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Downstairs, a chauffeur in leggings held his cap aloft as he opened the door of a long Mercedes. When we had rustled in he enveloped us in bearskin from the waist down. "You see?" the girls said, "High life!"

We soared through the liquid city and up into the wooded hills and alighted at a large villa of concrete and plate glass. Our host was a blond, heavy man with bloodshot eyes and a scar across his forehead. He hailed my companions with gallantry; me, much more guardedly. His dinner-jacket made me feel still more of a ragamuffin. (I cared passionately about these things; but the fact of being called Michael Brown—we had to stick to it now—induced a consoling sense of disembodiment.) Perhaps to account for my lowly outfit among these jewelled figures, he introduced me to the women as 'der englische Globetrotter,' which I didn't like much. Men guests who were unacquainted toured the room in the German way, shaking hands and reciprocally announcing their names: I did the same. "Muller!" "Brown!" "Ströbel!" "Brown!" "Tschudi!" "Brown!" "Röder!" "Brown!" "Altmeier!" "Brown!" "von Schröder!" "Brown!" ... An old man—a professor from Tübingen, I think, with heavy glasses and a beard—was talking to Lise. We wrung each other's hands, barking "Braun!" and "Brown!" simultaneously. Snap! I avoided the girls' glance.

Except for the panorama of the lights of Stuttgart through the plate glass, the house was hideous—prosperous, brand new, shiny, and dispiriting. Pale woods and plastics were juggled together with stale and pretentious vorticism, and the chairs resembled satin boxing-gloves and nickel plumbing. Carved dwarfs with red noses stoppered all the bottles on the oval bar and glass ballerinas pirouetted on ashtrays of agate that rose from the beige carpets on chromium stalks. There were paintings—or tinted photographs—of the Alps at sunset and of naked babies astride Great Danes. Everything looked better, however, after I'd swallowed two White Ladies taken from a tray that was carried about by a white-gloved butler. I helped myself to cigarettes from a seventeenth-century vellum-bound Dante, with the pages glued together and scooped hollow, the only book in sight. Down the dinner table, beside napkins that were half mitres and half Rajput turbans, glittered a promising arsenal of glasses, and by the time we had worked our way through them, the scene was delightfully blurred. From time to time during dinner, I intercepted a puzzled bloodhound scrutiny from the other end of the table. My host obviously found me a question mark; possibly a bit of a rotter, and up to no good; I didn't like him either. I bet he's a terrific Nazi, I thought. I asked the girls later, and they both exclaimed "Und wie!" in vehement unison: "And how!" I think he found something fishy, too, about my being on Du terms with his unwilling favourites, while he, most properly, was still restricted to Sie. (We had drunk threefold Brüderschaft and embraced in the Cologne style the night before.) When we were back in the salon, the men armed with cigars like truncheons and brandy rotating in glasses like transparent footballs, the party began to lose coherence. The host flogged it along with a jarring laugh even louder than the non-stop gramophone, between-whiles manoeuvring first Lise and then Annie into a window-bay whence each extricated herself in turn like a good-humoured Syrinx. I watched them as I listened to my namesake Dr. Braun, a learned and delightful fogey who was telling me all about the Suevi and the Alemanni and the Hohenstaufens and Eberhardt the Bearded. When the evening broke up, and Lise and Annie were back in the car, our host stood leaning against the top of the car door, idiotically telling them they looked like two Graces. I ducked under his arm and slipped in between them. "Three now!" Lise said. He looked at me with disfavour. "Ah! And where shall I tell him to drop you, junger Mann?"

"At the Graf Zeppelin, please." I sensed a tremor of admiration on either side: even Lise couldn't have done better.

"Ach so?" His opinion of me went up. "And how do you like our best hotel?"

"Clean, comfortable and quiet."

"Tell the manager if you have any complaints. He's a good friend of mine."

"I will! And thanks very much."

We had to take care about conversation because of the chauffeur. A few minutes later, he was opening the car with a flourish of his cockaded cap before the door of the hotel and after fake farewells, I strolled about the hall of the Graf Zeppelin for a last puff at the ogre cigar. When the coast was clear I hared through the streets and into the lift and up to the flat. They were waiting with the door open and we burst into a dance.

At half-past nine next morning, we were waving good-bye across a tide of Monday morning traffic. I kept looking upwards and back, flourishing my glittering wand and bumping into busy Stuttgarters until the diminishing torsos frantically signalling from the seventh-storey window were out of sight. I felt as Ulysses must have felt, gazing astern while some island of happy sojourn dropped below the horizon.

