Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  The Blindheim/Blenheim battlefield stretched for nearly 4 miles and I cycled right across it, listening to the birds sing. The extreme right flank of the Franco-Bavarian army had been protected by the Danube, and the extreme left flank touched the undulating pine-covered hills of the Swabian Jura. At the front of the French line ran a small stream, the Nebel, in ground that was soft and marshy and only fordable intermittently, and this stream flowed into the Danube at Blindheim. Between Blindheim and the next village of Oberglau the fields of wheat had been cut to stubble and were ideal for deploying troops. From Oberglau to the next hamlet of Lutzingen the terrain of ditches, thickets and brambles was potentially difficult ground.

  Marlborough took 36,000 troops and attacked from the left, with the aim of capturing Blindheim, while Eugene was to lead 16,000 men from the right. For their part, the French weren’t expecting an assault, although any attempt at surprise was negated by the lack of cover. ‘I could see’, wrote one of the French generals, ‘the enemy advancing ever closer in nine great columns … filling the whole plain from the Danube to the woods on the horizon.’

  For many hours it looked as if the result could go either way. In the late afternoon Marlborough had to rebuke a cavalry officer who was attempting to leave the field, ‘Sir, you are under a mistake, the enemy lies that way …’ Eventually, with one more weary charge, the Grand Alliance managed to rout the French cavalry. The remaining French infantry battalions fought with desperate valour, trying to form a defensive square, but they died to a man where they stood, right out in the open plain.

  The majority of the retreating French headed for Höchstädt but most did not make the safety of the town, being brought up short by the Danube where those 3,000 horsemen drowned; others were cut down by the pursuing cavalry. Marlborough, still in the saddle conducting the pursuit of the broken enemy, managed to snatch a moment to scribble a note to his wife, Sarah, on the back of an old tavern bill. ‘I have no time to say more but to beg you will give my duty to the Queen, and let her know her army has had a glorious victory.’

  French losses were immense, with some 30,000 killed, wounded and missing, and bodies turned up downriver for weeks to come. The myth of French invincibility had been destroyed overnight and French hopes for a bigger slice of Europe were postponed until the Bonaparte juggernaut started to move a hundred years later.

  With the thanks of much of Europe ringing in his ears, the Duke of Marlborough returned to England. The Queen granted him Woodstock Park and promised a sum of £240,000 to build a suitable house, Blenheim Palace, as a gift from a grateful crown in recognition of his victory. If it hadn’t been for Blindheim/Blenheim, say historians, all Europe might have been conquered by the French, with consequences that don’t bear thinking about. Cricket might never have existed.

  A couple of hours after leaving one battlefield I was cycling into another, equally unexpected. Germany’s Romantic Road is a chocolate-box tourist route which runs 200 miles north–south from Würzburg to Füssen, and in the town of Donauwörth it intersects with the Danube cyclepath and the Jakobusweg. The latter is probably better known as the St James’s Way, a pilgrimage route which starts in Oettingen and stumbles from one apostolic church to the next as it heads south and then west, joining other arterial routes which all eventually lead to the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela.

  It all sounded very spiritual and uplifting on paper, so I was surprised to come across the high-security airbase and manufacturing plant of Eurocopter, a helicopter specialist with significant military contracts (particularly in the Middle East) on Donauwörth’s outer edge. These days Eurocopter is owned by EADS, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, but once upon a time it was better known as Messerschmidt, which explains why Donauwörth ended up as a bomb target in the Second World War. I cycled around its barbed-wire perimeter, grinning up at all the security cameras and Grüss Gotting at security men in suits, who watched me pass without comment. Even if big deals were not being made with governments and warlords behind that bulletproof glass, I certainly got the impression that they were.

  Donauwörth wasn’t what it seemed, either. Despite the romantic image and the careful pastel configuration of the houses that lined its main street, most of the old-looking façades were facsimiles. Bombing had reduced the original town to rubble, and some of the houses had only been reconstructed as recently as the year 2000. The airborne pummelling had been compounded by the billeting of 12,000 ethnic German refugees from the Sudetenland on Donauwörth at the war’s end, which had the effect of tripling the local population at a time when food and shelter was at a minimum.

