I Wanna Hold 'Em Like They Do In Texas Please

"I went with a friend on a walking tour of Germany. It was the kind of thing one did then. Books strapped up in an arrangement of leather belts and slung over the shoulder as one tramped the meadows of Franconia, stopping off at taverns and guesthouses. We arrived in a small Bavarian valley late one morning and found a perfect beer garden, overlooked by a pretty old inn which tumbled with geraniums and lobelias. As we sat sipping our Steins of lager, chairs were being arranged in rows in the garden. It seemed that some sort of concert was in the offing. By and by two ambulances drew up. The driver and stretcher-bearers got out, yawned, lit cigarettes and stood by the open tailgates of their vehicles as if it were the most normal thing in the world. People began to arrive, and soon every chair in the beer garden was taken and the dozens who couldn't get a seat stood at the back or sat cross-legged on the grass in front of the small temporary stage. We simply could not imagine what was going to happen. An enthusiastic crowd, but no musicians and, most strangely of all, those ambulance drivers and stretcher-bearers. At last a pair of huge open-topped Mercedes tourers arrived, crammed like a Keystone Kop car with more uniformed figures than they could comfortably hold. They all lept out, and one of them, a short man in a long leather coat, marched to the stage and began to speak. Not speaking German at all well, I could not understand much of what he said, but I could make out the repeated phrase "Fünf Minuten bis Mitternacht! Fünf Minuten bis Mitternacht! Five minutes to midnight! Five minutes to midnight!" It was all most strange. Before long, women in the crowd would swoon and faint, and the stretcher-bearers would start forward to collect them. What kind of speaker was it who could be so guaranteed to cause people to faint with his words that ambulances came along beforehand? When the man had finished speaking he strode up the aisle, and his elbow barged against my shoulder as I leant out to see him go, and he backed into me, turned away as he was to take the ovation of the crowd. He immediately grabbed my shoulder to stop me from falling, "Entschuldigen Sie, mein Herr!" he said. "Excuse me, sir!" For some years afterwards, whenever he came on in the cinema newsreels as his fame spread, I would say to the girl next to me, "Hitler once apologised to me and called me sir.""

When the evening was over Alistair Cooke shook my hand goodbye and held it firmly, saying, "This hand you are shaking once shook the hand of Bertrand Russel."
"Wow!" I said, duly impressed.
"No, no," said Cooke. "It goes further than that. Bertrand Russel knew Robert Browning. Bertrand Russel's aunt danced with Napoleon. That's how close we all are to history. Just a few handshakes away. Never forget that."