4. WINTERREISE

NIPPING and eager, the air bites shrewdly and the snow and the wind have obliterated all the details of the journey to Munich. Snow is still falling hard when the scene clears in the late afternoon.

At the Poste Restante counter of the Hauptpost, they handed over a registered envelope crossed with blue chalk; inside, stiff and new, were four pound notes. Just in time! In high spirits I headed for the Jugendherberge—one of the very few Youth Hostels that still survived—where the magic word ‘student’ secured me a bed in a long empty dormitory. I had just placed my rucksack and stick on it in sign of possession when a depressing-looking and pimply newcomer entered and staked a claim on the next bed; infuriatingly: all the others were free. Worse, he sat down, bent on a chat and I was longing to see the town: I had a special goal in view. I made some excuse and dashed down the stairs.

* * *

I soon found myself battling down an avenue of enormous width that seemed to stretch to infinity across the draughtiest city in the world. A triumphal arch loomed mistily through the flakes, drew slowly alongside and faded away again behind me while the cold bit to the bone, and when at last a welcoming row of bars appeared, I hurled myself into the first, threw a glass of schnapps through chattering teeth and asked: “How much further to the Hofbräuhaus?” A pitying laugh broke out in the bar: I had come two miles in the wrong direction: this was a suburb called Schwabing. Swallowing two more schnapps, I retraced my way along the Friedrichstrasse by tram and got off it near a monument where a Bavarian king was riding on a metal horse in front of another colossal and traffic-straddling gateway.

I had expected a different kind of town, more like Nuremberg, perhaps, or Rothenburg. The neo-classical architecture in this boreal and boisterous weather, the giant boulevards, the unleavened pomp—everything struck chill to the heart. The proportion of Storm Troopers and S.S. in the streets was unusually high and still mounting and the Nazi salute flickered about the pavement like a tic douloureux. Outside the Feldherrnhalle, with its memorial to the sixteen Nazis killed in a 1923 street fight nearby, two S.S. sentries with fixed bayonets and black helmets mounted guard like figures of cast-iron and the right arms of all passers-by shot up as though in reflex to an electric beam. It was perilous to withhold this homage. One heard tales of uninitiated strangers being physically set-upon by zealots. Then the thoroughfares began to shrink. I caught a glimpse down a lane of Gothic masonry and lancets and buttresses and further on copper domes hung in convolutions of baroque. A Virgin on a column presided over a slanting piazza, one side of which was formed by a tall, Victorian-Gothic building whose great arched undercroft led to a confusion of lesser streets. In the heart of them stood a massive building; my objective, the Hofbräuhaus. A heavy arched door was pouring a raucous and lurching party of Brownshirts onto the trampled snow.

* * *

I was back in beer-territory. Halfway up the vaulted stairs a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika’d arm, was unloosing, in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours. Love’s labour lost. Each new storey radiated great halls given over to ingestion. In one chamber a table of S.A. men were grinding out Lore, Lore, Lore, scanning the slow beat with the butts of their mugs, then running the syllables in double time, like the carriages of an express: “UND—KOMMT—DER—FRÜHLingindastal! GRÜSS—MIR—DIE—LORenocheinmal.” But it was certain civilian figures seated at meat that drew the glance and held it.

One must travel east for a hundred and eighty miles from the Upper Rhine and seventy north from the Alpine watershed to form an idea of the transformation that beer, in collusion with almost nonstop eating—meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking that there is hardly an interprandial moment—can wreak on the human frame. Intestine strife and the truceless clash of intake and digestion wrecks many German tempers, twists brows into scowls and breaks out in harsh words and deeds.

The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their knobbly scalps. Except when five o’clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces as polished as ostriches’ eggs reflected the lamplight. The frizzy hair of their wives was wrenched up from scarlet necks and pinned under slides and then hatted with green Bavarian trilbys and round one pair of elephantine shoulders a little fox stole was clasped. The youngest of this group, resembling a matinée idol under some cruel spell, was the bulkiest. Under tumbling blond curls his china blue eyes protruded from cheeks that might have been blown up with a bicycle pump, and cherry lips laid bare the sort of teeth that make children squeal. There was nothing bleary or stunned about their eyes. The setting may have reduced their size, but it keyed their glances to a sharper focus. Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on cheek and brow. They might have been competing with stop-watches, and their voices, only partly gagged by the cheekfuls of good things they were grinding down, grew louder while their unmodulated laughter jarred the air in frequent claps. Pumpernickel and aniseed rolls and bretzels bridged all the slack moments but supplies always came through before a true lull threatened. Huge oval dishes, laden with schweinebraten, potatoes, sauerkraut, red cabbage and dumplings were laid in front of each diner. They were followed by colossal joints of meat—unclassifiable helpings which, when they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calves’ pelvises or the bones of elephants. Waitresses with the build of weight-lifters and all-in wrestlers whirled this provender along and features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre’s banquet. But all too soon the table was an empty bone-yard once more, sound faltered, a look of bereavement clouded those small eyes and there was a brief hint of sorrow in the air. But succour was always at hand; beldames barged to the rescue at full gallop with new clutches of mugs and fresh plate-loads of consumer goods; and the damp Laestrygonian brows unpuckered again in a happy renewal of clamour and intake.

I strayed by mistake into a room full of S.S. officers, Gruppen- and Sturmbannführers, black from their lightning-flash-collars to the forest of tall boots underneath the table. The window embrasure was piled high with their skull-and-crossbones caps. I still hadn’t found the part of this Bastille I was seeking, but at last a noise like the rush of a river guided me downstairs again to my journey’s end.

* * *

The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavier than a brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvellous, a brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth. This was the fuel that had turned the berserk feeders upstairs into Zeppelins and floated them so far from heart’s desire. The gunmetal-coloured cylinders were stamped with a blue HB conjoined under the Bavarian crown, like the foundry-mark on cannon. The tables, in my mind’s eye, were becoming batteries where each gunner served a silent and recoil-less piece of ordnance which, trained on himself, pounded away in steady siege. Mass-gunfire! Here and there on the tables, with their heads in puddles of beer, isolated bombardiers had been mown down in their emplacements. The vaults reverberated with the thunder of a creeping barrage. There must have been over a thousand pieces engaged!—Big Berthas, Krupp’s pale brood, battery on battery crashing at random or in salvoes as hands adjusted the elevation and traverse and then tightened on the stone trigger-guard. Supported by comrades, the walking wounded reeled through the battle smoke and a fresh gunner leaped into each place as it fell empty.

My own gun had fired its last shot, and I wanted to change to a darker-hued explosive. A new Mass was soon banged down on the board. In harmony with its colour, it struck a darker note at once, a long Wagnerian chord of black-letter semibreves: Nacht und Nebel! Rolling Bavarian acres formed in the inscape of the mind, fanning out in vistas of poles planted pyramidally with the hops gadding over them heavy with poppy-sombre flowers.

