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The crunch of measured footfalls and the rhythm of a marching song sounded in a side street. Led by a standard bearer, a column of the S.A. marched into the square. The song that kept time to their tread, "Volk, ans Gewehr!"—often within earshot during the following weeks was succeeded by the truculent beat of the Horst Wessel Lied: once heard, never forgotten; and when it finished, the singers were halted in a three-sided square, and stood at ease. It was dark now and thick snow flakes began falling across the lamplight. The S.A. men wore breeches and boots and stiff brown ski-caps with the chin-straps lowered like those of motor-bicyclists, and belts with a holster and a cross-brace. Their shirts, with a red arm-band on the left sleeve, looked like brown paper; but as they listened to an address by their commander they had a menacing and purposeful look. He stood in the middle of the empty fourth side of the square, and the rasp of his utterance, even robbed of its meaning, struck a chill. Ironic crescendoes were spaced out with due pauses for laughter and each clap of laughter preceded a serious and admonitory drop in key. When his peroration had died away the speaker clapped his left hand to his belt buckle, his right arm shot out, and a forest of arms answered him in concert with a three-fold "Heil!" to his clipped introductory "Sieg!" They fell out and streamed across the square, beating the snow off their caps and readjusting their chin-straps, while the standard-bearer rolled up his scarlet emblem and loped away with the flagpole over his shoulder.

I think the inn where I found refuge was called Zum Schwarzen Adler. It was the prototype of so many I fetched up in after the day's march that I must try to reconstruct it.

The opaque spiralling of the leaded panes hid the snowfall and the cars that churned through the slush outside, and a leather curtain on a semi-circular rod over the doorway kept the room snug from cold blasts. The heavy oak tables were set about with benches, hearts and lozenges pierced the chair-backs, a massive china stove soared to the beams overhead, logs were stacked high and sawdust was scattered on the russet tiles. Pewter-lidded beer-mugs paraded along the shelves in ascending height. A framed colour-print on the wall showed Frederick the Great, with cocked hat askew, on a restless charger. Bismarck, white-clad in a breastplate under an eagle-topped helmet, beetled baggy-eyed next door; Hindenburg, with hands crossed on sword-hilt, had the torpid solidity of a hippopotamus; and from a fourth frame, Hitler himself fixed us with a scowl of great malignity. Posters with scarlet hearts advertised Kaffee Hag. Clamped in stiff rods, a dozen newspapers hung in a row; and right across the walls were painted jaunty rhymes in bold Gothic black-letter script:

Wer liebt nicht Wein, Weib und Gesang,

Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang!

Beer, carraway seed, beeswax, coffee, pine-logs and melting snow combined with the smoke of thick, short cigars in a benign aroma across which every so often the ghost of sauerkraut would float.

I made room between the bretzel-stand, the Maggi sauce-bottle and my lidded mug on its round eagle-stamped mat and set to work. I was finishing the day's impressions with a dramatic description of the parade when a dozen S.A. men trooped in and settled at a long table. They looked less fierce without their horrible caps. One or two, wearing spectacles, might have been clerks or students. After a while they were singing:

Im Wald, im grünen Walde

Da steht ein Försterhaus...

The words, describing a pretty forester's daughter in the greenwood, bounced along cheerfully and ended in a crashing and sharply syncopated chorus. Lore, Lore, Lore, as the song was called, was the rage of Germany that year. It was followed hotfoot by another that was to become equally familiar and obsessive. Like many German songs it described love under the linden trees:

Darum wink, mein Mädel, wink! wink! wink!

The line that rhymed with it was 'Sitzt ein kleiner Fink, Fink, Fink.' (It took me weeks to learn that Fink was a finch; it was perched on one of those linden boughs.) Thumps accentuated the rhythm; the sound would have resembled a rugger club after a match if the singing had been less good. Later on, the volume dwindled and the thumping died away as the singing became softer and harmonies and descants began to weave more complex patterns. Germany has a rich anthology of regional songs, and these, I think, were dreamy celebrations of the forests and plains of Westphalia, long sighs of homesickness musically transposed. It was charming. And the charm made it impossible, at that moment, to connect the singers with organized bullying and the smashing of Jewish shop windows and nocturnal bonfires of books.

The green and intermittently wooded plains of Westphalia unfolded next day with hints of frozen marsh and a hovering threat of more snow. A troop of workmen in Robin Hood caps marched singing down a side lane with their spades martially at the slope: a similar troop, deployed in a row, was digging a turnip field at high speed and almost by numbers. They belonged to the Arbeitsdienst, or Labour Corps, a peasant told me. He was shod in those clogs I have always connected with the Dutch; but they were the universal footgear in the German country-side until much further south. (I still remembered a few German phrases I had picked up on winter holidays in Switzerland, so I was never as completely tongue-tied in Germany as I had been in Holland. As I spoke nothing but German during the coming months, these remnants blossomed, quite fast, into an ungrammatical fluency, and it is almost impossible to strike, at any given moment in these pages, the exact degree of my dwindling inarticulacy.)

I halted that evening in the little town of Kevelaer. It is lodged in my memory as a Gothic side-chapel overgrown with ex-votos. A seventeenth-century image of Our Lady of Kevelaer twinkled in her shrine, splendidly dressed for Advent in purple velvet, stiff with gold lace, heavily crowned and with a many-spiked halo behind a face like a little painted Infanta's. Westphalian pilgrims flocked to her chapel at other seasons and minor miracles abounded. Her likeness stamped my second Stocknagel next morning.

One signpost pointed to Kleve, where Anne of Cleves came from, and another to Aachen: if I had realized this was Aix-la-Chapelle, and merely the name of Charlemagne's capital in German, I would have headed there at full speed. As it was, I followed the Cologne road across the plain. Unmemorable and featureless, it flowed away until the fringes of the Ruhr hoisted a distant palisade of industrial chimneys along the horizon and barred the sky with a single massed streamer of smoke.

Germany!...I could hardly believe I was there.

For someone born in the second year of World War I, those three syllables were heavily charged. Even as I trudged across it, early subconscious notions, when one first confused Germans with germs and knew that both were bad, still sent up fumes; fumes, moreover, which the ensuing years had expanded into clouds as dark and baleful as the Ruhr smoke along the horizon and still potent enough to un-loose over the landscape a mood of—what? Something too evasive to be captured and broken down in a hurry.

I must go back fourteen years, to the first complete event I can remember. I was being led by Margaret, the daughter of the family who were looking after me, across the fields in Northamptonshire in the late afternoon of June 18th 1919. It was Peace Day, and she was twelve, I think, and I was four. In one of the water-meadows, a throng of villagers had assembled round an enormous bonfire all ready for kindling, and on top of it, ready for burning, were dummies of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince. The Kaiser wore a real German spiked-helmet and a cloth mask with huge whiskers; Little Willy was equipped with a cardboard monocle and a busby made of a hearthrug, and both had real German boots. Everyone lay on the grass, singing It's a long, long trail a-winding, The only girl in the world and Keep the home fires burning; then, Good-byee, don't cryee, and K-K-K-Katie. We were waiting till it was dark enough to light the bonfire. (An irrelevant remembered detail: when it was almost dark, a man called Thatcher Brown said "Half a mo!" and, putting a ladder against the stack, he climbed up and pulled off the boots, leaving tufts of straw bursting out below the knees. There were protestations: "Too good to waste," he said.) At last someone set fire to the dry furze at the bottom and up went the flames in a great blaze. Everyone joined hands and danced round it, singing Mademoiselle from Armentières and Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag. The whole field was lit up and when the flames reached the two dummies, irregular volleys of bangs and cracks broke out; they must have been stuffed with fireworks. Squibs and stars showered into the night. Everyone clapped and cheered, shouting: "There goes Kaiser Bill!" For the children there, hoisted on shoulders like me, it was a moment of ecstasy and terror. Lit by the flames, the figures of the halted dancers threw concentric spokes of shadow across the grass. The two dummies above were beginning to collapse like ghostly scarecrows of red ash. Shouting, waving sparklers and throwing fire-crackers, boys were running in and out of the ring of gazers when the delighted shrieks changed to a new key. Screams broke out, then cries for help. Everyone swarmed to a single spot, and looked down. Margaret joined them, then rushed back. She put her hands over my eyes, and we started running. When we were a little way off, she hoisted me piggy-back, saying "Don't look back!" She raced on across the dark fields and between the ricks and over the stiles as fast as she could run. But I did look back for a moment, all the same; the abandoned bonfire lit up the crowd which had assembled under the willows. Everything, somehow, spelt disaster and mishap. When we got home, she rushed upstairs, undressed me and put me into her bed and slipped in, hugging me to her flannel nightdress, sobbing and shuddering and refusing to answer questions. It was only after an endless siege that she told me, days later, what had happened. One of the village boys had been dancing about on the grass with his head back and a Roman candle in his mouth. The firework had slipped through his teeth and down his throat. They rushed him in agony,—"spitting stars," they said—down to the brook. But it was too late...

