Europe in the Looking Glass Read Online Free PDF Page B

square in the middle of the town lined with high-fronted old houses, themselves dwarfed by the upstanding and irregularly-built Gothic cathedral, must look much the same now but for a statue or two commemorating the event, as when Luther flung the Papal Bull into the flames and started the Reformation on this identical spot four hundred and nine years ago. Simon tentatively suggested lunch; but David hurried through rather faster than usual, as though he were a practising Roman Catholic.
    Though, as a matter of fact, he personally suffers from no form of religious hysteria, the way in which moral scruples can distort the actions of persons otherwise sane is sometimes scarcely believable. I have a relation who once sat eight hours without food or drink in a railway carriage at Monte Carlo on a boiling day in June, rather than set foot even on the platform of such a place. But then, after all, self-martyrdom is the greatest of all joys.
    After driving some way further, the country began to assume an industrial complexion; but not as in England. This was no ‘black country’. The grey and now more or less hedgeless panorama of small cultivated fields, relieved at intervals by rows of miniature Eiffel Towers bearing festoons of electric cable from one horizon to another, remained unchanged. Yet the inhabitants grew grimy, and a sudden wave of depression seemed to weight the air. The mining of coal and iron is all conducted in enormous craters two or three hundred feet below the surface of the fields. It is as though a peepshow designer had created a miniature replica of an industrial landscape at the bottom of a packing-case. Trucks and cranes and human beings can be seen moving vaguely about in miniature, like the people on the floor of St Paul’s viewed through the hole in the floor of the ball. Then the fields continue again, until the next crater cleaves their midst.
    As we drove by, the bands of workers on the road became ill-favoured and were at no pains to conceal their dislike of us, shaking their fists and shouting ‘Langsam, langsam!’ (Slowly, slowly!) Germans always slow down to pass anything. David accelerates.
    Though we had complained of the frequency with which the Hamburg-Berlin road had been closed for repairs, that indeed might have been an uncharted prairie compared with the present thoroughfare. Until at last, as Simon remarked, it was a comfort to be on a road at all, even if it was going in the wrong direction. One barrier necessitated a ten-mile detour along tracks that would have disgraced an Irish farm. David vowedhe would make no further digressions into the countryside. Round the next corner stood the inevitable obstruction and its notice:
    VORSICHT
GESPERRT.
    A convenient field offered a way round. Then followed another obstacle, also circumventable. But the third was more formidable. A wooden pole was stretched across the road at a point where it was crossing a small valley on an embankment, so that on either side was a steep declivity. Below this barrier, which we removed, lay a row of stone blocks, heaped higgledy-piggledy on top of one another; and at one side an inflexible iron pin, eighteen inches high and one-and-a-half in diameter, was embedded deep into the roadway. We could move neither backward nor forward. A crowd collected from some neighbouring cottages, full of hostility. Suddenly David, without another moment’s hesitation, charged the entire barricade. Bending the iron pin into a right-angle, Diana heaved her enormous body on to the stones and scattered them like the walls of Jericho. Simon and I rushed frantically in her wake, followed by the curses of the populace. Poised one on either step, we drove off in triumph.
    At length we reached Leipzig, through long wastes of industrial suburbs. Simon, no longer tentative, insisted that we should have tea. David said that first we must find our way through the town. So we drove for half-an-hour through unending labyrinths of tramlined