The peasants and farmers and the Munich artisans that filled the tables were much nicer than the civic swallowers overhead. Compared to the trim, drilled figures of the few soldiers there, the Storm Troopers looked like brown-paper parcels badly tied with string. There was even a sailor with two black silk streamers falling over his collar from the back of his cap, round the front of which, in gold letters, was written Unterseeboot. What was this Hanseatic submariner doing here, so far inland from Kiel and the Baltic? My tablemates were from the country, big, horny-handed men, with a wife or two among them. Some of the older men wore green and grey loden jackets with bone buttons and badgers’ brushes or blackcocks’ feathers in the back of their hatbands. The bone mouthpieces of long cherrywood pipes were lost in their whiskers and on their glazed china bowls, painted castles and pine-glades and chamois glowed cheerfully while shag-smoke poured through the perforations of their metal lids. Some of them, gnarled and mummified, puffed at cheroots through which straws were threaded to make them draw better. They gave me one and I added a choking tribute to the enveloping cloud. The accent had changed again, and I could only grasp the meaning of the simplest sentences. Many words were docked of their final consonants; ‘Bursch’—‘a chap’—for instance, became ‘bua’; ‘A’ was rolled over into ‘O,’ ‘Ö’ became ‘E,’ and every O and U seemed to have a final A appended, turning it into a disyllable. All this set up a universal moo-ing note, wildly distorted by resonance and echo; for these millions of vowels, prolonged and bent into boomerangs, sailed ricochetting up through the fog to swell the tidal thunder. This echoing and fluid feeling, the bouncing of sounds and syllables and the hogsheads of pungent liquid that sloshed about the tables and blotted the sawdust underfoot, must have been responsible for the name of this enormous hall. It was called the Schwemme, or horse-pond. The hollowness of those tall mugs augmented the volume of noise like the amphorae which the Greeks embedded in masonry to add resonance to their chants. My own note, as the mug emptied, was sliding down to middle C.

Mammoth columns were rooted in the flagstones and the sawdust. Arches flew in broad hoops from capital to capital; crossing in diagonals, they groined the barrel-vaults that hung dimly above the smoke. The place should have been lit by pine-torches in stanchions. It was beginning to change, turning now, under my clouding glance, into the scenery for some terrible Germanic saga, where snow vanished under the breath of dragons whose red-hot blood thawed sword-blades like icicles. It was a place for battle-axes and bloodshed and the last pages of the Nibelungenlied when the capital of Hunland is in flames and everybody in the castle is hacked to bits. Things grew quickly darker and more fluid; the echo, the splash, the boom and the roar of fast currents sunk this beer-hall under the Rhine-bed; it became a cavern full of more dragons, misshapen guardians of gross treasure; or the fearful abode, perhaps, where Beowulf, after tearing the Grendel’s arm out of its socket, tracked him over the snow by the bloodstains and, reaching the mere’s edge, dived in to swim many fathoms down and slay his loathsome water-hag of a mother in darkening spirals of gore.

Or so it seemed, when the third mug arrived.

* * *

Surely I had never seen that oleograph before? Haloed with stars, the Blessed Virgin was sailing skywards through hoops of pink cloud and cherubim, and at the bottom, in gold lettering, ran the words: Mariä Himmelfahrt. And those trusses of chair-legs, the tabby cat in a nest of shavings and the bench fitted with clamps? Planes, mallets, chisels and braces-and-bits littered the room. There was a smell of glue, and sawdust lay thick on the cobwebs in the mid-morning light. A tall man was sand-papering chair-spokes and a woman was tiptoeing through the shavings with bread and butter and a coffee pot and, as she placed them beside the sofa where I lay blanketed, she asked me with a smile how my Katzenjammer was. Both were utter strangers.

A Katzenjammer is a hangover. I had learnt the word from those girls in Stuttgart.

As I drank the coffee and listened, their features slowly came back to me. At some point, unwillingly emulous of the casualties I had noticed with scorn, I had slumped forward over the Hofbräuhaus table in unwakeable stupor. There has been no vomiting, thank God; nothing worse than total insensibility; and the hefty Samaritan on the bench beside me had simply scooped me up and put me in his handcart, which was full of turned chair legs, and then, wrapping me in my greatcoat against the snow, wheeled it clean across Munich and laid me out mute as a flounder. The calamity must have been brought on by the mixture of the beer with the schnapps I had drunk in Schwabing; I had forgotten to eat anything but an apple since breakfast. Don’t worry, the carpenter said: why, in Prague, the beerhalls kept horses that they harnessed to wickerwork coffins on wheels, just to carry the casualties home at the brewery’s expense... What I needed, he said, opening a cupboard, was a ‘schluck’ of schnapps to put me on my feet. I made a dash for the yard and stuck my head under the pump. Then, combed and outwardly respectable, I thanked my saviours and was soon striding guiltily and at high speed through these outlying streets.

I felt terrible. I had often been drunk, and high spirits had led to rash doings; but never to this hoggish catalepsy.

In the Jugendherberge my rucksack had been tidied away from my unslept-in bed. The caretaker looked in a cupboard in vain and called for the charwoman. No, she said, the only rucksack in the building had departed first thing on the back of their only over-night lodger... What! Was he a spotty young man? I eked out my inadequate German with a few pointilliste prods. Yes, he had been rather pimply: “a pickeliger Bua.”

I was aghast. The implications were too much to take in at first. Momentarily, the loss of the diary ousted all other thoughts. Those thousands of lines, the flowery descriptions, the pensées, the philosophic flights, the sketches and verses! All gone. Infected by my distress, the caretaker and the charwoman accompanied me to the police station, where a sympathetic Schupo wrote down all the details, clicking his tongue. “Schlimm! Schlimm!” Bad... So it was; but there was worse. When he asked for my passport, I reached in the pocket of my jerkin: there was no familiar slotted blue binding there: and I remembered with a new access of despair that I had tucked it down the back of a rucksack pocket for the first time on this journey. The policeman looked grave, and I looked graver still: for inside the passport, for fear of losing it or of spending too much, I had folded the canvas envelope with the four new pounds and this left me with three marks and twenty-five pfennigs in the world, and my lifeline cut for the next four weeks. Apart from this I gathered that wandering about Germany without papers was a serious offence. The policeman telephoned the details to the central police station and said “We must go to the British Consulate.” We caught a tram and I jolted along beside him. He was formidable in a greatcoat and belted side-arms and a black-lacquered shako and chin-strap. I had visions of being packed home as a distressed British subject, or conducted to the frontier as an undesirable alien and felt as though last night’s debauch were stamped on my forehead. I might have been back two years in time, guiltily approaching some dreaded study door.

The clerk at the Consulate knew all about it. The Hauptpolizeiamt had telephoned.

The Consul, seated at a huge desk in a comfortable office under photographs of King George V and Queen Mary, was an austere and scholarly-looking figure in horn-rimmed spectacles. He asked me in a tired voice what all the fuss was about.