It was a lurid start. A bit later, Margaret took me to watch trucks full of departing German prisoners go by; then to see The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which left a confused impression of exploding shells, bodies on barbed wire, and a Prussian officers' orgy in a chateau. Much later on, old copies of Punch and Queen Mary's Gift Book and albums of war-time cartoons abetted the sinister mystique with a new set of stage properties: atrocity stories, farmhouses on fire, French cathedrals in ruins, Zeppelins and the goose-step; uhlans galloping through the autumn woods, Death's Head Hussars, corsetted officers with Iron Crosses and fencing slashes, monocles and staccato laughs...(How different from our own carefree subalterns in similar illustrations! Fox-terriers and Fox's puttees and Anzora hair-cream and Abdullah cigarettes; and Old Bill lighting his pipe under the starshells!) The German military figures had a certain terrifying glamour, but not the civilians. The bristling paterfamilias, his tightly-buttoned wife, the priggish spectacled children and the odious dachshund reciting the Hymn of Hate among the sausages and the beer-mugs—nothing relieved the alien strangeness of these visions. Later still the villains of books (when they were not Chinese) were always Germans—spymasters or megalomaniac scientists bent on world domination. (When did these visions replace the early nineteenth-century stereotype of picturesque principalities exclusively populated—except for Prussia—by philosophers and composers and bandsmen and peasants and students drinking and singing in harmony? After the Franco-Prussian War, perhaps.) More recently, All Quiet on the Western Front had appeared; tales of night life in Berlin came soon after... There was not much else until the Nazis came into power.

How did the Germans seem, now I was in the thick of them?

No nation could live up to so melodramatic an image. Anticlimactically but predictably, I very soon found myself liking them. There is an old tradition in Germany of benevolence to the wandering young: the very humility of my status acted as an Open Sesame to kindness and hospitality. Rather surprisingly to me, being English seemed to help; one was a rare bird and an object of curiosity. But, even if there had been less to like, I would have felt warmly towards them: I was abroad at last, far from my familiar habitat and separated by the sea from the tangles of the past; and all this, combined with the wild and growing exhilaration of the journey, shed a golden radiance.

Even the leaden sky and the dull landscape round Krefeld became a region of mystery and enchantment, though this great industrial city itself only survives as a landmark for a night's shelter. But, at the end of the next day, the evening flush of Düsseldorf meant that I was back on the Rhine! There, once again, flowed the great river flanked by embankments, active with barges and spanned by an enormous modern bridge (called, slightly vexingly, the Skagerrakbrücke, after the Battle of Jutland) and looking no narrower than when we had parted. Great boulevards diminished in perspective on the other shore. There were gardens and a castle and an ornamental lake where a nearly static and enforcedly narcissistic game of swans were reflected in holes that had been chopped for them in the ice; but no black one that I can remember, like Thomas Mann's in the same piece of water.

I asked a policeman where the workhouse was. An hour's walk led to a sparsely lit quarter. Warehouses and the factories and silent yards lay deep under the untrodden snow. I rang a bell and a bearded Franciscan in clogs unbarred a door and led the way to a dormitory lined with palliasses on plank beds and filled with an overpowering fug and a scattering of whispers. A street-lamp showed that all the beds round the stove were taken. I pulled off my boots and lay down, smoking in self-defence. I hadn't slept in a room with so many people since leaving school. Some of my contemporaries would still be there, at the end of their last term, snug, at this very moment, (I thought as I fell asleep) in their green curtained cubicles, long after their house-master's rounds and lights out with Bell Harry tolling the hours and the night-watchman's voice in the precincts announcing a quiet night.

A long stertorous note and a guttural change of pitch from the next bed woke me with a start. The stove had gone out. Snores and groans and sighs were joining in chorus. Though everyone was fast asleep, there were broken sentences and occasional laughs; random explosions broke out. Someone sang a few bars of song and suddenly broke off. Lying in wait in the rafters all the nightmares of the Rhineland had descended on the sleepers.

It was dark in the yard and still snowing when the monk on duty supplied us with axes and saws. We set to work by lamplight on a pile of logs and when they were cut, we filed past a second silent monk and he handed each of us a tin bowl of coffee in exchange for our tools. Another distributed slices of black bread and when the bowls had been handed in, my chopping-mate broke the icicles off the spout of the pump and we worked the handle in turn to slosh the sleep from our faces. The doors were then unbarred.

My chopping-mate was a Saxon from Brunswick and he was heading for Aachen, where, after he had drawn blank in Cologne, Duisburg, Essen and Düsseldorf and combed the whole of the Ruhr, he hoped to find work in a pins-and-needles factory. "Gar kein Glück!" he said. He hunched his shoulders into his lumberjack's coat and turned the flaps of his cap down over his ears. A few people were about now, stooping like us against the falling flakes. Snow lay on all the ledges and sills and covered the pavements with a trackless carpet. A tram clanged by with its lights still on, although daylight was beginning and when we reached the heart of the city, the white inviolate gardens and frozen trees expanded round the equestrian statue of an Elector. What about the government, I asked: were they any help? He said "Ach, Quatsch!" ("All rot!") and shrugged as though it were all too taxing a theme for our one-sided idiom. He had been in trouble, and he had no hopes of a turn for the better... The sky was loosening and lemon-coloured light was dropping through the gaps in the snow-clouds as we crossed the Skagerrak Bridge and wails downstream announced that a ship of heavy draught was weighing anchor. At the crossroads on the other side we lit the last two cigars from a packet I had bought on the Stadthouder. He blew out a long cloud and burst out laughing: "Man wird mich für einen Grafen halten!," he said: "They'll take me for a Count!" When he'd gone a few paces, he turned and shouted with a wave: "Gute Reise, Kamerad!" and struck west for Aachen. I headed south and upstream for Cologne.

After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. Except for the little constellation of tapers in the shadows of a side-chapel, everything was dim. Women knelt interspersed with nuns and the murmured second half of the Gegrüsset seist Du, Maria rose in answering chorus to the priest's initial solo; a discreet clatter of beads kept tally of the accumulating prayers. In churches with open spires like Cologne, one could understand how congregations thought their orisons had a better start than prayers under a dome where the syllables might flutter round for hours. With steeples they follow the uprush of lancets and make an immediate break for it.

Tinsel and stars flashed in all the shops and banners saying Fröhliche Weihnacht! were suspended across the streets. Clogged villagers and women in fleece-lined rubber boots slipped about the icy pavements with exclamatory greetings and small screams, spilling their armfuls of parcels. The snow heaped up wherever it could and the sharp air and the lights gave the town an authentic Christmas card feeling. It was the real thing at last! Christmas was only five days away. Renaissance doors pierced walls of ancient brick, upper storeys jutted in salients of carved timber and glass, triangles of crow-steps outlined the steep gables, and eagles and lions and swans swung from convoluted iron brackets along a maze of lanes. As each quarter struck, the saint-encrusted towers challenged each other through the snow and the rivalry of those heavy bells left the air shaking.

Beyond the Cathedral and directly beneath the flying-buttresses of the apse, a street dropped sharply to the quays. Tramp steamers and tugs and barges and fair-sized ships lay at anchor under the spans of the bridges, and cafés and bars were raucous with music. I had been toying with the idea, if I could make the right friends, of cadging a lift on a barge and sailing upstream in style for a bit.

