A phenomenon that has often preoccupied me as a writer of narrative non-fiction – the work I mostly do when I’m not writing this column – is the way in which the world continually produces metaphors of such domineering obviousness that, were they to appear in a fictional text, a reader of any discernment would view them as disastrously heavy-handed. It’s a phenomenon related in my mind to the way the astonishing sunsets we often see in this part of the world – vast and spectacular displays of luminescent reds, oranges, bruised indigos – would appear simply gaudy and tasteless if faithfully reproduced by even the most skilled of painters. Reality is an ongoing phantasmagoria of the kind of absurd and vanishingly unlikely events that, if we encountered them in a film or novel, would severely imperil the suspension of disbelief, and would seem poorly judged.

An example of the phenomenon presented itself this week in the form of news that, after a summer of extreme heat and low precipitation across the Continent, the Danube’s water levels have sunk so low that dozens of wrecked Nazi warships, along with a variety of other second World War-era artillery and impedimenta, have emerged from its former depths. These ships have lain at the bottom of the Danube on the Serbian-Romanian border since 1944, when the Soviets forced the Nazis to retreat westward. Elsewhere along the Danube, motorbikes and other wartime remnants have been recovered. In an effort to slow the advance of the Red Army, the Germans scuttled much of the Black Sea Fleet, leaving some 200 naval vessels sunk in the riverbed of the Danube, many of them still bearing live ammunition and ordnance.

And so we have this lurid........

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