Astray in Europe
or: A Couple of Naïfs Take a Trip
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“It was not difficult to pretend that we could hear faint, thousand-year-old echoes of clashing weapons and screaming men and horses.” |
Seagull waiting impatiently for us to finish lunch on Dover Beach
Dover is a city of some 40,000 souls tucked into a notch carved by the river Dour into the famous white cliffs. One side of the notch is a nearly vertical, heavily vegetated bluff on top of which perches the magnificently picturesque castle. The city sprawls across the bottom of the notch and up a more gentle rise on the other side. A major highway runs just inland of the beachfront hotels and condos, filling the air with the roar and the stench of diesel engines. However, a pedestrian tunnel under the highway provides a safe crossing for vacationers. And because many of the streets are either closed to auto traffic or partially blocked off, walking in the city was generally convenient and pleasant.
After loading up on pounds sterling at an ATM, we followed a series of signs to the local tourist information office, which was near the old "gaol." This jail is a restored Victorian prison now housing a museum, so we made a note to visit it later (but never did). We entered the information office and waited for the travel advisor at the desk to finish explaining to a young British family how to catch the ferry to Calais. As we waited, we browsed through the brochure racks scattered about the room and found a map of the downtown area and a brochure about the Battle of Hastings site, which is ten or fifteen miles inland from Hastings in a little town called Battle.
After the British family had been properly booked up, we asked the travel advisor how best to get to Battle. Strangely, she said she didn't know. The best she could suggest was for us to catch a bus for a two- or three- hour ride to Hastings, and from there we would be able to find our way to Battle. She added that she had once visited Battle, and there really wasn't very much there to see. We were explaining that we had been told the trip to Hastings was only about an hour by rail from Dover when an older woman came out of a back room. To our relief, she contradicted her young colleague by confirming that the train to Hastings was the best way to go, and that it was indeed only about an hour's trip.
From there, she said, we could take a bus to Battle, and this would be about another hour's journey. She was a bit more encouraging about the trip than her partner, but not much. We suspected that she wanted us to ignore the Battle of Hastings altogether and stay in Dover to see the castle and something called "the Wartime Secret Tunnels." She seemed to have difficulty accepting that any American would be more interested in a 1066 skirmish when the most important battle of WW II beckoned just a stone's throw away. But we resisted the temptation, and when the first woman asked if we wanted to buy a phone card to use for calling home, we declined politely and asked for directions to the train station.
Dover Priory Station was as archetypically British in appearance as its name suggested. It was an inconspicuous little 1930's structure at the end of a secluded lane that branched off a major thoroughfare half-way up the hillside opposite the castle. It was a long, narrow brick structure with a massive slate roof, a parking lot on the street side, and the railroad tracks on the opposite side. There were only two ticket windows, but we didn't have to wait because at that time of day, only a handful of travelers were waiting for the next train as the ticket agents chatted idly behind their barred windows. They told us there was a train to Hastings every hour, so we bought round-trips, planning to leave early the next day. With our tickets in hand, we still had the better part of the afternoon ahead of us, so we decided to have a look at the castle. If we couldn't see all we wanted that afternoon, we could spend more time there after our tour to Battle.
We walked back down the hill and through the business district following a series of signs to Castle Hill Road, which climbs precipitously up the side of the bluff. We were the only pedestrians, and it was easy to see why. Although at first the sidewalk bordered the street, after the first switchback, it curved away from the road and ascended at an even steeper angle. Not willing to admit we were too old and out of shape for this climb (the vertical lift seemed a lot more than the supposed 300 feet of the cliffs), we persisted. We climbed ever upward under dense foliage along the face of the bluff listening to the hum of insects, an occasional birdsong, and the muffled sounds of automobiles gliding effortlessly on the road below us. Just as we started telling each other that we must surely be near the top (now too far committed to even think of turning back), we came to a flight of sixty or seventy concrete steps extending upward at an even steeper angle. Craning our necks, we saw that they seemed to extend to a patch of blue sky visible through a hole in the overhanging foliage.