I made friends all right. It was impossible not to. The first place was a haunt of seamen and bargees shod in tall sea-boots rolled down to the knee, with felt linings and thick wooden soles. They were throwing schnapps down their throats at a brisk rate. Each swig was followed by a chaser of beer, and I started doing the same. The girls who drifted in and out were pretty but a rough lot and there was one bulky terror, bursting out of a sailor's jersey and wearing a bargeman's cap askew on a nest of candy-floss hair, called Maggi—which was short for Magda—who greeted every newcomer with a cry of "Hallo, Bubi!" and a sharp, cunningly twisted and very painful pinch on the cheek. I liked the place, especially after several schnapps, and I was soon firm friends with two beaming bargemen whose Low German speech, even sober, would have been blurred beyond the most expert linguist's grasp. They were called Uli and Peter. "Don't keep on saying Sie," Uli insisted, with a troubled brow and an unsteadily admonishing forefinger: "Say Du." This advance from the plural to the greater intimacy of the singular was then celebrated by drinking Brüderschaft. Glasses in hand, with our right arms crooked through the other two with the complexity of the three Graces on a Parisian public fountain, we drank in unison. Then we reversed the process with our left arms, preparatory to ending with a triune embrace on both cheeks, a manoeuvre as elaborate as being knighted or invested with the Golden Fleece. The first half of the ceremony went without a hitch, but a loss of balance in the second, while our forearms were still interlocked, landed the three of us in the sawdust in a sottish heap. Later, in the fickle fashion of the very drunk, they lurched away into the night, leaving their newly-created brother dancing with a girl who had joined our unsteady group: my hobnail boots could do no more damage to her shiny dancing shoes, I thought, than the seaboots that were clumping all round us. She was very pretty except for two missing front teeth. They had been knocked out in a brawl the week before, she told me.

I woke up in a bargemen's lodging house above a cluster of masts and determined to stay another day in this marvellous town.

It had occurred to me that I might learn German quicker by reading Shakespeare in the famous German translation. The young man in the bookshop spoke some English. Was it really so good, I asked him. He was enthusiastic: Schlegel and Tieck's version, he said, was almost as good as the original; so I bought Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark, in a paperbound pocket edition. He was so helpful that I asked him if there were any way of travelling up the Rhine by barge. He called a friend into consultation who was more fluent in English: I explained I was a student, travelling to Constantinople on foot with not much money, and that I didn't mind how uncomfortable I was. The newcomer asked: student of what? Well—literature: I wanted to write a book. "So! You are travelling about Europe like Childe Harold?," he said. "Yes, yes! Absolutely like Childe Harold!" Where was I staying? I told them. "Pfui!" They were horrified, and amused. Both were delightful and, as the upshot of all this, I was asked to stay with one of them. We were to meet in the evening.

The day passed in exploring churches and picture galleries and looking at old buildings, with a borrowed guidebook.

Hans, who was my host, had been a fellow-student at Cologne University with Karl, the bookseller. He told me at dinner that he had fixed up a free lift for me next day on a string of barges heading upstream, all the way to the Black Forest if I wanted. We drank delicious Rhine wine and talked about English literature. The key figures in Germany I gathered, were Shakespeare, Byron, Poe, Galsworthy, Wilde, Maugham, Virginia Woolf, Charles Morgan and, very recently, Rosamund Lehmann. What about Priestley, they asked: The Good Companions?—and The Story of San Michele?

It was my first venture inside a German house. The interior was composed of Victorian furniture, bobbled curtains, a stove with green china tiles and many books with characteristic German bindings. Hans's cheerful landlady, who was the widow of a don at the University, joined us over tea with brandy in it. I answered many earnest questions about England: how lucky and enviable I was, they said, to belong to that fortunate kingdom where all was so just and sensible! The allied occupation of the Rhineland had come to an end less than ten years before, and the British, she said, had left an excellent impression. The life she described revolved round football, boxing matches, fox-hunts and theatricals. The Tommies got drunk, of course, and boxed each other in the street—she lifted her hands in the posture of squaring up—but they scarcely ever set about the locals. As for the colonel who had been billeted on her for years, with his pipe and his fox terriers—what a gentleman! What kindness and tact and humour! "Ein Gentleman durch und durch!" And his soldier servant—an angel!—had married a German girl. This idyllic world of cheery Tommies and Colonel Brambles sounded almost too good to be true and I basked vicariously in their lustre. But the French, they all agreed, were a different story. There had, it seems, been much friction, bloodshed even, and the ill-feeling still lingered. It sprang mainly from the presence of Senegalese units among the occupying troops; their inclusion had been interpreted as an act of calculated vengeance. The collapse of the Reichsmark was touched on, and Reparations; Hitler cropped up. The professor's widow couldn't bear him: such a mean face! "So ein gemeines Gesicht!"—and that voice! Both the others were against him too, and the whole Nazi movement: it was no solution to Germany's problems; and wrong...the conversation slid into a trough of depression. (I divined that it was a theme of constant discussion and that they were all against it, but in different ways and for different reasons. It was a time when friendships and families were breaking up all over Germany.) The conversation revived over German literature: apart from Remarque, the only German book I had read was a translation of Zarathustra. Neither of them cared much for Nietzsche, "But he understood us Germans," Hans said in an ambiguous tone. The Erasmian pronunciation of Latin cropped up, followed by the reciting of rival passages from the ancient tongues: innocent showing off all round with no time for any of us to run dry. We grew excited and noisy, and our hostess was delighted. How her husband would have enjoyed it! The evening ended with a third round of handshakes. (The first had taken place on arrival and the second at the beginning of dinner, when the word Mahlzeit was ritually pronounced. German days are scanned by a number of such formalities.)

The evening ended for me with the crowning delight of a bath, the first since London. I wondered if the tall copper boiler had been covertly lit as a result of a lively account of my potentially verminous night in the workhouse..."My husband's study," my hostess had said with a sigh, when she showed me my room. And here, under another of those giant meringue eiderdowns, I lay at last between clean sheets on an enormous leather sofa with a shaded light beside me beneath row upon row of Greek and Latin classics. The works of Lessing, Mommsen Kant, Ranke, Niebuhr and Gregorovius soared to a ceiling decoratively stencilled with sphinxes and muses. There were plaster busts of Pericles and Cicero, a Victorian view of the Bay of Naples behind a massive desk and round the walls, faded and enlarged, in clearings among the volumes, huge photographs of Paestum, Syracuse, Agrigento, Selinunte and Segesta. I began to understand that German middle-class life held charms that I had never heard of.

The gables of the Rhine-quays were gliding past and, as we gathered speed and sailed under one of the spans of the first bridge, the lamps of Cologne all went on simultaneously. In a flash the fading city soared out of the dark and expanded in a geometrical infinity of electric bulbs. Diminishing skeletons of yellow dots leaped into being along the banks and joined hands across the flood in a sequence of lamp-strung bridges. Cologne was sliding astern. The spires were the last of the city to survive and as they too began to dwindle, a dark red sun dropped through bars of amber into a vague Abendland that rolled glimmering away towards the Ardennes. I watched the twilight scene from the bows of the leading barge. The new plaque on my stick commemorated the three Magi—their bones had been brought back from the crusade by Frederick Barbarossa—and the legend of St. Ursula and her suite of eleven thousand virgins.

The barges were carrying a cargo of cement to Karlsruhe, where they were due to take on timber from the Black Forest and sail downstream again, possibly to Holland. The barges were pretty low in the water already: the cement sacks were lashed under tarpaulin lest a downpour should turn the cargo to stone. Near the stern of the leading barge the funnel puffed out a rank volume of diesel smoke, and just aft of this hazard swung the brightly painted and beam-like tiller.

The crew were my pals from the bar! I had been the first to realize it. The others grasped the fact more slowly, with anguished cries of recognition as everything gradually and painfully came back to them. Four untidy bunks lined the walls of the cabin and a brazier stood in the middle. Postcards of Anny Ondra, Lilian Harvey, Brigitte Helm and Marlene Dietrich were pinned on the planks of this den; there was Max Schmeling with the gloves up in a bruising crouch, and two chimpanzees astride a giraffe. Uli and Peter and the diesel-engineer were all from Hamburg. We sat on the lower bunks and ate fried potatoes mixed with Speck: cold lumps of pork fat which struck me as the worst thing I had ever eaten. I contributed a garlic sausage and a bottle of schnapps—leaving presents from Cologne—and at the sight of the bottle, Uli howled like a beagle in pain. Cologne had been a testing time for them all; they were at grips with a group-hangover; but the bottle was soon empty all the same. Afterwards Peter brought out a very elaborate mouth-organ. We sang Stille Nacht, and I learnt the words of Lore, Lore, Lore and Muss i denn, muss i denn zum Städtele 'naus; they said this had been the wartime equivalent of Tipperary; then came a Hamburg song about 'Sankt Pauli und die Reeperbahn.' By pulling down a lock of his hair and holding the end of a pocket comb under his nose to simulate a toothbrush moustache, Uli gave an imitation of Hitler making a speech.

