Along the Danube, one of Europe's oldest arteries of commerce and conflict, an extreme drought has drawn the water down far enough to surface what eighty years of submersion had concealed — the iron remains of warships lost in World War Two. What the river once swallowed, it now reluctantly returns, offering historians a rare window into a forgotten theater of war while confronting engineers, ecologists, and river pilots with hazards that no chart had marked. The past, it seems, does not remain buried simply because we have moved on from it; it waits for the conditions that will bring it back.