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BLACK SEA CRUISE: THE CHARGE OF THE BRIGHT BRIGADE In the second week of his enlightening Black Sea cruise, Frederic Raphael conquers the Crimea, Ukraine |
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After last week's article, I had a prompt call from my cruise friend, Mr Know-All, reminding me that LP Hartley said the past was a foreign country. Quite true, but Hartley needs emendation: the past is many foreign countries, some happy, some bloody. Minerva II's second week in the Black Sea began with four different ports of call in the Ukraine. Joseph Brodsky, speaking of the USSR, remarked that "six decades of turning the other cheek transformed the face of the nation into one big bruise". Today's welcoming smiles have the memory of pain in them. In Yalta, we docked not far from where Chekhov saw that Lady with the Dog. In the late 1800s, it was the smart resort for north Russian aristocrats and tubercular bourgeois. Among the latter, Chekhov found Yalta extremely dull, but stayed alive there for several years and wrote some of his best work - Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard - in the "White Dacha", a stuccoed asymmetrical suburban villa which he had built in 1899 on today's Kirov Street. After the revolution, Lenin decreed the workerisation of Yalta. Villas and palaces were turned into sanatoria. But Chekhov's renown preserved the modest house where Maria, his long-lived sister, kept the flame. We had a protracted morning's homage at the Soviet-style museum of sepia relics, as we waited for an official delegation to have its fill of the crepuscular rooms where Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky had played the ebony upright piano and Anton had his blue-leathered desk. His friend Tolstoy said that Chekhov's plays were "worse even than Shakespeare's". Trust another writer. We were so flaked by our morning in attendance on Chekhov that we fell asleep and missed the bus to Levadia, where the triumvirate of FDR, Joseph Stalin and (last and least by then) Winston Churchill carved the world in two in 1944. After a look at the Alexander Nevsky cathedral - bright and cheerfully onion-domed outside, ardently incensed within - we slumped on an arboured bench on the Lenin promenade, where we were discovered by Mr Know-All. The wide, curved waterfront reminded him of Smyrna, "now Izmir. Scene of another mass evacuation. 1922. Been chucked out of a lot of places in their time, your Greeks". Indeed. They were in the Crimea for millennia, if myths are anything to go by: Prometheus spent 30,000 years chained in the Caucasus, having his liver pecked by an eagle for giving mankind the divine gift of fire. And in one version, Iphigenia was not sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to procure a fair wind for Troy, but was spirited off to Tauris, near Sevastopol, our next ancient destination. All but 10 houses in Sevastopol date from after 1945. What it endured when stormed by the British and French in 1855 was repeated, more bloodily and ruinously, during the Nazi invasion and occupation. We spent another ancient Greek morning at Chersonesos, one of the last colonies to be founded, as recently as 421BC, in a region where any successful city was always a target for takeover. The citizens must have had a fat defence budget to put up the double walls, with a "killing ditch" between them. So: we did Chersonesos, as had the Khazars, the Pechenegs and the Tatars, each in their ungentle way, before setting off for the battle of Balaklava. Bob Godfrey, the military man, took command. First we paraded at the (Russian) war memorial down on the battlefield. The Swan contingent massed on the low but significant ridge where the British guns (and some Turks) were disposed. The little harbour of Balaklava and the sea were in front of us, beyond the long, broadish "South Valley". Parallel to it, behind us, was the shallow "North Valley": Tennyson's "Valley of Death", when the Light Brigade made its magnificent, misguided charge. In 1855, Balaklava was a vital British arsenal, screened by some 600 men of the 93rd infantry. On the morning of the battle, they watched 4,000 Russian cavalry debouch into the North Valley from the east (I hope I've got this bit right, sir). The 93rd were watched by William Russell, the Times correspondent, as they were charged by, and repelled, the Russians. His report coined the famous phrase "the thin red line tipped with steel". As the Russians re-grouped, they were charged and shattered by General Scarlet' s Heavy Brigade: 400 men and horses pitching into almost 10 times as many. So far, not so bad at all. Meanwhile, Lord Lucan and his Light Brigade had been held in reserve. Lord Raglan, the one-armed C-in-C, had been anxious not to risk the cavalry in the preliminary battle at the Alma. Lucan and his men had endured a good deal of chaff from the cholera-ridden, hardfighting infantry: Lord "Look- On" was now impatient to do something heroic. We embussed for Raglan's vantage point: a superb panoramic position. The Russians had mounted their artillery on the high hills closing the far end of the North Valley. But Raglan was more concerned about losing his own guns than capturing the Russians'. From where he stood, high above the battlefield at the west end of the two valleys, he spotted his Turkish contingent, guarding the guns on the ridge, start to disintegrate. He sent polite word to Lucan to take care of the guns. He assumed it would be obvious which guns he meant. Raglan was puzzled, then horrified as Lucan took the Light Brigade over the ridge into the South Valley and aligned them in perfect drill order to advance towards the Russian guns. As Lucan's squadrons began the long, disciplined walk down the valley, one of Raglan's staff, Captain Nolan, volunteered to gallop down and clarify Lucan's orders. As he began to do so, he was killed. Lucan and his brave men walked, trotted, cantered and finally - but only for the last 50 yards - charged. Raglan looked on helplessly as the French Gen- eral Bosquet remarked, "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre!" - 600 went in; barely 250 came back.