I followed the banks of the Neckar, crossed it, and finally left it for good. Suddenly, when it was much too late, I remembered the Kitsch-Museum in Stuttgart; a museum, that is, of German and international bad taste, which the girls had said I mustn't miss. (The décor last night—for this was how the subject had cropped up—could have been incorporated as it stood.) I slept at Göppingen and tried with the help of the dictionary to write three letters in German; to Heidelberg, Bruchsal and Stuttgart. Further on I got a funny joint answer from Lise and Annie; there was a rumpus when Annie's parents got back; not about my actually staying in the flat, which remained a secret to the end. But the bottles we had recklessly drained were the last of a fabulously rare and wonderful vintage that Annie's father had been particularly looking forward to. Heaven only knew what treasured Spätlese from the banks of the Upper Mosel: nectar beyond compare. They had prudently blamed the choice on me. Outrage had finally simmered down to the words: "Well, your thirsty friend must know a lot about wine." (Totally untrue.) "I hope he enjoyed it." (Yes.) It was years before the real enormity of our inroads dawned on me.

Now the track was running south-south-east across Swabia. Scattered conifers appeared, and woods sometimes overshadowed the road for many furlongs. They were random outposts, separated by leagues of pasture and ploughland, of the great mass, lying dark towards the south-west, of the Black Forest. Beyond it the land rippled away to the Alps.

On straight stretches of road where the scenery changed slowly, singing often came to the rescue; and when songs ran short, poetry. At home, and at my various schools, and among the people who took me in after scholastic croppers, there had always been a lot of reading aloud. (My mother was marvellously gifted in this exacting skill, and imaginative and far-ranging in choice; there had been much singing to the piano as well.) At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary. (I was at the age when one's memory for poetry or for languages—indeed for anything—takes impressions like wax and, up to a point, lasts like marble.)

The range is fairly predictable and all too revealing of the scope, the enthusiasms and the limitations, examined at the eighteenth milestone, of a particular kind of growing up. There was a great deal of Shakespeare, numerous speeches, most of the choruses of Henry V, long stretches of A Midsummer Night's Dream (drunk in subconsciously and only half understood, by acting Starveling, the shortest part in the play, at the age of six); a number of the Sonnets, many detached fragments; and, generally, a fairly wide familiarity. Several Marlowe speeches followed and stretches of Spenser's Pro- and Epithalamion; most of Keats's Odes; the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge; very little Shelley, no Byron. (Amazingly to me today, I scarcely considered him a poet at all.) Nothing from the eighteenth century except Gray's Elegy and some of The Rape of the Lock; some Blake; The Burial of Sir John Moore; bits of The Scholar Gypsy; some Scott, fragments of Swinburne, any amount of Rossetti, for whom I had had a long passion, now quite vanished; some Francis Thompson and some Dowson; one sonnet of Wordsworth; bits of Hopkins; and, like all English people with any Irish links, Rolleston's translation of The Dead of Clonmacnois; a great deal of Kipling; and some of the verses from Hassan. We now move on to Recent Acquisitions: passages from Donne and Herrick and Quarles, one poem of Raleigh, one of Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of Herbert, two of Marvell; a few Border ballads; an abundance of A.E. Housman; some improper stretches of Chaucer (mastered chiefly for popularity purposes at school); a lot of Carroll and Lear. No Chesterton or Belloc, beyond bits of the Cautionary Tales. In fact, apart from those mentioned, very little from the present century. No Yeats later than the Ronsard paraphrase and Innisfree and Down by the Salley Gardens; but this belonged more to singing than reciting; of Pound or Eliot, not a word, either learnt or read; and of younger modern poets now venerable, nothing. If someone had asked me point blank who my favourite contemporary poets were, I would have answered Sacheverell, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, in that order: (Dr. Donne and Gargantua and The Hundred and One Harlequins had appeared in white paper pamphlets while I was at school; I felt I had broken into dazzling new territory). Prose writers would have been Aldous Huxley, Norman Douglas and Evelyn Waugh. This is the end of the short section; but if the road stretched interminably, longer pieces would come to the surface: all Horatius and a lot of Lake Regillus, hardy survivors from an early craze; Grantchester; and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam—intact then, now a heap of fragments hard to re-assemble. The standard drops steeply after this: as I pounded along, limericks pinpointed the planet from Siberia to Cape Horn with improper and imaginative acts, and when they came to an end, similar themes would blossom forth in a score of different metres. It is a field where England can take on all challengers.

