, in that order: (Dr. Donne and Gargantua and The Hundred and One Harlequins had appeared in white paper pamphlets while I was at school; I felt I had broken into dazzling new territory). Prose writers would have been Aldous Huxley, Norman Douglas and Evelyn Waugh. This is the end of the short section; but if the road stretched interminably, longer pieces would come to the surface: all Horatius and a lot of Lake Regillus, hardy survivors from an early craze; Grantchester; and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam—intact then, now a heap of fragments hard to re-assemble. The standard drops steeply after this: as I pounded along, limericks pinpointed the planet from Siberia to Cape Horn with improper and imaginative acts, and when they came to an end, similar themes would blossom forth in a score of different metres. It is a field where England can take on all challengers.
My bridgehead in French poetry didn’t penetrate very far: a few nursery rhymes, one poem of Theodore de Banville, two of Baudelaire, part of one of Verlaine, Yeats’s Ronsard sonnet in the original, and another of du Bellay; lastly, more than all the rest put together, large quantities of Villon (this was a very recent discovery, and a passion. I had translated a number of the ballades and rondeaux from the Grand Testament into English verse and they had turned out more respectably than any of my other attempts of the same kind). Most of the Latin contribution is as predictable as the rest: passages of Virgil, chiefly but not entirely, assimilated through writing lines at school: they went faster if one had the text by heart. As nobody seemed to mind who had written them as long as they were hexameters, I used Lucan’s Pharsalia for a while; they seemed to have just the glibness needed for the task; but I soon reverted to Virgil, rightly convinced that they would last better: my main haunts were the second and sixth books of the Aeneid, with sallies into the Georgics and the Eclogues. The other chief Romans were Catullus and Horace: Catullus—a dozen short poems and stretches of the Attis—because the young are prone (at least I was) to identify themselves with him when feeling angry, lonely, misunderstood, besotted, ill-starred or crossed in love. I probably adored Horace for the opposite reason; and taught myself a number of the Odes and translated a few of them into awkward English sapphics and alcaics. Apart from their other charms, they were infallible mood-changers. (One of them—I. ix. Ad Thaliarchum—came to my rescue in strange circumstances a few years later. The hazards of war landed me among the crags of occupied Crete with a band of Cretan guerillas and a captive German general whom we had waylaid and carried off into the mountains three days before. The German garrison of the island were in hot, but luckily temporarily misdirected, chase. It was a time of anxiety and danger; and for our captive, of hardship and distress. During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:
Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte...
It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:
nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,
and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general’s blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine—and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.)
Hotfoot on Horace came Hadrian’s lines to his soul—The Oxford Book of Latin Verse was about the only prize I carried away from school—and Petronius’ ten counter-balancing verses, hinging on the marvellous line: ‘sed sic, sic, sine fine feriati’; then some passages of the Pervigilium Veneris. After this, with a change of key, come one or two early Latin hymns and canticles; then the Dies Irae and the Stabat Mater. (Of Latin poets of the two centuries between the classical and the Christian, I scarcely even knew the names; it was a region to be invaded and explored alone, and much later and with great delight.) Last came a smattering of profane Mediaeval Latin lyrics, many of them from the monastery of Benediktbeuern.[5] In the brief Greek coda to all this, the sound of barrel-scraping grows louder. It begins with the opening movement of the Odyssey, as it does for everyone who has dabbled in the language, followed by bits from the escape of Odysseus from the cave of Polyphemus; unexpectedly, not Heraclitus; nothing from the tragic dramatists (too difficult); snatches of Aristophanes; a few epitaphs of Simonides, two moon-poems of Sappho; and then silence.