We rested briefly, then shook the kinks out of our legs and made a last desperate effort that brought us out just a few yards from the automobile entrance to the castle grounds. We asked the man in the booth if he had tickets for a couple of foolish folks who had walked up. He politely twitched a small muscle at the corner of his mouth to signify a smile (obviously, ours was not the first limp attempt at jocularity he had heard from walkers) and advised us to take the guided tour of "the Wartime Secret Tunnels" before doing anything else because the last tour of the day would soon be starting.
We finished our climb to the Canon's Gateway entrance where we found a small terrace that overlooked the port of Dover from atop the white cliffs.
We have reached the lower portion of Dover Castle
Signs there directed us into a long, fairly steep down-sloping tunnel to another terrace where more signs guided us into yet another tunnel and finally, the reception desk for the tours. We checked in, received plastic tags with the number "17" on them, and took seats on a bench where about a dozen other tourists were waiting. After a while, a lanky, sandy-haired young man with a long, narrow face, perhaps a history student working for the summer, came along and in the deferential, modest style of some Brits indirectly suggested that perhaps he was the guide for our tour.
After confirming that we were all "Number Seventeens," he explained the safety rules, which he said were important because it was easy to get lost in the labyrinthine tunnels. They boiled down to "stick with me." He then showed a film that explained that the first tunneling at this location started in the middle ages to provide hideouts for soldiers waiting to fight off cross-channel invaders. Toward the end of the 18th century, the tunnels were expanded to house troops defending the coast from a threatened invasion by Napoleon. During WW I, they were again expanded, and at the beginning of WWII yet again. The WWII project was top secret, hence the designation, "Wartime Secret Tunnels." Though intended to serve as the nation’s emergency central military headquarters, the tunnels actually served two lesser, but nevertheless extremely important functions in WWII. First, the evacuation of Dunkirk was organized and directed from this location, and second, it was from here that the aerial Battle of Britain was directed.
The Dunkirk evacuation took place in May 1940. Some 340,000 British and French troops had been pushed literally to the water’s edge at the French city of Dunkirk, not far from Calais. The Brits rescued them by improvising an operation that called into service every vessel on the English side of the channel that would float, from destroyers and merchant ships right down to thirty-foot fishing smacks and pleasure craft.
The start of the Battle of Britain was signified the following June 18, when Winston Churchill said in one of his famous inspirational speeches, "the Battle of France is over, the Battle of Britain has just begun." During the summer of 1940, Goering's Luftwaffe came to within a hair's breadth of destroying England's air defenses and paving the way for a cross-channel invasion. The defense was directed from the tunnels as a handful of Spitfire fighter planes fought off the attacking German bombers. Had England lost that air battle, the defense against invading German ground troops also would have been directed from there. As it was, the tunnels remained a secret throughout the war and were used primarily to maintain the security of the channel, supporting the rescue of allied fliers downed in the channel, and directing the fire of huge artillery pieces into Calais and vicinity.
In the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the tunnels were expanded again and prepared for use as an emergency government center in case of nuclear war. Our guide said all of this was top secret at that time, and some of the information about the tunnels is still secret today. Later, a Dover taxi driver told us he had worked in the tunnels in the sixties and agreed that the work was officially hush-hush. He also said that everyone in Dover knew what was going on.
The first part of the tour took us through the WW II hospital facilities, now a museum. The guide was very proud of the fact that a complete surgical hospital had been set up in the tunnels. These rooms, carved out of the living rock, were long and narrow with low ceilings, dingy white-washed walls, and bare concrete floors. Though neat and clean, their aspect was shabby and soulless, like those monumental Sherman tanks one used to see abandoned in the town squares of sleepy Midwestern villages. Our guide said wounded soldiers from Dunkirk, and later a few pilots shot down during the Battle of Britain, were treated there. But he admitted that for the most part the hospital had served as a clinic treating routine morning sick-call complaints.
