Cloudy Skies Over the White Cliffs of Dover
On Saturday morning I got up with intention to go for a long walk, somewhere, after a quick breakfast at the Chandos. The friendly owner directed me toward the beach, where I could walk west and hit several small towns over the miles along the coast. I only lasted about an hour on this route, since the weather is indeed as cold here as in London. Even bundled up in half of my ski gear (snow pants were all I was missing) and walking fast, I couldn't keep warm enough to make it worth the journey or the views. I walked along the cliff-top for a mile or so, then dropped down toward a valley. An elderly man was standing at a bus stop, and I asked him if he was waiting for the bus back to Folkestone. Just about the moment I asked, I realized that this would be the case if I were in America, but here the traffic goes in the opposite direction per side of the street, so I was looking to go the wrong way. I laughed and explained that I was American (as if my accent didn't give that away), and he exclaimed with much enthusiasm, "Oh it's ok, I love Americans!" Which I thought was quite possibly one of the strangest things I had heard all week, until it occurred to me that he was much older, of a generation that remembers when my home nation came to aid of Britain and changed the course of an otherwise terribly gloomy battle. Back when the American war machine was engaged in far more honorable acts than beating up third-world nations for their oil. It struck me as tragic that we've thrown away the world's good will that we won at such a heavy price on the beaches of Normandy and the battlefields of the South Pacific.
Instead of going back to
Folkestone, I hopped a bus straight through to Dover, which proved a much livelier locale than from where I had come, the with bustle of tourists even in the cold weather. I hadn't felt even remotely warm since I left the B&B this morning, so I first stopped to try to warm up with a cup of soup, which did little to lift the chill but gave me the energy to walk the several hundred stairs on the footpath up to Dover Castle, which perches atop one of the stretches of famous white cliff. This embattlement goes back to medieval times, but hardly a generation has passed that hasn't bunkered in against enemies from across the channel. Tunnels were originally dug into the soft limestone in the 13th century, and during the Napoleanic wars these were transformed into extensive barracks to hold an army prepared to fend off an attack from the sea which never came. But the castle's glory days came in the early years of World War II, when the tunnels were expanded into a major military outpost, housing command posts, communications centers, and battalions of men ready to defend the front lines, the closest point of access Germany had to the British Isle from occupied France. In the early days of the war, the white cliffs were hit hard from the air and the sea, and they were defended equally vehemently by gun emplacements that could rocket shells all the way to the coast of France, not more than 40 miles away. In 1941, as the German ranks broke the Magineau Line and closed in on the Allied stronghold at Dunkirk, commander Ramsay ordered a wholescale evacuation by sea of any soldier who could haul their exhausted body onto one of the hundreds of battleships, fishing dories, scows, and all other form of floating vessel that could be conjured up from the Allied waters and dragged back and forth to the beach at Dunkirk. They expected to pull out 30,000 men; in ten days, the luck of calm spring seas allowed the evacuation of over 330,000 British, French, and Belgian troops - troops who, just four year later, formed the backbone of the shock forces who took back the French beach in the bloody storm known as D-Day, and marched all the way to Paris one hard-fought mile at a time, to take back the capital city from the Nazis.
The tour of the tunnels was guided mostly by a sound system designed to mimic the heyday of military operations in the bunker. Drifting voices of ordinary soldiers bumming cigarettes off each other, commanders at their posts, surgeons in the operating theatre, and women running the vital communications switchboard led us down one dank hall after another. Brick lined the improved areas, strong enough to hold against air raids that came with such regularity that many men and women stationed there just never left the bunkers. In other tunnels, limestone was still laid bare, pock-marked with the glazed grey of flint stone; in these tunnels, water percolated through the unimproved walls of the porous cliffs, setting up a constant drip from all quarters of the ceilings and walls. The tour guide noted that the worst working conditions were experienced by the women who ran the switchboards, who worked under bare limestone and had the ill luck to be situated adjacent to the store of chemical batteries that ran the precious electricity supply on a potent mixture of sulphuric acid, which lent the constant smell of rotting eggs to their quarters. The last leg of the tour took us along the tunnel paralleling the cliff face, where Ramsay commanded his troops from his quarters, complete with a bay window overlooking the English Channel that was remarkably never hit by the thousands of bomber runs that attacked the white cliffs. That tunnel also boasts a row of private bathrooms with a first-class ocean-front view over the back of the toilet, though I'm not sure I would want to be on the toilet at the cliff face when the bombs began to shatter the air all around.
Exiting back into the mercifully fresh air, we stepped out on a balcony-like shelf overlooking the harbor where the ferries lazed in and out on their regular route from Calais - a route that was once only taken on the road to battle. From there I walked the perimeter of the fortress, along the embankments that drop steeply into a dry moat and across gun battlements that were built with medieval rock but buttressed with modern cannons and other artifacts of industrial war. A testament to the near-constant war-making that has dominated most of Europe's history, and the rare half-century of peace that has marked the countryside since the German bombs fell silent and will, with luck, last centuries more.