My bridgehead in French poetry didn't penetrate very far: a few nursery rhymes, one poem of Theodore de Banville, two of Baudelaire, part of one of Verlaine, Yeats's Ronsard sonnet in the original, and another of du Bellay; lastly, more than all the rest put together, large quantities of Villon (this was a very recent discovery, and a passion. I had translated a number of the ballades and rondeaux from the Grand Testament into English verse and they had turned out more respectably than any of my other attempts of the same kind). Most of the Latin contribution is as predictable as the rest: passages of Virgil, chiefly but not entirely, assimilated through writing lines at school: they went faster if one had the text by heart. As nobody seemed to mind who had written them as long as they were hexameters, I used Lucan's Pharsalia for a while; they seemed to have just the glibness needed for the task; but I soon reverted to Virgil, rightly convinced that they would last better: my main haunts were the second and sixth books of the Aeneid, with sallies into the Georgics and the Eclogues. The other chief Romans were Catullus and Horace: Catullus—a dozen short poems and stretches of the Attis—because the young are prone (at least I was) to identify themselves with him when feeling angry, lonely, misunderstood, besotted, ill-starred or crossed in love. I probably adored Horace for the opposite reason; and taught myself a number of the Odes and translated a few of them into awkward English sapphics and alcaics. Apart from their other charms, they were infallible mood-changers. (One of them—I. ix. Ad Thaliarchum—came to my rescue in strange circumstances a few years later. The hazards of war landed me among the crags of occupied Crete with a band of Cretan guerillas and a captive German general whom we had waylaid and carried off into the mountains three days before. The German garrison of the island were in hot, but luckily temporarily misdirected, chase. It was a time of anxiety and danger; and for our captive, of hardship and distress. During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum

Soracte...

It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:

nec jam sustineant onus

Silvae laborantes, geluque

Flumina constiterint acuto,

and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general's blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine—and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: "Ach so, Herr Major!" It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.)

Hotfoot on Horace came Hadrian's lines to his soul—The Oxford Book of Latin Verse was about the only prize I carried away from school—and Petronius' ten counter-balancing verses, hinging on the marvellous line: 'sed sic, sic, sine fine feriati'; then some passages of the Pervigilium Veneris. After this, with a change of key, come one or two early Latin hymns and canticles; then the Dies Irae and the Stabat Mater. (Of Latin poets of the two centuries between the classical and the Christian, I scarcely even knew the names; it was a region to be invaded and explored alone, and much later and with great delight.) Last came a smattering of profane Mediaeval Latin lyrics, many of them from the monastery of Benediktbeuern. In the brief Greek coda to all this, the sound of barrel-scraping grows louder. It begins with the opening movement of the Odyssey, as it does for everyone who has dabbled in the language, followed by bits from the escape of Odysseus from the cave of Polyphemus; unexpectedly, not Heraclitus; nothing from the tragic dramatists (too difficult); snatches of Aristophanes; a few epitaphs of Simonides, two moon-poems of Sappho; and then silence.

A give-away collection. It covers the thirteen years between five and eighteen, for in the months preceding my departure the swing of late nights and recovery had slowed the intake down to a standstill. Too much of it comes from the narrow confines of the Oxford Books. It is a mixture of a rather dog-eared romanticism with heroics and rough stuff, with traces of religious mania, temporarily in abeyance, Pre-Raphaelite languor and Wardour Street mediaevalism; slightly corrected—or, at any rate, altered—by a streak of coarseness and a bias towards low life. A fair picture, in fact, of my intellectual state-of-play: backward-looking, haphazard, unscholarly and, especially in Greek, marked with the blemish of untimely breaking-off. (I've tried to catch up since with mixed results.) But there are one or two beams of hope, and I feel bound to urge in self-defence, that Shakespeare, both in quantity and addiction, overshadowed all the rest of this rolling-stock. A lot has dropped away through disuse; some remains; additions have been appended, but the later quantity is smaller, for the sad reason that the knack of learning by heart grows less. The wax hardens and the stylus scrapes in vain.

Back to the Swabian highroad.

Song is universal in Germany; it causes no dismay; Shuffle off to Buffalo; Bye, Bye, Blackbird; or Shenandoah; or The Raggle Taggle Gypsies sung as I moved along, evoked nothing but tolerant smiles. But verse was different. Murmuring on the highway caused raised eyebrows and a look of anxious pity. Passages, uttered with gestures and sometimes quite loud, provoked, if one was caught in the act, stares of alarm. Regulus brushing the delaying populace aside as he headed for the Carthaginian executioner, as though to Lacedaemonian Tarentum or the Venafrian fields, called for a fairly mild flourish; but urging the assault-party at Harfleur to close the wall up with English dead would automatically bring on a heightened pitch of voice and action and double one's embarrassment if caught. When this happened I would try to taper off in a cough or weave the words into a tuneless hum and reduce all gestures to a feint at hair-tidying. But some passages demand an empty road as far as the eye can see before letting fly. The terrible boxing-match, for instance, at the funeral games of Anchises when Entellus sends Dares reeling and spitting blood and teeth across the Sicilian shore—'ore ejectantem mixtosque in sanguine dentes'!—and then, with his thonged fist, scatters a steer's brains with one blow between the horns—this needs care. As for the sword-thrust at the bridgehead that brings the great lord of Luna crashing among the augurs like an oak-tree on Mount Alvernus—here the shouts, the walking-stick slashes, the staggering gait and the arms upflung should never be indulged if there is anyone within miles, if then. To a strange eye, one is drunk or a lunatic.

So it was today. I was at this very moment of crescendo and climax, when an old woman tottered out of a wood where she had been gathering sticks. Dropping and scattering them, she took to her heels. I would have liked the earth to have swallowed me, or to have been plucked into the clouds.

