Europe
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29 Crossing the rivers
Great European riven have generally decreed the situation of great European cities, founded where there was a convenient ford, or an easy bridging site, or at the highest point of navigation, or at the estuary. Run your eye upon a map of the Rhine, and you find upon its banks Rotterdam, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Mainz, Mannheim, Strasbourg, Basle. The Rhône has given birth to Geneva, Lyon, Avignon and Marseille, the Danube to Regensburg, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade. Many a famous battle, too, has been fought around the river crossings, from Horatius holding his bridge against the Etruscans to Montgomery aiming a Rhine bridge too far at Arnhem. Who has not stood upon a bridge parapet, above some famous stream, and sententiously marvelled at all the history, wasteful and productive, sad and joyful, that it has sponsored on its journey, through so many centuries, to the sea? I do it often myself on the little stone bridge across our river Dwyfor at home, which has been tumbling for so many thousand years the full nine miles between its source in the mountains and its fusion with the Irish Sea! No wonder the course of the river is the most familiar of all pulpit metaphors.
But the crossings themselves, too, can be metaphors of another sort, illustrating mankind’s own energies. The bridges of Europe are among the most suggestive of all its structures, especially when they form links between nations, States or Powers: the fateful Rhine crossings, or the fine pair of modern bridges, over the Severn, which separate England from Wales, or the Glienecker bridge over the River Havel at Berlin, which is where they used to swop the spies of East and West during the Cold War, or the bridge between Hungary and Slovakia, below the basilica of Esztergom, which Patrick Leigh Fermor immortalized by ending his masterpiece A Time of Gifts bang in the middle of it.
On the Danube there is only one bridge along the whole frontier of Bulgaria, from the Yugoslav border almost to the Black Sea. It is a monstrous iron thing at Ruse, built jointly by the Communist Governments of Bulgaria and Romania in the 1950s, and called (of course) the Friendship Bridge. When it was built it was the second longest bridge in Europe. It springs from the Romanian shore at Giurgiu, and subsides on the Bulgarian side in a welter of oil-tanks, pipes, gas stations, railway lines and truckers’ cafés. Ruse itself has always been a cosmopolitan river-crossing town. The novelist Elias Canetti, who grew up there in its once thriving Sephardic Jewish community, wrote that everything he experienced later in life had already happened to him in Ruse. Through all the vagaries of Bulgarian history, and despite much heavy industry, and drear chemical pollution from the Romanian shore, it has remained surprisingly elegant – rather Viennese, with well-proportioned boulevards, and lots of sidewalk cafés. However, from the water-meadows along the river-bank a few miles downstream you would hardly know the city existed at all. The river flows placidly by down there, the banks are gently wooded, cattle graze the meadows, an occasional boat chugs by, bucolic sounds emerge from the village behind your back, and all you can see upstream is that bridge – an enormous cantilevered structure with pompous towers at each end.
Different metaphors indeed entered my mind when I stood in the sunshine in 1995 considering this object, for it looked to me a very conduit of skulduggery. It was the principal route of traffic out of central and eastern Europe towards Turkey: trucks came to it from many countries, trains from Bucharest, Prague, Berlin, Kiev, Moscow and even St Petersburg. I imagined I could see all the villains of post-Communist Europe flooding across it into Bulgaria, driving stolen Mercedes (every self-respecting Balkan villain had to have a Mercedes, preferably with the plates of some far-away country). Romanian rogues, Hungarian con men, Gypsy thieves, opportunists from Moldavia, Russian crooks – there they all were, I thought, rumbling between the cantilever girders with crates of contraband, packets of cocaine, bundles of money to be laundered, introductions to flexible Government ministers and handguns secreted under the floorboards. There is nothing like a big river bridge for stimulating the fancy.
30 A bridge transformed
In my time few European cities have been more startlingly revivified than Prague, and the prime symbol of its metamorphosis is the Charles Bridge across the Vltava river. One of the most beautiful and celebrated bridges in the world, in Communist times it used to strike me as a froward edifice, leading between its bowed and crumbled statues over the river to Hradčany Castle, where dreadful things looked as though they might happen. When I went back after the fall of Communism I found it had become, almost overnight, one of the liveliest river crossings in all Europe. Here, where the tutelary saint of bridges, St John of Nepomuk, was thrown into the river by royal command, and the old kings of Bohemia processed in arrogant glory towards their coronations, the whole gallimaufry of tourism now assembled beneath the sacred images: sellers of etchings and leather purses, mime artists, instant portraitists, folk-musicians with bagpipes and wheezing gourds, merry little dogs running here and there, the inevitable classical violinist, and an accordion-player who looked exactly like the Emperor Franz Josef himself, and who thanked me with a truly sovereign bow when I congratulated him upon the resemblance.