A give-away collection. It covers the thirteen years between five and eighteen, for in the months preceding my departure the swing of late nights and recovery had slowed the intake down to a standstill. Too much of it comes from the narrow confines of the Oxford Books. It is a mixture of a rather dog-eared romanticism with heroics and rough stuff, with traces of religious mania, temporarily in abeyance, Pre-Raphaelite languor and Wardour Street mediaevalism; slightly corrected—or, at any rate, altered—by a streak of coarseness and a bias towards low life. A fair picture, in fact, of my intellectual state-of-play: backward-looking, haphazard, unscholarly and, especially in Greek, marked with the blemish of untimely breaking-off. (I’ve tried to catch up since with mixed results.) But there are one or two beams of hope, and I feel bound to urge in self-defence, that Shakespeare, both in quantity and addiction, overshadowed all the rest of this rolling-stock. A lot has dropped away through disuse; some remains; additions have been appended, but the later quantity is smaller, for the sad reason that the knack of learning by heart grows less. The wax hardens and the stylus scrapes in vain.
Back to the Swabian highroad.
Song is universal in Germany; it causes no dismay; Shuffle off to Buffalo; Bye, Bye, Blackbird; or Shenandoah; or The Raggle Taggle Gypsies sung as I moved along, evoked nothing but tolerant smiles. But verse was different. Murmuring on the highway caused raised eyebrows and a look of anxious pity. Passages, uttered with gestures and sometimes quite loud, provoked, if one was caught in the act, stares of alarm. Regulus brushing the delaying populace aside as he headed for the Carthaginian executioner, as though to Lacedaemonian Tarentum or the Venafrian fields, called for a fairly mild flourish; but urging the assault-party at Harfleur to close the wall up with English dead would automatically bring on a heightened pitch of voice and action and double one’s embarrassment if caught. When this happened I would try to taper off in a cough or weave the words into a tuneless hum and reduce all gestures to a feint at hair-tidying. But some passages demand an empty road as far as the eye can see before letting fly. The terrible boxing-match, for instance, at the funeral games of Anchises when Entellus sends Dares reeling and spitting blood and teeth across the Sicilian shore—‘ore ejectantem mixtosque in sanguine dentes’!—and then, with his thonged fist, scatters a steer’s brains with one blow between the horns—this needs care. As for the sword-thrust at the bridgehead that brings the great lord of Luna crashing among the augurs like an oak-tree on Mount Alvernus—here the shouts, the walking-stick slashes, the staggering gait and the arms upflung should never be indulged if there is anyone within miles, if then. To a strange eye, one is drunk or a lunatic.
So it was today. I was at this very moment of crescendo and climax, when an old woman tottered out of a wood where she had been gathering sticks. Dropping and scattering them, she took to her heels. I would have liked the earth to have swallowed me, or to have been plucked into the clouds.
Herrick would have been safer; Valéry, if I had known him, perfect: ‘Calme...’
* * *
The rain had churned the snow into slush, then blasts from the mountains had frozen it into a pock-marked upheaval of rutted ice. Now, after a short warning drift, the wind was sending flakes along by the million. They blotted out the landscape, turning one side of a traveller’s body into a snowdrift, thatching his head with a crust of white and tangling his eyelashes with sticky scales. The track ran along a shelterless hog’s back and the wind seemed either to lay a hindering hand on my chest, or, suddenly changing its quarter, to kick me spinning and stumbling along the road. No village had been in sight, even before this onslaught. Scarcely a car passed. I despised lifts and I had a clear policy about them: to avoid them rigorously, that is, until walking became literally intolerable; and then, to travel no further than a day’s march would cover. (I stuck to this.) But now not a vehicle came; nothing but snowflakes and wind; until at last a dark blur materialized and a clanking something drew alongside and clattered to a halt. It turned out to be a heavy diesel truck with chains on its wheels and a load of girders. The driver opened the door and reached down a helping hand, with the words “Spring hinein!” When I was beside him in the steamy cabin he said “Du bist ein Schneemann!”—a snowman. So I was. We clanked on. Pointing to the flakes that clogged the windscreen as fast as the wipers wiped, he said, “Schlimm, niet?” Evil, what? He dug out a bottle of schnapps and I took a long swig. Travellers’ joy! “Wohin gehst Du?” I told him. (I think it was somewhere about this point on the journey that I began to notice the change in this question: “Where are you going?” In the north, in Low Germany, everyone had said “Wohin laufen Sie” and “Warum laufen Sie zu Fuss?”—Why are you walking on foot? Recently the verb had been ‘gehen.’ For ‘laufen,’ in the south, means to run—probably from the same root as ‘lope’ in English. The accent, too, had been altering fast; in Swabia, the most noticeable change was the substitution of -le at the end of a noun, as a diminutive, instead of -chen; Häusle and Hundle, instead of Häuschen and Hündchen, for a little house and a small dog. I felt I was getting ahead now, both linguistically and geographically, plunging deeper and deeper into the heart of High Germany.... The driver’s Du was a sign of inter-working-class mateyness that I had come across several times. It meant friendly acceptance and fellow-feeling.)
