An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  He massaged his temples. Could there be a lonelier time than four in the morning? Maybe three in the morning. Why had he joined the navy? If they made it back to Germany he would never set foot on a ship again, never go farther than ten meters from land; give up swimming. He pulled himself upright. To hell with the navy. To hell with the storm. To hell with everything. The officers’ steward rapped again. “Ten minutes, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  “Ja, ja.” No choice in the matter, must make the legs move. It was a courtesy to relieve the watch ten minutes early.

  Max stepped into the passageway that ran through the officers’ quarters, quiet at this time of night, pale blue in the gleam of the nightlights. Fumbling for a moment, he buttoned his heavy bridge coat and made his way toward the main companionway, staggering like a drunk. Going out on deck would be suicide in a storm like this; he climbed the interior ladder to the bridge, clinging tightly to the handrail as the ship bucked beneath him.

  The wind howled around the navigating bridge, and even here, in the enclosed section, Max could barely hear. Gerhard gave him a weary smile. A four-hour watch exhausted a man in these conditions. The constant giving at the knees tired your legs and made you feel like you had been mountain climbing. This high in the ship the motion was even more pronounced. Just keeping your feet was hard enough; paying attention to your duties, almost impossible.

  Max lurched to the starboard binnacle, grabbed hold. He saluted Gerhard. “Sir,” he said, almost shouting, “Wachoffizier Brekendorf reporting.”

  Gerhard returned the salute. “We are proceeding northwest by north, steering a compass heading of three three zero. Wind is out of the northeast by east coming from zero six zero degrees at fifty knots. Making turns for twelve knots. Engines two, three, four, and six are on line.”

  Langsdorff had them heading perpendicular to the wind, the force of the gale striking the ship all along her starboard side. This explained why they were shipping so much green water to starboard and constantly rolling thirty-five degrees to port, then whipping back on an even keel for a moment, only to do it again. And again. Even Max began to feel queasy. Normally a captain would position his ship bows on into the wind with just enough power to maintain steerageway and ride it out. Since the bow was the strongest part of the ship, this method had been used by mariners for centuries. Instead, Langsdorff proceeded at his best speed with the storm abeam, which exposed the starboard side of Graf Spee to the full fury of the gale, creating the harshest conditions for the men—the ship rolling and plunging like a porpoise. It would have been easier on the men to ride the storm out hove to, but Spee could not afford that luxury. They had to proceed northwest by north to make their rendezvous with Altmark.

  “Ship is battened down,” Gerhard continued. “Main batteries only are manned. Captain is on the bridge.”

  Max turned. Langsdorff was wedged in the back corner, buttoned tightly into his bridge coat, a glowing cigar jutting from his mouth.

  Max came to attention and saluted. “Sir, I relieve you.” Gerhard saluted in return. The relief crew assembled behind Max. Max and Gerhard initialed the logbook. Formalities completed, the men moved to their posts, replacing the exhausted bridge messengers and telephone talkers.

  The only light on the bridge came from the illuminated instrument dials—the two chest-high compasses and the smaller gauges giving speed, wind direction, engine revolutions, depth of the water. Max clung to one of the compasses, squinting in the pale green glow. He waited for the right moment, then moved to the center of the bridge, grasping the handrail that ran underneath the wide, square portholes, which showed nothing but black outside. Rain drummed loudly against the heavy glass. Beneath him, the deck shuddered as the ship pounded into the waves.

  “Weather officer believes we are on the edge of a vast storm but should be through by tomorrow.”

  Max turned. The captain had come up beside him. “I hope so, sir,” Max said. “But this will delay our rendezvous with Altmark, yes?”

  Langsdorff nodded, then leaned in close. “By a day, but it cannot be helped. The sea has other plans, as you can feel.”

  “And where do we meet Altmark, sir?”

  “Off the estuary of the Rio Plata. We will try to pick up an outbound British convoy after we resupply. Then home by Christmas,” Langsdorff said, smiling at the last remark.

  Max turned to the captain. “Home by Christmas, Herr Kapitän, would be the best present we could have.”

  “I’m certain all aboard agree with you, Maximilian, myself most of all.”