  Forcible resettlement of ethnic Germans from elsewhere had taken place all over Germany, which had had to absorb eight million refugees at a time when it was at its lowest ebb, being burdened with huge reparations whilst losing 27,000 square miles of its territory. Some of the refugees were farflung Danube Swabians like Franz Flock, and some were from distinct multicultural regions with large German minorities, like the Sudetenland and Silesia (the latter now in Poland). Many had been economic migrants in previous centuries, migrants whose big mistake was to retain their Germanic culture, and who were accordingly redefined as the enemy when the nationalistic tide turned against them. Like the Danube Swabians they’d suddenly found themselves persona non grata in their host nations. But nor did they find themselves welcome in their supposed fatherland, becoming a traumatized generation of the unwanted. Although it is little recorded and rarely discussed, hundreds of thousands of today’s elderly Germans still feel they don’t truly belong in the towns in which they have lived for over sixty years. My mother-in-law, born in Silesia, and now living near Bremen, is one of them.

  This unwelcome swelling of the German population turned out to be one of the driving forces behind the post-war economic miracle, because as a labour force the incomers were very motivated to prove themselves, and, with no local roots to bog them down, they were willing to move to areas where manpower was most needed. So Donauwörth didn’t remain Sudeten-dominated for long – or so I believed.

  I found a room in a creaky, old-fashioned boarding house which belonged to a thin, elderly lady who was in a stage of life where everything becomes a source of worry. She was anxious about everything it was possible to be anxious about. About her hip, and whether it needed replacing. About her visitors, and whether more of them were suddenly going to arrive or not. About keys, and whether they were going to be lost. About bicycles, and whether they were safe in the outhouses. She tried to manage that anxiety through signage, all over the house. ‘Please remove your shoes here.’ ‘Please close this door.’ ‘Please open window after you’ve used the bathroom.’ ‘Please leave this door open.’ And the endearing ‘This toilet roll is for using here, not for taking away,’ which conjured up visions of all kinds of illegal employment of toilet roll elsewhere.

  Those parts of the house that weren’t for visitors had ‘Privat’ labels stuck on them, even down to a flannel hook by the bathroom sink, which was also labelled ‘Privat’, for the proprietor’s flannel alone. I’m afraid that, for me, that was one sign too far; during my post-cycle shower I took advantage of that private hook to stop my socks getting wet.

  All these signs made my host seem like a dictator, which she was not. She simply knew how things were best arranged, and she relied on her signs to be her lieutenants, always on guard against guest error. As I went to bed I imagined her sitting in her kitchen, listening, hoping that the signs were doing their duty, worrying that doors were being left open when they ought not to be, and concerned that shoes were being left inappropriately unremoved.

  At breakfast time she seemed much more relaxed, possibly because I was the only guest. She told me about a pilgrim who’d stayed with her while doing the St James’s Way.

  ‘He was in a terrible state. Didn’t speak a word of German or English, a bundle of nerves. He was crying, his skin was blistered and his hair was streaked and knotted with dirt. Wh
en I asked what the matter was, he explained that God was helping him, or at least that’s what I think he was saying. Honestly, it didn’t look like God was helping him very much.’ She allowed herself a small smile. ‘And I had another gentleman staying, you know what he said? He said “He doesn’t need God, he needs suncream!”’

  For a moment she looked as if she was about to laugh, then she checked herself. ‘I’m sorry, are you religious? It wasn’t me that said he didn’t need God, you understand.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I take it that you’re not religious either?’

  She shook her head. ‘My mother used to be.’

  There was something in the way she said this that made me pursue it.

  ‘And what happened?’

  The landlady looked reluctant. ‘The war happened.’

  ‘Your father was killed?’ It was an obvious conclusion.

  She nodded. ‘And then we had a lot of people. Come here.’