31 Changing the geography
The myriad canals of Europe, often linking one river with another, have changed the arrangements of the continent – it was Charlemagne who first artificially connected the Rhine with the Danube. The two most famous of them have actually changed its geography. One is the Corinth Canal in Greece, opened in 1893 after several thousand years of false starts, which links the Ionian and the Aegean Seas and makes the whole of the Peloponnese an island. The other is the Kiel Canal, née the Kaiser Wilhelm Nord-Ostsee-Kanal, which was opened in 1895 to connect the Baltic with the North Sea. No two works of engineering could be much more different of manner or allusion.
The Corinth Canal is only about three miles long, but runs in a deep ditch, straight as a die, from one gulf to the other. Its banks are so steep that from the deck of a ship you can see nothing of the passing countryside, so that a voyage through it is more an imaginative experience than an episode of travel. I have traversed it twice on ships from Venice, on my way to and from Piraeus, and I found the presence of the lion of St Mark, bold and noble on the funnel above me, wonderfully conducive to historical fancy. The Venetians themselves must often have crossed this isthmus in the course of their imperial adventures, travelling overland between their colonies, or finally sending their armies to the siege of Athens itself, when they blew up the Parthenon. But more suggestive still, for me, was the thought of the classical goings-on out of sight over those high banks – vaguely conceived comings and goings of Spartans, Corinthians and Athenians, armies from Persia with strange beasts, philosophers declaiming in town squares, sculptors working away at immortal figures, mathematical geniuses in their baths, javelin-throwers and tragedy-actors in full display – all happening up there above the thin drift of vapour from our smokestack, like a dream-show.
But think of Kiel and you think of Kaiser Bill, and all the mighty works of German threat and enterprise that led up to the First World War. The Kiel Canal linked the great Baltic naval base of Kiel itself with the North Sea, through sixty miles of pleasant pasture land, and, quite apart from its commercial convenience (scores of ships used to be wrecked every year in the treacherous navigation through the Danish Belt), it meant that the German High Seas Fleet could now sail from one sea to another without having to pass through foreign waters at all. How the Kaiser and his admirals gloried in it! At the opening ceremony a hundred warships sailed through, led by the Imperial yacht Hohenzollern, and the Kaiser delighted in showing off the wonders of the canal to eminent foreign visitors. When King Edward VII of England sailed through it in 1908, along its banks gorgeously uniformed German cavalry trotted in escort all the way. The building of the canal was a deliberate spit in the eyes of the British, enabling the entire German fleet to be easily concentrated against them. In 1906 my friend Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher of the British Navy built his 17,000-ton battleship Dreadnought, obliging the
Germans to build to a similar size; the Kiel Canal had to be widened and deepened at immense expense – an annovance Jack boasted of ever afterwards.
The best place to see the Kiel Canal is at Rendsburg, about a third of the way along from Kiel. Three ancillary marvels there make the great canal seem even greater, and, since the place is an old garrison town, there is an apposite plethora too of barracks and parade-grounds and streets named for kaisers, kings and crown princes. The first wonder of Rendsburg is the tremendous four-lane tunnel which takes Route 77 under the canal, a work of terrific power and elegance. The second is the high-level bridge over the canal. This not only has a transport-carriage for cars always swinging backwards and forwards under its span, but is so lofty that when its railway tracks descend to Rendsburg station they can do so only in an immensely wide-swinging curve, enclosing an entire quarter of the town as within a rampart. The third wonder is the longest escalator in Europe, which plunges deep beneath the canal to take pedestrians to the other side. I stood one morning looking down this dreadful shaft, which was all empty and rumbling, wondering if anyone ever used it, when a cheerful girl rode up behind me on a bicycle. Without a pause she tucked the bike under her arm, as it were, and launched herself upon the moving staircase. I stood there watching her go: and down and down she went, all alone, smaller and smaller, clutching her bicycle, until she disappeared altogether into the hole beneath the Kiel Canal. Above her the ships sailed on through the green countryside.
32 Sea-route
Europe is three-quarters an island, with a wide isthmus between the Baltic and the Black Seas, and all around it sea-traffic is still active, ferries crossing gulfs and channels, coasting vessels nosing into fjords and river estuaries, not to mention fishing-boats and dredgers and pleasure craft sailing ever more ambitiously from country to country. Among the surviving sea-routes, the most resilient is the Hurtigruten, the coastal shipping service of the Norwegians. This was not what I imagined when I went to board one of its ships at the quay in Bergen in the 1990s. I had half expected to see an old black-and-white steamer with a tall smokestack, with those big trumpet-like ventilators that steamships used to have, and hefty derricks fore and aft. Instead I found a kind of cruise liner towering there, like something out of Miami, humming, with cargo going on board via fork-lift trucks through a huge side-hatch, and a coachload of Norwegian-American tourists at that moment gregariously embarking.