  Langsdorff said nothing else, only stared into the darkness. Max scanned the instrument dials. He had little to do with the captain exercising direct command on the bridge, especially with a crew so well trained as that of Graf Spee. The men knew their jobs and performed them with little prodding from the officers.

  The last two hours of night were a vigil, weary and long, Max’s body constantly tensed against the motion of the ship. To let go of the handrail was to be flung to the deck, which happened twice to one of the bridge messengers. Dawn broke, revealing vast mountains of water heaving around them. Wind caught the wave tops and blew the spray against the ship, rattling the vessel as if striking the hull with chains. Graf Spee would rise to the top of one gray-green mountain, then down, down, Max holding fast, till the ship buried her prow into the sea, shipping water in a torrent to the foot of the bridge. Just when it seemed as if she might not rise again, Spee would drag herself out of the trough and climb to the top of another wave, her sides streaming water like a hunting dog coming out of a pond.

  Sun hit the waves, and the sea laid bare the insignificance of the ship. In the months since he had come aboard, Max had always thought of her as a fortress—stout and strong, armored against her enemies by the finest Krupp steel—so large that young sailors often lost their way when first aboard. But one could hardly maintain that illusion now—a fortress wasn’t thrown about like a woodchip in a stream. So Graf Spee labored through the storm, the marching waves pounding her to starboard in a relentless parade, at one point rolling her so violently to port that even Captain Langsdorff lost his footing and went sprawling across the bridge.

  Still, Spee could not turn bows on into the wind and ride out the storm, for even now the British would be plowing into the gale, drinking endless cups of tea, cursing the weather and the Germans. Graf Spee was the most wanted ship in the South Atlantic, and they would not be able to outfox the British forever. The Royal Navy knew every ocean and every sea, every wind and every current. They had charted every coastline, every harbor. They knew every merchant shipping lane. And they knew how to chase down and destroy a commerce raider. They had been doing it for three hundred years.

  Around 0700, Max fastened his oilskin and left the enclosed bridge for one of the exposed wings. Wind knocked the breath from his chest. He clung to the handrail and inched his way around to the signal post, a small platform directly behind the enclosed bridge from which the signalmen ran their flags up and down the signal mast. The wind dropped off as Spee’s superstructure formed a sort of lee.

  Max pulled his binoculars from under his coat and scanned the sea astern of the ship. A clean ozone smell, the smell of storm air, filled his nostrils. Windblown rain quickly splotched the binoculars. He licked water off the lenses, took another look, then put away the binoculars. Looking down to button the coat, he paused. Three sailors struggled with the floatplane. The plane threatened to break loose from its moorings; young, inexperienced men tried to add restraining wires to hold it fast to the catapult. Exposed to these waves, they worked without lifelines. They had not yet learned that the sea was a hard master, deadly and remorseless, unforgiving of mistakes. One of the rules drilled into every Seekadett—never go on deck in a storm without a lifeline. In a tropical storm off Florida, while on the training cruiser Emden, two cadets had ignored that advice. They were the first of Max’s crewkameraden to die.

  Max yelled at the men to get below. The wind s
natched his words and they didn’t hear.

  Max shouted again. Then his eyes widened. A giant wave bore down on them. Cupping his hands against his mouth, he bellowed with everything he had. The men, only ten meters away, did not hear.

  The wave arced. One of the sailors looked up and screamed at his shipmates. Too late. A wall of angry water hit the ship, heeled her over thirty degrees, and broke over the floatplane in a shower of spray and foam. Water ran from the deck as Spee righted herself. Two men were gone. The third hit a stanchion of the deck railing on his way overboard. He clung to it in desperation.

  “Hold on! Hold on!” Max yelled. The man did not move—no doubt injured. The next wave would take him. Max spun around, jerked open the flag locker, seized a length of manila rope. He dropped his binoculars into the locker and slammed it shut.

  Coil of rope in hand, he grasped the outer rails of the metal stairs, slid to the next landing, then vaulted the railing and dropped three meters to the teak deck. He heard the rush of water, the freight train sound of the big waves racing toward them, and dashed to the sailor—Keppler, a deckhand, all of eighteen.

  Graf Spee began to heel.