He asked us to try to imagine what those uninhabited, spiritually sterile caves must have been like during the war. As we walked through the rooms glancing desultorily into glass-faced wooden cabinets containing cruel shiny surgical instruments and looking without revulsion at an operating room with sheets on the table sporting fake blood stains, we listened to a recording supposedly of the voices of doctors and nurses caring for a wounded Spitfire pilot who had been fished out of the channel. He arrives in a flurry of urgent commands and anxious responses. Then in crisp but calm ER voices the doctors decide to make a heroic effort to save his mangled leg. Finally, cheery nurses tend to him in one of the wards.
Then, after a quick look at the kitchen, mess hall, latrine, barracks rooms, etc., we were taken down a level to the operations center, a large, high room with a huge wooden map table in the center and a spacious gallery with two-by-four railing on all four sides. This was the room so often recreated in the movies where slim young women in well-tailored uniforms move numbered blocks about on the table as steely-eyed RAF officers watch from the gallery and mutter grimly about launching their last limping Spitfire against masses of German bombers. The walls were white-washed, and everything else that was not moveable, including the map table, was painted the color of putty. Clunky WWII military radios and telephones were in place, as were other furniture and equipment of the period. Our guide pointed to the very spot where Winston Churchill stood to personally command an artillery barrage during one of his junkets.
The tour was very interesting, and most of the people in our group seemed eager to hear what the guide had to say. However, there was one young English woman in her late teens or early twenties who must have irritated the guide by acting totally, you know, bored with the whole thing, and whispering into the ear of the older woman (her mother?) who accompanied her. They stayed mostly at the back of the group, so Minnie and I had hardly noticed their rudeness until finally, the guide broke off his spiel to give her a pretty good chewing out. Her lack of interest was not only bad in itself, he said, but also created a bad impression on foreigners in the group. That was the only time in our lives that we have seen a guide at a public monument or historic site display anything but good natured patience with even the rudest people. But it worked. The young woman took the scolding like a school girl, and neither she nor her mother uttered a peep for the rest of the tour.
After the tunnels, we walked on up to the castle itself. There was much more to see than either our time or our stamina would allow. Of course, there were shops and restaurants, both a bit too pricey for our taste, or at least for our pocket book. But the landscaping, and the vistas of the harbor were delightful and could be enjoyed at no additional charge. In the castle’s inner courtyard a handful of weary tourists were sitting on the base of a full-size reconstruction of a medieval catapult. This was quite a different machine from those we had seen in the moat of the castle at Caen. Though bulky and ominously robust, those now seemed small compared with this monster with its thirty-foot throwing arm towering above us in the vertical, or "at rest" position.
It looked authentic and operable, but it wasn’t going to be demonstrated that day, so we went on into the central building of the castle, the sixty-foot stone structure called King Henry’s Keep. Henry II (reigned 1154-1189) built it, and for a while kept his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine imprisoned there. Although built a century after the Conquest, and therefore a late specimen of the flurry of Norman construction kicked off by William I, it is typical of the Norman style: a grey stone rectangle with high walls punctured here and there by small windows, and trimmed at the corners with blocks of lighter, more finished limestone.
Inside, it was a tangle of small rooms, large rooms, stairways, nooks, and crannies. According to the brochure, the décor was supposed to have been restored to the Henry II period, and a large room on the top floor was set up as it would have been on a day when the palace household was about to make one of its frequent moves. Hidden loudspeakers piped the sounds of the people of the court going about the business of packing up for the move. By modern standards the furnishings were extremely skimpy. In the throne room, only the king had a place to sit. No tables, no chairs, no tapestries or other decoration on the walls, no rugs on the plank floors. Wooden chests and canvas bags were scattered around the edge of the room. The throne, a modest chair on a low tapestry-covered platform with a tiny canopy over it, had a trivial look about it.
Royal luxury circa 1150
Through a door and around a corner was the king’s bedroom. It was a tiny, dark place with no ventilation and no fireplace. An ornate four-poster bed with heavy scarlet silk curtains nearly filled the room. A tapestry on the wall at the head of the bed was barely perceptible in the dark, and we didn’t even notice it till later when we looked at the flash photo I took. Otherwise, the walls here, as throughout, were bare whitewashed stone.