* * *
When he set me down on the icy cobbles of Ulm, I knew I had reached an important landmark on my journey. For there, in the lee of the battlements, dark under the tumbling flakes and already discoloured with silt, flowed the Danube.
It was a momentous encounter. A great bridge spanned it, and the ice was advancing from either bank to meet and eventually join amidstream. Inland from the river-wall, the roofs that retreated in confusion were too steep for the snow; the flakes would collect, bank up, then slide into the lanes with a swish. In the heart of this warren, Ulm Minster rose, literally saddled, on an octagon bestriding the west end of the huge nave, with the highest steeple in the world, and the transparent spire disappeared into a moulting eiderdown of cloud.
A market day was ending. Snow was being banged from tarpaulins and basket was slotted into basket. Cataracts of vegetables rumbled on the bottoms of waggons and the carthorses, many of them with those beautiful flaxen manes and tails, were being backed with bad language between the shafts. Scarlet-cheeked women from a score of villages were coifed in head-dresses of starch and black ribbon that must have been terrible snow-traps. They gathered round the braziers and stamped in extraordinary bucket-boots whose like I never saw before or since: elephantine cylinders as wide as the footgear of seventeenth-century postilions, all swaddled inside with felt and stuffed with straw. Dark dialect shouts criss-crossed through the snorts and the neighs. There was a flurry of poultry and the squeal of pigs and cattle were goaded from their half-dismantled pens as the hurdles were stacked. Villagers with flat wide hats and red waistcoats and cart-whips hobnobbed in the colonnades and up and down the shallow steps. There was a raucous and jocular hum of confabulation and smoke among the heavy pillars; and the vaults that these pillars upheld were the floors of mediaeval halls as big and as massive as tithe barns.
A late mediaeval atmosphere filled the famous town. The vigorous Teutonic interpretation of the Renaissance burst out in the corbels and the mullions of jutting windows and proliferated round thresholds. At the end of each high civic building a zigzag isosceles rose and dormers and flat gables lifted their gills along enormous roofs that looked as if they were tiled with the scales of pangolins. Shields carved in high relief projected from the walls. Many were charged with the double-headed eagle. This bird was emblematic of the town’s status as an Imperial City: it meant that Ulm—unlike the neighbouring towns and provinces, which had been the fiefs of lesser sovereigns—was subject only to the Emperor. It was a Reichstadt.
A flight of steps led to a lower part of the town. Here the storeys beetled and almost touched and in one of the wider lanes was a warren of carpenters and saddlers and smithies and cavernous workshops. Down the middle, visible through a few chopped holes, a river rushed ice-carapaced and snow-quilted under a succession of narrow bridges, to split round an island where a weeping willow expanded to the icicled eaves and then, re-uniting by a watermill so deeply clogged in ice that it looked as if it would never grind again, sped on to hurl itself into the Danube.
This part of the town contained nothing later than the Middle Ages, or so it appeared. A kind crone outside a harness-maker’s saw me peering down a hole in the ice. “It’s full of Forellen!” she said. Trout? “Ja, Forellen! Voll, voll davon.” How did they manage under that thick shell of ice? Hovering suspended in the dark? Or hurtling along on their Schubertian courses, hidden and headlong? Were they in season? If so, I determined to go a bust and get hold of one for dinner, and a bottle of Franconian wine. Meanwhile, night was falling fast. High up in the snowfall a bell began booming slowly. Funera plango! a deep and solemn note. Fulgura frango! It might have been tolling for an Emperor’s passing, for war, siege, revolt, plague, excommunication, a ban of interdict, or Doomsday: ‘Excito lentos! Dissipo ventos! Paco cruentos!’