Perched on the edge of a leather armchair, I told him, and roughly outlined my Constantinople plan and my idea of writing a book. Then caught up in a fit of volubility, I launched myself on a sort of rambling, prudently censored autobiography. When I finished, he asked me where my father was. In India, I told him. He nodded, and there was a tactful pause. He leant back, with fingertips joined, gazing vaguely at the ceiling, and said: “Got a photograph?” This rather puzzled me. “Of my father? I’m afraid not.” He laughed, and said “No, of you”; and I realized things were taking a turn for the better. The clerk and the policeman led me round the corner to a photomaton shop, which left me with only a few pfennigs. Then I signed the documents waiting in the hall and was summoned back to the Consul’s office. He asked me what I proposed to use for money. I hadn’t thought yet. I said perhaps I could find odd jobs on farms, walking every other day, till I’d let enough time elapse for some more cash to mount up... He said “Well! His Majesty’s Government will lend you a fiver. Send it back some time when you’re less broke.” After my amazed thanks he asked me how I had come to leave my stuff unguarded in the Jugendherberge; I told him all: the recital evoked another tired smile. When the clerk came in with the passport, the Consul-General signed and blotted it carefully, took some banknotes from a drawer, placed them between the pages and pushed it over to my side of his desk. “There you are. Try not to lose it this time.” (I’ve got it in front of me now, faded, torn, dog-eared and travel-stained, crammed with the visas of vanished kingdoms and entry- and exit-stamps in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters. The face in the discoloured snap has a dissolute and rather impertinent look. The consular stamp has gratis written across it, and the signature is D. St Clair Gainer.)

“Do you know anyone in Munich?” Mr. Gainer said, getting up. I said I did—that is, not exactly, but I’d got an introduction to a family. “Get in touch with them,” he said. “Try and keep out of trouble, and I should avoid beer and schnapps on an empty stomach next time. I’ll look out for the book.”[1]

I walked out into the snowy Prannerstrasse like a reprieved malefactor.

* * *

Luckily, the letter of introduction had been posted a few days before. But I remembered the name—Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff—so I telephoned, and was asked to stay; and that same evening, in Gräfelfing, a little way out of Munich, I found myself at a lamp-lit table with a family of the utmost charm and kindness. It seemed a miracle that a day so ominously begun could end so happily.

The Lipharts were a White Russian family: more specifically, they were from Esthonia and, like many Baltic landowners, they had taken flight through Sweden and Denmark after the loss of their estates at the end of the war. The castle they lived in—was it called Ratshoff?—became a national museum in Esthonia, and the family settled in Munich. They had none of the austerity that one might associate with descendants of Teutonic knights—in fact, nothing Teutonic at all—and the visual change from solid bulk to these fine-boned Latin-seeming faces was a welcome one. A Greco-esque look stamped this handsome family and they carried off their change of fortune in light-hearted style.

Karl, the eldest son, was a painter, about fifteen years older than me, and as he was short of a sitter for the few days of my stay, I came in handy. We went into Munich every morning and spent peaceful hours of chat in his studio. I listened to anecdotes and scandals and funny stories about Bavaria while the snow piled up on the skylight and the picture dashingly took shape.[2] When the light began to fail we would wait in a café for Karl’s younger brother Arvid, who worked in a bookshop. Here we would hobnob with friends of theirs for an hour or two or have a drink in someone’s house. On a day when there was no painting, I explored as many of the baroque churches and theatres as I could, and spent an entire morning in the Pinakothek. We would catch the train back to Gräfefing in the evening.

Their parents were captivating survivals of the decades when Paris and the South of France and Rome and Venice were full of northern grandees seeking refuge there from the birch trees and conifers and the frozen lakes of their white and innumerable acres. I could see them, in imagination, lit by the clustering globes of gasoliers on the steps of opera houses and spanking along avenues of lime trees behind carefully matched greys—I could almost catch the twinkle of the scarlet and canary spokes. They would be cantering among the tombs of the Appian Way or gliding from palace to palace, in wonderful clothes, under a maze of bridges. Much of Karl’s father’s life had been spent in painters’ studios and writers’ studies, and the house was full of books in half a dozen languages. In my bedroom I was very taken with an old photograph. It showed my host as a young man, dressed to kill and mounted on a beautiful horse in the middle of a pack of foxhounds. Beyond the tophats and the assembled carriages of his guests, the lost castle loomed. The tale of my rucksack, recounted now as a funny story, brought sympathy showering down. What! I’d lost everything? It wasn’t too bad, I said, thanks to Mr. Gainer’s fiver. “My dear boy, you’ll need every penny!” the Baron exclaimed. “Hang on to it! Karl, Arvid! We must hunt through the attic after dinner.” The attic and various cupboards yielded a splendid rucksack and a jersey, and shirts, socks and pyjamas, a small mountain of things. The whole operation was conducted with speed and laughter, and in ten minutes I was practically fitted out. (I bought the few remaining necessaries next day in Munich for well under a pound.) It was a day of miracles. I was dazed by this immediate and overflowing generosity; but their friendly bohemianism overrode all the reluctance I ought to have felt.

I stayed five days. When leaving-time came, I might have been a son of the house setting forth. The Baron spread maps and pointed out towns and mountains and monasteries and the country houses of friends he would write to, so that I could have a comfortable night now and then, and a bath. “There we are! Nando Arco at St. Martin! And my old friend Botho Coreth at Hochschatten. The Trautmannsdorffs at Pottenbrunn!” (He wrote to them all and it brought a new dimension into the journey.) He and the Baroness were worried about Bulgaria: “It’s full of robbers and comitadjis. You must take care! They’re a terrible lot. And as for the Turks!” The nature of the hinted menace was obscure.

The evenings were conversation and books. The Baron enlarged on the influence of Don Juan on Evgenye Oniegin and the decay of German literature and the changes of taste in France: was Paul Bourget read a great deal? Henri de Regnier? Maurice Barrès? I wish I could have answered. Saved from the general loss by its presence in a remote pocket, my only book now was the German translation of Hamlet: how true was the German claim that it was as good as the original? “Not true at all!” the Baron said: “But it’s better than in any other foreign language. Just listen!”; and he took down four books and read out Mark Antony’s speech in Russian, French, Italian and German. The Russian had a splendid ring, as it always does. The French sounded rather thin and the Italian bombastic and orotund; unfairly but amusingly, he exaggerated the styles as he read. The German, however, had a totally different consistency from any utterance I had heard on this journey: slow, thoughtful, clear and musical, stripped of its harshness and over-emphasis and gush; and in those minutes, as the lamplight caught the reader’s white hair and eyebrows and sweeping white moustache and twinkled in the signet ring of the hand that held the volume, I understood for the first time how magnificent a language it could be.