Herrick would have been safer; Valéry, if I had known him, perfect: 'Calme...'

The rain had churned the snow into slush, then blasts from the mountains had frozen it into a pock-marked upheaval of rutted ice. Now, after a short warning drift, the wind was sending flakes along by the million. They blotted out the landscape, turning one side of a traveller's body into a snowdrift, thatching his head with a crust of white and tangling his eyelashes with sticky scales. The track ran along a shelterless hog's back and the wind seemed either to lay a hindering hand on my chest, or, suddenly changing its quarter, to kick me spinning and stumbling along the road. No village had been in sight, even before this onslaught. Scarcely a car passed. I despised lifts and I had a clear policy about them: to avoid them rigorously, that is, until walking became literally intolerable; and then, to travel no further than a day's march would cover. (I stuck to this.) But now not a vehicle came; nothing but snowflakes and wind; until at last a dark blur materialized and a clanking something drew alongside and clattered to a halt. It turned out to be a heavy diesel truck with chains on its wheels and a load of girders. The driver opened the door and reached down a helping hand, with the words "Spring hinein!" When I was beside him in the steamy cabin he said "Du bist ein Schneemann!"—a snowman. So I was. We clanked on. Pointing to the flakes that clogged the windscreen as fast as the wipers wiped, he said, "Schlimm, niet?" Evil, what? He dug out a bottle of schnapps and I took a long swig. Travellers' joy! "Wohin gehst Du?" I told him. (I think it was somewhere about this point on the journey that I began to notice the change in this question: "Where are you going?" In the north, in Low Germany, everyone had said "Wohin laufen Sie" and "Warum laufen Sie zu Fuss?"—Why are you walking on foot? Recently the verb had been 'gehen.' For 'laufen,' in the south, means to run—probably from the same root as 'lope' in English. The accent, too, had been altering fast; in Swabia, the most noticeable change was the substitution of -le at the end of a noun, as a diminutive, instead of -chen; Häusle and Hundle, instead of Häuschen and Hündchen, for a little house and a small dog. I felt I was getting ahead now, both linguistically and geographically, plunging deeper and deeper into the heart of High Germany.... The driver's Du was a sign of inter-working-class mateyness that I had come across several times. It meant friendly acceptance and fellow-feeling.)

When he set me down on the icy cobbles of Ulm, I knew I had reached an important landmark on my journey. For there, in the lee of the battlements, dark under the tumbling flakes and already discoloured with silt, flowed the Danube.

It was a momentous encounter. A great bridge spanned it, and the ice was advancing from either bank to meet and eventually join amidstream. Inland from the river-wall, the roofs that retreated in confusion were too steep for the snow; the flakes would collect, bank up, then slide into the lanes with a swish. In the heart of this warren, Ulm Minster rose, literally saddled, on an octagon bestriding the west end of the huge nave, with the highest steeple in the world, and the transparent spire disappeared into a moulting eiderdown of cloud.

A market day was ending. Snow was being banged from tarpaulins and basket was slotted into basket. Cataracts of vegetables rumbled on the bottoms of waggons and the carthorses, many of them with those beautiful flaxen manes and tails, were being backed with bad language between the shafts. Scarlet-cheeked women from a score of villages were coifed in head-dresses of starch and black ribbon that must have been terrible snow-traps. They gathered round the braziers and stamped in extraordinary bucket-boots whose like I never saw before or since: elephantine cylinders as wide as the footgear of seventeenth-century postilions, all swaddled inside with felt and stuffed with straw. Dark dialect shouts criss-crossed through the snorts and the neighs. There was a flurry of poultry and the squeal of pigs and cattle were goaded from their half-dismantled pens as the hurdles were stacked. Villagers with flat wide hats and red waistcoats and cart-whips hobnobbed in the colonnades and up and down the shallow steps. There was a raucous and jocular hum of confabulation and smoke among the heavy pillars; and the vaults that these pillars upheld were the floors of mediaeval halls as big and as massive as tithe barns.

A late mediaeval atmosphere filled the famous town. The vigorous Teutonic interpretation of the Renaissance burst out in the corbels and the mullions of jutting windows and proliferated round thresholds. At the end of each high civic building a zigzag isosceles rose and dormers and flat gables lifted their gills along enormous roofs that looked as if they were tiled with the scales of pangolins. Shields carved in high relief projected from the walls. Many were charged with the double-headed eagle. This bird was emblematic of the town's status as an Imperial City: it meant that Ulm—unlike the neighbouring towns and provinces, which had been the fiefs of lesser sovereigns—was subject only to the Emperor. It was a Reichstadt.

A flight of steps led to a lower part of the town. Here the storeys beetled and almost touched and in one of the wider lanes was a warren of carpenters and saddlers and smithies and cavernous workshops. Down the middle, visible through a few chopped holes, a river rushed ice-carapaced and snow-quilted under a succession of narrow bridges, to split round an island where a weeping willow expanded to the icicled eaves and then, re-uniting by a watermill so deeply clogged in ice that it looked as if it would never grind again, sped on to hurl itself into the Danube.

