The tracks of history

I am unable to clamber aboard a train for a long journey without murmuring to myself W.H. Auden’s lyric poem, written for the 1936 documentary, “Night Mail.” The 24-minute classic film documents the nightly postal train operated by the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway between London and Scotland.

But the documentary is iconic and rightly compared to “Battleship Potemkin” by Sergei Eisenstein for the way it fuses humanistic realism with metaphorical imagery. And through clever film editing, it does, in fact, manage to build suspense for simple mechanical operations, such as mail sacks getting caught inside nets as the night train thunders along the tracks heading for Glasgow.

“All Scotland waits for her:

In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs

Men long for news.”

I’ve been news-gathering in Budapest and am writing this at Keleti railway station while waiting for a cross-border train to Bratislava. Alas, my train is not carrying mail.

And as we board, I notice tottering, bleary-eyed, backpacking youngsters from all across Europe hauling themselves along, trying to shake off the consequences of partying the night before in the Hungarian capital’s so-called ruin bars.

Sadly, there’s no steam either, and no evocative monochrome. But I am excited nonetheless. Traveling by train is my preferred means of transportation, and in Europe, there’s a history to stations and track, often poignant and always instructive.

The history of the continent is tied up with its trains. Historian A.J.P. Taylor brilliantly argued World War I became unavoidable thanks to railway timetables. He noted that the complicated military mobilization plans of the participants depended on railways.

He wrote, “All the mobilization plans had been timed to the minute, months or even years before and they could not be changed. Modification in one direction would ruin them in every other direction. Any attempt for instance by the Austrians to mobilize against Serbia would mean that they could not then mobilize against Russian because two lots of trains would be running against each other.”

The same problem confronted the Russians and the Germans. “Any alteration in the mobilization plan meant not a delay for 24 hours but for at least six months before the next lot of timetables were ready.” No country wanted to risk being defenseless if their adversaries mobilized.

Keleti railway station saw its fair share of Hungarian troops passing through on their way to war. Completed in 1892, it connected Budapest by rail to Transylvania and the northern Balkans. It speaks now of another age, helped no doubt by its state of shabby neglect.

In the bulbous main hall, high above the ground, there’s a fresco by Károly Lotz depicting the towering figure of Steam, the offspring of the deities Water and Fire.

In its day, this station was quite the thing, a testimony to the imperial glory of the Austro-Hungarians. The architects toured other European metropolitan railway stations to gather ideas. When Keleti was completed, people marveled at the electric lighting, then a novelty, provided by 70 arc lamps and 664 incandescent light bulbs.

Fifteen minutes or so out of Budapest and we are in the countryside.

Outside the small Hungarian town of Vác, a couple holds up their two toddlers to see the snaking train better. The kids point; I wave. We are paralleling the mighty Danube, river majesty on one side and on the other is the “back life” afforded by peering glancingly into gardens and kitchens to gain blurred snapshots of private lives.

The youngsters with their hangovers are quiet now, mouths open and sleeping off the previous night. As we clatter along, I’m wide awake, wondering what awaits me in Bratislava and seeing in my mind’s eye ghostly soldiers clambering on board trains for their gory rendezvous with history.

“In the farm she passes no one wakes,

But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.”

Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.