The Lion at Sea (6 page)

Within two days, he found himself heading with the squadron for Halifax, Nova Scotia, on a cruise to show the flag in Canadian and American ports. The crossing of the Atlantic was made in a full gale, with the ship battened down and everything below deck swimming in water. Clothing hung at odd angles from the bulkheads as it swung in jerky arcs to the corkscrewing of the ship, and the atmosphere was so damp the deckheads ran with moisture and the seamen’s messes were awash with grey suds that sluiced wet clothing and mess traps about the decks.

The greater moments included a dash up the Hudson in close line ahead at seventeen knots which, while it was a fine sight, was a little unnerving to the ferries and small craft that scuttled for their lives from the sharp steel bows. There was also the ruination of a dance they gave in New York when fifteen degrees of frost so froze the hearts of the American heiresses they’d hoped to attract, they remained quite impervious to the charms of
Clarendon
’s impecunious officers.

New York was kind to them, however; almost too kind, because when the New Yorkers took them to their homes, Kelly found himself adopted by the over-eager daughter of a well-heeled businesswoman who, twice divorced, left them alone in her apartment while she went about her own affairs. Finding himself fighting off the girl across a vast bed in the early hours of the morning, he decided it wasn’t worth trying to remain a virgin.

As he woke the next morning, dazzled and a little startled by what had happened, and unable to avoid a feeling that was arrogant, bold and self-satisfied all at the same time, the girl appeared in the doorway, holding his shoes and a bottle of beer. ‘Only trouble with this, I guess,’ she said with a grin, ‘it gives you such a thirst. Better push off now because if Mother finds out she’ll start the War of Independence all over again.’

Back in England, feeling himself weather-beaten – if not as a seaman, at least as a lover – he realised that his Irish accent had almost gone and that in its place the indefinable but undeniable signs of a seafaring life that were common to all sailors were already beginning to show. For three weeks, he had written almost daily to the girl in New York, but love affairs for sub-lieutenants were pretty deathless affairs, full of adoration, broken hearts and sudden partings, with a new girl and a new broken heart in every port. At the end of it he had found he couldn’t even remember what she looked like and he began now to make plans to use his leave to visit Ireland. He was looking forward, if not to seeing his parents, at least to seeing Charley. She had never failed to write to him even when his own family had found other business more pressing, and he was feeling a strange sort of elation at the thought that she would be sixteen now, a mature young lady and, surely to God, too old to be watched day and night by her mother. Kimister, who had always known of his affection for her and had been in love with her himself since he’d met her as a cadet at Dartmouth, called it romantic. Verschoyle called it cradle-snatching. But Kimister was somewhere in the north of England now, with Verschoyle, in destroyers, something that had become a sore point with Kelly since Verschoyle had wanted a battleship and Kimister had never been sure what he wanted.

As he was brooding on it, a head appeared round the wardroom door. It was the navigator, a breezy young man called Fanshawe who was built like a house-side and had once played rugby for England. ‘Hope you’ve not made any plans, Maguire,’ he said.

Kelly turned. ‘Why not?’

‘Leave’s cancelled. Everything’s changed. We’re going to Kiel as part of a banzai party for the German naval review. You’d better survey your uniform, and if you can afford it buy full dress and a ball gown. I’ve got the order here – “Whilst in German waters, uniform will be worn ashore; for the purposes of sport, flannels will be permitted, but it is hoped that officers will see that the latter are of an immaculate nature.”’

They sailed for Kiel in a dense fog. Off the Jutland coast they had a harmless and entertaining dodging match with a group of German fishing smacks and that afternoon rehearsed cheering ship for when the Kaiser appeared. Rounding the Skaw, at the northern tip of Denmark, they made passage for the Belt and arrived at the northern limit of Kiel Bay at dusk two days 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
’s
officers 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 was alone with her at a night club where they consumed enormous quantities of caviar and champagne cup called bola, Kelly nagged all the time by a guilty feeling that he wasn’t playing fair with Charley.

That the Ice Maiden wasn’t as frigid as her reputation was proved beyond doubt when he found himself outside her apartment as dawn was breaking. Without a word, she pulled him inside, and was throwing her clothes across the room and reaching with her lips for his mouth and with long cool fingers for his shirt even before he’d managed to slam the door behind them. All his life, Kelly had worked on the principle that you could touch anything anywhere on a girl that was not covered with clothing but that the rest was verboten; but since New York all the rules had gone by the board, and shedding clothes right and left, he grabbed her hand and ran for the bedroom.

