This was true. We had been worried by stenches ever since we had begun to walk up the hilly street.
On the way back two small incidents occurred. The first was that Little Yeogh Wough nearly got into serious trouble by taking a photograph of half a dozen street urchins, and the second was that we passed a battalion of soldiers marching with such regularity that the whole mass of them was like one huge moving machine. We stopped and watched them go by, never dreaming of what was coming to us and to them in the very near future.
Ah, Heaven! If we could have foreseen the thing that was coming!
That afternoon the brightness of the day had gone and heavy showers of rain made me give up the idea of going ashore again. Little Yeogh Wough went, however, with his father, and when they came back two hours later he gave me one of the most perfect dark red roses that I have ever seen in my life.
"A German girl gave it to me," he told me. "I asked her for it, right straight out. We were sheltering from one of the showers under the wall of one of those villa gardens, and I saw the rose and it looked so lovely that I told father that I wished I could get it for you. Then, just as the rain was leaving off, the girl came out of the villa into the garden and I asked father to tell me what words to say in German to ask for the rose. And he told me, and I asked her. I couldn't have done it for myself. I only did it because I wanted the rose for you so badly. And she actually said: 'Ja' and gave it to me. Then she smiled and said: 'Auf wiedersehen.' I asked father what that meant, and he said it was the same as the French au revoir, or 'To our next meeting.' But I don't suppose I shall ever see that German girl again."
"No. I don't suppose you ever will."
And so he got his first German gift.
That night I wore the rose.
We had to wait about in the Kiel Canal because a ship had got stuck across one of the narrow parts of it. And the boy said:
"The Kaiser must have felt very much shut in before this canal was made. How funny it is to be on board a ship on a strip of water that's sometimes so narrow that you could have a talk with the people on the banks on either side—just as if you were on the Regent's Canal at home in London!"