Storming the Eagle's Nest (37 page)
Read Storming the Eagle's Nest Online
Authors: Jim Ring
By 1957 Europe – the Eastern Bloc excepted – and the Alps had once more achieved what the Germans called Bergfried, the peace of the mountains. ‘Therefore I say to you,’ Churchill had concluded in Zurich in 1946: ‘let Europe arise!’ Europe had arisen from the ashes of the eagle that smouldered in the Berlin and Berchtesgaden of May 1945. The Alps were once again, in Mark Twain’s words, ‘the visible throne of God’. It had taken twenty years, the Holocaust and forty million lives.
Creating any book is a voyage of discovery enlivened by unexpected landfalls, uncharted reefs, the calms of the Sargasso Sea, the storms of the South Atlantic, fine passages with following winds, the odd waterspout and – sadly – ships that pass in the night. This particular trip took – in all – twelve years, and was eased by a host of fellow seafarers, many of whom went out of their way to help a lone sailor, occasionally in distress.
My thanks in the first instance go to Gail Pirkis, who
commissioned
four of my books in the closing years of John Murray’s Albemarle Street era, a
belle époque
we will not see again. It was Gail who conjured into being
How the English Made the Alps
; and it was her enthusiasm for a sequel that saw the idea survive the demise of Albemarle Street, and brought it – nascent, amorphous, but heart still beating – into the tempestuous new world of publishing in the 2000s. Then, as is the way with books, it was set aside whilst the clamour of small children reigned on our north Norfolk estate.
The idea was – miraculously – revived by John Seaton of Faber and Faber. He asked me to heave to and discharge a cargo of paperback rights to my Murray books to the publishing house that still basked in the halo of T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound, Lawrence Durrell, William Golding, Ted Hughes, Silvia Plath, John Osborne and Tom Stoppard. Not only would Faber republish
Erskine Childers, We Come Unseen, Riviera
and
How the English Made the Alps
itself, they would also consider the book that was now taking shape amid the wood-shavings in the boathouse under the working title of
Alps
Under the Swastika
. When Julian Loose, Gail Pirkis’s opposite number at Faber, expressed serious interest in the book – by then a good ten years after its conception – I had come across a Spanish galleon adrift on the high seas.
It is to Julian that I owe the current thrust of the book, for at his suggestion it was given a much sharper focus and far finer lines than I had originally drafted; to Julian, too, goes the credit of the final, far more telling title.
My research then took me to the Alps themselves, often following paths that I had first trodden in the previous century in pursuit of the English in the Alps. Here I was not entirely surprised to discover those who felt the story of the Alps during the war was one best forgotten, that concentration camps and deportations and rocket factories and the Gestapo detracted from the rosy hue and crackling banknotes of tourism. Of the many, many exceptions I would like particularly to thank Timothy Nelson of Bibliotheken der Landschaft Davos, Corina Huber of the Bibliothek St Moritz, the scholar Alois Schwarzmüller of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and three quite remarkable living witnesses: Frau Inge Rainer of Kitzbühel, Marko Feingold of Salzburg, and Matteus Guidon of Bergün, Canton Graubünden. These people told a truth that was far from invariably comfortable.
Thereafter, when the book was actually in draft, a handful of specialists troubled themselves to wade through the Dead Sea of typographical errors and non sequiturs in an attempt to generally set the ship to rights. These were the Alpinists David Pirkis and Philip Hawes, the scholar Clive Jenkins, the wizard of the Man Booker Prize David Waller, the iconoclast Alan Page, the Second World War historian Bill Purdue, and the diplomat Michael Zimmermann. I am grateful equally for their patience, their scholarship, and for their insistence that only certain vintages would change hands. In the usual way, I myself bear responsibility for the errors and omissions that remain.
At the same time a galaxy of others have provided moral and practical support for the book. Prominent amongst them are my very old friend and colleague Tim Lefroy of the Advertising
Association, the head of the commentariat Peter York, the business guru Murray Keith, Elisabeth Dyck and Ruth Morgart of the United Nations, Mary Palmer of the NHS, and my business partner Richard Kennan of Gig House Films.
In a sense most importantly, it is my family that has borne this long voyage with fortitude, humour and even patience. It is a great sadness that my mother Stella, a generous and constructive critic of the book’s early chapters, did not live to see the work completed; my sister and two brothers have been unwaveringly encouraging; and it is with great pleasure that I was able to dedicate this book to my father, hale and hearty in his ninety-first year. To my wife Kate I owe a great deal of typing, fact-checking and childcare; to my son Ashmole time that would otherwise have been spent building his own boat; and to my daughter Jessie the energy that would surely have been devoted to augmenting her wardrobe. All in all, although they have coped with the passage very well, they are pleased it is over. I have yet to tell them that another is about to begin.
Finally, my thanks go to Faber’s Kate Murray-Browne, who has seen the book through the press so expertly and sympathetically; to my copy editor Merlin Cox, whose eye for detail, English grammar and even maths proved so much better than my own; and to my typesetter, Donald Sommerville, who has added more than just style to the book.
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