This part of the town contained nothing later than the Middle Ages, or so it appeared. A kind crone outside a harness-maker's saw me peering down a hole in the ice. "It's full of Forellen!" she said. Trout? "Ja, Forellen! Voll, voll davon." How did they manage under that thick shell of ice? Hovering suspended in the dark? Or hurtling along on their Schubertian courses, hidden and headlong? Were they in season? If so, I determined to go a bust and get hold of one for dinner, and a bottle of Franconian wine. Meanwhile, night was falling fast. High up in the snowfall a bell began booming slowly. Funera plango! a deep and solemn note. Fulgura frango! It might have been tolling for an Emperor's passing, for war, siege, revolt, plague, excommunication, a ban of interdict, or Doomsday: 'Excito lentos! Dissipo ventos! Paco cruentos!'

As soon as the Minster was open I toiled up the steeple-steps and halted, with heart pounding, above the loft where those bells were hung. Seen through the cusps of a cinque-foil and the flurry of jackdaws and a rook or two that my ascent had dislodged, the fore-shortened roofs of the town shrank to a grovelling maze. Ulm is the highest navigable point of the Danube, and lines of barges lay at anchor. I wondered if the ice had crept forward during the night, and where the barges would be hauled to. Water is the one thing that expands when it freezes instead of contracting, and a sudden drop in temperature smashes unwary boats like egg-shells. South of the river, the country retreated in a white expanse which buckled into the Swabian Jura. The eastern rim of the Black Forest blurred them; then they rose and merged into the foothills of the Alps and somewhere among them, invisible in a trough with the Rhine flowing into it from the south and out again northwards, Lake Constance lay. Clearly discernible, and rising in peak after peak, the whole upheaval of Switzerland gleamed in the pale sunlight.

It was an amazing vision. Few stretches of Central Europe have been the theatre for so much history. Beyond which watershed lay the pass where Hannibal's elephants had slithered downhill? Only a few miles away, the frontier of the Roman Empire had begun. Deep in those mythical forests that the river reflected for many days' march, the German tribes, Rome's Nemesis, had waited for their hour to strike. The Roman limes followed the river's southern bank all the way to the Black Sea. The same valley, functioning in reverse, funnelled half the barbarians of Asia into Central Europe and just below my eyrie, heading upstream, the Huns entered and left again before swimming their ponies across the Rhine—or trotting them over the ice—until, foiled by a miracle, they drew rein a little short of Paris. Charlemagne stalked across this corner of his empire to destroy the Avars in Pannonia and a few leagues south-west, the ruins of Hohenstaufen, home of the family that plunged Emperors and Popes into centuries of vendetta, crumbled still. Again and again, armies of mercenaries, lugging siege-engines and bristling with scaling ladders, crawled all over this map. The Thirty Years' War, the worst of them all, was becoming an obsession with me: a lurid, ruinous, doomed conflict of beliefs and dynasties, helpless and hopeless, with principles shifting the whole time and a constant shuffle and re-deal of the actors. For, apart from the events—the defenestrations and pitched battles and historic sieges, the slaughter and famine and plague—astrological portents and the rumour of cannibalism and witchcraft flitted about the shadows. The polyglot captains of the ruffian multi-lingual hosts hold our gaze willy-nilly with their grave eyes and their Velasquez moustaches and populate half the picture-galleries in Europe. Caracoling in full feather against a background of tents and colliding squadrons, how serenely they point their batons; or, magnanimously bare-headed and on foot in a grove of lances, accept surrendered keys, or a sword! Curls flow and lace or starched collars break over the black armour and the gold inlay; they glance from their frames with an aloof and high-souled melancholy which is both haunting and enigmatic. Tilly, Wallenstein, Mansfeld, Bethlen, Brunswick, Spinola, Maximilian, Gustavus Adolphus, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, Piccolomini, Arnim, Königsmarck, Wrangel, Pappenheim, the Cardinal-Infant of the Spanish Netherlands, Le Grand Condé. The destroying banners move about the landscape like flags on a campaign map: the Emperor's haloed double eagles, the blue-and-white Wittelsbach lozenges for the Palatinate and Bavaria, the rampant Bohemian lion, the black and gold bars of Saxony, the three Vasa crowns of Sweden, the black and white check of Brandenburg, the lions and castles of Castille and Aragon, the blue and gold French lilies. Ever since then, the jigsaw distribution of Catholics and Protestants has remained as it was after the Peace of Westphalia. Each dovetailing enclave depended on the faith of its sovereign, and occasionally, by a quirk of succession, a prince of the alternative faith would reign as peacefully as the Moslem Nizam over his Hindu subjects in Hyderabad. If the landscape were really a map, it would be dotted with those little crossed swords that indicate battles. The village of Blenheim was only a day's march along the same shore, and Napoleon defeated the Austrian army on the bank just beyond the barbican. The cannon sank into the flooded fields while the limbers and gun-teams and gunners were carried away by the current. Looking down, I could see a scarlet banner with the swastika on its white disc fluttering in one of the lanes, hinting that there was still trouble ahead. Seeing it, someone skilled in prophecy and the meaning of symbols could have foretold that three-quarters of the old city below would go up in explosion and flame a few years later; to rise again in a geometry of skyscraping concrete blocks.

