BY JAN MORRIS | nowadays the Watch on the Rhine is kept, thank God, chiefly by crumbled castles and tourist lookouts. Only a few anachronistic monuments remember the terrible old enmities of the river, like the vast and awful memorial near Rudesheimn that ostensibly celebrates the unification of Germany in 1871 but is really a crow of triumph over the defeated French of the Franco-Prussian War. On both the French and German sides of the Rhine, run-down military camps, abandoned artillery ranges, forgotten fortifications testify to the Great Peace that has come to Western Europe since the end of World War II. It is not by coincidence that the Parliament of the European Union sits at Strasbourg, a city of the Rhineland that has sometimes been French, sometimes German, and feels to the stranger today like a little of each.

As it happens I recently found myself sleeping on successive nights on opposite sides of the great frontier -- one night in Germany, the next in France. I did not have to show a passport as I drove across the line; I knew very well that my Eurocard would see me through wherever I was. I found the same gasoline in both countries and heard more or less the same rock music all the way, but still I felt a definite culture shock as I passed from a small country hotel in western Germany to a small country hotel in eastern France.

I got the last room at the, well, let us call it fictionally the Gasthof Krone. It was not far from a well-known spa town, and the whole area swarmed with tourists -- even the out-of-the-way river valley where the hotel was. A dozen smart cars, all with German plates, already stood in the car park. The lady of the house, austerely spectacled and wearing a green pinafore, came out of her kitchen to greet me and took me briskly upstairs to show me the room. Dinner, she said, tidying the bath towels as she talked, would start at 7:30 sharp. "Inside or outside?" said I, for the evening was balmy and wood-pigeons were cooing in the trees around. She shrugged. "Wherever you want it," she said.

I wanted it al fresco, and I sat at a trestle table, just outside the dining room, looking across an unkempt meadow toward the little river, which ran among willow trees through a wilderness of rushes. A fat retriever was playing around down there, presently gamboling up to the house dripping muddy water all over the place, to be greeted by my stern hostess with affectionate endearments -- surprising to me, because I thought she would make a fuss about the mud. The elderly barman leaned across to give the dog a biscuit, which it slobbered over, and my fellow diners, most of them inside, some out on the terrace with me, reached out to greet the animal with sentimental oohs and aahs. By the restrained standards of the Gasthof Krone evening, this was a moment of high drama. Otherwise, nobody talked much, and nobody returned my ingratiating smiles, although one or two people half-bowed stiffly in my direction. The diners were unostentatiously dressed, middle-aged and amply built. They seemed to me rather shy, except toward the dog. The chief sound was the sound of contented chumping, and there was beer at every table.

I had Wienerschnitzel for my dinner (if only because I didn't recognize anything else on the floridly hand-written menu) with a glass of beer, chunks of rough brown bread and an ice cream. "Was it good?" asked the lady without a smile when she came to clear the things away. "Very good," I said. "Was it good?" asked the man behind the bar gruffly when I passed through the dining room. "Excellent," I said. Neither seemed particularly pleased. Neither seemed to care much really. It was as though they had been cooking Wienerschnizels, baking brown bread and making ice cream for a thousand years or so, ritually asking their guests if it was good, until the whole process was as organic as going to bed.

Which I presently did, up a staircase decorated with homely kitsch, dolls, souvenir plates, family pictures of upstanding rural worthies and a rather alarming arrangement of plaited blond hair that suggested to me at first a Borneo headhunting memento, but was really a representation of an Old German Fairy Tale. My room was rather like home. It creaked a bit, in a comfortable homely way, and was patterned with a dimly floral wallpaper. As I dropped off to sleep I could hear somebody chopping wood outside, and grunting, wheezing, slopping noises which I took to be something to do with the dog.

"May I have my dinner on the terrace?" I asked the next night at the French country inn -- shall we call it the Auberge de la Couronne d'Or? -- since the evening was lovely and swallows were dashing exhilaratingly about the rooftops. The proprietress smiled winningly. I could by all means have an aperitif on the terrace, and the head waiter would be most happy to bring me the menu there and allow me to make my choice of food, but as to dinner outside, she very much regretted that was not possible. She waved an explanatory hand through the dining room window, and when I saw the brilliant white napery inside, the gleaming glasses, the chandeliers, the cutlery in dazzling sequence on the tables, I perfectly understood.

The hotel stood not far from one of the great French motorways, with its endless traffic streaming down to the south, and the dining room was full of smart, cosmopolitan faces, smiling at me cosmopolitanly as I was shown to my table. An adorable small terrier lay under the next table to mine, and I fell in love with it. "I have fallen in love with your dog," I said to its mistress, and everyone laughed. "He is mine," she said, wagging a figure at me. "I allow no rivals." "Everybody is in love with her dog," said her husband, "nobody is in love with me." "Oh, except me, chéri," said the lady, and they smiled at each other most charmingly, and everyone laughed again.

Dinner was an exquisite collection of smallish things, fishes and light vegetables and a weightless soufflé, interrupted now and then by complimentary tidbits from the chef, which were very rich and unidentifiably delicious. I had a half-bottle of Sancerre, brought to me by the waiter with full ritual of label-presentation, corkscrewing, sniff, napkin-wipe, tasting-driblet in the bottom of the glass. I did not try it. "I believe you," I said, and he smiled in a knowing way. "Bonsoir, madame," sang the proprietress over her shoulder when I left the room, but she did not bother to ask if I had enjoyed my meal. She assumed that I would have. Besides, a car much grander than mine had just drawn up outside the front door.

My bedroom was in the oldest part of the building. This had once been a mill, and the stream ran outside my window, but the room had recently been redecorated in a vividly Parisian style, all black and white, all angles and polished brick, all small sofas in niches, with myriad mirrors and multiple televisions and a huge satin-covered bed. The bath was divine. The peace was absolute. As I went to sleep, I heard only the murmur of voices from a couple in the garden below, saying sweetly witty things to each other, I assumed.

Two sides of the Rhine! I come from another world again, from the farthest northwest corner of Wales, and both the Krone and the Couronne d'Or were extremely foreign to me, as I was to them. I recognized, though, that I was experiencing more than just a couple of rural hotels, but true epitomes of their respective societies: the German so unassuming, so essentially sure of itself, so traditional, so homely, so charmless; the French bathed in fun, elegance and pretension, living on its reputation, polishing its image. Europe is inevitably coalescing, and I suppose before long one or the other of these two cultures, the French or German, is going to grasp the hegemony of the continent, the English having opted out.

Which do you think, dear Reader, I shall feel more at home with, when the time comes: Wienerschnitzel with the snuffly retriever on the terrace, or nouvelle cuisine with the delightful terrier under the chandeliers -- an obliging frau without a smile in a pinafore or a winsome madame looking over my shoulder to the next customer? Answers on a postcard -- electronic, of course -- please, before the end of the century.
March 25, 1997

Which side of the Rhine do you prefer? Share your thoughts in Table Talk.

S A L O N    A R C H I V E S    N E W S L E T T E R    T A B L E   T A L K    M A R K E T P L A C E