Europe @ 2.4 km/h (22 page)

For my farewell to the capital of Belgium, I raise a glass of something that should truly unite this divided land, a lambic (fruit) beer known as Kriek. Want the secret of a recipe for putting Belgium’s woes out of your mind? This one takes the cherry.

612-614 km

In Rochefort, deep in the heart of Wallonia, I stay at a friendly
gite d’étape
(family-run guesthouse) whose owners at first appear nonplussed by my habit of hauling myself up the grand staircase like a self-trained walrus. (But this is the
easy
way to reach my room, and there are none on the ground floor, so needs must.)

On Rochefort’s main street I see a sign — quite a brilliant shaming tactic, the like of which I have not seen before but one that should really be imitated elsewhere. Above a disabled-parking bay next to the town’s tourist information bureau, it reads, ‘You want my place? Take my handicap as well’.

627 km

This evening in picturesque Namur, I submit to the random kindness of Belgians when a bus passenger pays my fare before I can do so myself. Now this could happen anywhere, I agree, but the fact is it
has
happened here in Belgium. I like this country, more than some of the people living here like it. The only question is whether my benefactor would have considered herself a Belgian. Too late to ask …

Epiphany visits when least expected. It’s Friday evening and I sit, Leffe beer in hand, on the porch of Namur’s
auberge de jeunesse
overlooking the Parc à la Plante and the brooding River Meuse. Perfection.

628-633 km

In the south-eastern corner of Belgium, close to the Luxembourg border, I hike 3 km into the countryside beyond Bastogne to the site of my third battlefield in a week, where another gamble by another would-be master of Europe came to grief.

The offensive was launched on 16 December 1944, six months after D-Day. Hitler was playing his last card. His objectives were to split the Americans from the British and give himself enough time to develop, deploy and dispatch his new weapons of mass destruction — the V1 and V2 rockets. If the Führer’s gamble failed, the road to Berlin would be wide open. Game over.

I wheel up the green slopes of a hill — the Colline du Mardasson — crowned by a star-shaped American memorial and a museum of the traditional type surely preferred by GIs well into their pensionable age. Ardennes — the Battle of the Bulge, as the Americans call it — was measured in weeks rather than Waterloo’s hours or Ypres’ years.

As you enter the dark rotunda housing the exhibits, your eyes are drawn to a lifelike diorama of three American generals — Patton, Eisenhower and Bradley — conferring at Bastogne barracks on 3 January 1945. Hitler’s battle plan relied on inexperienced
Volksgrenadiers
— every male between 17 and 45 he could conscript — to break through the Allied lines, race across Belgium and capture Antwerp. In three days they had reached the Meuse; in another three, the Germans issued Bastogne with the ultimatum ‘Surrender or be destroyed’, to which General McAuliffe delivered his immortal riposte, ‘Nuts!’ The enemy had no idea what he meant. The translator upon meeting the German messenger explained, ‘It’s a definite no. If you don’t understand the phrase, it means “Go to hell”.’ To the French it was faithfully translated ‘
Allez au diable!
’

On Christmas night the Luftwaffe, subjecting Allied troops to the campaign’s most intensive bombing, destroyed US headquarters along with much of the town. Many GIs later confessed they were thinking, This is the end. But next day Patton’s troops broke through the encirclement and forged 100 km across icy and snowbound terrain to save the beleaguered town. ‘Bastogne breathes again,’ Patton cabled Eisenhower. When the Germans retreated on 8 January they had lost 110,000 men; 80,000 Americans had been killed, injured or taken prisoner. Churchill called Ardennes ‘the greatest American victory of all time’, with justice. They’d been outnumbered three to one from the outset.

In the museum shop, handkerchiefs emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes are on sale at €5 apiece. I’m surprised no one has succeeded in having them removed from sale. If burning the flag is shameful, why would blowing your nose on it be acceptable?

On my descent from the war memorial I set two new speed records: 23.6 km/h and then 24.1 km/h. It’s tempting to exceed 25 km/h but a speed record’s not all I might break.

Tomorrow I head back into Germany, so it’s time to ask, What do the Belgians think of their powerful eastern neighbours? They trade with them — obviously — but, considering their history over the past 100 years, I duck the challenge and opt for a quiet night.