  ‘Ah-hah. From Sudetenland. I read about that.’

  She seemed relieved that the back-story didn’t need explaining.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘In this house? At the worst time we had as many as twenty.’ She started to clear the table. ‘You cannot imagine. It was just me, my sister and my mother. My mother became very angry, her husband missing and now her house full of strangers. She hadn’t wanted to go to war in the first place.’

  There was a short pause while she disappeared to the kitchen with the dirty crockery, and when she returned she seemed to have made a decision to talk more.

  ‘We only lived down here, this was our part of the house. The rest was theirs. Upstairs. Our house, but theirs, you can’t imagine. And two of the families, they stayed here for six years.’

  ‘Surely they became friends?’

  She shuddered. ‘We didn’t talk to them. Never, not even in the street. My mother told us not to. I didn’t even talk to them at school.’

  Now I understood the origin of all the signs all over the house. ‘So you wrote notes telling them what they could and couldn’t do?’

  She nodded. ‘And when they left, my mother didn’t want to move back upstairs. She started renting those rooms out. She used to say it was high time we made something out of our property for ourselves. She was very bitter.’

  I said I understood.

  ‘There was a lot of suffering in those days. It ruined my mother’s life. She lived a long time, another forty years, and it never left her, that bitterness, particularly as she got old. But it is not something we talk about, we Germans. My sister and I, we knew why our mother was so difficult in those last years, and she was very, very difficult. There was nothing we could do. Or say. The doctors knew, the nurses knew, everyone knew, but no one ever spoke about it. It’s like a disease you’re too ashamed to mention. You can’t talk about German suffering during or after the war, however huge it was, because of course it was all our fault.’

  I sensed, with alarm, the nearness of tears, so I attempted a detour in the conversation.

  ‘And today. Are there many Sudeten Germans left in town?’

  ‘Of course. For my generation, Donauwörth is divided. I don’t talk to them, for my mother’s sake. But the younger people, they get on, which is how it should be; it wasn’t their war. I suppose you could say that time is healing things, but it has taken more time than you can possibly imagine. And for people like my mother, it never healed.’

  Half an hour later I was wheeling my bike out of her shed to resume my journey when my landlady emerged to ask if everything had been ‘recht’, a word that carried more weight than the usual ‘I hope you enjoyed your stay.’ She was asking whether it had been OK to talk about the forbidden – about German suffering during and after the war. So I said it had, it had been very recht. Besides, it meant I didn’t have to ’fess up to the illegal use of a flannel hook.

  From Donauwörth the road started to lollop away with consummate ease, but it is not so easy to lollop on a bicycle and ‘consummate ease’ is far easier to write than to achieve when there are hills in the equation. The landscape looked lazy, rising and falling like the chest of a sleeping giant, while the road samba’ed sideways, doing an off-the-shoulder number, too louche to go over the top. I rumba’ed over it as best I could, but all the saddle fitness I’d gained over the last ten days seemed to evaporate after the first hour. Some days were like that.

  Still, there was plenty to look at and I was in no hurry. I was entering the valley of the Altmühl, another tributary diversion from the Danube, a land of glossy meadows and hidden biergartens, veined with little waterways tressed with bridges and muscled with birch and oak. Leggy hunters’ watchtowers stood on stilts in the clearings, empty and hollow-eyed until the deer season started, when they’d once more spit lead. Birds of prey rose into the sky as the day warmed, circling upwards above ruined castles atop plugs of rock, where lizards were no doubt just starting to sun themselves, unaware of the danger overhead.

  The ground here had a substantial chalk content so there was no chance of missing the cycle way, a clearly identifiable dribble of white ribbon that threaded between distant wheatfields. It was as if a country-loving road painter had recently passed this way on his holidays, and had been unable to move on without leaving his mark between carriageways of cereals. For much of the time the route stayed up on the valley sides, around the lower fringe of the trees, scared to get its feet wet in the valley floor. I found it an irritation, climbing unnecessarily only to descend again, but once in a while I was rewarded with a view of a patchwork landscape whose colours were beginning to separate out and become more complex as the season progressed beyond spring’s pure and luminous green.