It was a brilliant starry night but very cold and they said I would freeze to death on the cement sacks; I had planned to curl up in my sleeping bag and lie gazing at the stars. So I settled in one of the bunks, getting up every now and then to smoke a cigarette with whoever was on duty at the tiller.

Each barge had a port and starboard light. When another string of barges came downstream, both flotillas signalled with lanterns and the two long Indian files would slide past each other, rocking for a minute or two in each other's wakes. At one point we passed a tug trailing nine barges, each of them twice the length of ours; and later on, the bright speck of a steamer twinkled in the distance. It expanded as it advanced until it towered high above us, and then dwindled and vanished. Deep quarries were scooped out of the banks between the starlit villages that floated downstream. There was a faint glimmer of towns and villages across the plain. Even travelling against the current, we were moving more slowly than we should; the engineer didn't like the sound of the engine: if it broke down altogether, our little procession would start floating chaotically backwards and downstream. Files of barges were constantly overtaking us. As dawn broke, amid a shaking of heads, we tied up at the quays of Bonn.

The sky was cloudy and the classical buildings, the public gardens and the leafless trees of the town looked dingy against the snow; but I didn't dare to wander far in case we were suddenly ready to start. My companions were more heavily smeared with diesel-oil each time I returned; the engine lay dismembered across the deck amid spanners and hacksaws in an increasingly irreparable-looking chaos and at nightfall it seemed beyond redemption. We supped near and Uli and Peter and I, leaving the engineer alone with his blow-lamp, trooped off to a Laurel and Hardy film—we'd had our eye on it all day—and rolled about in paroxysms till the curtain came down.

At daybreak, all was well! The engine rang with a brisk new note. The country sped downstream at a great pace and the Siebengebirge and the Siegfried-haunted Drachenfels began to climb into the sparkling morning and the saw-teeth of their peaks shed alternate spokes of shadow and sunlight across the water. We sailed between tree-tufted islands. The Rhine crinkled round us where the current ran faster and the bows of vessels creased the surface with wide arrows and each propeller trailed its own long groove between their expanding lines. Among the little tricolours fluttering from every poop the Dutch red-white-and-blue was almost as frequent as the German black-white-and-red. A few flags showing the same colours as the Dutch but with the stripes perpendicular instead of horizontal, flew from French vessels of shallow draught from the quays of Strasbourg. The rarest colours of all were the black-yellow-and-red of Belgium. These boats, manned by Walloons from Liège, had joined the great river via the Meuse, just below Gorinchem. (What a long way off the little town seemed now, both in time and distance!) A stiff punctilio ruled all this going and coming. Long before crossing or overtaking each other, the appropriate flags were flourished a prescribed number of times from either vessel; and each exchange was followed by long siren blasts. Note answered note; and these salutations and responses and reciprocally fluttering colours spread a charming atmosphere of ceremony over the watery traffic like the doffing of hats between grandees. Sometimes a Schleppzug—a string of barges—lay so heavy under its cargo that the coiling bow-wave hid the vessels in turn as though they were sinking one after the other and then emerging for a few seconds as the wave dropped, only to vanish with the next curl of water; and so all along the line. Seagulls still skimmed and swooped and hovered on beating wings for thrown morsels or alighted on the bulwarks and stood there pensively for a minute or two. I watched all this from a nest among the sacks with a mug of Uli's coffee in one hand and a slice of bread in the other.

How exhilarating to be away from the plain! With every minute that passed the mountains climbed with greater resolution. Bridges linked the little towns from bank to bank and the water scurried round the piers on either side as we threaded upstream. Shuttered for the winter, hotels rose above the town roofs and piers for passenger steamers jutted into the stream. Unfabled as yet, Bad Godesberg slipped past. Castles crumbled on pinnacles. They loomed on their spikes like the turrets of the Green Knight before Sir Gawain; and one of them—so my unfolding river map told me—might have been built by Roland. Charlemagne was associated with the next. Standing among tall trees, the palaces of electors and princes and pleasure-loving archbishops reflected the sunlight from many windows. The castle of the Princes of Wied moved out of the wings, floated to the centre and then drifted slowly off-stage again. Was this where the short-reigned Mpret of Albania grew up? Were any of these castles, I wondered, abodes of those romantic-sounding noblemen, Rheingrafen and Wildgrafen—Rhine-Counts or Counts of the Forest, or the Wilderness or of Deer? If I had had to be German, I thought, I wouldn't have minded being a Wildgrave; or a Rhinegrave...A shout from the cabin broke into these thoughts: Uli handed up a tin plate of delicious baked beans garnished with some more frightful Speck, which was quickly hidden and sent to join the Rheingold when no one was looking.

On the concertina-folds of my map these annotated shores resembled a historical traffic-block. We were chugging along Caesar's limes with the Franks. 'Caesar threw a bridge across the Rhine...' Yes, but where? Later emperors moved the frontier eastward into the mountains far beyond the left bank, where, so they said, the Hercynian forest, home of unicorns, was too dense for a cohort to deploy, let alone a legion. (Look what happened to the legions of Quintilius Varus a hundred miles north-east! Those were vague regions, utterly unlike the shores of the brilliant Rhine: the Frigund of German myth, a thicket that still continued after sixty days of travel and the haunt, when the unicorns trotted away into fable, of wolves and elks and reindeers and the aurochs. The Dark Ages, when they reached them, found no lights to extinguish, for none had ever shone there.) Westward the map indicated the outlines of Lothair's kingdom after the Carolingian break-up. Later fragmentations were illustrated heraldically by a jostle of crossed swords and crosiers and shields with closed crowns and coronets and mitres on top, and electoral caps turned up with ermine. Sometimes the hats of cardinals were levitated above their twin pyramids of tassels and an unwieldy growth of crests sprang from the helmets of robber knights. Each of these emblems symbolized a piece in a jigsaw of minute but hardy sovereign fiefs that had owed homage only to the Holy Roman Emperor; each of them exacted toll from the wretched ships that sailed under their battlements; and when Napoleon's advance exorcized the lingering ghost of the realm of Charlemagne, they survived, and still survive, in a confetti of mediatizations. On the terrace of one waterside schloss a strolling descendant in a Norfolk jacket was lighting his mid-morning cigar.

The amazing procession went on all day.

The walled town of Andernach was bearing down on us. The engineer snored in his bunk, Peter was smoking at the tiller and I lolled in the sun on the cabin roof while Uli sent flourishes and gracenotes cascading from his mouth-organ. Two or three bridges and half-a-dozen castles later, after a final hour or so of snow-covered slopes, we were losing speed under the lee of the Ehrenbreitstein. This colossal and extremely business-like modern fort was a cliff of masonry bristling with casemates and slotted with gun-embrasures. The town of Coblenz rose from the other shore with a noble sweep.

We slanted in towards the quay on the west bank; gradually, to prevent the barges bumping into each other or piling up as we lost speed. The whole manoeuvre was for my sake as the others had to hasten on. It was a sad parting: "Du kommst nicht mit?," they cried. When we were going slow enough, and close enough to the embankment, I jumped ashore. We waved to each other as they steered amidstream again, and Uli unloosed a succession of piercing shrieks from the siren and then a long blast of valediction that echoed amazingly along the cliffs of Coblenz. Then they straightened out and slid under a bridge of boats and sped south.

A point like a flat-iron jutted into the river and a plinth on its tip lifted a colossal bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I many yards into the air among the sparrows and the gulls. This projection of rock and masonry had once been an isolated southern settlement of the Teutonic Knights—to my surprise: I had always imagined these warriors hacking away at Muscovites in a non-stop snowstorm on the shores of the Baltic or the Masurian lakes. The Thirty Years War raged through the place. Metternich was born a few doors away. But a hoarier, more cosmic chronology had singled it out. Two great rivers, rushing blind down their converging canyons, collide under the tip of the flat-iron and the tangled flux of the current ruffles and dwindles downstream till the Rhine's great silted volume subdues the clearer flow of the newcomer. The Moselle! I knew that this loop of water, swerving under its bridges and out of sight, was the last stretch of a long valley of the utmost significance and beauty. A seagull, flying upstream, would look down for scores of miles on tiered and winding vineyards, and swoop, if he chose, through the great black Roman gates of Trier and then over the amphitheatre and across the frontier into Lorraine. Skimming through the weather-vanes of the old Merovingian city of Metz, he would settle among the rocks of the Vosges where the stream begins. I was tempted, for a moment, to follow it: but its path pointed due west; I'd never get to Constantinople that way. Ausonius, if I had read him then, might have tipped the scales.