GERMANY

Time spent: 34 days

Distance covered: 3079 km

Distance pushed: 248.7 km

Average speed: 2.829 km/h

Journey distance to date: 16,204 km

Other nations have culture, Germany has
Kultur
. The capital seems important, but then German Capitalises Many Words. You Won’t See That Sort of Thing Here.

Kultur
is the key that unlocks the heartland of Europe, but the land of the heart? That’s France. Germany idolises logic, aspires to efficiency. The heartland of Europe rewards those who use their head. Who has ever made more mathematical, cerebral music than Johann Sebastian Bach? Yet this is also the land of Beethoven and Wagner, those grand stirrers of emotion.

It is the land of Goethe, Classicist
par excellence
(sorry, I mean
uber alles
). But it is also home to flights of fancy (so long as they have clearance from the tower and are capable of landing safely after a controlled descent). Formalistic Goethe was at ease with lyrical Schiller.

Here, on their Olympus, I can hope to meet some of Europe’s cultural gods — Beethoven, Bach, Goethe and Schiller — and to see with my one-sixteenth-German eye how German hearts sing, German brains tick, and German people see the world from Europe’s greatest position of strength.

The consequences of being the strongest kid on the European block have not vanished, but after bitter experience Germany has adapted to the fact that its weight of numbers (82 million at last count, but falling) can intimidate the neighbours; and has learnt to tread, if not lightly, with agility.

Outsiders often think of Germans as intense, earnest folk. Those who come here soon know better. Mediterraneans (Greeks, Italians, Spaniards) are said to know how to enjoy life but you may have noticed that Santorini has never hosted the Oktoberfest. That Europe’s chosen anthem is
Ode to Joy
tells us something about the whole Continent, but let’s not forget where the melody came from.

Germany is now at the head of a peaceful, orderly, life-loving Europe but Germans have spent most of their history as members of fragmentary mini-states. Creating a unified nation, glorying in its strength, provided a purpose worth fighting for. The Germans are a purposeful folk, inclined to be dogmatic. Who else could have produced Karl Marx? And does anyone here still believe in him, insist on his correctness? If they do, I am sure to meet them somewhere here.

The German perfectionist admires things in their classical form but passion is never absent, just held in check. To a German, the love of order, or an abhorrence of chaos, may often see the greatest virtue of all.
Ordnung muss sein
. But even perfectionists aren’t perfect. Like me, they love to go a-wandering …

638-643 km

By train from Liège to Köln (in German the ö de Cologne is pronounced as in ‘colonel’). I needn’t have worried that Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) would be hard to find. Step outside the
Hauptbahnhof
and it’s there on your left, its twin towers soaring 157 metres into the sky — that’s 30 metres taller than Our Lady of Antwerp. Charcoal-black, slender-steepled, how could this Gothic pile have withstood the firestorm bombing of World War II, I wonder. If I can’t miss it, how could they? The body of the cathedral was raised in seventeen years, nothing short of a gallop by church construction standards. But the hulking edifice we see today was not completed until Kaiser Wilhelm I placed the finial atop the lofty south tower (the emperor must have been unafraid of heights) in 1880, a leisurely six centuries after the foundation stone had been laid.

Visit Cologne Cathedral and you start to measure time in centuries. Here is the oldest monumental crucifix in the West, donated by Archbishop Gero in AD 976. Light on this storm-threatening day streams into the Chapel of St Stephen through the Newer Biblical Window, a mere stripling at 727 years of age.

The pilgrimage to Cologne was one of the largest of the Middle Ages, after the bones of the Three Magi (still claimed to be here) were transferred from Milan. By this stage the Three Wise Men had been travelling westwards for more than 1000 years after Jesus’ earthly ministry. I suppose you have to stop sometime. And even the oldest part of the cathedral is recent compared with the side entrance to the ancient city’s Roman north gate, dated
circa
AD 50, which stands in front of the Dom.

Inside the cathedral I see the appalling sight of a tourist video-taping parishioners in a side chapel lighting candles — in memory of their dear departed. On reflection I think the solution, in a famous church such as this, is to set apart certain hours for tourism and others for devotion. The two activities mix like oil and water — crude oil and holy water.