‘Hurtigruten’ means ‘Fast Route’, and stands generically for the Coastal Express, the service of ships which has for more than a century linked the ports of the Norwegian coast from Bergen around the North Cape to Kirkenes on the Russian border: part working passenger and cargo ships, part pleasure-vessels. The coastal service is a national institution, part of the Norwegian way of things. ‘Just wait till tomorrow,’ cries Ibsen’s Professor Rubek (again in When We Dead Wake). ‘Then the great comfortable steamer will put into the harbour, and we’ll get on board and sail northward all round the coast – right up into the Arctic.’ In his day a couple of ships a week made the voyage. By the 1990s eleven vessels maintained a daily service all the year round, putting in at thirty-two ports along the way. It was an epic and an elegant enterprise. The ships sailed 500 miles above the Arctic Circle, and in winter they were the only links with the rest of the world for many of the isolated communities of the North.
I should have known better, of course, than to expect that tall-funnelled old steamship. That was the kind my grandfather sailed on, when he made this voyage soon after the turn of the century. My Hurtigruten ship, the Kong Harald, 6,270 tons, was modernity exemplified. Nevertheless our progress up the long coast faithfully followed the pattern of the steamboats that had gone before: the same route, the same mooring-places, the same manner of familiar service. Time and again the old and the homely intervened, with a suggestion of simpler times. When we were warped into some lonely quayside, with a grey scatter of houses around, a few fishing-boats, a warehouse or two and a pile of crates to be loaded, often down on the wharf there would be a Norwegian Gothic couple, waiting with their bags to take passage to Tromsø or Hammerfest. And once there came aboard, to disembark at the next port, an entire brass band. Its musicians were of all ages, down to small boys and girls, and they were festooned with medals, of musicianship I suppose, dangling from ribbons on their breasts and arms. As we ploughed on through the twilight they earned their passage by playing marches in the forward lounge on Deck 4 – solemn but rousing stuff, speaking to us I thought directly out of the bandstands of Professor Rubek’s Norway. The younger members of the ensemble, when the performance was over, swarmed into the cafeteria to eat ice-creams, but this did not spoil the effect at all, because their faces were quintessentially Norwegian – pale, long, incurious, handsome faces. One boy asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said, ‘I have a grandmother in Wales.’ ‘You don’t mean it,’ I exclaimed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was only joking.’
33 The Via Baltica
Another busy sea-route is the crossing between Helsinki in Finland and Tallinn in Estonia, fifty miles across the Gulf of Finland. All day long ferries are working this route, and they are almost always full. Thousands of Finns cross every week in search of bargains of one kind or another, to make deals or perhaps conclude skulduggeries on the other side. Flotillas of housewives with shopping-bags sweep on board in festive mood, as if they are off to a holiday camp. Businessmen get their heads down to work the moment they find a seat, like commuters. Two fortresses guard the sea-crossing. On the Finnish side there is the tremendous island fortress of Seaborg, now called Suomenlinna, for generations one of the crucial works of the Baltic, built by the Swedes, captured by the Russians, bombarded by the British, ceded to the Finns, and now kept in repair by squads of inebriate motorists, performing their community service. On the Estonian side is the medieval castle of Toompea, battered but proud upon its hill. It is only an hour’s run from one stronghold to the other, and although Helsinki was originally founded in rivalry with Tallinn, in the 1990s they suggested to me a couple of old business colleagues passing the traffic confidentially between them. This was the Via Baltica, linking the far North with central Europe and the Mediterranean. For more than half a century its traffic was interrupted by war and ideology, but by the time I made the crossing the power of the market had restored it.
34 A fellow traveller
Half way to Tallinn I looked out of the cabin window and saw a big grey goose flying alongside us, at almost the same speed, and not much higher. I take it that bird had been flying the Via Baltica all its life, unimpeded by politics, and I would like to be able to describe it as winging an effortless, graceful, timeless way towards Estonia. The fact was that it was showing every sign of strain, flapping its wings with evident difficulty, and with an expression on its face, I fancied, of weary disenchantment. We overtook it gradually, and as it disappeared astern I could almost hear it panting.
35 On the ferries
Hydrofoils work the Helsinki – Tallinn route, which is why we could overhaul the goose. Although hundreds of the old ferries still sail across the narrows and straits of Europe, one by one they are giving way to more modern kinds of vessels – rattly hovercraft, svelte hydrofoils, futuristic catamarans with vast galleried cabins like the insides of fictional spacecraft. The most enjoyable of these, I think, are the Italian hydrofoils which skim about the Mediterranean, because they go so fast, and are so swirled about by spray and buffeted by wind, that they give a kind of stylized or impressionistic view of the world around you. Take the hydrofoil to one of the offshore islands in the Gulf of Naples, and if it is a blustery day they will probably not allow you to stand on the narrow open deck, where you might fall off and sue them, so that it is through a scummed and sea-sprayed cabin window that you watch your progress through the archipelago. If it is a misty day too, so much the better. Then everything out there seems an opaque synthesis of Mediterraneanness – islands, white villas on headlands, fishing-boats, surf
around rocks, lighthouses, brown-skinned children playing immemorial games on beaches, olive trees, castles, that sort of thing, until an indistinct sign on a jetty, announcing a disco club, Zimmer Mit Deutsch Spoken or a Special Touristic Restaurant tells you that you have reached your destination.