There’s no glamour in this desperate journey across a dangerous continent, the advancing Nazis close behind
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When we board Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy in September 1939, the Simplon Orient Express is into the second night of a slow steam across Europe; the Nazis have been advancing into Poland for a day or two; and passengers Guy and Harriet Pringle met a month ago and haven’t yet been married a week.
Manning’s express is no glamorous transport: “balls of sandwich paper unscrewed themselves in the heat, empty Vichy bottles rolled about under seats,” she wrote of the luxe-less carriages. There is a dining car, but Guy gives almost all the Pringles’ limited funds to a German-Jewish refugee who has lost his passport and ticket, so all they can afford on their last day is dinner, whipped off the tables as the wagon must be uncoupled. The stations lack masters, their loudspeakers announce military call-ups. Harriet glimpses the unexplained through the window, bright eyes of beasts racing through the Romanian forest by the trackside.
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