A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  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, w
ith 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 wit
h 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.