One of the more obvious reasons non-fiction writers are drawn to rivers is that they appear to offer a ready-made narrative, sweeping the reader from source to sea, cradle to grave, preface to prologue. But for every river that begins as a solitary fountainhead, another seeps out of a bog at umpteen different places; some rivers empty monolithically into the sea, others end in a delta of proliferating branches.
That is also a truer model of how history tends to unfold: a multitude of beginnings flowing to a multitude of endings. In Three Rivers Robert Winder makes a case for a more deterministic approach, advancing “unglamorous physical geography as being the force behind historical events”. The book was conceived in a railway tunnel beneath the Gotthard Pass, Switzerland.
As he gazed at a map of the region, Winder realised that western Europe’s three great rivers, the Rhine, the Rhône and the Po, could each be said (allowing for some license) to rise from the massif above his head. By tracing their courses in a three-way, outward-flowing journey, he could examine how, individually and collectively, they gave rise to the three great national cultures of Germany, France and Italy — and in so doing helped to unify the Europe we know today.
It is a beautifully elegant premise. His river narratives are braided with such subtlety that it’s possible to forget he is describing three rivers and not one. This is not inappropriate given Winder’s faith, stated at the outset, that the “differences between Europe’s nations, however clear and clung to, disguise a profound similarity”. The rivers serve as emblems and instruments of unity, inspiring “ideas of compromise and co-operation”.
The Peace of Westphalia of 1648, for example, following the catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War, led to the recognition of the Rhine as a “mutual resource, not merely something to be fought over”. The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, founded in 1815 and eventually counting France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, Switzerland and Italy among its members, is arguably the world’s oldest international organisation.
The book’s main interest is the political, philosophical, artistic and scientific flourishing these waters have helped to spawn
The book’s main interest is the political, philosophical, artistic and scientific flourishing these waters have helped to spawn, from Dante’s Po, winding its way through Renaissance Italy, to the “conduit of the Reformation” that is the Rhine, to the pioneering of the science of glaciology on the Rhône Glacier.
The book’s standard bearer is Johann Gottfried Tulla, the young German engineer who in 1817 oversaw the “rectification” of the upper Rhine (which looms largest of the three rivers). In order to reduce seasonal flooding and improve navigability, Tulla’s grand project straightened the river’s meanders, excised its islands and filled in its oxbow lakes.
The effect of his vast canalisation was to make the Rhine “more useful: a heaving corridor for trade, freight, power generation, transport and tourism”. The river had, Winder writes, “been brought to heel”.
The price of that subjugation was the mass loss of habitat and the poisoning of the river’s waters. In 1850 it was home to an estimated 280,000 tonnes of salmon; a century later there was none.
Three Rivers isn’t travel writing but history founded in geography. Nevertheless the potted histories of his stopping-off places sometimes have a cruise-brochure quality, as if we are observing the passing world from a deckchair, browsing Wikipedia.
Winder could hardly have ignored the slicks of effluent, and he is attentive to the melting of the glaciers that give rise to these waters. But if a current of thinking connects Tulla’s “rectification” with the present-day plight of Europe’s waterways it is not examined here. The disappearing of the Rhône glacier is merely another drama in that river’s long story, rather than heralding, as it may do, the shattering of that story.
During the arid summer of 2022, a mercifully unfamiliar object was exposed by the sluggish Rhine at Worms: a so-called hunger stone, engraved with the year 1947, an earlier time when the water had dropped so drastically, and postwar Germany was menaced by famine. Part memorial, part warning.
If that river, along with the Rhône and the Po, are the cradles of modern Europe, we are left to wonder what will become of the continent if one day the hunger stones are permanently dry. Unacknowledged in Winder’s paean is a troubling possibility: that, whatever peace and prosperity these three great rivers have helped to bring to the continent, the division and disorder that have also characterised Europe’s past will be as nothing compared to a water-depleted future.
Three Rivers: The Extraordinary Waterways That Made Europe by Robert Winder Elliott & Thompson £20, 304 pages
William Atkins is the author of ‘Exiles: Three Island Journeys’ (Faber)
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