Sometimes it's hard to tell where a river begins. It's doubly difficult with the Danube, born of two rival sources , both trickling down the slopes of Germany's Black Forest. The first third of its nearly , 1 800 - miles journey to the Black Sea it supplies an idyllic course beside tidy villages and storybook castles. But there in another Danube River, mainly in Eastern Europe , one damaged by pollution and war . A Nato bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 destroyed industrial facilities , releasing contaminants into the water.

But the Danube had a dual personality even before the bombing . The river is playground for swimming and boating ; it is also very much a working river of fisherman, barges, power plants, and shipyards. The working river is part of a busy transportation corridor connecting the North Sea with the Black Sea through the Main-Danube Canal , but it also feeds wetlands and valuable wildlife habitats . Today people along the river are striving to reconcile these competing demands and are beginning to undo years of environmental and war damage.


        

The course of the river can be followed from Ulm, the first navigable point on the river, patrolled by graceful swans. Leaving Germany, the Danube flows eastward into Austria. The river passes castle ruins and apricot orchards that cover the banks with snowy blossoms. But no place is as identified with Danube's charm as Vienna . Vienna was hub of the Hapsburg empire, and in the 1860s , after Austria's defeat by the Prussians , Johann wrote the " Blue Danube " to cheer up his fellow Austrians. Downriver from Vienna the Danube cleaves Hungary's capital Budapest, with Pest on the left bank , commanded by the stately parliament building , Buda on the right , crowned by Castle Hill.

The contrast between Blue Danube nostalgia and reality couldn't be sharper then in Yugoslavia , which was bombed by NATO , Sitting on the Danube 47 miles upstream from Belgrade, Novi Sad suffered mightily, with an oil refinery and three bridges blown up. Further downriver , near Belgrade , the attacks crippled the city of Pancevo, destroying petrochemical plants and an oil refinery.
The 78 days of bombing left a mammoth job of cleaning up the river.