* * *
As soon as the Minster was open I toiled up the steeple-steps and halted, with heart pounding, above the loft where those bells were hung. Seen through the cusps of a cinque-foil and the flurry of jackdaws and a rook or two that my ascent had dislodged, the fore-shortened roofs of the town shrank to a grovelling maze. Ulm is the highest navigable point of the Danube, and lines of barges lay at anchor. I wondered if the ice had crept forward during the night, and where the barges would be hauled to. Water is the one thing that expands when it freezes instead of contracting, and a sudden drop in temperature smashes unwary boats like egg-shells. South of the river, the country retreated in a white expanse which buckled into the Swabian Jura. The eastern rim of the Black Forest blurred them; then they rose and merged into the foothills of the Alps and somewhere among them, invisible in a trough with the Rhine flowing into it from the south and out again northwards, Lake Constance lay. Clearly discernible, and rising in peak after peak, the whole upheaval of Switzerland gleamed in the pale sunlight.
It was an amazing vision. Few stretches of Central Europe have been the theatre for so much history. Beyond which watershed lay the pass where Hannibal’s elephants had slithered downhill? Only a few miles away, the frontier of the Roman Empire had begun. Deep in those mythical forests that the river reflected for many days’ march, the German tribes, Rome’s Nemesis, had waited for their hour to strike. The Roman limes followed the river’s southern bank all the way to the Black Sea. The same valley, functioning in reverse, funnelled half the barbarians of Asia into Central Europe and just below my eyrie, heading upstream, the Huns entered and left again before swimming their ponies across the Rhine—or trotting them over the ice—until, foiled by a miracle, they drew rein a little short of Paris. Charlemagne stalked across this corner of his empire to destroy the Avars in Pannonia and a few leagues south-west, the ruins of Hohenstaufen, home of the family that plunged Emperors and Popes into centuries of vendetta, crumbled still. Again and again, armies of mercenaries, lugging siege-engines and bristling with scaling ladders, crawled all over this map. The Thirty Years’ War, the worst of them all, was becoming an obsession with me: a lurid, ruinous, doomed conflict of beliefs and dynasties, helpless and hopeless, with principles shifting the whole time and a constant shuffle and re-deal of the actors. For, apart from the events—the defenestrations and pitched battles and historic sieges, the slaughter and famine and plague—astrological portents and the rumour of cannibalism and witchcraft flitted about the shadows. The polyglot captains of the ruffian multi-lingual hosts hold our gaze willy-nilly with their grave eyes and their Velasquez moustaches and populate half the picture-galleries in Europe. Caracoling in full feather against a background of tents and colliding squadrons, how serenely they point their batons; or, magnanimously bare-headed and on foot in a grove of lances, accept surrendered keys, or a sword! Curls flow and lace or starched collars break over the black armour and the gold inlay; they glance from their frames with an aloof and high-souled melancholy which is both haunting and enigmatic. Tilly, Wallenstein, Mansfeld, Bethlen, Brunswick, Spinola, Maximilian, Gustavus Adolphus, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, Piccolomini, Arnim, Königsmarck, Wrangel, Pappenheim, the Cardinal-Infant of the Spanish Netherlands, Le Grand Condé. The destroying banners move about the landscape like flags on a campaign map: the Emperor’s haloed double eagles, the blue-and-white Wittelsbach lozenges for the Palatinate and Bavaria, the rampant Bohemian lion, the black and gold bars of Saxony, the three Vasa crowns of Sweden, the black and white check of Brandenburg, the lions and castles of Castille and Aragon, the blue and gold French lilies. Ever since then, the jigsaw distribution of Catholics and Protestants has remained as it was after the Peace of Westphalia. Each dovetailing enclave depended on the faith of its sovereign, and occasionally, by a quirk of succession, a prince of the alternative faith would reign as peacefully as the Moslem Nizam over his Hindu subjects in Hyderabad. If the landscape were really a map, it would be dotted with those little crossed swords that indicate battles. The village of Blenheim [6] was only a day’s march along the same shore, and Napoleon defeated the Austrian army on the bank just beyond the barbican. The cannon sank into the flooded fields while the limbers and gun-teams and gunners were carried away by the current. Looking down, I could see a scarlet banner with the swastika on its white disc fluttering in one of the lanes, hinting that there was still trouble ahead. Seeing it, someone skilled in prophecy and the meaning of symbols could have foretold that three-quarters of the old city below would go up in explosion and flame a few years later; to rise again in a geometry of skyscraping concrete blocks.