All these kindnesses were crowned with a dazzling consummation. I had said that my books, after the lost diary, were what I missed most. I ought to have known by now that mention of loss had only one result under this roof... What books? I had named them; when the time came for farewells, the Baron said: “We can’t do much about the others but here’s Horace for you.” He put a small duodecimo volume in my hand. It was the Odes and Epodes, beautifully printed on thin paper in Amsterdam in the middle of the seventeenth century, bound in hard green leather with gilt lettering. The leather on the spine had faded but the sides were as bright as grass after rain and the little book opened and shut as compactly as a Chinese casket. There were gold edges to the pages and a faded marker of scarlet silk slanted across the long S’s of the text and the charming engraved vignettes: cornucopias, lyres, pan-pipes, chaplets of olive and bay and myrtle. Small mezzotints showed the Forum and the Capitol and imaginary Sabine landscapes; Tibur, Lucretilis, the Bandusian spring, Soracte, Venusia...I made a feint at disclaiming a treasure so far beyond the status of the rough travels ahead. But I had been forestalled, I saw with relief, by an inscription: ‘To our young friend,’ etc., on the page opposite an emblematic ex libris with the name of their machicolated Baltic home. Here and there between the pages a skeleton leaf conjured up those lost woods.

* * *

This book became a fetish. I noticed, during the next few days, that it filled everyone with feelings of wonder akin to my own. On the second evening—Rosenheim was the first—placed alongside the resolutely broached new diary on the inn-table of Hohenaschau, it immediately made me seem more exalted than the tramp that I actually was. “What a beautiful little book!,” awed voices would say. Horny fingers reverently turned the pages. “Lateinisch? Well, well...” A spurious aura of scholarship and respectability sprang up.

* * *

Remembering the advice the mayor of Bruchsal had given me, the moment I had arrived in this little village, I had sought out the Bürgermeister. I found him in the Gemeindeamt, where he filled out a slip of paper. I presented it at the inn: it entitled me to supper and a mug of beer, a bed for the night and bread and a bowl of coffee in the morning; all on the parish. It seems amazing to me now, but so it was, and there was no kind of slur attached to it; nothing, ever, but a friendly welcome. I wonder how many times I took advantage of this generous and, apparently, very old custom? It prevailed all through Germany and Austria, a survival perhaps, of some ancient charity to wandering students and pilgrims, extended now to all poor travellers.

The Gastwirtschaft was a beetling chalet with cut logs piled to the eaves. An elaborate balcony ran all the way round it; carved and fretted woodwork frilled it at every point and a layer of snow two feet thick, like the cotton-wool packing for a fragile treasure, muffled the shallow tilt of the enormous wide-eaved roof.

Of the village in the snowy dark outside, nothing has stuck. But unlike the three overnight halts that follow—Riedering, Söllhuben and Röttau, that is to say—it is at least marked on maps.

Each of these little unmarked hamlets seems smaller in retrospect than the other two, and remoter, and more deeply embedded in hills and snow and dialect. They have left an impression of women scattering grain in their yards to a rush of poultry, and of hooded children returning from school with hairy satchels and muffled ears: homing goblins, slapping along lanes on skis as short and wide as barrel-staves and propelling themselves with sticks of unringed hazel. When we passed each other, they would squeak “Grüss Gott!” in a polite shrill chorus. One or two were half gagged by cheekfuls bitten from long slices of black bread and butter.

All was frozen. There was a particular delight in treading across the hard puddles. The grey discs and pods of ice creaked under hobnails and clogs with a mysterious sigh of captive air: then they split into stars and whitened as the spiders-web fissures expanded. Outside the villages the telegraph wire was a single cable of flakes interrupted by birds alighting and I would follow the path below and break through the new and sparkling crust to sink in powdery depths. I travelled on footpaths and over stiles and across fields and along country roads that ran through dark woods and out again into the white ploughland and pasture. The valleys were dotted with villages that huddled round the shingle roofs of churches, and all the belfries tapered and then swelled again into black ribbed cupolas. These onion-domes had a fleetingly Russian look. Otherwise, especially when the bare hardwoods were replaced by conifers, the décor belonged to Grimms’ Fairy Tales. “Once upon a time, on the edge of a dark forest, there lived an old woodman, with a single beautiful daughter,” it was that sort of a region. Cottages that looked as innocent as cuckoo-clocks turned into witches’ ginger-bread after dark. Deep and crusted loads of snow weighed the conifer-branches to the ground. When I touched them with the tip of my new walking stick, up they sprang in sparkling explosions. Crows, rooks and magpies were the only birds about and the arrows of their footprints were sometimes crossed by the deeper slots of hares’ pads. Now and again I came on a hare, seated alone in a field and looking enormous; hindered by the snow it would lope awkwardly away to cover, for the snow slowed everything up, especially when the rails and the posts beside the path were buried. The only people I saw outside the villages were woodcutters. They were indicated, long before they appeared, by the wide twin grooves of their sledges, with cart-horses’ crescent-shaped tracks stamped deep between. Then they would come into view on a clearing or the edge of a distant spinney and the sound of axes and the rasp of two-handed saws would reach my ears a second after my eye had caught the vertical fall or the horizontal slide of the blades. If, by the time I reached them, a tall tree was about to come down, I found it impossible to move on. The sledge-horses, with icicled fetlocks and muzzles deep in their nosebags, were rugged up in sacking and I stamped to keep warm as I watched. Armed with beetles, rustic bruisers at work in a ring of chips and sawdust and trodden snow, banged the wedges home. They were rough and friendly men, and one of them, on the pretext of a strange presence and with a collusive wink, was sure to pull out a bottle of schnapps. Swigs, followed by gasps of fiery bliss, sent prongs of vapour into the frosty air. I took a turn with the saw once or twice, clumsily till I got the hang of it, unable to tear myself away till at last the tree came crashing down. Once, arriving on the scene just as the loading of the dismembered tree was complete, I got a lift on the sledge, and swished along behind two of those colossal chestnuts with flaxen manes and tails and ornate jingling collars. The trip ended with more schnapps in a Gastwirtschaft, and a departure sped by dialect farewells. It shot through my mind that if I were up against it further on, I might do worse than hitch on to one of these forest teams, as one of the woodmen half jocularly suggested, and hack away for my keep.

Otherwise, except for birds, most of these white landscapes were empty, and I would crunch along adding the track of my hobnails to their criss-cross of little tridents. Fired by the Baron’s example, I tried to get by heart, from Schlegel and Tieck’s pocket translation, the passages of Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark which I knew in English. ‘Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer...’ came rumbling out over the snow in its new guise:

until I got to ‘It is a fear of something after death/that undiscovered country from whose bourne/no traveller returns’:

Again, anyone bumping into me unawares, like the crone on the Ulm road, would have taken me for drunk; in a literary sense they would have been right.