The first sight of the Danube! It was a tremendous vision. In Europe, only the Volga is longer. If one of the crows that were fidgeting among the crockets below had flown to my next meeting place with the river, it would have alighted two hundred miles east of this steeple. The blast was whistling louder through the perforated stone of the spire and clouds were advancing fast.

The empty nave, lit only by the marvellous deep-hued gloom of the glass, was dark by contrast. An organist, rapt with improvisation, was fluting and rumbling in his high lamp-lit nest under a display of giant pan-pipes. The clustered piers, which looked slender for so huge a place, divided the nave into five aisles and soared to a network of groins and ribs and liernes that a slight architectural shrug would have flicked into fan-tracery. But it was the choir-stalls that halted one. A bold oaken outburst of three-dimensional humanism had wrought the finials of the choir-stalls into the life-size torsos, in dark wood, of the sybils: ladies that is, dressed in coifs and wimples and slashed sleeves and hatted in pikehorn head-dresses like the Duchess's in Alice in Wonderland. They craned yearning across the chancel towards Plato and Aristotle and an answering academy of pagan philosophers accoutred like burgomasters and led by a burgravial Ptolemy wielding a wooden astrolabe. The vaulted hexagon under the spire was used as a commemorative chapel. The laurel-wreathed and silken colours of Württemberg and Baden regiments from 1914 to 1918 were hanging there in rows: banners bearing black crosses on a white background. The battle-honours inscribed in gold on the fluttering ribands—the Somme, Vimy, Verdun and Passchendaele—were all familiar.

The coloured windows died like fires going out. The clouds had closed over again and the sky presaged snow.

I was haunting cathedrals these days. Only a few hours later I was inside yet another, munching bread and cheese and an onion in one of the transepts. The day's march had been a repetition of yesterday's: I had crossed the Danube bridge; base clouds pursued me with their rotten smoke; the clouds broke and the east wind, once again blurring all in a maelstrom of flakes, had practically brought me to a standstill. Then a benefactor had come to the rescue and deposited me in Augsburg in the late morning. I hadn't expected to reach it till long after dark, if then.

On these Augsburg choir-stalls, highly polished free-standing scenes of Biblical bloodshed ran riot. For realism and immediacy they left the carvings of Ulm far behind. On the first, Jael, with hanging sleeves and hatted like a margravine, gripped a coal-hammer and steadied an iron spike among the sleeping Sisera's curls. Judith, likewise dressed in high Plantagenet fashion, held the severed head of Holophernes in one hand while the other buried a sword in the small of his back. Cain's axe was splitting Abel's temple wide open, and David, stooping over the steel-clad figure of Goliath, had all but sawn his head off. These wooden duets were only slightly grotesque. Flemings and Burgundians compete with the Germans in wood-carving but they can't catch up with this blunt realism. On tombs and slabs, the figures of highborn laymen—broad- and hard-faced men in full plate armour with their hair clipped in fringes—were outnumbered by the prince-bishops and the mitred landgraves that once ruled in this war-like see. Some were mailclad, some vested in chasubles; and the stone hands joining in prayer were gauntleted or episcopally gloved with gems in a lozenge to mark the points of the stigmata. Tonsured on cushions or bobbed on helms, identical frowns of dominion stamped those rectangular heads, and lances and crosiers were interchangeable at their sides. Under one prelate in heavy pontificals lay an effigy of his skeleton when the worms had finished with him. Further on, from a hanging jaw under the hollow cheeks and eye sockets of an aquiline zealot, the death-rattle was nearly audible.

Stark mementoes. But, in compensation, four ravishing scenes from the life of the Virgin hung behind side-altars. 'Hans Holbein,' the brass plate said; but they were more like Memling in costume and feeling; much earlier in date than the royalties and ambassadors and magnates we all know. They turned out to be by the father and namesake of the best-known Holbein, patriarch of a whole dynasty of Augsburg painters.

I must resist the temptation to enlarge on the fascinating city outside: its abundance of magnificent buildings, the frescoed façade of the Fugger house, the wells canopied with wrought iron. I was pursuing a more general quarry as I munched: no less than the whole feeling and character of pre-baroque German towns. We have been through a number of them; there are more to come. A theory had been forming and clumsy tuning notes have sounded on earlier pages, so I may as well get it off my chest.