Coblenz is on a slant. Every street tilted and I was always looking across towers and chimney-pots and down on the two corridors of mountain that conducted the streams to their meeting. It was a buoyant place under a clear sky, everything in the air whispered that the plains were far behind and the sunlight sent a flicker and a flash of reflections glancing up from the snow; and two more invisible lines had been crossed and important ones: the accent had changed and wine cellars had taken the place of beer-halls. Instead of those grey mastodontic mugs, wine-glasses glittered on the oak. (It was under a vista of old casks in a Weinstube that I settled with my diary till bedtime.) The plain bowls of these wine-glasses were poised on slender glass stalks, or on diminishing pagodas of little globes, and both kinds of stem were coloured: a deep green for Mosel and, for Rhenish, a brown smoky gold that was almost amber. When horny hands lifted them, each flashed forth its coloured message in the lamplight. It is impossible, drinking by the glass in those charmingly named inns and wine-cellars, not to drink too much. Deceptively and treacherously, those innocent-looking goblets hold nearly half a bottle and simply by sipping one could explore the two great rivers below and the Danube and all Swabia, and Franconia too by proxy, and the vales of Imhof and the faraway slopes of Würzburg: journeying in time from year to year, with draughts as cool as a deep well, limpidly varying from dark gold to pale silver and smelling of glades and meadows and flowers. Gothic inscriptions still flaunted across the walls, but they were harmless here, and free of the gloom imposed by those boisterous and pace-forcing black-letter hortations in the beer-halls of the north. And the style was better: less emphatic, more lucid and laconic; and both consoling and profound in content; or so it seemed as the hours passed. Glaub, was wahr ist, enjoined a message across an antlered wall, Lieb, was rar ist; Trink, was klar ist. I only realized as I stumbled to bed how pliantly I had obeyed.

It was the shortest day of the year and signs of the season were becoming hourly more marked. Every other person in the streets was heading for home with a tall and newly felled fir-sapling across his shoulder, and it was under a mesh of Christmas decorations that I was sucked into the Liebfrauenkirche next day. The romanesque nave was packed and an anthem of great choral splendour rose from the gothic choir stalls, while the cauliflowering incense followed the plainsong across the slopes of the sunbeams. A Dominican in horn-rimmed spectacles delivered a vigorous sermon. A number of Brownshirts—I'd forgotten all about them for the moment—was scattered among the congregation, with eyes lowered and their caps in their hands. They looked rather odd. They should have been out in the forest, dancing round Odin and Thor, or Loki perhaps.

Coblenz and its great fortress dropped behind and the mountains took another pace forward. Serried vineyards now covered the banks of the river, climbing as high as they could find a foothold. Carefully buttressed with masonry, shelf rose on shelf in fluid and looping sweeps. Pruned to the bone, the dark vine-shoots stuck out of the snow in rows of skeleton fists which shrank to quincunxes of black commas along the snow-covered contour-lines of the vineyards as they climbed, until the steep waves of salients and re-entrants faltered at last and expired overhead among the wild bare rocks. On the mountains that overhung these flowing ledges, scarcely a peak had been left without a castle. At Stolzenfels, where I stopped for something to eat, a neo-Gothic keep climbed into the sky on a staircase of vineyards, and another castle echoed it from Oberlahnstein on the other shore. Then another rose up, and another, and yet another: ruin on ruin, and vineyard on vineyard... They seemed to revolve as they moved downstream, and then to impend. Finally a loop of the river would carry them away until the dimness of the evening blurred them all and the lights of the shore began to twinkle among their darkening reflections. Soon after dark, I halted at Boppard. It was lodged a little way up the mountain-side so that next morning a fresh length of the river uncoiled southward while the Sunday morning bells were answering our own chimes upstream and down.

When the cliffs above were too steep for snow, spinneys frilled the ledges of shale, and fans of brushwood split the sunbeams into an infinity of threads. Higher still, the gap-toothed and unfailing towers—choked with trees and lashed together with ivy—thrust angles into the air which followed up the impulse of the crags on which they were perched; and, most fittingly, their names all ended in the German word for 'angle' or 'rock' or 'crag' or 'keep': Hoheneck, Reichenstein, Stolzenfels, Falkenburg... Each turn of the river brought into view a new set of stage wings and sometimes a troop of islands which the perpetual rush of the water had worn thin and moulded into the swerve of the current. They seemed to float there under a tangle of bare twigs and a load of monastic or secular ruins. A few of these eyots were sockets for towers which could bar the river by slinging chains to either bank and holding up ships for toll or loot or ransom. Dark tales abound.

Fragmentary walls, pierced by old gateways, girdled most of the little towns. I halted in many of them for a glass of wine out of one of those goblets with coloured stems with a slice of black bread and butter, sipping and munching by the stove while, every few minutes, my dripping boots shed another slab of hobnail-impacted snow several inches thick. The river, meanwhile, was narrowing fast and the mountains were advancing and tilting more steeply until there was barely space for the road. A huge answering buttress loomed on the other bank and on its summit, helped by the innkeeper's explanation, I could just discern the semblance of the Lorelei who gave the rock its name. The river, after narrowing with such suddenness, sinks to a great depth here and churns perilously enough to give colour to the stories of ships and sailors beckoned to destruction. The siren of a barge unloosed a long echo; and the road, scanned by brief halts, brought me into Bingen at dusk.

The only customer, I unslung my rucksack in a little Gasthof. Standing on chairs, the innkeeper's pretty daughters, who were aged from five to fifteen, were helping their father decorate a Christmas tree; hanging witch-balls, looping tinsel, fixing candles to the branches, and crowning the tip with a wonderful star. They asked me to help and when it was almost done, their father, a tall, thoughtful-looking man, uncorked a slim bottle from the Rüdesheim vineyard just over the river. We drank it together and had nearly finished a second by the time the last touches to the tree were complete. Then the family assembled round it and sang. The candles were the only light and the solemn and charming ceremony was made memorable by the candle-lit faces of the girls—and by their beautiful and clear voices. I was rather surprised that they didn't sing Stille Nacht: it had been much in the air the last few days; but it is a Lutheran hymn and I think this bank of the Rhine was mostly Catholic. Two of the carols they sang have stuck in my memory: O Du Heilige and Es ist ein Reis entsprungen: both were entrancing, and especially the second, which, they told me, was very old. In the end I went to church with them and stayed the night. When all the inhabitants of Bingen were exchanging greetings with each other outside the church in the small hours, a few flakes began falling. Next morning the household embraced each other, shook hands again and wished every one a happy Christmas. The smallest of the daughters gave me a tangerine and a packet of cigarettes wrapped beautifully in tinsel and silver paper. I wished I'd had something to hand her, neatly done up in holly-patterned ribbon—I thought later of my aluminium pencil-case containing a new Venus or Royal Sovereign wound in tissue paper, but too late. The time of gifts.

The Rhine soon takes a sharp turn eastwards, and the walls of the valley recede again. I crossed the river to Rüdesheim, drank a glass of Hock under the famous vineyard and pushed on. The snow lay deep and crisp and even. On the march under the light fall of flakes, I wondered if I had been right to leave Bingen. My kind benefactors had asked me to stay, several times; but they had been expecting relations and, after their hospitality, I felt, in spite of their insistence, that a strange face at their family feast might be too much. So here I was on a sunny Christmas morning, plunging on through a layer of new snow. No vessels were moving on the Rhine, hardly a car passed, nobody was out of doors and, in the little towns, nothing stirred. Everyone was inside. Feeling lonely and beginning to regret my flight, I wondered what my family and my friends were doing, and skinned and ate the tangerine rather pensively. The flung peel, fallen short on the icy margin, became the target for a sudden assembly of Rhine gulls. Watching them swoop, I unpacked and lit one of my Christmas cigarettes, and felt better.

In the inn where I halted at midday—where was it? Geisenheim? Winkel? Östrich? Hattenheim?—a long table was splendidly spread for a feast and a lit Christmas tree twinkled at one end. About thirty people were settling down with a lot of jovial noise when some soft-hearted soul must have spotted the solitary figure in the empty bar. Unreluctantly, I was drawn into the feast; and here, in my memory, as the bottles of Johannisberger and Markobrunner mount up, things begin to grow blurred.