Every mile or so wooden calvaries, hewn and painted with rustic velleities of baroque, stood askew beside the path. Streaming wounds mangled the gaunt figures and exposure had warped or split them along the grain. Haloes of tarnished brass put out spikes behind the heads; the brows were clumsily hooped already with plaits of real thorns and sheltered by pointed snow-laden chevrons. They might have been the lineal replacements, changed every few generations, of the first Christian emblems which St. Boniface, hot-foot from Devonshire, had set up in Germany. He converted the country a hundred years after St. Augustine had arrived in Kent; and not much more than two centuries after Hengist and Horsa had landed in Britain while their German kinsmen were bursting into Gaul and into these trans-Danubian woods. This saint from Devonshire was not the only Englishman to help drive the old gods out: monks from south-east England, the West Country and the Shires were soon seated on all the earliest bishops’ thrones of Germany.

Vague speculation thrives in weather like this. The world is muffled in white, motor-roads and telegraph-poles vanish, a few castles appear in the middle distance; everything slips back hundreds of years. The details of the landscape—the leafless trees, the sheds, the church towers, the birds and the animals, the sledges and the woodmen, the sliced ricks and the occasional cowmen driving a floundering herd from barn to barn—all these stand out dark in isolation against the snow, distinct and momentous. Objects expand or shrink and the change makes the scenery resemble early woodcuts of winter husbandry. Sometimes the landscape moves it further back in time. Pictures from illuminated manuscripts take shape; they become the scenes which old breviaries and Books of Hours enclosed in the O of Orate, fratres. The snow falls; it is Carolingian weather... Set on the way by my Villon craze, I had discovered and devoured Helen Waddell’s Mediaeval Latin Lyrics and the Wandering Scholars the year before and had seized on the Archpoet and the Carmina Burana; and I wasn’t slow, in the present circumstances, to identify myself with one of those itinerant mediaeval clerks. In an inn or a cowshed, when I scratched away the ice-ferns in the morning and the winter scene widened, the illusion was complete:

It was the world all round me! ‘De ramis cadunt folia...’ they had fallen long ago. ‘Modo frigescit quidquid est...’ icicles, barring the scene out-of-doors, dripped from the eaves in confirmation.

There was something meditative and consoling about this dim season, except towards evening, when the sun—invisible through the clouds, reduced to a silvery blur or expanded to an orange globe like a winter cherry—began to set. Then rooks fell silent; the pink after-glow faded on faraway peaks; the light dwindled over the grey fields; and life ebbed with a shudder like a soul leaving the body. All was suddenly quiet and ghostly and I longed for the first glimpse of the lamplight streaming through the windows of my destined village. I lost my way now and then through misunderstanding instructions at a farm or a cottage; sometimes dialect or lack of teeth or the wind had garbled them. Heading in the twilight for one of those three uncharted villages, I had a moment of panic. I was long past the last signpost: it had pointed to Pfaffenbichl and Marwang—I remember these two names because the first was ridiculous and the second rather sinister. All at once it was dark and the snow was coming down fast. I was feeling my way by a wooden rail when I lost touch and fell stumbling in a drift and floundered in circles but couldn’t find the rail. I must have strayed into a field. Luckily I found a ruined barn and fumbled my way to the door. I lit a match and cleared the snow and the ancient cow-pats and owls’ pellets out of a corner and, pulling on every stitch of extra clothing from my rucksack, resigned myself to the thought of sheltering there till daybreak. The sun had only just set.

I usually had an apple and a hunk of bread and a flask, but not this time. There was no light to read by or dry wood for a fire, the cold was getting worse and the wind was driving snow through a score of gaps. I huddled in a ball with my arms round my knees, stirring every few minutes to stamp and flap my arms. Too low for wolves, I thought melodramatically; or was it? After a while I stopped the singing with which I was trying to pass the interminable hours. There was nothing for it but to sit clenched and shivering in this prehistoric burial posture and listen to my teeth rattling. Every now and then I seemed to fall into a sort of catalepsy. But suddenly—was it midnight, or one in the morning? or later perhaps?—the wind fell and I heard voices, quite near, and jumped up and ran out shouting. There was silence, then someone called back. I could make out two faint blurs. They were villagers returning home. What was I doing there, on such a night? I told them. “Der arme Bua!” They were all sympathy. But it was only half-past eight and the village was a mere two or three hundred metres away, just round the end of the hill... And within five minutes, there were the roofs and the belfry and the lighted doorway. The carpet of lamplight unrolled across the snow and the flakes floating past the windows were turning to sequins. Inside the inn the lamplit and steaming rustics round the table, veiled in the smoke of their lidded pipes, were maundering away with slurred vowels over their mugs. It was no good trying to explain.

* * *

“Hans.”

“ What?”

“Can you see me?”

“No.”

“Well, the dumplings are enough.”

The inn-keeper’s wife, who was from Munich, was illustrating the difficulties of the dialect by an imaginary conversation between two Bavarian peasants. They are seated on either side of a table, helping themselves from a huge dish of Knödel, and it is only when the plate of one of them is piled high enough with dumplings to hide him from view that he stops. In ordinary German, this dialogue would run: “Hans!” “Was?” “Siehst Du mich?” “Nein.” “Also, die Knödel sind genug.” But in the speech of Lower Bavaria, as closely as I can remember, it turns into: “Schani!” “Woas?” “Siahst Du ma?” “Na.” “Nacha, siang die Kniadel knua.” Such sounds were mooing and rumbling in the background all through this Bavarian trudge.

The inns in these remote and winter-bound thorpes were warm and snug. There was usually a picture of Hitler and a compulsory poster or two, but they were outnumbered by pious symbols and more venerable mementoes. Perhaps because I was a foreigner, politics seldom entered the conversations I had to share in; rather surprisingly, considering the closeness of those villages to the fountain-head of the Party. (It was different in towns.) Inn-talk, when it concerned the regional oddities of Bavaria, was rife with semi-humorous bias. Even then, many decades after Bismarck’s incorporation of the Bavarian Kingdom into the German Empire, Prussia was the chief target. A frequent butt of these stories was a hypothetical Prussian visitor to the province. Disciplined, blinkered, pig-headed and sharp-spoken, with thin vowels and stripped consonants—every “sch” turning into “s” and every hard “g” into “y”—this ridiculous figure was an unfailing prey for the easy-going but shrewd Bavarians. Affection for the former ruling family still lingered. The hoary origins and the thousand years’ sway of the Wittelsbachs were remembered with pride and their past follies forgiven. So august and gifted and beautiful a dynasty had every right, these old people inferred, to be a bit cracked now and then. The unassuming demeanour of Prince Ruprecht, the actual Pretender—who was also the last Stuart Pretender to the British throne—was frequently extolled; he was a distinguished doctor in Munich, and much loved. All this breathed homesickness for a past now doubly removed and thickly overlaid by recent history. I liked them for these old loyalties. Not everyone is fond of Bavarians: their fame is mixed, both inside Germany and out and one hears damning tales of aggressive ruthlessness. They seemed a rougher race than the civilized Rhinelanders or the diligent and homely Swabians. They were, perhaps, more raw in aspect and more uncompromising in manner; and—trivial detail!—an impression remains, perhaps a mistaken one, of darker hair. But there was nothing sinister about the farm people and foresters and woodcutters I spent these evenings with. They have left a memory of whiskers and wrinkles and deep eye sockets, of slurred speech and friendly warmth and hospitable kindness. Carved wood teemed in every detail of their dwellings, for from the Norwegian fiords to Nepal, above certain contour-lines, the upshot of long winters, early nightfall, soft wood and sharp knives is the same. It soars to a feverish zenith in Switzerland, where each winter begets teeming millions of cuckoo clocks, chamois, dwarfs and brown bears.