The characteristics I have in mind, though of course I didn't know the details, stretch further afield than South Germany: they advance down the Danube, through Austria and into Bohemia, across the mountains of the Tyrol to the edge of Lombardy and through the Swiss Alps and across the Upper Rhine into Alsace; and the real secret about the architecture of these towns is that it is mediaeval in structure and Renaissance—or the Teutonic interpretation of the Renaissance—only in detail. A great wave assembled in Lombardy and Venetia. It mounted, gathered speed, and at last rushed northwards through the passes and down into the plain to break over the German mediaeval bulk in vast distintegrating fans of spray. Curves like the slits in a violin began to complicate and soften the zigzags of the gables, and, from the burgeoning crow-steps, florid finials and elaborated obelisks were soon shooting up. Structurally, the new arcades were mediaeval cloisters still, but the detail that proliferated all over them turned them into elaborately sheltered loggias for a prosperous laity. The barn-like mediaeval roofs remained, but, from the arcade to the eaves, projecting oriels soared in tiers of mullions and armorial glass as ornately as galleons' poops. They even jutted in spiraling polygons and cylinders at street corners, abetted in their extravagance by tangles of carved stone and wood. The same ebullient trend broke loose everywhere...

I had been fumbling for a symbol that might hit off this idio-syncracy and suddenly I found it! In the girls' flat in Stuttgart, turning over a picture book of German history, I stopped at a colour plate depicting three arresting figures. 'Landsknechts in the time of the Emperor Maximilian I,' was the caption. They were three blond giants. Challenging moustachios luxuriated over the jut of their bushy beards. Their floppy hats were worn at killing angles, and, under the curl of ostrich feathers, the segmented brims spread as incongruously as the petals of a periwinkle. Two of these men grasped pikes with elaborate blades, the third carried a musket; their hands on the hilts of their broadswords tilted up the scabbards behind them. Slashed doublets expanded their shoulders and quilted sleeves puffed out their arms like Zeppelins; but on top of all this, their torsos were wrapped slantwise in wide ribbons, loosely attached to their trunks by a row of bows at an opposite slant, and bright bands fluttered about their already-voluminous arms in similar contradictory spirals: scarlet, vermilion, orange, canary, Prussian blue, grass green, violet and ochre. From buttocks and cod piece to knee, their legs were subjected to the same contradictory ribbon-treatment, and, with cunning asymmetry, the bright bands were arranged differently askew on each leg. They were fluttering criss-cross cages of colour, like maypoles about to unfurl. The tights below, which ended in wide slash-toed duck-bill shoes, were striped and parti-coloured. One soldier, with a breast-plate over his finery, eschewed all ribbons below the fork. Instead, his legs were adorned with tiers of fringes as far as mid-calf—square-ended tapes that sprang out like the umbelliferous rings of foliage on those marsh plants called mare's tails.

They were swashbuckling, exuberant and preposterous outfits, yet there was nothing foppish about the wearers: under the flutter of this blinding haberdashery, they were grim Teutonic soldiers, and mediaeval still. All this slashing which caught on everywhere, was a Teutonic thing. It began in the late fifteenth century, when miles of plundered silk were sliced up to patch the campaigning tatters of some lucky mercenaries: they went berserk among the bales; then, carried away, they started pulling their underlinen through the gaps and puffing it out. Once launched, the fashion spread to the courts of the Valois and Tudors and Stuarts and broke at last into its fullest flower at the field of the Cloth of Gold. But the Landsknechts were objects of dread. They swore and hacked their way through all the religious and dynastic wars of the Empire; and, while they plied their pikes, buildings were beginning to go up. When Charles V succeeded Maximilian in 1519, the meridian splendour of the Landsknechts coincided with a generation of glory that the Holy Roman Empire had not seen since Charlemagne and would never see again. Through inheritence, conquest, marriage and discovery, Charles' Empire reached north to the Baltic settlements of the Teutonic knights, to the old Hanseatic world and the Netherlands; it stretched south to include the Duchy of Milan and swallowed up the outpost kingdoms of Naples and Sicily; it marched with Turkey on the Middle Danube and expanded to western Burgundy; then, skipping France—whose King, however, was the Emperor's prisoner in Madrid—it leapt the Atlantic from the Pyrenees to the Pacific shores of Peru.