A thirsty and boisterous rump at the end of the table was still drinking at sunset. Then came a packed motorcar, a short journey, and a large room full of faces and the Rhine twinkling far below. Perhaps we were in a castle...some time later, the scene changes: there is another jaunt, through the dark this time, with the lights multiplying and the snow under the tyres turning to slush; then more faces float to the surface and music and dancing and glasses being filled and emptied and spilled.

I woke up dizzily next morning on someone's sofa. Beyond the lace curtains and some distance below, the snow on either side of the tramlines looked unseasonably mashed and sooty for the feast of Stephen.

Remains a fool his whole life long!'

The exploding exclamation marks and the metaphorical slaps on the back always managed to weave a note of obscure melancholy into these otherwise charming places. They spoke of wine but it was beer-mugs, not glasses, that jostled each other on the tables.

[ INTO HIGH GERMANY ]

Apart from that glimpse of tramlines and slush, the mists of the Nibelungenlied might have risen from the Rhine-bed and enveloped the town; and not only Mainz: the same vapours of oblivion have coiled upstream, enveloping Oppenheim, Worms and Mannheim on their way. I spent a night in each of them and only a few scattered fragments remain: a tower or two, a row of gargoyles, some bridges and pinnacles and buttresses and the perspective of an arcade dwindling into the shadows. There is a statue of Luther that can only belong to Worms; but there are cloisters as well and the blackletter pages of a Gutenberg Bible, a picture of St. Boniface and a twirl of Jesuit columns. Lamplight shines through shields of crimson glass patterned with gold crescents and outlined in lead; but the arch that framed them has gone. And there are lost faces: a chimney sweep, a walrus moustache, a girl's long fair hair under a tam o'shanter. It is like reconstructing a brontosaur from half an eye socket and a basket full of bones. The cloud lifts at last in the middle of the Ludwigshafen-Mannheim bridge.

After following the Rhine, off and on ever since I had stepped ashore, I was about to leave it for good. The valley had widened after Bingen and opened into the snowy Hessian champaign; the mountains still kept their distance as the river coiled southwards and out of sight. But the Rhine map I unfolded on the balustrade traced its course upstream hundreds of miles and far beyond my range. After Spires and Strasbourg, the Black Forest scowled across the water at the blue line of the Vosges. In hungry winters like this, I had been told, wolves came down from the conifers and trotted through the streets. Freiburg came next, then the Swiss border and the falls of Schaffhausen where the river poured from Lake Constance. Beyond, the map finished in an ultimate and unbroken white chaos of glaciers.

On the far side of the bridge I abandoned the Rhine for its tributary and after a few miles alongside the Neckar the steep lights of Heidelberg assembled. It was dark by the time I climbed the main street and soon softly-lit panes of coloured glass, under the hanging sign of a Red Ox, were beckoning me indoors. With freezing cheeks and hair caked with snow, I clumped into an entrancing haven of oak beams and carving and alcoves and changing floor levels. A jungle of impedimenta encrusted the interior—mugs and bottles and glasses and antlers—the innocent accumulation of years, not stage props of forced conviviality—and the whole place glowed with a universal patina. It was more like a room in a castle and, except for a cat asleep in front of the stove, quite empty.

This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day's doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots. An elderly woman came downstairs and settled by the stove with her sewing. Spotting my stick and rucksack and the puddle of melting snow, she said, with a smile, "Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?" My German, now fifteen days old, was just up to this: "Who rides so late through night and wind?" But I was puzzled by reitet. (How was I to know that it was the first line of Goethe's famous Erlkönig, made more famous still by the music of Schubert?) What, a foreigner? I knew what to say at this point, and came in on cue:... "Englischer Student...zu Fuss nach Konstantinopel"...I'd got it pat by now. "Konstantinopel?" she said. "Oh Weh!" O Woe! So far! And in midwinter too. She asked where I would be the day after, on New Year's Eve. Somewhere on the road, I said, "You can't go wandering about in the snow on Sylvesterabend!" she answered. "And where are you staying tonight, pray?" I hadn't thought yet. Her husband had come in a little while before and overheard our exchange. "Stay with us," he said. "You must be our guest."

They were the owner and his wife and their names were Herr and Frau Spengel. Upstairs, on my hostess's orders, I fished out things to be washed—it was my first laundry since London—and handed them over to the maid: wondering, as I did so, how a German would get on in Oxford if he turned up at The Mitre on a snowy December night.

One of the stained-glass armorial shields in the windows bore the slanting zigzag of Franken. This old stronghold of the Salian Franks is a part of northern Bavaria now and the Red Ox Inn was the headquarters of the Franconia student league. All the old inns of Heidelberg had these regional associations, and the most exalted of them, the Saxoborussia, was Heidelberg's Bullingdon and the members were Prussia's and Saxony's haughtiest. They held their sessions at Seppl's next door, where the walls were crowded with faded daguerrotypes of slashed and incipiently side-whiskered scions of the Hochjunkertum defiant in high boots and tricoloured sashes. Their gauntlets grasped basket-hilted sabres. Askew on those faded pates little caps like collapsed képis were tilted to display the initial of the Corps embroidered on the crown—a contorted Gothic cypher and an exclamation mark, all picked out in gold wire. I pestered Fritz Spengel, the son of my hosts, with questions about student life: songs, drinking ritual, and above all, duelling, which wasn't duelling at all of course, but tribal scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-years' cult of the humanities. With a sabre from the wall, Fritz demonstrated the stance and the grip and described how the participants were gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were upholstered from harm. Distance was measured; the sabres crossed at the end of outstretched arms; only the wrists moved; to flinch spelt disgrace; and the blades clashed by numbers until the razor-sharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed-in salt, to last a lifetime. I had noticed these academic stigmata on the spectacled faces of doctors and lawyers; brow, cheek or chin, and sometimes all three, were ripped up by this haphazard surgery in puckered or gleaming lines strangely at odds with the wrinkles that middle age had inscribed there. I think Fritz, who was humane, thoughtful and civilized and a few years older than me, looked down on this antique custom, and he answered my question with friendly pity. He knew all too well the dark glamour of the Mensur among foreigners.

The rather sad charm of a university in the vacation pervaded the beautiful town. We explored the academic buildings and the libraries and the museum and wandered round the churches. Formerly a stronghold of the Reform, the town now harbours the rival faiths in peaceful juxtaposition and if it is a Sunday, Gregorian plainsong escapes through the doors of one church and the Lutheran strains of Ein' feste Burg from the next.

That afternoon, with Fritz and a friend, I climbed through the woods to look at the ruins of the palace that overhangs the town: an enormous complex of dark red stone which turns pink, russet or purple with the vagaries of the light and the hour. The basic mass is mediaeval, but the Renaissance bursts out again and again in gateways and courtyards and galleries and expands in the delicate sixteenth-century carving. Troops of statues posture in their scalloped recesses. Siege and explosion had partly wrecked it when the French ravaged the region. When? In the Thirty Years War; one might have guessed... But who had built it? Didn't I know? Die Kurfürsten von der Pfalz! The Electors Palatine... We were in the old capital of the Palatinate...

Distant bells, ringing from faraway English class-rooms, were trying to convey a forgotten message; but it was no good. "Guess what this gate is called!" Fritz said, slapping a red column. "The Elizabeth, or English Gate! Named after the English princess." Of course! I was there at last! The Winter Queen! Elizabeth, the high-spirited daughter of James I, Electress Palatine and, for a year, Queen of Bohemia! She arrived here as a bride of seventeen and for the five years of her reign, Heidelberg, my companions said, had never seen anything like the masques and the revels and the balls. But soon, when the Palatinate and Bohemia were both lost and her brother's head was cut off and the Commonwealth had reduced her to exile and poverty, she was celebrated as the Queen of Hearts by a galaxy of champions. Her great-niece, Queen Anne, ended the reigning line of the Stuarts and Elizabeth's grandson, George I, ascended the throne where her descendant still sits. My companions knew much more about it than I did.

In spite of its beauty, it was a chill, grey prospect at this moment. Lagged in sacking for the winter, desolate rose trees pierced the snow-muffled terraces. These were bare of all footprints but our own and the tiny arrows of a robin. Below the last balustrade, the roofs of the town clustered and beyond it flowed the Neckar and then the Rhine, and the Haardt Mountains, and the Palatine Forest rippled away beyond. A sun like an enormous crimson balloon was about to sink into the pallid landscape. It recalled, as it does still, the first time I saw this wintry portent. In a sailor-suit with H.M.S. Indomitable on my cap-ribbon, I was being hurried home to tea across Regent's Park while the keepers were calling closing time. We lived so close to the zoo that one could hear the lions roaring at night.

