CHAPTER VIITHE BERGISCHE LAND
Oneof the real advantages of life in Cologne is the charm of the surrounding neighbourhood. Not that the neighbourhood to which I refer is near at hand or very accessible except by train or by motor car. Cologne lies in the centre of a great fertile plain, through which the Rhine flows nobly in that last stage of its career before entering the mud flats of Holland. At a distance varying from ten to fifteen miles the plain east and west is bounded by a chain of low hills broken up, especially on the eastern side, by delicious valleys. Here are woods and trout streams, meadows and flowers. No district with which I am acquainted is more adapted to walks, delightful without being arduous, or to longer expeditions by motor. These low hills commanding the plain abound in views of extraordinary vastness and extent. The hills are so easily climbed! Yet from their summits the wanderer has the impression that the kingdoms of the earth lie spread at his feet. For very little real exertion, therefore, he has the impression of having mastered some Alpine peak—an observation for which I hope I may be pardoned by any member of the Alpine Club.
From the eastern ridge, known as the Bergische Land, the sunset view is one of special beauty. The cultivated slopes and pasture lands fall away gently to the plain below, in spring fresh with the vivid green of young grassor corn, in autumn rich with harvest gold. In the distance, chimneys stretching north and south reveal the course of the Rhine, whose waters are hidden from view. Far away to the left is the outline of the Siebengebirge mounting guard over Bonn and the entrance to the romantic reach of the stream known as the Rheingau. Above the chimneys and the remote huddle of houses and factories, the twin spires of Cologne Cathedral, their clumsiness softened by distance, raise their symbol of man’s hope and aspiration to heaven.
The low range lying on the west side of Cologne known as the Vorgebirge is less attractive than the Bergische Land to the east. Industry preponderates on this side, for the Vorgebirge is of special importance owing to the famous black coal extracted from the hills. Here is dug, without any apparatus of shafts or sinking, a special brown deposit which, pressed and pounded, turns into the briquettes on which Cologne relies for its light and heat. The presence in the near neighbourhood of this ample supply of cheap fuel has been a factor of the utmost importance in the commercial development of Cologne. We of the Occupation have learnt to bless the black briquettes, which feed the central heating in winter and give us abundant electric light throughout the year.
How well these people manage their industrialism! That is a reflection borne in upon me time and again in the Rhineland. Prussianism, however bad for the soul, was very efficient in the organisation of daily life. Wages in Germany before the war were not high; the liberty and rights of the worker were restricted in many directions. On the other hand, no country in the world could approach Germany in the excellence of its municipalorganisation and the many advantages of the population as regards public services. German authorities excelled in arrangements concerned with health, communication, and amusement. Town planning and building operations were controlled; cities were laid out and houses built on lines destined to promote the welfare of the whole community. The speculative builder was not allowed to wax fat at the expense of his neighbours. Electric light is supplied even in small villages, and an admirable service of trams and light railways brings the amenities of life within reach of the poorest.
Amusements are dealt with in a rational spirit, which makes for happiness and self-respect. Cafés, beer gardens with concert rooms attached, are decent places, where a man does not drink furtively but takes his glass of wine or beer in the company of his family. Not only have large towns a first-rate opera house and theatre, but good music and good drama can be heard in quite small places. Industry in particular has been brought to heel. Factory chimneys are not allowed to pollute a district at will or to poison the air with noxious fumes. A modern school of painters has taught us to see qualities of strength and even beauty in certain aspects of industry. But those qualities cannot be obvious to the working-class wife who has to struggle with the intolerable grime and dirt produced. The strength of a nation is rooted in the homes of a nation, and there are many districts in England where no man can be proud of his home. Men and women whose lot in life is cast in the Black Country, or who are forced to dwell in the long, mean street of dirty houses which extends from Nottingham to Leeds, might wellenvy the better conditions of existence which obtain in Germany.
