ANGELN.
It has been said that the Russian War revealed to the majority of Englishmen the existence of the Crimea. The Slesvig-Holstein question has been too long before the world, and has been used too much by the lightest of littérateurs as a synonym for something utterly incomprehensible, to allow me to say that the Dano-German war will be for my countrymen the epoch of the discovery of Slesvig. But its exploration will certainly date from the Austro-Prussian invasion. Thousands of tourists will trace this autumn the path of the German hosts, wander over the ground where the Dannevirke stood for well nigh a thousand years, maim their feet upon the execrable pavement of the long dull street of Slesvig town, look through the fine (as far as the interior is concerned) Dom Kirche, drive along the road to Flensburg, on which the outnumbered Danes made their retreat, stop at Oversee to note the spot where they made such a gallant stand, and dealt such slaughter amongst the impetuous Styrians, lounge along the quays of Flensburg, or sail upon its beautiful inlet, and, as the term of their journey, revisit, as it were, Sundewitt and Alsen, with which the vivid descriptions of special correspondents have already made them well acquainted.
I cannot tell how Slesvig may look this autumn, after the tornado of war has swept across it, but if the recuperative power of nature is strong enough to give it anything like the same smiling aspect it presented last year, the tourists cannot fail to find much to delight them. Very easy of access, Slesvig, which no one formerly visited, because it led nowhere and had no special attractions, could boast no mountains or waterfalls, no world-compelling ruins or galleries, will now draw the curious who delight to gaze upon the theatre of important events, and charm while it fills with wonder all those Englishmen who love the rural beauty of their native land. For, but that the people speak platt deutsch and dialects in which it is difficult to say, so philologists tell us, whether German or Danish more predominates, but that they dress a little differently, an Englishmen fancies himself at home in Slesvig. As long as he keeps out of doors it is hard for him—in the summer time—to believe that he is not in England. In winter the bitterness of the cold would remind him that he was in another clime, and the blank, dreary appearance of the snow-covered land would strike him with no similitude to the English landscape.
I am presuming that the tourist visits the right part of Slesvig; but it is extremely probable that unless he has some suggestion to do so he will pass by the most interesting district, and come away with an indifferent opinion of the duchy. I know Sundewitt, which he is sure to visit, would please him well enough if it were in its natural condition, but it has been the great theatre of war, the camping-ground of sixty or seventy thousand soldiers, and when the armies withdraw it must change from a scene of animation to one of desolation. The rest of the duchy that he is likely to see, if he follows the track of the war or of the railway, is one long unbroken stretch of heath and marsh, very good to fatten cattle for the London market, but very cheerless to look upon.
The interesting portion of Slesvig lies aside from the railway and from the war. The turn-pike road from Slesvig to Flensburg, of which I have spoken, may be said to form its boundary. The traveller who, instead of making his way from Slesvig to Flensburg by the rail, chooses, perhaps from a desire to follow in the steps of the armies, the road, will find himself after he gets a mile or two out of Slesvig on a heath, broken only two or three times on the whole of the rest of the distance—some twenty miles—by villages, cultivated land, and bits of wood. On his left hand the moor will stretch as far as his eye can reach, and if his vision were powerful enough, he would follow it to the North Sea. On his right hand, however, it is stopped in less than a mile by hillocks covered with wood. Sheltered by those hillocks, and stretching from them to the sea, forming a semicircle of which this road may be called the line, and the sea, the inlet of Flensburg, and the Slei the outside, lies Angeln, a country which possesses even a greater interest to Englishmen than the quiet beauty which it shows to all comers, inasmuch as it is the reputed home of the race which gave their land its back-bone and its name.
I am no ethnologist; I do not pretend to offer an opinion upon the merits of the arguments which have been brought forward in the controversy whether the Angles did come from Angeln, but I have acquired a conviction that they did, which no force of argument, I will even say no proof, however strong, can shake. I was at home there. As I wandered through the narrow roads, with their thick, luxurious fences, in which the blackberries invited me to feast, as I was wont to do when a schoolboy; as I turned aside to ramble without purpose or goal up the green lanes, with their even taller and more unkempt hedges; as I strolled in pleasant footpaths across fields of about five or six acres, in which the oats stood in shocks waiting to be carted, or the ploughman whistled after his horses; as I caught every now and