MOSELLE AND RHINE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23221, 19 June 1937, Page 4

MOSELLE AND RHINE

AN UNKEPT DIARY Specially Written for the Otago Daily Times By J. H. E. S. XI At St. Goar on Sunday morning we saw hosts of German charabanctourists. They had arrived from Wiesbaden and Bad Ems, chiefly in time to make tremendous demands on Herr Hauser for second breakfasts, from which they had swarmed out under the lime trees and round the postcard, fruit, and chocolate kiosks by the river. Wandering among these pious visitors of Father Rhine, and studying with particular interest the sight-seeing uniform of the men —hunting hat with feather, Norfolk jacket, plus fours, golf stockings, and large boots —I drifted out of view and call. I had left W. upstairs, stowing her pack; and she, coming down and peering here and there in vain, encountered Herr Hauser, quick to detect something amiss. “ Ich habe,” she struggled to explain. “ mein’ Mann Geschossen.” I emerged from the circling Norfolk jackets and feathers in time to see the alarm on his face, and to see it dispelled as he caught sight of me—not shot, after all; not even any longer “verloren,” or lost! Directly we had to leave St. Goar, and him, and his “ House with every Comfort, Auto-boxes, and Parkplace,” as it is described on the cover of a romantic little pamphlet

he gave us. This pamphlet leads off with a verse, addressed to his “honoured guests,” in which, as I make it out, Herr Hauser pledges himself to St. Goar on the Rhine, in the clear moonlight, to extend to one and to all the same hospitality. Wherefore, “ Auf wiederseh’n,” he cries in print, “im Hotel Cafe Hauser in St. Goar! ” And his name sits under. Turn the page and you find an extract from the “ Drinking Song ” of Johannes Trojan, addressed to “ Blessed St. Goar

In blessed Goar's quiet night the rising voices call. Here swing the wine-awakened troop, and merry are they all — Askew their gait, askew their hats; tills is the way of Rhine, Of Rhino's St. Goar, where so good, so very good is wine 1

So, roughly, runs a third of this piece of Trojan poetry; but the pamphlet contains much more—contains, indeed, nothing but poetry of the Rhine. The poets’ names, Jorg Ritzel, Rudolf* Baumbach, Herm. Brandt, A. von Bergsattel, and others, are strange to me, except the first, and perhaps are of small account; but if it occurred to the Tourist Department or to hotelkeepers to gather a little book of verse about, say, Mount Cook, or Tongariro, or the Wanganui, or the Franz Josef, or Rotorua, I wish that the result might be as far from the ludicrous as Herr Fred. Hauser’s little book.

PAST THE LORELEI A river boat carried us across to St. Goarshausen in a few minutes. From there we were to walk over the hills to Kaub; and a charming, odd little illustration of Herr Hauser’s tact in showmanship ought to be mentioned. A short detour to the right would have taken us out on the Rhine cliffs, the rocks, celebrated in song and story, of the Lorelei He mentioned the fact, as

in duty bound, but with so marked a want of persuasive enthusiasm that we were left firmly minded, if not advised, to go straight on. We did. We passed the fair nymph with her golden comb and her spell of song; and her enchantment fell on others, very likely on the parties from Wiesboden and Bad Ems. The Lorelei, it might be hazarded, has lapsed in local esteem as it became a craze with visitors. When we tried to make sure of our way by asking two girls we met on the hill, just before the Lorelei turn-off, they told us, but mentioned the Lorelei road also, exchanging as they did so the looks and smiles of those who, being inside the secret of a fraud, have an amusing advantage over simple outsiders.

j The high level behind the Rhine here is almost tiresomely well cultivated; the fields spread about the road and tease it into the dull belief that it. can never escape them. Hardly any trees appear ahead to beckon it on; the gigantic cherry tree outside Weisel, the only village through which the road crawls, is almost a unique variation of the corn, root crops, and fallow. For ease of this monotony and for promise of an end you must look far ahead to the beautiful remote blue hill-waves, or look up, to the crystal blue of the sky, the cloud-billows and the scattered fleeces. Weisel itself offers only an exchange of featurelessness for featurelessness. | It is all right angles and whitewash: j and it lives so regular and virtuous a life that on this Sunday afternoon it gave no sign of life at all. We saw nobody, among these blank walls; we heard nothing, in this blank silence, except our plodding shoes. But beyond Weisel a little way the road begins to wind down S again, gradually, through the