  It was the weekend and the weather was fine, so the route began to be busy with others, mostly families with younger children or vigorous fifty-somethings whose offspring had left home. Long-distancers like me were few and far between, which was one reason why I’d first noticed the American cyclist in Ulm, and I now came across him again in the outskirts of Eichstätt, a baroque university town that could have been a chunk of Vienna airlifted into the valley. The other reason why he was unmissable was the music coming from his handlebars.

  I never learned his name, the American, but there was no doubting his nationality. He wore baggy shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, garish sneakers, a reversed baseball cap and his handlebar-speaker was broadcasting a station called VoA, turned up loud. Most cyclists slipped through towns and villages virtually unnoticed, but wherever this man went people stopped what they were doing, stared and nudged each other. Even the cows stared. It is hard to radiate a mixture of indifference and aggression from a bicycle saddle, but he managed it.

  I’d tracked him from a distance before the chance came for conversation as we both pushed our bikes over Eichstätt’s un-cycleable cobbles. He must have been in his late thirties, although his style would have you believe him to be younger, and his manner suggested he was in a hurry, although his cycle speed was no more than average.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘USA,’ he said, quite unnecessarily, not looking up, but nodding to the beat coming from his speaker.

  ‘I can tell that, but where in the USA?’

  ‘Houston. You bin there?’

  I said I’d once changed planes in the airport.

  ‘Well I sure as hell am looking forward to getting back there, out of all this bullshit.’

  ‘You’re not having a good time?’

  ‘Do I look like I am? Do I really look like I am?’ He looked at me for the first time, and I could read the anger in his eyes.

  At that moment there was a break in his music and he scowled at his handlebars.

  ‘Is that Voice of America? Are they still broadcasting?’ I asked.

  He was hauling a mobile phone out of his pocket to check its screen display and I could see he’d wired it along the bike-frame to the speakers.

  ‘Not broadcasting,’ he said, sarcastically, �
��webcasting. You have heard of that where you’re from?’

  The music started again. Plainly, he was listening to Voice of America via his mobile phone. I couldn’t pretend to myself that this was normal behaviour.

  ‘Christ, isn’t that a bit expensive on the phone bill?’

  ‘Worth every cent,’ he grunted. He looked at me again, suspiciously. ‘You don’t sound like a Kraut.’

  I told him I was British.

  ‘Hey.’ His tone was suddenly conciliatory. ‘Pleased to meet you, friend of America. You can’t tell these days with them square-heads, some of them speak such good English.’ He sounded resentful.

  Sensing an opening, I suggested we stopped for an ice-cream at a small Italian café by the roadside, and surprisingly he agreed. Even more surprising was the good German in which he placed his order.

  ‘Are you in the army here?’ I asked. I knew it was the wrong explanation as soon as I said it. For one thing, his hair was far too long.

  ‘Do I look like I am?’

  ‘I just wondered, what with you speaking good German …’

  ‘My parents,’ he muttered, and then more quietly, ‘always blame the parents.’

  We ate our ices in silence. If truth were told, both of us were a bit surprised to find ourselves in each other’s company. He’d unplugged his phone from the speaker, although I noticed that he’d not bothered to stop the download, so VoA continued to play companionably to itself in his pocket, a furtive umbilical cord to the motherland.

  Eventually, he picked up where we’d left off. ‘My parents, see, they were German.’

  ‘Were? You mean they changed nationality?’

  ‘Nope. They died. Four months back.’

  I said I was sorry, but he shrugged my words away.

  ‘Hey, they didn’t want to live any more. They were old. Jeez, they were already old when they had me, and I think I was a mistake. Any road, they never brought me here, they never talked about family or Germany, the only thing they ever did that was German was to speak it to each other when they didn’t want me to understand. Otherwise, nothing, nix, zilch.’ His tone sounded accusatory.