I have never seen any information as to the stages of the Industrial Revolution in Germany. Naturally it came at a later date than our own and was able to benefit by our mistakes. But to what influence does it owe a character so different? Here in the lower Rhineland there are big industrial towns and great factories. These places are not beautiful, but they lack the overpowering dirt and ugliness of the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. All along the lower Rhine one factory succeeds another, but they consume their own smoke and fumes and are not allowed to tyrannise over the district. Düsseldorf even more than Cologne is a great manufacturing centre, and among other industries has large machine and puddling works in its suburbs. But the public gardens of the town, which are of great extent and beauty, might be a hundred miles removed from a factory. Leverkusen, the great dyeworks near Cologne, has the appearance of a model village. It is all to the credit of Germany that she has not allowed herself to be obsessed by that spirit of helpless fatalism which has descended on too many of the manufacturing districts and towns in England. Men and women’s lives are spent amid this grime, to the detriment of soul as well as body. It is a valuable object lesson to learn that, granted energy and a will to be clean, some of the drawbacks of an ugly industrialism can be avoided for the workers.
Lancashire and Yorkshire have one feature in common with the German industrial centres on the lower Rhine. Both have their own beautiful hinterland. The German hinterland in question has nothing so grand and so austereto show as the great heather-clad moors and rugged dales of Yorkshire and Derbyshire. But withal the rural districts of this smiling Bergische Land, with its wooded valleys and running streams and black and white houses buried deep among orchards, lie, so it seems, within a stone’s throw of factories and workshops. Full of charm are these little valleys, divided one from another by narrow watersheds. All of a family, yet each possesses its own features and has the impress of its own personality. A trout stream almost invariably meanders along the valley, sometimes finding its way through meadows of long lush grass, Alpine in its greenness, sometimes flowing among overhanging woods where the murmur of the waters mingles with the rustling of the leaves or the deeper, more melancholy note of the fir boughs. It is a smiling, almost park-like land, richly cultivated and well populated. There are no wild or desert places. Everything perhaps is a trifle sophisticated. Many of the black and white cottages, gabled and romantic, might have stepped off the light-comedy stage. Here and there the moated tower of some ruined Burg or an eighteenth-century country house set back in a walled garden strikes the same note. This is not Nature in her strength and power, but Nature laughing, gay, forthcoming, a sylvan goddess of woods and streams and meadows. “Intime” is the word which best expresses her charm. Last, but not least, Nature in the Bergische Land is a goddess of the fruits of the earth.
Spring is a season of wonder and beauty in the Rhineland. The villages disappear in a cloud of pink and white blossom. White and pink too are the country roads lined with fruit trees. Beech trees abound; and hasNature in her great spectacle of the changing year any sight more beautiful than the first shy unfolding of the young beech leaves? A little later come the chestnuts, stately and self-important, carrying their white candles on broad green candlesticks and lighting up the countryside with so brave an illumination. Then follows the deep-red blossom of the thorn, mingled with the purple and yellow of lilac and laburnum. Under foot the emerald green of the meadows is flecked yellow with cowslips. Yellow too are the great fields of mustard, which in turn yield place to carmine stretches of clover. It is a riot of colour and beauty throughout the Bergische Land. The high midsummer pomps find the cottage gardens a mass of roses and other homely flowers. Finally the white promise of spring gives way to the golden fulfilment of autumn. The orchards bend low under the weight of pear and apple and plum. And winter is no harsh thing in the valleys, where the delicate tracery of the leafless woods, detached against a frosty sky, has a charm as great as the young foliage of spring.
Though so little removed from the neighbourhood of industry, there is practically neither grime nor contamination about the Bergische Land. The German housewife, as I have said, is happily spared that hand-to-hand struggle with dirt which embitters existence for many an English working woman. The decentralisation of industry is much practised in Germany, and frequently isolated factories will be found in country surroundings which give employment to the immediate neighbourhood. It is perhaps for this reason that the game is not a hopeless one, that the extraordinary cleanliness of the German village is due. It is quite an experience to walk or motorthrough the villages on a Saturday evening when cleaning operations are in full swing. The whole population is out in the street tidying up. The oldest and the youngest inhabitant alike are hard at work with buckets and besoms. I am now able to appreciate why the Besom Binder always figures so largely in German fairy tales. As soon as a child can stagger it is provided with a besom three times the size of itself and turned out to sweep. Tiny children flourishing brooms will remain one of my permanent impressions of Germany.