The first sight of the Danube! It was a tremendous vision. In Europe, only the Volga is longer. If one of the crows that were fidgeting among the crockets below had flown to my next meeting place with the river, it would have alighted two hundred miles east of this steeple. The blast was whistling louder through the perforated stone of the spire and clouds were advancing fast.
The empty nave, lit only by the marvellous deep-hued gloom of the glass, was dark by contrast. An organist, rapt with improvisation, was fluting and rumbling in his high lamp-lit nest under a display of giant pan-pipes. The clustered piers, which looked slender for so huge a place, divided the nave into five aisles and soared to a network of groins and ribs and liernes that a slight architectural shrug would have flicked into fan-tracery. But it was the choir-stalls that halted one. A bold oaken outburst of three-dimensional humanism had wrought the finials of the choir-stalls into the life-size torsos, in dark wood, of the sybils: ladies that is, dressed in coifs and wimples and slashed sleeves and hatted in pikehorn head-dresses like the Duchess’s in Alice in Wonderland. They craned yearning across the chancel towards Plato and Aristotle and an answering academy of pagan philosophers accoutred like burgomasters and led by a burgravial Ptolemy wielding a wooden astrolabe. The vaulted hexagon under the spire was used as a commemorative chapel. The laurel-wreathed and silken colours of Württemberg and Baden regiments from 1914 to 1918 were hanging there in rows: banners bearing black crosses on a white background. The battle-honours inscribed in gold on the fluttering ribands—the Somme, Vimy, Verdun and Passchendaele—were all familiar.
The coloured windows died like fires going out. The clouds had closed over again and the sky presaged snow.
* * *
I was haunting cathedrals these days. Only a few hours later I was inside yet another, munching bread and cheese and an onion in one of the transepts. The day’s march had been a repetition of yesterday’s: I had crossed the Danube bridge; base clouds pursued me with their rotten smoke; the clouds broke and the east wind, once again blurring all in a maelstrom of flakes, had practically brought me to a standstill. Then a benefactor had come to the rescue and deposited me in Augsburg in the late morning. I hadn’t expected to reach it till long after dark, if then.
On these Augsburg choir-stalls, highly polished free-standing scenes of Biblical bloodshed ran riot. For realism and immediacy they left the carvings of Ulm far behind. On the first, Jael, with hanging sleeves and hatted like a margravine, gripped a coal-hammer and steadied an iron spike among the sleeping Sisera’s curls. Judith, likewise dressed in high Plantagenet fashion, held the severed head of Holophernes in one hand while the other buried a sword in the small of his back. Cain’s axe was splitting Abel’s temple wide open, and David, stooping over the steel-clad figure of Goliath, had all but sawn his head off. These wooden duets were only slightly grotesque. Flemings and Burgundians compete with the Germans in wood-carving but they can’t catch up with this blunt realism. On tombs and slabs, the figures of highborn laymen—broad- and hard-faced men in full plate armour with their hair clipped in fringes—were outnumbered by the prince-bishops and the mitred landgraves that once ruled in this war-like see. Some were mailclad, some vested in chasubles; and the stone hands joining in prayer were gauntleted or episcopally gloved with gems in a lozenge to mark the points of the stigmata. Tonsured on cushions or bobbed on helms, identical frowns of dominion stamped those rectangular heads, and lances and crosiers were interchangeable at their sides. Under one prelate in heavy pontificals lay an effigy of his skeleton when the worms had finished with him. Further on, from a hanging jaw under the hollow cheeks and eye sockets of an aquiline zealot, the death-rattle was nearly audible.