This Palatine sun was the dying wick of 1933; the last vestige of that ownerless rump of the seasons that stretches from the winter solstice to the New Year. ''Tis the year's midnight...the world's whole sap is sunk.' On the way back we passed a group of youths sitting on a low wall and kicking their heels as they whistled the Horst Wessel Lied between their teeth. Fritz said, "I think, perhaps, I've heard that tune before..."

That night at the inn, I noticed that a lint-haired young man at the next table was fixing me with an icy gleam. Except for pale blue eyes set flush with his head like a hare's, he might have been an albino. He suddenly rose with a stumble, came over, and said: "So? Ein Engländer?" with a sardonic smile. "Wunderbar!" Then his face changed to a mask of hate. Why had we stolen Germany's colonies? Why shouldn't Germany have a fleet and a proper army? Did I think Germany was going to take orders from a country that was run by the Jews? A catalogue of accusation followed, not very loud, but clearly and intensely articulated. His face, which was almost touching mine, raked me with long blasts of schnapps-breath. "Adolf Hitler will change all that," he ended. "Perhaps you've heard the name?" Fritz shut his eyes with a bored groan and murmured "Um Gottes willen!" Then he took him by the elbow with the words, "Komm, Franzi!"; and, rather surprisingly, my accuser allowed himself to be led to the door. Fritz sat down again, saying: "I'm so sorry. You see what it's like." Luckily, none of the other tables had noticed and the hateful moment was soon superseded by feasting and talk and wine and, later, by songs to usher in St. Sylvester's Vigil; and by the time the first bells of 1934 were clashing outside, everything had merged in a luminous haze of music and toasts and greetings.

Frau Spengel insisted that it was absurd to set off on New Year's Day; so I spent another twenty-four hours wandering about the town and the castle and reading and writing and talking with this kind and civilized family. (My sojourn at the Red Ox, afterwards, was one of several high points of recollection that failed to succumb to the obliterating moods of war. I often thought of it.)

"Don't forget your treuer Wanderstab," Frau Spengel said, handing me my gleaming stick as I was loading up for departure on the second of January. Fritz accompanied me to the edge of the town. Ironed linen lay neatly in my rucksack; also a large parcel of Gebäck, special Sylvestrine cakes rather like shortbread, which I munched as I loped along over the snow. All prospects glowed, for the next halt—at Bruchsal, a good stretch further—was already fixed up. Before leaving London, a friend who had stayed there the summer before and canoed down the Neckar by faltboot with one of the sons of the house, had given me an introduction to the mayor. Fritz had telephoned; and by dusk I was sitting with Dr. Arnold and his family drinking tea laced with brandy in one of the huge baroque rooms of Schloss Bruchsal. I couldn't stop gazing at my magnificent surroundings. Bruchsal is one of the most beautiful baroque palaces in the whole of Germany. It was built in the eighteenth century by the Prince-Bishops of Spires, I can't remember when their successors stopped living in it; perhaps when their secular sovereignty was dissolved. But for many decades it had been the abode of the Burgomasters of Bruchsal. I stayed here two nights, sleeping in the bedroom of an absent son. After a long bath, I explored his collection of Tauchnitz editions and found exactly what I wanted to read in bed—Leave it to Psmith—and soon I wasn't really in a German schloss at all, but in the corner seat of a first-class carriage on the 3:45 from Paddington to Market Blandings, bound for a different castle.

It was the first time I had seen such architecture. The whole of next day I loitered about the building; hesitating halfway up shallow staircases balustraded by magnificent branching designs of wrought metal; wandering through double doors that led from state room to state room; and gazing with untutored and marvelling eyes down perspectives crossed by the diminishing slants of winter sunbeams. Pastoral scenes unfolded in light-hearted colours across ceilings that were enclosed in a studiously asymetrical icing of scrolls and sheaves; shells and garlands and foliage and ribands depicted myths extravagant enough to stop an unprepared observer dead in his tracks. The sensation of wintry but glowing interior space, the airiness of the snowy convolutions, the twirl of the metal foliage and the gilt of the arabesques were all made more buoyant still by reflections from the real snow that lay untrodden outside; it came glancing up through the panes, diffusing a still and muted luminosity: a northern variant (I thought years later) of the reflected flicker that canals, during Venetian siestas, send up across the cloud-born apotheoses and rapes that cover the ceilings. Only statues and skeleton trees broke the outdoor whiteness, and a colony of rooks.

In England, the Burgomaster, with his white hair and moustache, his erect bearing and grey tweeds, might have been colonel of a good line regiment. After dinner he tucked a cigar in a holder made of a cardboard cone and a quill, changed spectacles and, hunting through a pile of music on the piano, sat down and attacked the Waldstein Sonata with authority and verve. The pleasure was reinforced by the player's enjoyment of his capacity to wrestle with it. His expression of delight, as he peered at the notes through a veil of cigar smoke and tumbling ash, was at odds with the gravity of the music. It was a surprise; so different was it from an evening spent with his putative English equivalent; and when the last chord had been struck, he leapt from the stool with a smile of youthful and almost ecstatic enjoyment amid the good-humoured applause of his family. A rush of appraisal broke out, and hot argument about possible alternative interpretations.

There was no doubt about it, I thought next day: I'd taken a wrong turning. Instead of reaching Pforzheim towards sunset, I was plodding across open fields with snow and the night both falling fast. My new goal was a light which soon turned out to be the window of a farmhouse by the edge of a wood. A dog had started barking. When I reached the door a man's silhouette appeared in the threshold and told the dog to be quiet and shouted: "Wer ist da?" Concluding that I was harmless, he let me in.

A dozen faces peered up in surprise, their spoons halted in mid air, and their features, lit from below by a lantern on the table, were as gnarled and grained as the board itself. Their clogs were hidden in the dark underneath, and the rest of the room, except for the crucifix on the wall, was swallowed by shadow. The spell was broken by the unexpectedness of the irruption: A stranger from Ausland! Shy, amazed hospitality replaced earlier fears and I was soon seated among them on the bench and busy with a spoon as well.

The habit of grasping and speaking German had been outpaced during the last few days by another change of accent and idiom. These farmhouse sentences were all but out of reach. But there was something else here that was enigmatically familiar. Raw knuckles of enormous hands, half clenched still from the grasp of ploughs and spades and bill-hooks, lay loose among the cut onions and the chipped pitchers and a brown loaf broken open. Smoke had blackened the earthenware tureen and the light caught its pewter ladle and stressed the furrowed faces, and the bricky cheeks of young and hemp-haired giants...A small crone in a pleated coif sat at the end of the table, her eyes bright and timid in their hollows of bone and all these puzzled features were flung into relief by a single wick from below. Supper at Emmaus or Bethany? Painted by whom?

Dog-tired from the fields, the family began to stretch and get down the moment the meal was over and to amble bedwards with dragging clogs. A grandson, apologizing because there was no room indoors, slung a pillow and two blankets over his shoulder, took the lantern and led the way across the yard. In the barn the other side, harrows, ploughshares, scythes and sieves loomed for a moment, and beyond, tethered to a manger that ran the length of the barn, horns and tousled brows and liquid eyes gleamed in the lantern's beam. The head of a cart-horse, with a pale mane and tail and ears pricked at our advent, almost touched the rafters.

When I was alone I stretched out on a bed of sliced hay like a crusader on his tomb, snugly wrapped up in greatcoat and blankets, with crossed legs still putteed and clodhoppered. Two owls were within earshot. The composite smell of snow, wood, dust, cobwebs, mangolds, beetroots, fodder, cattlecake and the cows' breath was laced with an ammoniac tang from the plip-plop and the splash that sometimes broke the rhythm of the munching and the click of horns. There was an occasional grate of blocks and halters through their iron rings, a moo from time to time, or a huge horseshoe scraping or clinking on the cobbles. This was more like it!

The eaves were stiff with icicles next morning. Everyone was out of the kitchen and already at work, except the old woman in the coif. She gave me a scalding bowl of coffee and milk with dark brown bread broken in it. Would an offer to pay be putting my foot in it, I wondered; and then tentatively proposed it. There was no offence; but, equally, it was out of the question: "Nee, nee!" she said, with a light pat of her transparent hand. (It sounded the same as the English 'Nay.') The smile of her totally dismantled gums had the innocence of an infant's. "Gar nix!" After farewells, she called me back with a shrill cry and put a foot-long slice of buttered black bread in my hand; I ate my way along this gigantic and delicious butterbrot as I went, and after a furlong, caught sight of all the others. They waved and shouted "Gute Reise!" They were hacking at the frost-bitten grass with mattocks, delving into a field that looked and sounded as hard as iron.

