The Sunday Gentleman (35 page)

When World War II broke out, and the Orient Express, in September of 1939, made its last full run from Paris to Istanbul and back again—“with only four of us in the diner on that last ride,” a newspaperwoman representing the Istanbul
Vatan
recalls, “and two were Americans eating chicken”—it was feared by the train’s owners, the French and Belgian officials of the Wagons-Lits company, that the old train might never be the same again. Their fears, stemming from the knowledge that Herr Hitler had his eye on the famed Express and its luxurious equipment, were well justified. When Hitler marched into France, he confiscated most of the glittering coaches and baggage cars of the Orient Express for the use of German officialdom and its military hierarchy. However, while it is difficult to hide a train, the French managed to salvage a handful of the Orient Express coaches by the process of sending them to the cities of Lyons, Vichy, and Dijon as temporary shelters for war refugees. During the war, these coaches of the Orient Express, along with other Wagons-Lits cars put out to pasture, managed to house more than 58,000 persons.

With the dawn of V-E Day, the Wagons-Lits people began collecting and reassembling the remnants of their stock. They brought coaches back from Germany, the Lowlands, the Balkans and from every corner of France, and by September, 1945. they had a shabby, makeshift edition of the Orient Express traveling from Paris to Istanbul. At last, after months of steady repair work and reupholstering, after two international conferences at Lugano and Montreux It was officially announced that the Orient Express was ready to go three times a week as far as Milan, while its numerous sister trains were ready to proceed to Vienna and Prague. With that announcement, there was the merest hope among the romantics that glamour might again be had for the cost of a $138 one-way ticket.

Today, if ever before they entertained doubts, the romances may rest easily. Despite endless complications—the Russians creating difficulties for branch coaches of the Express passing through Austria, the Greeks declaring they could not possibly repair bridges for several years, Marshal Tito refusing the Express permission to traverse Yugoslavia unless he might have his way about loading the train with Yugoslav conductors and obtain a better share from the money exchange—the Orient Express, in January of 1947 with too much makeup and too much fuss, and creaking at the joints like an actress who has come out of retirement once too often, again got up steam for its historic run into the Near East. The usual staff of multilingual employees bustled about, but instead of the old label-plastered leather luggage, there was a dismaying preponderance of barracks bags and briefcases, and most of the first passengers were staid businessmen, army officers, and French railway officials. With this cargo, the Express puffed out of the chilly Gare de Lyon en route through broken Europe.

Today, again, the conductors walk down the corridors chanting. “Paris…Lyons…Lausanne…Milan Trieste…Ljubljana…Zagreb…Belgrade…Sofia “Now, three times weekly, five coaches of the Orient Express roll as far as Sofia, Bulgaria. Then the passengers tumble out, climb into Turkish sleepers, and continue overnight across a corner of Greece and into Istanbul.

Today, the Wagons-Lits company—in preparation for the 300,000 American tourists the American Express Company has predicted will visit Europe this year, in preparation for the dollars these tourists will spend, according to the promise of the U. S. Department of Commerce—has printed timetables and travel folders for the old-fashioned, undiluted trip from Paris to Istanbul, without the Bulgarian changeover, and Wagons-Lits has officially announced that this trip will be resumed in the next few months.

While a prewar first-class ticket from Paris to Istanbul could be purchased for $138, today’s American tourist will find that the purchase of through passage is no longer simple, nor is the price quite so definite. In Paris, the average tourist will visit the five-storied Wagons-Lits Cook building in the Place de la Madeleine, or the American Express offices in the Rue Scribe, wait in line an hour, learn that he must make his reservations at least twenty-eight days in advance, and be advised that he cannot purchase or pay for a through ticket. Because of the eccentricities of money-exchange control regulations, the tourist can buy, with French francs, rail tickets and sleeper reservations on the Orient Express only as far as Italy. There, in American dollars, he must pay for extensions on his ticket to Belgrade, and in Belgrade, using Yugoslav currency, he must pay for an added ticket to Sofia. The whole process will cost him $134, more or less, depending upon the fluctuations of exchange, and at journey’s end he will be an economist or a madman.