By this time we were quite tired, and Minnie's foot was starting to hurt, so we decided to head back to the hotel. Part way down Castle Hill Road we came upon another set of stairs that we hadn’t noticed on the way up, and since they looked like they would provide a shortcut in the direction of the beach area, we descended them and came out in a narrow alley that looked like a private walkway between plain and very ordinary stone and stucco buildings on one side and a high unkempt hedge on the other. Hoping that we wouldn’t end up in someone’s back yard, we continued downward rather than climb back up, and gratefully came out in one of the main drags, Maison Dieu Road, which brought us back to the Churchill.
We hoped this street would not lead us into someone's backyard
On Wednesday, July 17, we were up early and ready for the trip to Battle. After breakfast in the hotel restaurant, we walked in pleasant sunshine to Priory Station and caught an earlier train to Hastings than we had planned. The cars were the old style with the seats arranged alternately face-to-face and back-to-back with a door at each set of facing seats. This made entering and exiting the cars much quicker than in the newer cars where passengers must shoulder past each other to the end of the car when coming aboard and when exiting. The train stopped at every town, but we arrived in Hastings in a little over an hour. There, we quickly discovered by looking at the schedule board posted in the waiting room that there was a train every twenty minutes or so and the "journey," as the Brits would say, would take only about fifteen minutes. We bought round trips, and in a few minutes boarded the train. It was in the same style, but more ancient than the one to Hastings and nearly empty. It rolled and swayed without incident through a green English countryside whose pastures, fields, patches of woods, and occasional farmsteads reminded us a great deal of the rolling country in Tuscarawas County. Every now and then, seemingly in the middle of a sheep pasture, there would be a little trackside shelter like a countrified version of a big city bus stop. Once, on the way back, the train actually stopped at one of these to allow a couple of passengers to get off.
The Battle train station is in a little valley at the edge of town. A street named Station Road, with no sidewalks and lined with shabby industrial buildings and weedy lots, inclines up a slight grade to a busy street lined on both sides with well-kept residences and small shops. This was Lower Lake Street which we followed till it changed its name to Upper Lake Street. A little further and we were walking next to a twenty-foot high stone wall that ended near a three-story, stone structure with a crenelated roof line and a sign at its door identifying it as the "Old Gatehouse." This was the entrance to Battle Abbey.
We paid admission and picked up our autoguides, hand-held listening gadgets similar to the ones at Bayeux (except both of these worked). The first stop was a small museum with displays consisting mainly of posters and life-size cardboard cutouts of mean looking men in chain-mail suits and bullet-shaped helmets with "nasals" (the nose-guard that gave the average 11th-century Norman GI that characteristic cross-eyed look).
Norman troopers
This display was aimed at school children and provided basic information such as the date of the battle (October 14, 1066), the participating forces (the Saxons under King Harold vs the Normans under William the Bastard) (the epithet wasn’t quite as pejorative then as it is now), the cause of the battle (a failure of communication as to whether Harold or William should be the next king of the Saxons after the passing of the monkish and childless Edward the Confessor), and the consequences (after a couple of bloody decades of Saxon resistance to them, the invaders became English and Normandy became an English province).
After the museum, we paused at a small roofed area sheltering a TV set for a jigger of TV docu-history, then moved impatiently along a paved walkway that circled the battleground. We were first impressed by how remarkably small and mundane the area was, considering that the event that took place here completely changed the course of European history. It took us about an hour to walk around the moderately sloping, grassy area which, by our estimate covered less than fifty acres.
It looked like an unkempt hay field recently mowed but not raked. It was surrounded by trees and more grassy fields on three sides, and at the top of the slope on the fourth side, stood the rough stone walls and rugged towers of the partially restored abbey. The energetic bustle of the modern world in the streets just outside the walls barely reached us, and we encountered only a handful of other tourists. In a word, it was not difficult to pretend that we could hear faint, thousand-year-old echoes of clashing weapons and screaming men and horses.
Site of the Battle of Hastings
What we actually heard was the mellow voice of a BBC type reciting the story of the battle and monologs by actors portraying three of the participants: a Norman knight named Henri d’Evreux, a Saxon thane named Aelfric, and Edith Swan-Neck, the wife of King Harold. We stopped at each of half a dozen "battlefield interpretive panels" posted along the way to read the information, examine the diagrams, and listen to our "talkers," as we called them. It was all quite well done and very informative.