Stick-nail fetishism carried me to Mühlacker, all of two miles off my way, in order to get the local stocknagel hammered on, the seventeenth. It was becoming a fixation.

Of the town of Pforzheim, where I spent the next night, I remember nothing. But the evening after I was in the heart of Stuttgart by lamp-lighting time, sole customer in a café opposite the cubistic mass of the Hotel Graf Zeppelin. Snow and sleet and biting winds had emptied the streets of all but a few scuttling figures, and two cheerless boys doggedly rattling a collection box. Now they had vanished as well and the proprietor and I were the only people in sight in the whole capital of Württemberg. I was writing out the day's doings and vaguely wondering where to find lodging when two cheerful and obviously well-brought up girls came in, and began buying groceries at the counter. They were amusingly dressed in eskimo hoods, furry boots and gauntlets like grizzly bears which they clapped together to dispel the cold. I wished I knew them... The sleet, turning to hail, rattled on the window like grapeshot. One of the girls, who wore horn-rimmed spectacles, catching sight of my German-English dictionary, daringly said "How do you do, do, Mister Brown?" (This was the only line of an idiotic and now mercifully forgotten song, repeated ad infinitum like Lloyd George Knew My Father; it had swept across the world two years before.) Then she laughed in confusion at her boldness, under a mild reproof from her companion. I jumped up and implored them to have a coffee, or anything... They suddenly became more reserved: "Nein, nein, besten Dank, aber wir müssen weg!" I looked crestfallen; and after an exchange of "Warum nicht?"s, they consented to stay five minutes, but refused coffee.

The line of the song was almost the only English they knew. My first interlocutrix, who had taken her spectacles off, asked how old I was. I said "Nineteen," though it wouldn't be quite true for another five weeks. "We too!" they said. "And what do you do?" "I'm a student." "We too! Wunderbar!" They were called Elizabeth-Charlotte, shortened to Liselotte or Lise—and Annie. Lise was from Donaueschingen, where the Danube rises, in the Black Forest, but she was living in Annie's parents' house in Stuttgart, where they were studying music. Both were pretty. Lise had unruly brown hair and a captivating and lively face, from which a smile was never absent for long; her glance, with her spectacles off, was wide, unfocussed and full of trusting charm. Annie's fair hair was plaited and coiled in earphones, a fashion I'd always hated; but it suited her pallor and long neck and gave her the look of a Gothic effigy from the door of an abbey. They told me they were buying things for a young people's party in celebration of the Dreikönigsfest. It was Epiphany, the 6th of January, the feast of the Three Kings. After some whispered confabulation, they decided to have pity on me and take me with them. Lise enterprisingly suggested we could invent a link with her family—"falls sie fragen, wo wir Sie aufgegabelt haben" ("Just in case they ask where we forked you out from"). Soon, in the comfortable bathroom of Annie's absent parents—he was a bank manager and they were away in Basel on business—I was trying to make myself presentable: combing my hair, putting on the clean shirt and flannel bags I had extracted before leaving my rucksack in charge of the café. I hadn't fixed up anything for the night yet, they said, when I rejoined them: it was unorthodox and would be uncomfortable—but would I like to doss down on the sofa? "No, no, no!" I cried: far too much of a nuisance for them, after all their kindness; but I didn't insist too long. "Don't say you're staying here!" Annie said. "You know how silly people are." There was a feeling of secrecy and collusion in all this, like plans for a midnight feast. They were thrilled by their recklessness. So was I.

Collusion looked like breaking down when we got to the party. "Can I introduce," Annie began. "Darf ich Ihnen vorstellen—." Her brow puckered in alarm; we hadn't exchanged surnames. Lise quickly chimed in with "Mr. Brown, a family friend." She might have been a captain of hussars, turning the tide of battle by a brilliant swoop. Later a cake was ceremoniously cut, and a girl was crowned with a gold cardboard crown. Songs were sung in honour of Epiphany and the Magi, some in unison, some solo. Asked if there were any English ones (as I had hoped, in order to show Lise and Annie I wasn't a godless barbarian), I sang We Three Kings of Orient Are. A later song, celebrating the Neckar Valley and Swabia, was sung in complex harmony. I can't remember the words completely, but it has stuck in my mind ever since. I put it down here as I've never met anyone who knows it.

Kennt Ihr das Land in deutschen Gauen,

Das schönste dort am Neckarstrand?

Die grünen Rebenhügel schauen

Ins Tal von hoher Felsenwand.

Es ist das Land, das mich gebar,

Wo meiner Väter Wiege stand.

Drum sing ich heut' und immerdar:

Das schöne Schwaben ist mein Heimatland!

Then someone put Couchés dans le foin on the gramophone, and Sentimental Journey, and everyone danced.

When I woke up on the sofa—rather late; we had sat up talking and drinking Annie's father's wine before going to bed—I had no idea where I was; it was a frequent phenomenon on this journey. But when I found my hands muffled like a pierrot's in the scarlet silk sleeves of Annie's father's pyjamas, everything came back to me. He must have been a giant (a photograph on the piano of a handsome ski-booted trio in the snow—my host with his arms round his wife and daughter—bore this out). The curtains were still drawn and two dressing-gowned figures were tiptoeing about the shadows. When they realized I was awake at last, greetings were exchanged and the curtains drawn. It only seemed to make the room very few degrees lighter. "Look!" Lise said, "no day for walking!" It was true: merciless gusts of rain were thrashing the roofscape outside. Nice weather for young ducks. "Armer Kerl!—Poor chap!" she said, "you'll have to be our prisoner till tomorrow." She put on another log and Annie came in with coffee. Halfway through breakfast, Sunday morning bells began challenging each other from belfry to belfry. We might have been in a submarine among sunk cathedrals. "O Weh!" Lise cried, "I ought to be in church!"; then, peering at the streaming panes: "Too late now." "Zum Beichten, perhaps," Annie said. (Beichten is confession.) Lise asked: "What for?" "Picking up strangers." (Lise was Catholic, Annie Protestant; there was a certain amount of sectarian banter.) I urged their claim to every dispensation for sheltering the needy, clothing the naked—a flourish of crimson sleeve supported this—and feeding the hungry. Across the boom of all these bells a marvellous carillon broke out. It is one of the most famous things in Stuttgart. We listened until its complicated pattern faded into silence.

The evening presented a problem in advance. They were ineluctably bidden to a dinner party by a business acquaintance of Annie's father, and though they didn't like him they couldn't plausibly chuck it. But what was to become of me? At last, screwing up their courage, Annie rang his wife up: could they bring a young English friend of Lise's family—informally clad, because he was on a winter walking tour across Europe? (It sounded pretty thin.) There was a twitter of assent from the other end; the receiver was replaced in triumph. She, it seemed, was very nice; he was an industrialist—steinreich, rolling—"You'll get plenty to eat and drink!" —Annie said he was a great admirer of Lise's. "No, no!" Lise cried, "of Annie's!" "He's awful! You'll see! You must defend us both."

We were safe till ten o'clock next morning, when the maid's bus got back; she had gone to her Swabian village for the Dreikönigsfest. We drew the curtains to block out the deluge and put on the lights—it was best to treat the dismal scene outside as if it were night—and lolled in dishabille all the morning talking by the fire. I played the gramophone—St. Louis Blues, Stormy Weather, Night and Day—while the girls ironed their dresses for the dinner party and the submarine morning sped by, until it was time for Annie and me to face the weather outdoors: she for luncheon—a weekly fixture with relations—me to collect my stuff and to buy some eggs for an omelette. Out-of-doors, even in a momentary lull, the rain was fierce and hostile and the wind was even worse. When Annie got back about five, I was doing a sketch of Lise; an attempt at Annie followed; then I taught them how to play Heads-Bodies-and-Legs. They took to this with a feverish intensity and we played until tolling bells reminded us how late it was. In my case, all that a flat-iron and a brush and comb could achieve had been done. But the girls emerged from their rooms like two marvellous swans. The door bell rang. It was the first sign of the outer world since my invasion, and a bit ominous. "It's the car! He always sends one. Everything in style!"