Stark mementoes. But, in compensation, four ravishing scenes from the life of the Virgin hung behind side-altars. ‘Hans Holbein,’ the brass plate said; but they were more like Memling in costume and feeling; much earlier in date than the royalties and ambassadors and magnates we all know. They turned out to be by the father and namesake of the best-known Holbein, patriarch of a whole dynasty of Augsburg painters.
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I must resist the temptation to enlarge on the fascinating city outside: its abundance of magnificent buildings, the frescoed façade of the Fugger house, the wells canopied with wrought iron. I was pursuing a more general quarry as I munched: no less than the whole feeling and character of pre-baroque German towns. We have been through a number of them; there are more to come. A theory had been forming and clumsy tuning notes have sounded on earlier pages, so I may as well get it off my chest.
The characteristics I have in mind, though of course I didn’t know the details, stretch further afield than South Germany: they advance down the Danube, through Austria and into Bohemia, across the mountains of the Tyrol to the edge of Lombardy and through the Swiss Alps and across the Upper Rhine into Alsace; and the real secret about the architecture of these towns is that it is mediaeval in structure and Renaissance—or the Teutonic interpretation of the Renaissance—only in detail. A great wave assembled in Lombardy and Venetia. It mounted, gathered speed, and at last rushed northwards through the passes and down into the plain to break over the German mediaeval bulk in vast distintegrating fans of spray. Curves like the slits in a violin began to complicate and soften the zigzags of the gables, and, from the burgeoning crow-steps, florid finials and elaborated obelisks were soon shooting up. Structurally, the new arcades were mediaeval cloisters still, but the detail that proliferated all over them turned them into elaborately sheltered loggias for a prosperous laity. The barn-like mediaeval roofs remained, but, from the arcade to the eaves, projecting oriels soared in tiers of mullions and armorial glass as ornately as galleons’ poops. They even jutted in spiraling polygons and cylinders at street corners, abetted in their extravagance by tangles of carved stone and wood. The same ebullient trend broke loose everywhere...
I had been fumbling for a symbol that might hit off this idio-syncracy and suddenly I found it! In the girls’ flat in Stuttgart, turning over a picture book of German history, I stopped at a colour plate depicting three arresting figures. ‘Landsknechts in the time of the Emperor Maximilian I,’ was the caption. They were three blond giants. Challenging moustachios luxuriated over the jut of their bushy beards. Their floppy hats were worn at killing angles, and, under the curl of ostrich feathers, the segmented brims spread as incongruously as the petals of a periwinkle. Two of these men grasped pikes with elaborate blades, the third carried a musket; their hands on the hilts of their broadswords tilted up the scabbards behind them. Slashed doublets expanded their shoulders and quilted sleeves puffed out their arms like Zeppelins; but on top of all this, their torsos were wrapped slantwise in wide ribbons, loosely attached to their trunks by a row of bows at an opposite slant, and bright bands fluttered about their already-voluminous arms in similar contradictory spirals: scarlet, vermilion, orange, canary, Prussian blue, grass green, violet and ochre. From buttocks and cod piece to knee, their legs were subjected to the same contradictory ribbon-treatment, and, with cunning asymmetry, the bright bands were arranged differently askew on each leg. They were fluttering criss-cross cages of colour, like maypoles about to unfurl. The tights below, which ended in wide slash-toed duck-bill shoes, were striped and parti-coloured. One soldier, with a breast-plate over his finery, eschewed all ribbons below the fork. Instead, his legs were adorned with tiers of fringes as far as mid-calf—square-ended tapes that sprang out like the umbelliferous rings of foliage on those marsh plants called mare’s tails.