Once I had got hold of the Landsknecht formula—mediaeval solidity adorned with a jungle of inorganic Renaissance detail—there was no holding me! It came into play wherever I looked: not only in gables, bell-hampers, well-heads, oriels, and arcades—in the woodland giants that wrestled in coloured tempera over fifty feet of façade—but in everything. In heraldry, which haunts all German cities, it was omnipresent. The coats of arms that encrust those South German walls were once as simple as upside-down flat-irons with reversed buckets on top: at the touch of the new formula, each shield blossomed into the lower half of a horizontally bisected 'cello, floridly notched for a tilting lance, under a twenty-fold display of latticed and strawberry-leaf-crowned casques, each helmet top-heavy with horns or wings or ostrich or peacocks' feathers and all of them suddenly embowered in mantelling as reckless, convoluted and slashed as spatulate leaves in a whirlwind. The wings of eagles expanded in sprays of separate sable plumes, tails bifurcated in multiple tassels, tongues leapt from beaks and fangs like flames; armour broke out in ribs and fluting and flares and inlaid arabesques. All was lambent. Was it the Landsknecht principle, spreading to typography, that contorted capital letters, twirled the serifs and let loose, round the text of post-Gutenberg blackletter, those reckless, refluent, never-ending black flourishes, like ribands kept in motion on the tips of sticks by a conjurer? Typography, bookplates, title pages, headlines, woodcuts, block-engraving.... Dürer, encastled in mediaeval Nuremberg on his return from Renaissance Venice, spurred it on. The hard outline in German art, the love of complexity.... And Holbein? (Not Cranach. I'd been looking at him that morning in the museum.) Taking their cue—subconsciously, perhaps—from those soldiers, the masons and smiths and joiners must have conspired together; everything that could fork, ramify, coil, flutter, fold back or thread through itself, suddenly sprang to action. Clocks, keys, hinges, door-bands, hilts and trigger-guards...centrifugal lambency and recoil! The principle is active still.

We have all invented a half-bogus golden age to embower us when we eat and drink away from home. Judging by pubs, this is represented in England by the reign of Elizabeth, with the Regency following close. France's dream dining-land is Rabelais' Thélème and the chicken-in-the-pot world of Henry IV; and South Germany's lost paradise covers roughly the same epoch: Landsknecht-time, in fact. Their armies marched and counter-marched; but it was not only a time of military and territorial triumph. The stimulating ding-dong of the Reform was at work. The Counter-Reformation was limbering up for a return bout. Luther was fulminating, Erasmus, Reuchlin, Melanchthon and Paracelsus were stooped over their desks; Germany's greatest painters were busy in their studios; books and ideas were on the move. Then, when the Thirty Years' War broke out and the deadening years lengthened into decades, all building stopped and artists and writers fell back into eclipse. The Empire was soon sinking into dotage among the cinders. The Landsknechts' high noon was over. The penultimate sparkle of Maria Theresa was only a reprieve, and the perverse and cerebral wonders of Baroque, that flowered among the princes like a springtime in autumn, faded all too soon. (Death came with the Revolution; and the only hope of revival for the Teutonic world lay far away in the north, with the star rising in the Mark of Brandenburg. But the southern Germans and the Austrians never cared for Prussia.) No wonder, then, that the reigns of Maximilian and Charles V should remain the care-free dreamland of the German-speaking world. (Not Valhalla or Asgard at all; these always send them off the rails.) Wine-cellars, taverns, beerhalls, coffee houses—hundreds of authentic ones were still intact; and the new ones automatically echoed them. So it is not the vomiting crossbowman of an earlier age that haunts such premises, still less the introspective toper after the Thirty Years' War. That periwigged figure was morosely waiting for the coloured pastorals to cohere among the gesso tendrils overhead and for the string quartets to begin tuning.

No. It's the bearded guzzler in his harlequin haberdashery, recruited in Swabia, twirling his whiskers and shouting for another bottle. He is the walking epitome and his influence is everywhere: in the tapering coloured globes that form the stems of the wine-glasses, in the labels on the green and amber bottles, in the hanging metal signs that creak outside on wrought-iron stanchions; in the unfolding of the carved brackets and the iron involution of banisters, in the folds of the panelling and the calligraphic flourishes of the mural mottoes; in the heavy Bacchic riot of the hewn wooden ivy that inter-twines with the vine shoots and the leaves and the clusters. He is present in the perforation on bench-backs, in the stretchers of the tables, and in the wood and plaster coffering overhead; the tiered tops, the hinges and handles of the stone tankards, the coiling lead that honeycombs the circular window-panes together, the tiles of the stoves looted from the Spanish Netherlands, the very lids of the painted china pipe-bowls—all are his. It is the corroborative detail of dreamland.

Dreamland for me, too, for a while. It was snug among these impedimenta, with sawdust underfoot and hidden in the shag and cheroot smoke that I poured such ideas into my diary. The Landsknecht touch-stone! (Stale news, I suppose. These discoveries nearly always are.) But it was in the transept of the cathedral that the notion suddenly took shape, detonating over my head and shooting up to triforium-level like a giant exclamation mark in a strip cartoon.

[ WINTERREISE ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or so it seemed, when the third mug arrived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ob's edler im Gemüt, die Pfeil' und Schleudern

Des wütenden Geschicks erdulden, oder,

Sich waffnend gegen eine See von Plagen,

Durch Widerstand sie enden

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

Nur dass die Furcht vor etwas nach dem Tod—

Das unentdeckte Land, von des Bezirk

Kein Wandrer wiederkehrt

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

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