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followed by the rush of falling coal, followed by a groan. Only the nature of the groan was subject to variation.
    â€œOh, Juli-bumm, your face.” His former officers on the Kraetke stared at him as at one desecrated. “Your beard. Your moustache.”
    â€œIt’s the war. They chopped down all those expensive pine trees in Tsingtao for the war. My beard’s the same thing. They’re turning it into socks for the infantry.”
    Lauterbach sat in the saloon sipping iced beer and jawing comfortably with his former officers as dust rattled like hail against the sealed portholes. It was good to be with grown-ups again. Von Guerard was nice enough but it was hard to share a cabin with someone who regarded every day as an opportunity for achievement and growth rather than something to be simply got through intact. Losing a glorious beard was one thing, yet he was appalled to see his ostentatiously immaculate craft reduced to the fate of a common collier. It broke his heart to see the mahogany stairrails scored and pitted with grime like a miner’s face, the paintwork copiously chipped and gouged and everything defiled and cheapened. It was a world from which elegance and style had been brusquely put to flight as battleship grey had been sloshed over the whole of social life. It sent a little frisson of regret up his spine that they still called him ‘captain’ here, not ‘lieutenant.’
    And the chatter too was all of war, war, war. At least, in the cabin, von Guerard sometimes talked about sport and horses even if shy of talking of women. They were entranced by the westward thrust of the Reich’s army but worried by what the Russian peasant troops and their bayonets might be doing to their relatives in East Prussia. What else, he asked, was happening in dear old Tsingtao? The coolies were leaving, streaming out in thousands on foot, by sea, by rail. Like rats. German soldiers were driving them back at bayonet point. Bayonets again. The Austrians had scuttled their old cruiser, the Kaiserin Elisabeth , outside the harbour. There had been a run on the bank. Lauterbach was pleased to have prudently arranged the transfer of his own funds to sit snug in a dollar account in Shanghai. But the sinking of the Emden , he now learned, had already been confidently announced by Reuters. Another rumour had it that the Russian heavy cruiser, Askold , was sunk by them. Then again, they had been clearly identified fearfully fleeing from Tsingtao, flying the British flag, in the face of a lurking Japanese force blockading the harbour. In the eyes of most of the world the Emden was already a ghost-ship.
    Lauterbach cared little for such wounds on the face of truth. Wars were fought from the backside up. His crackling leather armchair was a rare treat to the rump after the Muecke-imposed austerities of the Emden. During the journey from Tsingtao, with iconoclastic zeal, the sea-puppies had ripped out the ship’s wood panelling, as a fire-risk, fed it to the boilers in proof and painted the walls a bilious green that troubled his equanimity. The measure of his stoked-up discomfort, it seemed, was to be the measure of their patriotism. Since all volatile chemicals had been diverted for military use, the paint would not dry. It dribbled and ran icontinently and formed a crusty patina of grime and human hair. Everyone had it on their hands and shoulders. Enough. He drew a mental line under this war and promptly made arrangements for the surreptitious transshipment of his wine-cellar, his library with its gentlemanly works of sepia pornography and a set of comfortable deckchairs to the Emden. Henceforth, he would make it a matter of self-respect that he should always be more at ease than his superiors.
    When he returned to the Emden , several hours later, Lauterbach was calmed and refreshed – indeed he was refreshed to the point of befuddlement. As he made his way carefully down the difficult and