In return for these financial acrobatics, the tourist will have the finest railroad accommodations in Europe today—although veteran travelers will assure him that, comfortable as they are, the Orient Express just is not what it used to be. At least, not yet. While the 57-ton sleeping coaches, each containing eleven private compartments, are still paneled in mahogany, and expensively carpeted, the added touches are missing all down the line. In the palmy days, for example, there were showers on the train. They are no more. Also, before the war, the Orient Express featured a deluxe special compartment for dogs only. Now passengers must keep their Pekingese, Scotties, and Russian wolfhounds on the floors of their own compartments.

In the good old days, the Orient Express diner, gleaming with silver, sparkling with bone china and mirrors, abounding in deep leather chairs, was a mobile mess for epicures. Now, though still physically attractive, it is simply a mess.

The Orient Express often changes dining cars four times on a single run. It starts with a French diner, staffed by French chefs, switches to a Swiss diner, then to an Italian kitchen, and finally to a Yugoslav one. Before the war, the first and second chefs, in white uniforms, supervised six cupboards on each diner, each cupboard representing a nation through which the Express passed and containing the choice delicacies and vintages of that country. Because each European nation had its food restrictions and drink monopolies, all cupboards were kept securely locked, except the one containing the food and drink of the land through which the Express happened to be moving. As the Orient Express left Paris, the chefs extracted French wines from the French cupboard, and waiters in silk breeches and buckled shoes served these in Belgian crystal goblets during the two-hour evening dinner period. When the train crossed into Switzerland, a French customs official boarded it, locked the French cupboard with its array of wines and liqueurs, then a Swiss customs man came on and unlocked the Swiss cupboard with its chocolates, cheeses, and jams. When the train entered Italy, a Swiss customs man came on, sealed the Swiss food cupboard, and an Italian official followed him and opened the Italian cupboard. And so it would go through Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Turkey.

Today, these cupboards are anything but a gourmet’s delight. No longer can the Orient Express chefs prepare, and the three train waiters (sporting immaculate white gloves) serve on rich silver platters the old menu of eight hors d’oeuvres, omelets, fish, a choice of four meat dishes, and a selection of the best white and red wines in the Old World. Now, due to shortages and government rationing, the dinners are frugal. When the Orient Express goes through France, the dining car features, for 150 francs or $1.25, a set menu of soup, a choice of fish or meat, two vegetables and, for dessert, an apple. The best meal to be had on the journey, if the passenger will rise before dawn, is breakfast in Switzerland, where everything may be ordered from high-grade coffee and fresh eggs to real butter and white bread. After that, in Italy and on through Bulgaria, the quality and quantity of the food deteriorate and the local chefs shrug, and in their awkward French invariably explain, “
C’est la guerre.
” Payment for these various meals is as complex as the food is simple, since payment must be made in the currency of the country in which the food happens to be served.

The Orient Express still carries two baggage cars. Only the contents of these cars are now different. Ten years ago, there would have been an exotic assortment of trunks bearing brightly colored labels, at least one bantam automobile such as a German Opel or an Italian Fiat, crates of gold being transferred from a French bank to a Serbian bank, and poking out above all this, like porcupine quills, dozens of skis and alpenstocks. Once, at the time when the late dictator of Turkey, blond Kemal Ataturk—who had converted mosques into granaries and put an end to polygamy—decided to westernize his country further by abolishing the traditional fez, the Orient Express was called upon to transport its strangest cargo. Ataturk was deadly serious about his ban on the fez; he even slapped the Egyptian minister for daring to wear one. Consequently, all males in Turkey were desperate for some kind of substitute headgear. The clothing stores and bazaars of Istanbul and Ankara put out a hurried SOS to the clothiers all over Europe. Overnight, the Orient Express baggage vans were loaded down with the most improbable, high-priority shipment they ever carried—London bowlers, German homburgs, Basque berets, Polish visor caps—all for the unprotected pates of Turkey.

Today, the luggage reflects the times. One baggage car will carry hundreds of food packages, secondhand bicycles, several baby carriages, endless bundles of clothes. The few trunks, with the remnants of their Monte Carlo and St. Moritz stickers, have seen better days. The second baggage car is devoted entirely to mail, delivering the bulk of land communications from Western Europe to the Near and Far East. In this car, all the postal clerks, by international agreement, are Frenchmen.

However, for the American tourist, the most unusual thing about the Orient Express will be the minor ways in which it differs from his own deluxe streamliners at home. While almost all first-class American trains have green- or rust-curtained sleeping berths lining both sides of a center aisle, the Orient Express has none. Every cushioned seat on the Orient Express, when converted into a berth at night, is enclosed in a private room, similar to the bedrooms and compartments on American Pullmans. Today, the officials on the Express are embarrassed by a temporary exception to this advertised privacy. Due to the acute European transport shortage, the train has been forced to drag along, at its rear, six ordinary day coaches. This appendage for the peasantry, regarded as a sort of steerage class, is not discussed openly by the officials of the train.