They were swashbuckling, exuberant and preposterous outfits, yet there was nothing foppish about the wearers: under the flutter of this blinding haberdashery, they were grim Teutonic soldiers, and mediaeval still. All this slashing which caught on everywhere, was a Teutonic thing. It began in the late fifteenth century, when miles of plundered silk were sliced up to patch the campaigning tatters of some lucky mercenaries: they went berserk among the bales; then, carried away, they started pulling their underlinen through the gaps and puffing it out. Once launched, the fashion spread to the courts of the Valois and Tudors and Stuarts and broke at last into its fullest flower at the field of the Cloth of Gold.[7] But the Landsknechts were objects of dread. They swore and hacked their way through all the religious and dynastic wars of the Empire; and, while they plied their pikes, buildings were beginning to go up. When Charles V succeeded Maximilian in 1519, the meridian splendour of the Landsknechts coincided with a generation of glory that the Holy Roman Empire had not seen since Charlemagne and would never see again. Through inheritence, conquest, marriage and discovery, Charles’ Empire reached north to the Baltic settlements of the Teutonic knights, to the old Hanseatic world and the Netherlands; it stretched south to include the Duchy of Milan and swallowed up the outpost kingdoms of Naples and Sicily; it marched with Turkey on the Middle Danube and expanded to western Burgundy; then, skipping France—whose King, however, was the Emperor’s prisoner in Madrid—it leapt the Atlantic from the Pyrenees to the Pacific shores of Peru.
Once I had got hold of the Landsknecht formula—mediaeval solidity adorned with a jungle of inorganic Renaissance detail—there was no holding me! It came into play wherever I looked: not only in gables, bell-hampers, well-heads, oriels, and arcades—in the woodland giants that wrestled in coloured tempera over fifty feet of façade—but in everything. In heraldry, which haunts all German cities, it was omnipresent. The coats of arms that encrust those South German walls were once as simple as upside-down flat-irons with reversed buckets on top: at the touch of the new formula, each shield blossomed into the lower half of a horizontally bisected ’cello, floridly notched for a tilting lance, under a twenty-fold display of latticed and strawberry-leaf-crowned casques, each helmet top-heavy with horns or wings or ostrich or peacocks’ feathers and all of them suddenly embowered in mantelling as reckless, convoluted and slashed as spatulate leaves in a whirlwind. The wings of eagles expanded in sprays of separate sable plumes, tails bifurcated in multiple tassels, tongues leapt from beaks and fangs like flames; armour broke out in ribs and fluting and flares and inlaid arabesques. All was lambent. Was it the Landsknecht principle, spreading to typography, that contorted capital letters, twirled the serifs and let loose, round the text of post-Gutenberg blackletter, those reckless, refluent, never-ending black flourishes, like ribands kept in motion on the tips of sticks by a conjurer? Typography, bookplates, title pages, headlines, woodcuts, block-engraving.... Dürer, encastled in mediaeval Nuremberg on his return from Renaissance Venice, spurred it on. The hard outline in German art, the love of complexity.... And Holbein? (Not Cranach. I’d been looking at him that morning in the museum.) Taking their cue—subconsciously, perhaps—from those soldiers, the masons and smiths and joiners must have conspired together; everything that could fork, ramify, coil, flutter, fold back or thread through itself, suddenly sprang to action. Clocks, keys, hinges, door-bands, hilts and trigger-guards...centrifugal lambency and recoil! The principle is active still.