Not only the doorstep of each individual house and the strip of pavement in front of the door, but the street itself is cleaned up thoroughly on Saturday night. There are rinsings and scrubbings and washings and sweepings. The midden is tidied and made as neat and trim as a haystack. The woodstack is similarly squared, the blocks piled with mathematical exactness one on the top of the other. From the street itself every vestige of dirt and dust is removed. You are almost afraid to breathe lest anything should be disturbed. As for a motor car, its intrusion on the scene is little short of a sacrilege. Until dusk and after, the Saturday cleaning lasts. Then on Sunday the village in its best clothes sits about at ease on doorsteps and contemplates the fruits of its labours.
Sunday in this Catholic land is a true feast day. It is impossible not to admire the simple, wholesome way in which the people, town and country alike, take their pleasures. Churches are crowded in the morning, and it is clear that the Catholic hierarchy keeps in very close touch with its flock. But religious festivals, which are frequent, have a pleasant social aspect and the population from oldest to youngest clearly enjoy them. Sometimes in thevalleys of the Bergische Land you may meet a long procession going on pilgrimage to a neighbouring shrine. The sound of chanting and music is borne on the wind as the company wind up the hillside. It is like a scene in a play as you watch the distant view of banners and crucifixes and white-robed acolytes. Especially attractive are the children’s processions held on White Sunday—the Sunday following Easter—when the ceremony of first communion takes place. No steps are omitted to make the occasion impressive. Every little child in Cologne down to the poorest wears a white frock and a wreath of white roses. They come with their parents in large numbers during the morning to say a prayer in the cathedral—tiny children, so they seem, to be struggling with the great mysteries of faith. We passed a small hillside church in the Bergische Land on the afternoon of White Sunday at the moment when a procession of children was coming out. It was a pretty sight: the fair heads crowned with flowers and every child carrying a gold-and-white lily in its hand; fond and anxious parents shepherding their lambs, and provided with cloaks and umbrellas in the event of rain.
These simple ceremonies give warmth and character to the countryside, but quite apart from religious exercises of the nature I have described, the whole of Cologne pours into the Bergische Land in the course of a fine Sunday afternoon. Various light railways issue from the city and, running across the plain, penetrate the valleys at various points. From the Dom Platz at Cologne you may, if fired by the spirit of adventure, take your choice of three trams to the Bergische Land. One will carry you in some forty minutes to the Königsförst,formerly a royal forest at the foot of the hills; another in fifty minutes to Bensberg, a charming old town crowned by an eighteenth-century castle in the Palladian style. The castle with its domes has dignity and character; it is now used as a barracks for French coloured troops. From the tiny acropolis to which the city clings—in spring half smothered by the white and pink of its cherry and plum and apple orchards—is the finest of all the views over the plain. Or you may journey for an hour northwards along the Rhine, passing through Mülheim—a widely scattered district of factories—till you come to the pleasant little town of Berg Gladbach. Here through a third gateway you may enter the wooded hills and valleys stretching to the east.
Only there will be certain disadvantages if you conduct these explorations on the Sabbath, for the Boche in his best clothes is of the same mind, and the trams are crowded to a point of suffocation hard to endure on a hot summer’s day. But all the same the experience of a Sunday excursion is by no means to be missed, for then you see the life of the people as it is. What light-hearted, cheerful crowds they are! Families, father, mother, and children, out for the day together, troops of young people with knapsacks and mandolines tramping for miles through the woods, singing as they march, and as often as not waving their hands and calling out “Good day” in English.
The group instinct of the German is very noticeable in his holiday-making. Picnic parties abound, clatches of children in the care of nuns and priests; more prosperous families out for the day in wonderful chars-à-bancs and wagonettes which are covered with greenboughs and wreaths of flowers. In summer it is a point of honour for picnic parties to decorate their carriages in this way. I have often seen horses drawn up by the roadside in the neighbourhood of the Königsförst or Bensberg while the occupants were employed in cutting down branches and converting the conveyance into a green bower.