I walked back into Dover under a sky clearing nearly to blue and caught a bus back to Folkestone. I was surprised to find that it was past four o'clock when I reached the B&B and the sun was still shining strong - a sign that with the solstice passed in December, even under the brutal February chill, spring is coming. The days will only get longer and warmer until the time that I finally depart for far shores, for home.
Instead of going back to
Folkestone, I hopped a bus straight through to Dover, which proved a much livelier locale than from where I had come, the with bustle of tourists even in the cold weather. I hadn't felt even remotely warm since I left the B&B this morning, so I first stopped to try to warm up with a cup of soup, which did little to lift the chill but gave me the energy to walk the several hundred stairs on the footpath up to Dover Castle, which perches atop one of the stretches of famous white cliff. This embattlement goes back to medieval times, but hardly a generation has passed that hasn't bunkered in against enemies from across the channel. Tunnels were originally dug into the soft limestone in the 13th century, and during the Napoleanic wars these were transformed into extensive barracks to hold an army prepared to fend off an attack from the sea which never came. But the castle's glory days came in the early years of World War II, when the tunnels were expanded into a major military outpost, housing command posts, communications centers, and battalions of men ready to defend the front lines, the closest point of access Germany had to the British Isle from occupied France. In the early days of the war, the white cliffs were hit hard from the air and the sea, and they were defended equally vehemently by gun emplacements that could rocket shells all the way to the coast of France, not more than 40 miles away. In 1941, as the German ranks broke the Magineau Line and closed in on the Allied stronghold at Dunkirk, commander Ramsay ordered a wholescale evacuation by sea of any soldier who could haul their exhausted body onto one of the hundreds of battleships, fishing dories, scows, and all other form of floating vessel that could be conjured up from the Allied waters and dragged back and forth to the beach at Dunkirk. They expected to pull out 30,000 men; in ten days, the luck of calm spring seas allowed the evacuation of over 330,000 British, French, and Belgian troops - troops who, just four year later, formed the backbone of the shock forces who took back the French beach in the bloody storm known as D-Day, and marched all the way to Paris one hard-fought mile at a time, to take back the capital city from the Nazis.The tour of the tunnels was guided mostly by a sound system designed to mimic the heyday of military operations in the bunker. Drifting voices of ordinary soldiers bumming cigarettes off each other, commanders at their posts, surgeons in the operating theatre, and women running the vital communications switchboard led us down one dank hall after another. Brick lined the improved areas, strong enough to hold against air raids that came with such regularity that many men and women stationed there just never left the bunkers. In other tunnels, limestone was still laid bare, pock-marked with the glazed grey of flint stone; in these tunnels, water percolated through the unimproved walls of the porous cliffs, setting up a constant drip from all quarters of the ceilings and walls. The tour guide noted that the worst working conditions were experienced by the women who ran the switchboards, who worked under bare limestone and had the ill luck to be situated adjacent to the store of chemical batteries that ran the precious electricity supply on a potent mixture of sulphuric acid, which lent the constant smell of rotting eggs to their quarters. The last leg of the tour took us along the tunnel paralleling the cliff face, where Ramsay commanded his troops from his quarters, complete with a bay window overlooking the English Channel that was remarkably never hit by the thousands of bomber runs that attacked the white cliffs. That tunnel also boasts a row of private bathrooms with a first-class ocean-front view over the back of the toilet, though I'm not sure I would want to be on the toilet at the cliff face when the bombs began to shatter the air all around.
Exiting back into the mercifully fresh air, we stepped out on a balcony-like shelf overlooking the harbor where the ferries lazed in and out on their regular route from Calais - a route that was once only taken on the road to battle. From there I walked the perimeter of the fortress, along the embankments that drop steeply into a dry moat and across gun battlements that were built with medieval rock but buttressed with modern cannons and other artifacts of industrial war. A testament to the near-constant war-making that has dominated most of Europe's history, and the rare half-century of peace that has marked the countryside since the German bombs fell silent and will, with luck, last centuries more.
I walked back into Dover under a sky clearing nearly to blue and caught a bus back to Folkestone. I was surprised to find that it was past four o'clock when I reached the B&B and the sun was still shining strong - a sign that with the solstice passed in December, even under the brutal February chill, spring is coming. The days will only get longer and warmer until the time that I finally depart for far shores, for home.
There'll be blue birds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow
Just you wait and see.
There'll be joy and laughter
And peace ever after,
Tomorrow
When the world is free,
The shepherd will count his sheep
The valleys will bloom again,
And Jimmy will go to sleep
In his own little room again,
There'll be blue birds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow
Just you wait and see.
- Nat Burton, circa 1941
posted by skylanda at 1:09 PM
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