A Time of Gifts (15 page)

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.

 

[1]
Hitler had recently suppressed all this, not out of antipathy to bloodsports but because these cliques and their exciting customs must have seemed rivals of the official youth and student movements.

[2]
There were many reasons for thinking about this castle later on, not least because of the Palatine Anthology, which was long treasured there; and for fascinating though nebulous links between the Princess and the Rosicrucians. She was preoccupied, in the layout of the Palace gardens, with devices like talking statues, singing fountains, water organs and the like. She had grown up among the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the conceits of Donne and played in masques where the scenery was designed by Inigo Jones.

[3]
After writing these words and wondering whether I had spelt the name Spengel right—also to discover what had happened to the family—on a sudden impulse I sent a letter to the Red Ox, addressed “to the proprietor.” A very nice letter from Fritz's son—he was born in 1939—tells me that not only my host and hostess are dead, but that Fritz was killed in Norway (where the first battalion of my own regiment at the time was heavily engaged) and buried at Trondheim in 1940, six years after we met. The present Herr Spengel is the sixth generation of the same family to own and run this delightful inn.

[4]
Sometime earlier I had temporarily abandoned the use of my ordinary Christian name, and, for reasons I've forgotten, adopted my second name, Michael, reverting to normal when this journey was over.

[5]
As the crow flies, had I but known, it lay only about forty miles S.E. of my point on the Swabian road.

[6]
The battle is known as Höchstädt—after the next village—in Germany and France.

[7]
The court-cards in a European pack are a mild version of all this, and the uniform of the Swiss Pontifical Guard at the Vatican is Michelangelo's attempt at standardizing it. There is still a French card game called Lansquenet.

N
IPPING
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.