We have all invented a half-bogus golden age to embower us when we eat and drink away from home. Judging by pubs, this is represented in England by the reign of Elizabeth, with the Regency following close. France’s dream dining-land is Rabelais’ Thélème and the chicken-in-the-pot world of Henry IV; and South Germany’s lost paradise covers roughly the same epoch: Landsknecht-time, in fact. Their armies marched and counter-marched; but it was not only a time of military and territorial triumph. The stimulating ding-dong of the Reform was at work. The Counter-Reformation was limbering up for a return bout. Luther was fulminating, Erasmus, Reuchlin, Melanchthon and Paracelsus were stooped over their desks; Germany’s greatest painters were busy in their studios; books and ideas were on the move. Then, when the Thirty Years’ War broke out and the deadening years lengthened into decades, all building stopped and artists and writers fell back into eclipse. The Empire was soon sinking into dotage among the cinders. The Landsknechts’ high noon was over. The penultimate sparkle of Maria Theresa was only a reprieve, and the perverse and cerebral wonders of Baroque, that flowered among the princes like a springtime in autumn, faded all too soon. (Death came with the Revolution; and the only hope of revival for the Teutonic world lay far away in the north, with the star rising in the Mark of Brandenburg. But the southern Germans and the Austrians never cared for Prussia.) No wonder, then, that the reigns of Maximilian and Charles V should remain the care-free dreamland of the German-speaking world. (Not Valhalla or Asgard at all; these always send them off the rails.) Wine-cellars, taverns, beerhalls, coffee houses—hundreds of authentic ones were still intact; and the new ones automatically echoed them. So it is not the vomiting crossbowman of an earlier age that haunts such premises, still less the introspective toper after the Thirty Years’ War. That periwigged figure was morosely waiting for the coloured pastorals to cohere among the gesso tendrils overhead and for the string quartets to begin tuning.
No. It’s the bearded guzzler in his harlequin haberdashery, recruited in Swabia, twirling his whiskers and shouting for another bottle. He is the walking epitome and his influence is everywhere: in the tapering coloured globes that form the stems of the wine-glasses, in the labels on the green and amber bottles, in the hanging metal signs that creak outside on wrought-iron stanchions; in the unfolding of the carved brackets and the iron involution of banisters, in the folds of the panelling and the calligraphic flourishes of the mural mottoes; in the heavy Bacchic riot of the hewn wooden ivy that inter-twines with the vine shoots and the leaves and the clusters. He is present in the perforation on bench-backs, in the stretchers of the tables, and in the wood and plaster coffering overhead; the tiered tops, the hinges and handles of the stone tankards, the coiling lead that honeycombs the circular window-panes together, the tiles of the stoves looted from the Spanish Netherlands, the very lids of the painted china pipe-bowls—all are his. It is the corroborative detail of dreamland.
Dreamland for me, too, for a while. It was snug among these impedimenta, with sawdust underfoot and hidden in the shag and cheroot smoke that I poured such ideas into my diary. The Landsknecht touch-stone! (Stale news, I suppose. These discoveries nearly always are.) But it was in the transept of the cathedral that the notion suddenly took shape, detonating over my head and shooting up to triforium-level like a giant exclamation mark in a strip cartoon.
[1] Hitler had recently suppressed all this, not out of antipathy to bloodsports but because these cliques and their exciting customs must have seemed rivals of the official youth and student movements.
[2] There were many reasons for thinking about this castle later on, not least because of the Palatine Anthology, which was long treasured there; and for fascinating though nebulous links between the Princess and the Rosicrucians. She was preoccupied, in the layout of the Palace gardens, with devices like talking statues, singing fountains, water organs and the like. She had grown up among the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the conceits of Donne and played in masques where the scenery was designed by Inigo Jones.
[3] After writing these words and wondering whether I had spelt the name Spengel right—also to discover what had happened to the family—on a sudden impulse I sent a letter to the Red Ox, addressed “to the proprietor.” A very nice letter from Fritz’s son—he was born in 1939—tells me that not only my host and hostess are dead, but that Fritz was killed in Norway (where the first battalion of my own regiment at the time was heavily engaged) and buried at Trondheim in 1940, six years after we met. The present Herr Spengel is the sixth generation of the same family to own and run this delightful inn.
[4] Sometime earlier I had temporarily abandoned the use of my ordinary Christian name, and, for reasons I’ve forgotten, adopted my second name, Michael, reverting to normal when this journey was over.
[5] As the crow flies, had I but known, it lay only about forty miles S.E. of my point on the Swabian road.
[6] The battle is known as Höchstädt—after the next village—in Germany and France.
[7] The court-cards in a European pack are a mild version of all this, and the uniform of the Swiss Pontifical Guard at the Vatican is Michelangelo’s attempt at standardizing it. There is still a French card game called Lansquenet.