While the Express now has central heating, its windows are not hermetically sealed as they are in similarly expensive American trains, but may be pulled down at will by passengers. Once, the Express experimented with a single coach, equipped with sealed windows, but the idea was quickly abandoned when the Continental fresh-air fiends complained they were being suffocated. The individual compartments, with directions printed usually in French, German, and English, lack the individual concealed toilets of the American streamliner. Nor do the coaches have separate lavatories for men and women. Instead, there is one community water closet at the end of each car. And while there is usually a pitcher of drinking water above the washbasin in each compartment, this is regarded as an American barbarism, and travelers are expected to have wine served in their rooms by the conductor when they are thirsty. Most surprising of all, perhaps, for the American traveler is the absence of Pullman porters. The brown-uniformed conductor doubles as the ticket collector and the attendant who makes up berths.

The private car, so often attached to the Orient Express, is an institution that will provide further amazement for the traveling American. Of course, Americans know all about private cars and can brag about building some of the world’s best. Many Americans will cite how Death Valley Scotty came out of the California desert, hired a luxurious private Pullman coach, and rode to New York in it, flinging gold pieces and greenbacks to the populace all along the way. Others will relate the extravagances of Mrs. Marjorie Post Davies, largest stockholder in the General Foods Corporation and wife of Joseph E. Davies, ex-Ambassador to Russia, who bought her own railroad Pullman, hired herself a private porter, and had the car fumigated before each trip. And almost every American knows about the highly advertised Presidential Pullman, so often used by F.D.R. and to a lesser extent by President Truman. But the use of the private car in the United States is still the exception, whereas in Europe, on the Orient Express, it is a routine thing.

The private car most frequently attached to the Orient Express is a special gray salon coach built for the Presidents of France and for foreigners of equally high station. The most recent personage to travel in it was Farida Zulfikar. Queen of Egypt, the wife of King Farouk I. Her government applied for its use through the protocol section of the Élysée Palace, and it was promptly offered, along with a staff of police from the Sûreté Nationale, by the French government and the Wagons-Lits company. The queen was astonished by its luxury. She discovered the coach interior was paneled with mahogany, inlaid with exquisite Lalique glass, and the car illuminated by indirect lighting. The entire car was divided into only four rooms—a large bedroom, with a real bed instead of a berth, for the queen’s use; a private bathroom; a tiny room for her maid or secretary; and the remainder a comfortable living room furnished with deep sofa, bureau, and easy chairs.

Run-of-the-mill celebrities and millionaires, however, are not permitted to use this car, but instead must hire a first-class coach of their own. The stunning Marina, Greek widow of the late Duke of Kent, always hired a private coach when she journeyed from London to Athens. The most frequent users of private cars have been Indian maharajas who cross over from India to Turkey and take the Orient Express to Paris. Once a particularly wealthy maharaja even hired a private restaurant car to trail his sleeper.

Another rich Indian potentate bought out an entire Wagons-Lits coach, all twenty-four berths, at a cost of around $3,500, to take, in complete privacy, the most curious collection of passengers the Orient Express ever carried from Istanbul to Paris. M. Bortolotti, a Frenchman and twenty-year veteran of the Express, was
chef de train
on that trip, and he recalls it with relish. “This Indian, a maharaja, or whatever he was, hired the private coach with the provision that all other passengers and Express personnel be barred from entering it except myself. I couldn’t wait to get in, to see what he was hiding. And then when I went in for the tickets and passports, I saw. What a sight! He had his whole harem on the Orient Express! There they were, seven of them, and don’t let anyone tell you modem harems aren’t pretty. All seven girls were young and beautiful, Indo-European types, gorgeous figures. Each wore a veil, but the veils were thin and you could see right through them. Each girl had a tiny diamond set on the right side of her nose and one in her right ear lobe, as beauty marks, I imagine. These diamonds didn’t look grotesque at all, but shone from behind the veils and were very exciting. I tried to act nonchalant. After all, we on the Orient Express are supposed to be used to everything. But I couldn’t help staring, and the girls kept giggling at me until I finished my business with their husband and left.”