  Three times around the stanchion for a running half hitch, then Max whipped the rope around both himself and Keppler, then around the stanchion again. He looped the end around his wrists, the weight of their bodies drawing it tight. The water broke over them. Max’s breath blew from his body. His mouth opened and filled with brine. Water invaded his ears, ran up his nose. The ocean sucked at them. A shoe went but the line held taut, biting deeply into Max’s flesh. He thrashed, shaking his head violently, the water clawing at them. And then it was gone, over the side, but he and Keppler remained.

  Max retched, coughing and spitting, then drew a lungful of air. He unfastened the line and dragged Keppler, unconscious, to the foot of the bridge housing. Popping the toggles on the heavy metal door, he strained against the weight until the door swung open. He pulled Keppler inside and started puking again, acid burning in his throat. That was how the senior bridge messenger found him.

  “Herr Oberleutnant!”

  “Fetch the doctor, now!”

  Max lay in his soggy uniform on the hard steel deck, fighting to regain his breath. With the adrenaline gone, he began to tremble. Death taunted—over the side, a last scream, mouth filling with water, arms thrashing, the ship now a gray shadow, now gone. Alone in the tossing waves. He shivered at the thought.

  “Oberleutnant,” said the doctor, crouching over him.

  “See to Keppler, please, Doktor.”

  Summoned by the doctor, orderlies appeared, bundled Keppler onto a stretcher, and carried him away to the infirmary. Max wanted to tell the doctor to carry on, that he was fine and had his watch to finish, but he didn’t feel that brave. His wrists, scored by the bite of the rope, bled into little red puddles on the deck. A knot on his head ached—the wave had pounded his skull against the stanchion.

  Max leaned against the doctor—like a damned old woman, he thought—as they made their way to the ship’s hospital, tottering like drunks to the motion of the ship. Spee had a twenty-bed infirmary complete with two operating theaters as well as dental and X-ray units. As good as the Charité Hospital in Berlin, they said. With over a thousand men, thousands of kilometers from land, she had to be so equipped. Several sailors were lying in the starched white beds when Max entered, a normal complement during storms, which always brought broken bones and sprains and gashes.

  Max lay down and the doctor put a needle in his arm. A warm feeling spread through his body as the morphine took effect. He fought it for a moment, tried to concentrate, to tell the doctor that it wasn’t necessary. But it felt wonderful. He let go and allowed the drug to embrace him.

  He woke some hours later, coming slowly out of his stupor. It took him a moment to realize where he was and what had happened. The pain reminded him. The morphine had worn off and his wrists burned. Thick gauze bandages kept him from surveying the damage.

  “Guten Abend, Herr Oberleutnant,” said the orderly, coming forward.

  Max propped himself up. “What time is it?”

  “Just coming on twenty-four hundred hours, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  “My God, I slept that long?”

  “It’s the morphine, sir. It does that to everyone.”

  Max grimaced as he moved to sit up. “Keppler?”

  “Broke both legs and three ribs, Herr Oberleutnant. We gave him twice the morphine dose you received, so he’ll be out for a while. But he’s doing fine—thanks to you, sir.”

  Max shrugged.

  Dieter entered the infirmary, both arms raised in the air like a prophet. “Already your bravery is legend among the lower orders, who have begun to worship you as a god.” Max grinned. Dieter punched him lightly on the shoulder. “You are well, Max?”

  “Well enough for someone who just woke up from an opium dream.”

  “Was it good?”

  “So good I can’t remember it.”

  “Ha! Like many of my finest nights,” Dieter said. “Stitches?” he said, looking at Max’s wrists.

  “Just abrasions from the rope.”

  “That can hurt, too. You remember the time I had to hang from a rope off the balcony of that hospital room in Danzig, so the matron wouldn’t find me with Olga?”

  Max nodded. “I do remember, but I think her name was Helga.”

  “Attention on deck!” an orderly called.

  Dieter went rigid and Max sat up straight. Langsdorff entered, smiling around the cigar in the corner of his mouth. “Young Brekendorf is always trying to get himself killed,” he said.

  Max felt the color come up in his face.