The battle took place at the top of the low ridge, then known as Senlac Ridge, where the abbey now stands. The Saxons fought on foot primarily with spears and battle axes. Most of them were peasant farmers (thanes) who had been drafted from throughout the region. Their personal armor was of the skimpiest, and most of their axes and spears were actually tools for chopping wood and pitching hay. There were no archers in Harold’s army because the people of the island had not yet learned how to use the long-bow as a military weapon. The only professional soldiers among them were a portion of Harold’s household guard, the remnants of an army that had defeated a Viking incursion near York only a few days before. Not even pausing to celebrate a victory that was in itself a remarkable feat, they had marched some two-hundred miles to this site to try to block the Normans from reaching London.
William’s army had landed unopposed near Hastings at about the same time the Vikings had hit York. He had taken time to establish a defensible "beachhead," then pressed inland toward London. His army consisted of masses of well-trained and equipped professional infantry, archers, and the Sherman tanks of the day, heavily armed cavalry. Their favorite tactic was to soften enemy defensive positions with infantry attacks supported by archers, then break through the defensive line with heavy cavalry charges.
The lead elements of the Norman column set out early in the morning of October 14. The march to Senlac Ridge was short, less than ten miles, historians say. Harold’s few professionals set up their defensive position by forming a wall with their shields. The rest of his troops were packed tightly behind them, perhaps as many as ten men deep. The Norman arrows were ineffective against the shield wall, and because the Saxons had no archers to fire back, William’s archers soon exhausted their supply. When the Norman infantry finally reached the shield wall after charging up hill, they were no match for the axe-wielding Saxons. William’s cavalry also was repelled as the Saxon axe-men would step between the shields and maul man and horse alike with force enough to slash through their chain-mail.
Time after time as the day wore on and the sun dipped toward the horizon, the Normans charged; the Saxons fought them off; and the Normans regrouped and charged again. The longer the Saxons held out, the better their chances for victory because for the Normans a retreat after dark through rough, forested terrain that was alien to them but home to their enemy was out of the question. If the Saxon shield wall held till nightfall, William had lost. But he was a wily and experienced tactician, and with his fate hanging in the balance, he played one of the favorite tactical cards of the middle ages. He ordered a troop of foot-soldiers to attack the Saxon right flank, then fall back as though routed and in a panic. The opposing Saxons, who to this point had maintained their positions in an uncharacteristically disciplined manner, were fooled. Their leaders were unable to keep them from breaking ranks to chase after the retreating Normans (or possibly Bretons or Flemish since these nationalities composed a large part of the "Norman" army). Then William unleashed a troop of cavalry that had been rested and prepared for this maneuver. The horsemen charged through the scattered Saxons and into the exposed flank of the shield wall, rolling it up and routing the Saxons who scurried into the woods where most of them were hunted down and killed.
Harold’s body was found on the battle field and, though mutilated, was identified by Edith Swan-Neck. The Bayeux Tapestry indicates that he was struck in the eye by an arrow and that his house-guard fought to the last man over his body. William had him buried with honors worthy of a king, and shortly thereafter built the abbey. Battle Abbey marks the place where Harold fell and is a monument of gratitude to God, who of course was pleased by William’s bloody victory.
On rounding the battlefield we arrived at the spot where Harold’s shield wall stood and the ruins of the abbey. The roof is gone because later God must have changed His mind and directed the good folks of a more enlightened age to destroy the monument. But the bare stone walls and solid floors remain standing as monuments to something more durable and more valuable than fickle doctrine: the craftsmanship of medieval carpenters and stonemasons. The colossal columns and round arches of one of the lower rooms still support a ceiling some thirty feet high. This must have been a precursor of structures five times as high that would be built all over France, Germany and England in the next three hundred years.
Man's understanding of God's will changes with the times, but a well-laid pile of stone is forever.
