The Lion at Sea by Max Hennessy

later.
    Kelly was on watch as they anchored and Fanshawe indicated the sky. ‘Believe in omens?’ he asked.
    Above their heads was a cloud – shaped like a snake, its head erect and about to strike.
    ‘Looking directly towards England,’ Fanshawe pointed out, and as he spoke the sun set, tingeing the cloud with red.
    ‘And that,’ he added portentously, ‘is probably blood.’
    The stay in Kiel was a round of official receptions, banquets and dances, with visits from German officers stiff as ramrods who could not understand that in the British Navy men off duty did not behave to each other in the wardroom as they did on the quarter deck. For the official functions, Clarendon ’sofficers had almost to live in full dress, a costume not designed for modern life, especially in summer, and while the talk was all the time of peace, always in the background there was the knowledge that war might be near.
    The whole of German society seemed to be in Kiel in a kaleidoscope of ships and yachts, and eventually the Kaiser himself appeared through the canal, the bows of his yacht, Hohenzollern, breaking the silk ribbons across the entrance to the new locks.
    ‘Well,’ Fanshawe said thoughtfully as they watched, ‘with the new locks and the bends in the canal widened, their largest dreadnoughts can now pass directly into the North Sea. If that doesn’t make the Kaiser more cocky than he is now, nothing will .’
    As the assembled ships’ companies cheered mechanically, the Kaiser stood at the salute in admiral’s uniform on a stage built over the yacht’s upper bridge, his withered arm carefully hidden. Fanshawe’s nose wrinkled.
    ‘Bloody poseur,’ he commented.
    The imperial yacht was followed by every kind of craft possible, from racing-eights to pleasure steamers, and one boat was swamped and a few loyal Germans drowned before Hohenzollern came to anchor, to be surrounded immediately by police boats to keep the enthusiasm at bay.
    ‘We do it much better at Spithead,’ Fanshawe said with lofty disapproval.
    There were night clubs ashore and willing girls of Russian and Austrian nationality who caused Kelly’s loyalty to Charley to slip a little and the increasingly fragile memory of the girl in New York to disappear like a puff of smoke. Sports were also held for the sailors and it was noticeable that the British were defeated at almost everything, much to the disgust of the lower deck.
    ‘The bastards had preliminary contests before we arrived,’ the Master-at-Arms told Kelly. ‘Their teams are the pick of thirty thousand men.’
    German orchestras played for them and they learned German patriotic songs like ‘Was Blasen die Trompeten?’ and ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and were told that there couldn’t possibly be any war between their nations, because ethnically they were almost brothers and it was only the dirty French who were the troublemakers. To seal the friendship, the German submarine depot gave a dance, a very private dance, it was explained, where everyone would be in mess undress, and the Kaiser’s severe displeasure was being risked because they were going to dance ragtime and be allowed to sit out, without chaperones, in the rose garden of a café chantant which had been taken over for the evening.
    By this time, with a dinner and a ball ashore almost every evening, Kelly’s eyes were hanging out on his cheeks and he had been looking forward to sleep. But this seemed to be a chance worth taking and those German girls who wore French-cut clothes were very attractive. Among them was a willowy countess from Mainz who went by the nickname of the Ice Maiden, because of her striking beauty, pale skin, blue eyes and white-blonde hair. She had a reputation for frigidness, it seemed, and with the experience of New York behind him and a few sparkling Moselles inside to work up a mood of over-confidence, Kelly set out to destroy it. The result startled him. Within an hour, he had left the café chantant and