On one of these evenings, an accordion player set everyone yodelling. I can’t bear it now, but I listened in rapture then. In the last of these villages I found myself rolling about on the floor in a friendly wrestling match with a village boy of about my own age. It ended in an inextricable clinch and a draw, from which we rose covered in sweat and sawdust, limping through acclaim towards the reviving beer mugs.

In thanks for shelter in farms, or for sojourns that the parish had imposed, I sketched the farmers and inn-keepers and their wives and presented them with the results and through politeness or lack of sophistication, they looked pleased. I will go into the merits of this output later. At one point, it plays an important part in this story.

* * *

It was different in towns.

In all those chance conversations in coffee houses and beer-halls and wine-cellars I was a most inadequate foil. Just how inadequate, I must try to convey, even if it slows things up for a couple of pages.

‘A dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness...’ those words in my housemaster’s report would have been nearer the mark if ‘sophistication’ had been replaced by ‘precocity plus backwardness.’ At all events, the mixture had produced nothing faintly resembling a grasp of politics and I’m forced to confess that, apart from a few predictable and almost subconscious prejudices, politically speaking, I didn’t care a damn. It was still possible for people to know each other fairly well without the dimmest idea of their opinions; and, at the King’s School, Canterbury, discussion raged on every theme but this.

It goes without saying that in a small, tradition-haunted public school of such improbable antiquity—founded a few decades after Justinian closed the pagan academy at Athens—the atmosphere was likely to be conservative, and it was; but it was conservatism of an inexplicit kind, unaggressive because it was unchallenged—at least, at the age of sixteen and a half it was, which is when I vanished from the scene; but deep in the bloodstream nevertheless. There were rumours of sporadic heterodoxy higher up but they were few, and not fierce, and no firebrands like the two-man jacquerie of Esmond Romilly and Philip Toynbee had ever broken in to scatter manifestos and drive away with a carload of straw boaters. Communism, in such surroundings, still suggested the beards, the fur hats and the steaming bombs of old-fashioned cartoons; it was a concept almost too exotic for conjecture. The few boys with Socialist leanings were thought to be harmless, but a bit odd; and, where they might have seemed dashing a couple of years later, they were then thought rather dim. Socialism sounded grey and without charm and Labour M.P.s conjured up visions of steelrimmed spectacles, homespun cloth, cocoa and seed-cake and long killjoy faces bent on dismantling—what? Here an odd medley of targets would be bandied across fifth-form studies: What indeed? Why, the Empire, for a start! The Fleet! The Army! Established religion—“except Methodist chapels”; Gibraltar, the Lords, judges’ wigs, kilts, bearskins, public schools (“No, steady on!” ), Latin and Greek, Oxford and Cambridge—“the Boat race too, most likely”; “county cricket for a cert.”—steeplechasing, shooting, fox-hunting, flat-racing, the Derby, betting, country-life, farming—(“I bet they’d plough up everything for swedes and beetroots if they got the chance!”) What about London? Why, the Palladium and the Aldwych would be turned into lecture halls or bloody temperance canteens. (The preceding notions were imported, rather than formed on the spot. They were fragments left over from outbursts and lamentations at home. The level may have been higher; but I think this reconstruction is about right.) Talk would languish and a pensive gloom descend. Then someone might say: “It’s a pity something can’t be done about those poor chaps on the dole”; and the gloom would deepen; then: “It’s rotten luck on all those miners.” Awkward silence would prolong itself while these liberal thoughts fluttered overhead. Then someone might tactfully put Rhapsody in Blue or Ain’t Misbehavin’ on the gramophone and steer the talk into happier channels: musical comedies, domestic scandal, Tallulah Bankhead, slow bowling or the fast passages in Juvenal.

My early days in London saw little advance on this; rather the reverse. The fellow crammers’ pups from other establishments that I knocked about with at first were mostly a year older than me, or more; and their early departure from school had been prompted by backwardness rather than iniquity. They were wide-eyed, pink-cheeked and innocent boys with tidy hair; cornets and ensigns in the larva phase, cramming painfully for their exams and bent on an early mastery of the customs of their future regiments. They shunned flannel bags for whole suits and choked happily behind ties that were silk autobiographies knotted in high starched collars. Lock had helmetted them in hard hats till after Goodwood. Brigg, or Swaine & Adeney, sworded them with umbrellas that no cloud-burst would ever unfurl, and—ah! how enviably!—Lobb, Peel and Maxwell, on their fathers’ accounts, had shod them in boned and gleaming shoes. With brows knit, they concentrated on not carrying parcels in London, on puffing at Turkish or Egyptian cigarettes rather than stinkers—even if they didn’t want to smoke at all—and on eschewing the arcane blacklist of verbal usage that regimental traditions condemned. There was earnest talk, but it revolved round breeches-makers, gunsmiths and spurriers and hairdressers and their lotions, and the rival claims, in the evening, of carnations and gardenias. Arlen-ish anxieties! They were absurd and rather delightful. I was dazzled by all this juvenile dandyism; it seemed the height of worldly maturity and I did my best to keep up. With expert advice on pattern and cut I pondered eclectically in shops as hushed as cave-palaces at the bottom of the sea, and bills mounted up. In the fullness of time, there was a Simla-London row about them, with bewilderment more than anger at the Simla end; how could I be quite so silly? Some of the bills weren’t paid till years after these travels ended. Decorous d’Orsay-esque canters under the plane trees with these new friends, especially when Hyde Park was still covered with dew, seemed a perfect beginning to the day and, in winter I sped across country on borrowed steeds. They were very nice to me, because I was the youngest and because genuine rashness, linked with a kind of clownish exhibitionism, whose secret I had learnt long ago and sedulously cultivated, always won a dubious popularity. I was even forgiven, after diving into a lake at a ball, for only remembering when climbing out covered in slime and duckweed that my tails were borrowed.

