Davies was preoccupied, but he lighted up when I talked of the Danish war. “Germany’s a thundering great nation,” he said; “I wonder if we shall ever fight her.” A little incident that happened after we anchored deepened the impression left by this conversation. We crept at dusk into a shaded back-water, where our keel almost touched the gravel bed. Opposite us on the Alsen shore there showed, clean-cut against the sky, the spire of a little monument rising from a leafy hollow.
“I wonder what that is,” I said. It was scarcely a minute’s row in the dinghy, and when the anchor was down we sculled over to it. A bank of loam led to gorse and bramble. Pushing aside some branches we came to a slender Gothic memorial in grey stone, inscribed with bas-reliefs of battle scenes, showing Prussians forcing a landing in boats and Danes resisting with savage tenacity. In the failing light we spelt out an inscription: “Den bei dem Meeres Uebergange und der Eroberung von Alsen am 29. Juni 1864 heldenmüthig gefallenen zum ehrenden Gedächtniss.” “To the honoured memory of those who died heroically at the invasion and storming of Alsen.” I knew the German passion for commemoration; I had seen similar memorials on Alsatian battlefields, and several on the Dybbol only that afternoon; but there was something in the scene, the hour, and the circumstances, which made this one seem singularly touching. As for Davies, I scarcely recognised him; his eyes flashed and filled with tears as he glanced from the inscription to the path we had followed and the water beyond. “It was a landing in boats, I suppose,” he said, half to himself. “I wonder they managed it. What does _heldenmüthig_ mean?”—“Heroically.”—“Heldenmüthig gefallenen,” he repeated, under his breath, lingering on each syllable. He was like a schoolboy reading of Waterloo.
Our conversation at dinner turned naturally on war, and in naval warfare I found I had come upon Davies’s literary hobby. I had not hitherto paid attention to the medley on our bookshelf, but I now saw that, besides a Nautical Almanack and some dilapidated _Sailing Directions_, there were several books on the cruises of small yachts, and also some big volumes crushed in anyhow or lying on the top. Squinting painfully at them I saw Mahan’s _Life of Nelson_, Brassey’s _Naval Annual_, and others.