Village feasts are common, and great is the excitement when a Kermess is held. The village is decorated from end to end, and the principal street is lined with booths and stalls. Merry-go-rounds, swing-boats, shooting-galleries cater for the amusement of the spectators, while dancing goes on in the inns and cafés. May-day festivities are a feature of the countryside, and the village belle may find her house decorated on May morning with a may-bush hung on a tall pole by an admiring suitor. If there is competition between suitors, more than one bush may be hung on the house, and the various lovers under such circumstances endeavour each to carry his bush into the air at a higher point than that of his rival or rivals. One fair lady this last year, so the story runs, found her may-bush decorated with a miniature figure in khaki hanging head downwards. Intimacy with British soldiers was frowned upon in the locality, and the village applauded the reproof thus administered to an erring beauty who had fraternised with the enemy.
One-horse cabs of archaic design survive in the more remote villages, and on Sunday afternoons the elderly local plutocrats may be seen solemnly taking the air in a conveyance of this character. The aged horse does his work in leisurely fashion, and if the rate of progression is slow, the dignity of the passengers loses nothing by the fact. No village is really remote, owing to the networkof light railways spread about the country. Yet despite the proximity of Cologne and the constant influx from the industrial districts on the Rhine, the village people appear to retain their simple habits and rustic outlook on life. They work hard, but they also enjoy life thoroughly in a simple way. It is this high standard of simple enjoyment among town and country people alike with which any traveller must be struck in the Rhineland, a better state of affairs surely than the enforced gloom of many an English village, where feasts and dancing would be regarded as a desecration of the Sabbath, and men are forced to drink and loaf for lack of something better to do. German education is open to grave indictment as regards the spirit and temper it has bred, but withal the Germans are an educated people, and an educated people knows how to employ its leisure.
The longer you live in the Occupied Area, the more sphinx-like the riddle it presents—the riddle of reconciling the behaviour of these decent, self-respecting people among whom you find yourself with the actions of that collective entity, Germany, who figures as the outcast of Europe. “It’s all put on,” some people say. But this theory of sustained hypocrisy becomes ridiculous over a period of many months, especially when you have mixed unknown in the crowd and seen the Germans at work and play among themselves. Some other explanation must be found for a psychology so bewildering. Love of God’s out-of-doors is always a redeeming element in every human being, and it is an element which can in no sense be denied to our late enemies. The town folk enjoy the beauties of the country in a quiet, self-respecting way with a minimum of rowdiness. It is not a question justof hanging about cafés and beerhouses. These places on a fine day are crowded, but they are crowded with parties whose dusty boots and draggled clothes show they have been far afield. The children carry bunches of flowers or green boughs. Sometimes a tired little one rides on a father’s shoulder. Knapsacks are produced, from which a meal sadly frugal in quality and quantity emerges. Coffee or beer is ordered, and the party sit down to eat and take a rest.
As at every other point in German life, children play a great part in these excursions. Hard though the times, parents pinch and save to see the children are well and neatly dressed. A white frock in summer for the girls—a bit of fur round the collar of the coat in Winter for the boys—these things are a point of honour. But boots have become a terrible problem to most working-class homes, as many a peasant has told us. It is certainly not easy to associate ideas of hunger and defeat with these respectable Sunday pleasure-seekers. But as I have said before, superficial impressions must be discounted in Germany, and there are always the thin legs and pasty faces of the children to pull you up short if you try to thrust aside ugly memories of reports and statistics and official inquiries.
Often as I have sat among the Sunday crowds in the little hill towns have I reflected on the worldly wisdom of Machiavelli, who, like Bismarck, if bad was long-headed. Machiavelli took the view that you must either destroy your enemy or so behave that you may turn him into a good neighbour. One thing is very clear: Germany will never be destroyed. What steps, if any, are we taking to turn her into a good neighbour?