Odessa was willed into being by Catherine the Great, as St Petersburg - more than 1,000 miles to the north - was by Peter the Great. Pushkin had a house (and the governor's wife) here, while exiled in "the Siberia of the south". It is a grand, sad-seeming city of tree-lined avenues and savage memories of occupation and atrocity: 100,000, mostly Jews, were deported. None returned. On the way to the Uspensky Monastery, our wry guide described the charmless mass of post-war government buildings as "Stalin-baroque". She was properly fair to Khrushchev, who ordered the housing of millions of homeless in a rash of apartment houses. The rooms were - and are - small, but they are still valued; so, perhaps, is Mr K, who handed over the Crimea to the Ukrainians, many of whom he had been deputed by Stalin to starve to death during collectivisation. In the big square, a statue of Lenin was attended by a forlorn posse of antique Stalinists. They were listening, under a Red Flag, to the Red Army choir on a crackling portable gramophone. At the archeological museum, we were the only visitors. Our guide apologised for the ill-ticketed, dusty cases, but we had the illusion of rummaging in a cryptic treasury, before going down the Odessa steps and on board Minerva II for scones, sandwiches, biscuits and tea. All right for some people, as Lenin would say. NEXT DAY: Constanta, in Romania, the ancient Tomis where Ovid was exiled after failing to sneak on the emperor Augustus's adulterous daughter, Julia. The mortified poet sent sheets of elegiac lamentations back to Rome, in the hope of a reprieve. I have always had a notion that things were not that bad in exile, but he didn't want anyone to know it. His statue stands in front of the archeological museum. A trim Ovidian couplet ends "... molliter ossa cubent": let these bones rest in peace. Why not? He was only the wittiest versifier ever. The Greek city of Histria was a 40-minute drive away. We were entertained by a stand-up guide who made some pretty good English puns ("According to whether they marry, human beings come in two kinds - the wise and the otherwise!"). Histria was another Graeco- Roman amalgam, with an ancient temple of Zeus and state- of-the-art baths for Ovid and his friends. There was a modern glass-and-concrete museum in which pots were being given a good roasting. A nice marble relief was the 2nd-century, three-dimensional equivalent of an aldermanic photograph. Tomis/Constanta's famous Roman mosaic pavements are more extensive than charming: you felt they were commissioned by the metre. However, the adjacent museum holds one (to me) unique curiosity: a Roman 2nd-century-AD sculpture with a sheep's head, a lion's trunk and a serpent's tail. The guide said that it represented "air, fire, and earth". "Ask me," Mr Know-All said, "it's the dragon that guarded the golden fleece. Why else has it got a sheep's head? Not your normal idea of a monster. But quite suit- able for a fleece-culture, don't you agree?" I had to. What's more, Medea's father is fabled to have put in at Tomis when he finally gave up chasing his daughter's lover, Jason, and the stolen fleece. They had cut Medea's brother into pieces and dumped him in the Black Sea. Dad fished out the bits and came in to Tomis to put him together again. It seemed a peaceful place, but Major Gallant had an ugly experience when on his own. Over next morning's breakfast, he told how he had felt his pocket being picked, grabbed the thief by the wrist and demanded his money back. As the rascal returned it, two men in plain clothes came up and started knocking the chap about. They claimed that they were police and demanded the Major's passport (which, like all of us, he had left on board). They then wanted to see his money. When he hesitated, one grabbed him and the other, behind him, started to search his pockets. The Major was over eighty, but he wasn't to be rolled over. He elbowed his searcher forcefully, and bloodily, in the nose. The fake coppers took the hint and scarpered. "If I'd done the same thing in England today, they'd probably put me inside and compensate the bastard." Indeed. Last stop before Istanbul, the little show-town of Nessebur in Bulgaria has a neat range of tessellated-brick Byzantine churches, only one in pious use. Mr Know-All preferred Mistra, in the Peloponnese. I had to agree with him, but the best icons of the cruise were to be found downstairs in the excellent - and cool - little museum. We had only one afternoon to shop in the Istanbul bazaar before term was over. It's always a pleasure being goldenly fleeced by stallholders gracious enough to give the impression that you have robbed them blind. Their apple tea is delicious too. Istanbul merits at least a week to itself. Our time on Minerva II could hardly have been more luxurious, better organised or more politely escorted. If praise is made more plausible by a cavil, I should say, although we ate nicely in any of three rest- aurants and copiously in the Bridge Cafe, with attentive and smiling Filipino service, General Bosquet would seldom have found the cooking magnifique. Everything else was as good as you could hope. Even the Euxine gave us an easy time. "Old civilians," Major Gallant remarked at the aiport, "never die: they only go on Swan Hellenic cruises." Who can blame them? Travel details: Frederic Raphael travelled as a guest of Swan Hellenic (0845 355 5111, www.swanhellenic.com). Minerva II next cruises the Black Sea on September 27; 15 days aboard start at £3,192pp, including flights from London or Manchester, all meals, excursions and transfers. Frederic Raphael's A Spoilt Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood is published by Orion at £14.99. To buy the book for £11.99 plus £1.95 p&p per order, call The Sunday Times Books Direct on 0870 165 8585. The Times Online; London, UK, June 29, 2003 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6810-730324,00.html For Personal and Academic Use Only |
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