We concluded our tour by strolling through and around the spacious, secluded, and nearly deserted cloister. Unfortunately, we missed the stone that is supposed to mark the very spot where Harold fell, but we did find some mossy steps leading to the top of the high wall that separates the grounds from Upper Lake Street. We walked on it in the shade of the dense foliage of overhanging trees, one foot, so to speak, in eleventh-century history, the other in twenty-first century mercantilism.
On our left, medieval barbarity, on our right, 21st century commerce
From there, it was a quick turn through the souvenir shop in the Old Gatehouse where we deposited our talkers, and then after a cursory survey of some of the souvenir shops in the square, we realized we were hungry.
After passing up two or three places that didn’t quite suit us, we settled on a pub called The 1066. It was a pleasant, nearly empty place, with dining in a garden in a back courtyard where tables were set up among flower beds in the mottled shade of large trees and covered by umbrellas for further protection from the very pleasant warmth of the sun. We had chosen the wrong time, though, as all the outside tables were taken. The best we could do was a place near the door where we could look out. We picked up a menu from a table near the bar as directed by a sign on the wall, and Minnie decided to have a "burger" which came with fries and garnish. I went for a "jacket potato" with cheese and beans. I ordered the food and wine for both of us at the bar as we were becoming accustomed to doing.
Minnie's "burger" turned out to be mostly soy, but my baked potato with cheese and bean topping was quite good, and with the wine we made a good lunch of it. After lunch we walked around the square for some more indolent shopping in the souvenir shops, then back along the lake streets to the station. We had to wait twenty minutes or so on the platform on the opposite side of the tracks from the station itself. Access was by a small pedestrian bridge over the tracks, and there was a shelter like a bus stop shelter built into a niche cut out of a steep embankment. It was a shady, quiet place with a slight, unpleasant odor whose source we didn’t want to know about, and littered here and there with empty plastic bottles and other trash. The only other waiting passenger was a young heavyset girl reading a newspaper who never looked up till the train arrived.
The trip to Hastings was without incident, but I had a bit of an adventure as we boarded the train to Dover. We had noted on the older trains that the doors, with one at every set of seats as noted above, did not close automatically and that everyone was careful to slam them shut when they entered or exited. So as we boarded, I tried to follow this example, but the doors were not equipped with large, easily graspable handles. There was only a tiny niche big enough for the tips of one or two fingers. Feeling that I didn’t have a very good grip on the rather heavy cast-iron door, I tried for a better one by grabbing at the edge as one would, say, take a hold of a book, then withdrawing my hand at the last instant as the door slammed shut.
Train doors like these are probably banged shut a million times a day all over England without incident, clearly my way of doing it was the wrong way. I let go just a split second too late, and one of my fingers almost got caught. I think most people at some time in their life, usually when they’re very young, have had a finger caught in an automobile door. I know I’ve done it at least a couple of times, and not only when I was too young to know better. This was kind of like that. Fortunately, it was only a grazing blow, so my finger wasn’t crushed to a pulp, but I did get a deep, three-quarter-inch gash. Naturally I yelped, but I didn't realize I was cut and tried to shake off the pain till Minnie told me I was splattering blood all about. I guess I didn’t get any on anyone else, though. At least no one complained.
Minnie had tissues, hand wipes, and band-aids in her bag, so we were able quickly to staunch the blood, clean the wound, and bandage it. But not before some blood had dripped onto the floor. The car was full of French teenagers, four of whom were in the seats across the aisle from us. Minnie later said the girl opposite me looked like she was going to faint when she saw the blood, but none of them said a word or even so much as looked directly at me. In fact, none of the other passengers around us showed the least sign of having noticed a thing. A tall slender blonde woman, thirtyish, had the window seat next to me, and she didn't move an eyelash or utter a sound.
The rest of the journey to Dover was without incident, and as we walked back to the Churchill from Dover Priory Station, we stopped at a pharmacy to buy some first-aid cream and more band-aids. For dinner we had only some soup and wine in the hotel bar, after which we sat on our balcony watching the ferries and a guy in a wet-suit giving windsurfing lessons to a very inept pupil.