  “Well done, Brekendorf. Very well done.” Langsdorff reached into his coat pocket, produced a second cigar, and offered it to Max.

  “Thank you, Herr Kapitän.”

  “Save it for a quiet moment, Oberleutnant. As you know from the radio message we received yesterday, Grand Admiral Raeder has authorized me to award one hundred Iron Crosses Second Class to members of the ship’s company who have shown a special devotion to duty. It is my pleasure to award one to you, Oberleutnant, for your actions in rescuing Seaman Keppler, and for your exemplary conduct during this war cruise.”

  “I’m honored, Herr Kapitän.”

  “It’s only what such an act deserves. The highest duty of any officer is to watch over the well-being of his men.” Langsdorff turned to Dieter. “Keeping our young friend company, Falkenheyn?”

  “I am, Herr Kapitän.”

  “I understand he might not be with us had you not helped him with Oberbootsmann Carls.”

  “Ja, Herr Kapitän. But this time he waited till I wasn’t there, so he could keep all the credit for himself.”

  Langsdorff smiled again. “Well, I bid you young gentlemen a good evening.”

  Dieter again came to attention.

  “Herr Kapitän?” Max said.

  “Ja?”

  “I wish to report for duty at my regular hour.”

  Langsdorff studied Max, taking in the bandages on his wrists and white gauze around his forehead. “If you can secure the surgeon’s permission, then you may.”

  “Thank you, Herr Kapitän.”

  “But Oberleutnant.”

  “Ja?”

  “Shave before you come on duty.”

  Max tried not to smile. “Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.”

  Langsdorff exited and Dieter produced a package of cigarettes, Murattis at that, hard to come by these days and not something Dieter shared readily. He took one for himself and then offered the rest of the package to Max.

  “He’s right, you know,” Max said. “I don’t think Carls and I would have made it off that freighter if you hadn’t come back for us.”

  Now it was Dieter’s turn to shrug. “I’m sure you would have managed.”

  “Well, thanks anyway. I’ve been meaning to say that.”

  Dieter nodded through the blue haze of hi
s cigarette. “You’re welcome, El Maximo.”

  They smoked in silence for a while.

  “Captain says we’ll find a convoy off the Rio Plata,” Max said. “Then home by Christmas.”

  Dieter smiled. “A Christmas goose. Sleigh rides with the girls. Carols around the fire. Sleigh rides with the girls. Mulled cider, maybe a sleigh ride or two with the girls. A man could get used to such a life. Naturally I’d miss being awakened in the dead of night by alarm bells—perhaps I could employ someone to do that for me while I’m home.”

  Max laughed. “I’m going to get married while we’re on leave,” he said.

  Dieter raised an eyebrow. “The brave groom schedules his wedding. Again.”

  Max ignored the cut. “You’ll be the best man, of course. We’ll have the ceremony at the Lutheran church in Bad Wilhelm, then a wedding feast—perhaps at Herr von Woller’s country house.”

  “Ah, a feast. You know I do love a feast, Max, especially at a venue as auspicious as Castle von Woller. Very high-toned and sure to be covered by the Berliner Morgenpost. But, El Maximo, a question: has Herr von Woller agreed to speak to you yet?”

  “No.”

  “I would not wish to present myself as an expert on social etiquette among the aristocracy, my own distinguished antecedents notwithstanding,” Dieter said, putting his right hand to his chest and making a slight bow, “but might that be something you should address before the wedding? Especially if you’re planning to have the reception at his estate?”

  Max looked away. In his mind formed a double line of starched naval officers, swords held high to create an arch for him and Mareth to walk through as they left the church, his father following behind, beaming with pride. Mareth’s parents, too. If they even attended. The von Wollers were Prussian aristocrats, long associated with the Prussian Court—old family and old money, much of it from the exclusive coaling supply contract they had enjoyed with the Imperial Navy until the years before the First War. The von Wollers had not been pleased when their only daughter had announced her intention to marry the local grocer’s son. Dieter would have been a more acceptable choice, his wild behavior aside, since he was officially Dieter Freiherr von Falkenheyn, with his own listing in the Almanac de Gotha, and his mother listed as well, since she was a countess and a former lady-in-waiting to the Crown Princess of Bavaria.