wooded convolutions which fold the i hills in the course of the Rhine. Their diversity is ended by the sharp plunge into Kaub. KAUB Occupying a narrow strip of river j shore, between the railway on the j bank and the rising ground behind, Kaub has been squeezed out long and thin, and still it has to save I space; so the wide cafe of the German House is upstairs. More, a doorway leads oft to a covered corridor-balcony which traverses the town. The windows and doors of house after house, in an unbroken frontage, open directly upon it; and each house possesses a sort of little detached balcony, built off tbe river ! side of this main one. Here, each in its own nook, the families of Kaub were at supper, sitting above the Rhine, and easily regardless of the passengers to and fro between them and their front doors. The German House is a place of pleasant sur- i prises. On the stairs hung a framed card, giving information about the meetings of the Schiller Society; and a framed photograph, honourably placed on the cafe balcony, turned out to be that of a waiter who had served there, man and boy, an incredible number of years. The river, too, presents a surprise: a small island, midstream, completely . overbuilt by a tiny castle, a dolls’ j castle. But it is no idle ornament, j In the morning, as we watched, r most of the tugs and river steamers seemed to be met by a boat from this island fortress; and perhaps it is the office of some river authority. We saw, also, a party of sightseers very different from those the charabancs brought to St. Goar. These at Baub were workers —and I think unemployed workers—making one of the specially cheap, guided tours organised for them by the State.

GREED AND HUNGER At Assmannshausen, where the train dropped us, we had two pieces of business to transact. The ticket clerk had to be asked to telephone to Rudenheim for somebody to rescue my jacket, which had carelessly travelled on, without me; he was a heavy man, but understood quickly and moved quickly. “ Tchk! Tchk! ” he said, and his moustaches vibrated sympathetic concern. The second business was to look, ceremonially, on the wine when it was red. So much respect must be shown by the visitor, for it is the pride of Assmannshausen, shared by few other places, to produce in this home of white an indubitable red. Johnson, I think, said that a woman’s preaching was like a dog’s walking on his hind legs: it was not done well, but it was wonderful that it was done at all. The red wine of Assmannshausen may be similarly esteemed. It would be ungrateful, though, not to say that when we had admired its deep raspberry colour and condoned its thin rasp-berry-vinegar flavour we were in tolerable heart for the steeps that hung above the town. And we needed to be; we had been so prepared by two neighbours in the cafe for horrors of heat and height and pesky insects. They were a queer pair: she fat, faded, querulous and money-padded; he lean, mean, glittering, sharp as an adder —Greed and Hunger, each the prey and the plague of the other. THE NIEDERWALD MEMORIAL • Of course they had maligned this grand climb and the forest levels above. It is a stiff pull up, but mostly in the shade; and the Rhine, the hills, and the roofs of Assmannshausen revolved below us as the path turned the frame of shadowing boughs. Rolling back from the

i deep cleft of the river, the plain I carries a rich forest, beech and pine, the scents of which had survived the morning sun and were fresh in the shimmering' air of mid-day. Above Beilstein we had followed a path i which betrayed to us all the way o | the red wink of the wild strawi berries snugged down in the grass, this through the Niederwald was • edged by thicket after thickest of I wild raspberries in abundant fruit. So, rightly pleased to have got de--1 licious food for no more than the delicious trouble of foraging, we came out' into the clearing on the height just opposite Bingen. Here is a great beer-garden, for the refreshment of the hundreds who arrive every day to see the Niederwald Denkmal, the enormous national ( memorial which stands on the hillfront, a short way down, dominating a superb spread of country—past Rudesheim, on the river below, far upstream to the left; over Bingen, on the other side, far across rising green fields and woods to the shutting sky; to the right, far down the 1 river towards Assmannshausen again and on the other side to the bold hills beyond the Mouse Tower and Rheinstein. It is an imposing : monument colossal, . grandiose, pompous; but it is a mistake, I think, to see it from the platform at its foot. Like the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial at Coblenz, which tills the acute angle where the ■ Moselle joins the Rhine, it should I no doubt be seen from the river. !.From the “Deutsche Eck” the best thing to see was not the prodigious rider and horse, on top of their steps and pedestal, but the laden and hillcharmed Rhine; from the platform under the Niederwald the best thing to see was not the prodigious Germania and its figured base, but the serene panorama below, to the loveliness of which it could add nothing, even though it could take nothing away.