It was about then that the first doubts about soldiering in peacetime began. Mermaid voices—the world of Literature and the Arts—were secretly beckoning. My friends, however much they might grumble about shortness of ready cash, would have enough later to enliven soldiering with all the country pursuits they loved and plenty left over for painting London red, and in a more elaborate and seemly style than our uncomplex weekly binges allowed. These would begin among the brass and the baize-curtained settles and the print-covered walls of Stone’s Chop-House in Panton Street—a Leach illustration for Surtees, destroyed in the Blitz—and twice they ended in Vine Street: (“Did you have a nice time last night, Richard?” “Perfect, Aunt Kitty. Just what I like: a vomit and a brush with the Police.”) Also, if they tired of the Army, they could leave it. But what about living on one’s pay, as I would have to? It might have worked had I felt utterly and exclusively vowed to a military life. But suddenly it seemed that the whole idea had taken shape faute de mieux; and, quite clearly, I was as ill-endowed for thrift in the face of temptation as I was for discipline. How would I manage, year after year, with no war in sight, never getting abroad, perhaps? As it happened, only one of this small set was destined for the infantry; armed at all points with arcane footguard vetoes, he was the one who was strictest, in a voice which had scarcely broken yet, about usage and attire; but dynastic loyalty had vowed the others, practically from birth, to paternal cavalry regiments and every so often, they were cast down by the thought that, Hussars and Lancers though they would be, the cavalry was being motorized fast. Wheels, armour-plating, nuts, bolts and caterpillar-tracks were closing in and soon, outside the Household Cavalry and the two first regiments of heavy Dragoons, there would not be a whinny within earshot except from their own loose-boxes. But all their longings remained true to boot and saddle, and these feelings were catching. I was infected with their equestrian yearnings and moments of hope would spring: Why not India? Plenty of horses there. And with the extra allowances, why not?

After this, at regular intervals, unloosed by my voices-in-the-next-room relationship to India, fostered by long gazing at faded photographs, and almost wholly unrelated to reality, unavowable dreams intoxicatingly and fleetingly took shape. Sashed, and in chain-mail epaulettes with a striped puggaree twisted round a conical Multani cap and its fringed tail flying loose with the speed of the charge, I would be pointing along a canyon with a sabre while a squadron of irregular horse, their pennanted lances lowered, thundered behind; the bullets of ten-rupee jezails, meanwhile, consistently missing, whistled past our ears. In another scene in this secret camera obscura I was seconded like Strickland Sahib, thanks to an effortless mastery of a dozen native tongues and their dialects, for special duties: unrecognizable under my rags I would disappear for months into the lanes and the bazaars of seething frontier cities. The scenery of the next slide was set beyond the Himalayas: how many weeks from Yarkand to Urumchi? There, sheltered from the blizzards of the Pamirs under the black and snowladen tent-flap, narrow-eyed over the hookah and indistinguishable from the shaggy chieftains cross-legged all round me, I played out the last chukkah of the Great Game... Invariably, as they dissolved, these deadly secret scenes made room for a final lantern-slide which was more convincing than all the rest and in much sharper focus. Squad-drill barked in the offing, recruits formed fours with a ragged triple crash, a bugler blew ‘Defaulters,’ and for miles around, Hampshire drizzle soaked into the gorse and pines and streamed over Aldershot windows. The adjutant meanwhile, pointing wearily at the mess-bills and cheques on his desk, said: “You realize this can’t go on? The Colonel will see you now. He’s waiting for you.”

* * *

Once I dropped the idea of soldiering, the mermaid voices which had all the time been softly, and then less softly, calling me away from those friendly cornets of horse, now held me in thrall. The world of Literature and Art...I didn’t find it. But through new friends and via the Cavendish Hotel, I think, I felt I had stepped through a looking-glass to wander in a bracing and brand new region. In this breezy, post-Stracheyan climate, it was cheerfully and explicitly held that all English life, thought and art were irredeemably provincial and a crashing bore and the sack from school, to my surprise, was hailed as a highly creditable feat; failure to join the Army was better still: “The Army! I should hope not indeed. The very idea!” I tried to explain that it had not been for ideological reasons and that I thought the King’s commission a heavy honour; but, jovially overridden, I remained traitorously silent next time. An exotic radiance played over this new world. Bright with fireworks and shot with sulphuric sparks, it was an extension into real life of half a dozen books I had just read. The Left Wing opinions that I occasionally heard were uttered in such a way that they seemed a part merely, and a minor part, of a more general emancipation. This was composed of eclectic passwords and symbols—a fluent awareness of modern painting, for instance, or a familiarity with new trends in music; neither more important nor less than acquaintance with nightlife in Paris and Berlin and a smattering of the languages spoken there. The atmosphere was far removed from cocoa and Methodism; principle never interfered with fastidious hedonism—expensive clothes and elaborate ties—and the only proletarian leanings I could discern probably sprang more from a physiological need for tough company than from dogma. How brilliantly the author of ‘Where Engels Fear to Tread’[3] depicts the protagonist of this particular aspect of Thirties’ London! He soars from the page like a genie out of a bottle, and the symbols he leaves on evaporation are not hammers or sickles but a scattering of jewels and the tail feather of a lyre-bird. No wonder that the ‘Left Wing’ and ‘Communism’ seemed little more than light siege-pieces aimed at the stuffiness of the old. This was the target, and shocks the tactics along the Ritz-Café Royal-Gargoyle front and a great salient of country houses. Of course I knew that these flashes were the frivolous symptoms of an enormous political movement. But I had no inkling of the immeasurable influence that it was about to exert on people of my age and not a hint of the unquestioning ardour and the disillusioned palinodes that lay in wait for most of my later friends. I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was denied or spared by a geographical fluke. From the end of these travels till the War, I lived, with a year’s interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends whom I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their western equivalents—peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them—felt able to do. For Russia began only a few fields away, the other side of a river; and there, as all her neighbours knew, great wrong was being done and terrible danger lay. All their fears came true. Living among them made me share those fears and they made stony ground for certain kinds of grain.

This is a long rigmarole, but it does show how ill-prepared I was for any form of political argument. In this respect, I might have been sleep-walking.

* * *

Those Bavarian inn conversations reflected opinions which ran from the total conviction of party-members to the total opposition of their opponents and victims; with the difference that the first were loud and voluble while the second remained either silent or non-committal until they were alone with a single interlocutor. Being English was relevant to all this, for though the Germans’ attitude to England varied, it was never indifferent. A few, like the near-albino in Heidelberg, showed loathing. The War inevitably cropped up: they resented that we had been on the winning side, but didn’t seem to blame us—always with the proviso that Germany would never have lost if she hadn’t been stabbed in the back; and they admired England, in a certain measure, for reasons that were seldom heard in respectable English circles any more. For past conquests, that is, and the extent of the colonies, and the still apparently undiminished power of the Empire. When, with education and practice the colonies could rule themselves, I would urge at this point, they would be given their independence. Not at once, of course; it would take time...(This was the theory we had all been brought up on.) Looks of admiration, partly rueful and partly ironical, at what they considered the size of the lie and the extent of its hypocrisy, were the invariable response.

In these exchanges I was held up by ignorance and by anxiety to hide it; and my limited German, though it was often a stumbling block, sometimes helped to mask its true depths. How I longed to be better equipped! When they asked, and they always did, what the English thought of National Socialism, I would stick repetitively to three main objections: the burning of the books, of which lurid photographs had filled the newspapers; the concentration camps which had been set up a few months before; and the persecution of the Jews. This procedure was irritating, I could see, but not wholly ineffective. Anyway, the reactions and arguments are too familiar for repetition.