Two hours later, shakily aware how little he knew about sex, he was anxiously wondering what the next erotic item in the programme would be, when she started up with a yelp, clutching the sheet to her ample bosom.

‘My husband,’ she shrieked. ‘He returns this morning from Brussels!’

Kelly had just made his escape to the end of the street when he saw a cab appear at the other end and draw up at the apartment block, and he returned thankfully to the ship ready to foreswear all official functions for the rest of the visit.

‘Good time?’ Fanshawe asked blandly as they sipped coffee in the mess.

‘Too good.’

‘Wonder what it is about you.’ Fanshawe eyed Kelly curiously. ‘Only got to blink those long red lashes of yours and they fall in droves at your feet. What’s the technique?’

‘No technique,’ Kelly said. ‘Just enthusiasm. Seafaring’s no profession for a man who believes in personal chastity.’

Fanshawe pulled a face. ‘Well, it’s true one’s away from women so long at times one feels like a wolf howling at the moon. But be careful, young Maguire. Seamen are notoriously sentimental. Every ship has its quota of three-badge men and elderly officers who ought to know better, who’ve been caught by some cheap little tart for no other reason than that they’ve been too long nourishing sentimental dreams at sea in the long nights and fallen for the first woman who crossed their bows.

Feigning a stomach disorder, Kelly remained on board for the next twenty-four hours, but when a note appeared for him from the Ice Maiden to say that her husband had gone on to Berlin and that she planned to appear at a tea dance the following afternoon, he threw caution to the winds, and set off full of excitement, wondering what the evening might hold.

As it happened, it held nothing. He had barely got his arms round her when a German dressed in some sort of official uniform appeared and a moment later the manager climbed on to the rostrum, stopped the band and made an announcement in German. His face was grave and immediately the Germans started whispering among themselves.

‘What’s he say?’

Fanshawe translated. ‘The Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s been assassinated in Sarajevo,’ he announced.

‘Who’s the Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he’s at home? where the hell’s Sarajevo?’

‘The Archduke was the heir to the Austrian throne and Sarajevo’s in Serbia.’

‘What does that mean?’

Fanshawe shrugged. ‘It means war, old boy. I was talking to the navigator of
Hohenzollern
last night – chap called Erich Raeder – and he said the Germans were scared stiff of an unexpected incident like this setting off a war between us. This time it’s not like Agadir.’

Kelly frowned. At the time of Agadir, he’d been concerned only with keeping his nose clean to avoid the attentions of the sub-lieutenant of the gunroom, but even so he’d been well aware of
the intensity of the crisis. The Germans had sent a gunboat to protect their interests in French North Africa and all the alarm bells in Europe had started to quiver. The crisis, had been defused in the end but it had been a clear pointer to German attitudes and the deep and violent passions of resentment coursing beneath the glittering uniforms that thronged the Kaiser’s palaces.

The dancing had stopped and people were reaching for their coats.

‘You will have to return to your ship,’ the Ice Maiden said, and he saw that her face looked bleak and worried.

‘Surely there isn’t that much hurry?’

She sighed. ‘I think you will find there is,’ she said. ‘This is a black day for Germany. The Archduke represented German influence in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Emperor had even promised him recognition for his morganatic wife. All the work of fifteen years is gone.’

That evening, soon after they were aboard, a despatch boat came into the anchorage and shot past the ship’s stern. She had been to fetch the Kaiser from where he’d been taking part in a sailing race. He was seated aft, his appearance quite the opposite of
when they’d seen him going to sea in the morning. He’d left on the yacht,
Meteor,
with a large party and, as the ship had passed close astern of
Clarendon
he had seemed to be in excellent spirits. Now he was alone, his staff grouped behind him at a distance, while he sat staring silently ahead, his chin supported by one hand. That evening they heard he’d left for Berlin.

The news had clearly brought the review week to an abrupt end, and as the British ships sailed for home through the Kiel Canal, they noticed they were being energetically photographed from all angles from the suspension bridges, while zeppelins hovered above them in the sky like huge cigars, taking more pictures.

The swan song of the old navy came in a last review at Spithead for which
Clarendon
received a new commanding officer, Captain the Lord Charles Everley, a small gloomy man with sad eyes and the pendulous jowls of a bloodhound.

‘Looks as if he’s been struck by lightning,’ Kelly said. ‘Who is he? And where did he come from?’