In all of these conversations there was one opening I particularly dreaded: I was English? Yes. A student? Yes. At Oxford, no? No. At this point I knew what we were in for.

The summer before, the Oxford Union had voted that ‘under no circumstances would they fight for King and Country.’ The stir it had made in England was nothing, I gathered, to the sensation in Germany. I didn’t know much about it. In my explanation—for I was always pressed for one—I depicted the whole thing as merely another act of defiance against the older generation. The very phrasing of the motion—‘Fight for King and Country’—was an obsolete cliché from an old recruiting poster: no-one, not even the fiercest patriot, would use it now to describe a deeply-felt sentiment. My interlocutors asked: “Why not?” ‘Für König und Vaterland’ sounded different in German ears: it was a bugle-call that had lost none of its resonance. What exactly did I mean? The motion was probably ‘pour épater les bourgeois,’ I floundered. Here someone speaking a little French would try to help. “Um die Bürger zu erstaunen? Ach, so!” A pause would follow. “A kind of joke, really,” I went on. “Ein Scherz?” they would ask. “Ein Spass? Ein Witz?” I was surrounded by glaring eyeballs and teeth. Someone would shrug and let out a staccato laugh like three notches on a watchman’s rattle. I could detect a kindling glint of scornful pity and triumph in the surrounding eyes which declared quite plainly their certainty that, were I right, England was too far gone in degeneracy and frivolity to present a problem. But the distress I could detect on the face of a silent opponent of the régime was still harder to bear: it hinted that the will or the capacity to save civilization was lacking where it might have been hoped for. Veterans of the War showed a sort of unpartisan sorrow at this falling-off. It sprang from the ambiguous love-hate for England that many Germans felt. They recalled the trenches and the stubborn fighting qualities of ‘die Tommies’; then they compared them to the pacifist voters in the Union, and shook their heads. There was a sorrowing, Horatian note in this. Not from such sires, these veterans seemed to say, were sprung the youths who dyed the sea red with Punic blood and struck down Pyrrhus and mighty Antiochus and grim Hannibal.

These undergraduates had landed their wandering compatriots in a fix. I cursed their vote; and it wasn’t even true, as events were to prove. But I was stung still more by the tacit and unjust implication that it was prompted by lack of spirit. I urged that there had always been an anti-militarist strain among the English in peace time. But when the blast of war blew in their ears, they imitated the action of the tiger, stiffened the sinews, summoned up the blood, and disguised fair nature with hard-favoured rage, etc. It didn’t cut much ice.

* * *

Appalling things had happened since Hitler had come into power ten months earlier; but the range of horror was not yet fully unfolded. In the country the prevailing mood was a bewildered acquiescence. Occasionally it rose to fanaticism. Often when nobody was in earshot, it found utterance in pessimism, distrust and foreboding, and sometimes in shame and fear but only in private. The rumours of the concentration camps were still no louder than a murmur; but they hinted at countless unavowable tragedies.

In one of those lost Rhineland towns, I can’t remember which, I had a glimpse of how quick the change-over had been for many Germans. In a workmen’s bar late at night I made friends with several factory hands in overalls who had come off a late shift. They were about my age, and one of them, an amusing, clownish character, said: why didn’t I doss down on his brother’s camp bed at his place? When we climbed the ladder to his attic, the room turned out to be a shrine of Hitleriana. The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His S.A. uniform hung neatly ironed on a hanger. He explained these cult objects with fetishist zest, saving up till the last the centrepiece of his collection. It was an automatic pistol, a Luger parabellum, I think, carefully oiled and wrapped in mackintosh, accompanied by a pile of green cardboard boxes packed with bullets. He stripped and reassembled the pistol, loaded the magazine and smacked it home and ejected it again, put on a belt and crossbrace with a holster, whipped the gun in and out like a cowboy, tossed it in the air and caught it, spun it round by the trigger-guard and danced about with one eye shut, going through the motions of aiming and firing with loud clicks of the tongue... When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on his bed, and said: “Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite! I used to punch the heads of anyone singing the Horst Wessel Lied! It was all the Red Flag and the International then! I wasn’t only a Sozi, but a Kommi, ein echter Bolschewik!” He gave a clenched fist salute. “You should have seen me! Street fights! We used to beat the hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us. We laughed ourselves silly—Man hat sich totgelacht. Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!” He snapped his fingers in the air. “And here I am!” What about all his old pals, I asked. “They changed too!—all those chaps in the bar. Every single one! They’re all in the S.A. now.” Had a lot of people done the same, then? A lot? His eyes opened wide. “Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!” He shook his head dubiously for a moment. Then a wide, untroubled smile divided his face, as he spilled the bullets like rosary beads through the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other. “Sakra Haxen noch amal! We’ve scarcely got any Sozis or Kommis left to pitch into!” He laughed merrily. What did his parents think about it all? I had met them on the way up—rather a nice, seedy-looking old couple listening to the wireless by the kitchen stove. He shrugged and looked depressed. “Mensch! They don’t understand anything. My father’s old-fashioned: only thinks abut the Kaiser and Bismarck and old Hindenburg—and now he’s dead, too—anyway, he helped the Führer to get where he is! And my mother, she knows nothing about politics. All she cares about is going to church. She’s old-fashioned too.”

* * *

On the road running east from my last Bavarian halt in Traunstein the sudden clear weather showed how close I was getting to the Alps. The clouds had vanished and the great range soared out of the plain as abruptly as a wall rises from a field. The snow-covered masses climbed and gleamed, slashed with blue shadows; dark loops of fir and the peaks of the Kitzbühel Alps and the East Tyrol overlapped in the sky above a deep mesh of shadowy valleys. A signpost pointed south and along a valley at the end of which Bad Reichenhall lay. On the ledge above, Berchtesgaden was perched, only known, as yet, for its abbey and its castle and its view over the wide Bavarian lowlands.

But I steered east and reached the banks of the Salzach late in the afternoon. A red, white and black pole barred the road. Inside the customs-house hung the last picture of the Führer. Uniform sleeves were ringed by the last swastika armbands and in a few minutes, beside a barrier striped red and white, an Austrian official was stamping my passport: 24 January 1934.

By nightfall I was gazing at the statues and wandering down the baroque colonnades of Salzburg in search of a café. The windows, when I found one, looked out on a fountain adorned by stampeding horses and stalactitic with icicles.

[1] I never saw the rucksack again: I had hoped the diary might have been jettisoned and handed in. Rather oddly the stick, with its twenty-two plaques, had vanished as well. The loss of the journal still aches now and then like an old wound in bad weather. There was no news either of the ‘pickeliger Bua.’ I repaid the fiver from Constantinople almost exactly a year later.

[2] It was destroyed by a bomb in the war.

[3] In The Condemned Playground by Cyril Connolly.