Dieter heard him, he thought, looked up.
Max tore open his tunic, brass buttons flying everywhere, put one foot on the gunwale and moved to dive back into the water, but a burly sailor held him back—Harslager. He said nothing, only wrestled Max away from the side of the lifeboat and held him in an iron grip. Max watched as flames tore across the oil-slicked water, shooting out from the deckhouse to burn a wide circle around the ship. The blaze overtook Dieter quickly. A wall of orange fire shot up and Max lost sight of him. The screams of the burning men were so loud, they pierced the terrible roar of the inferno. Max stared openmouthed into the spreading flames. His body shook, then lost all sensation. Harslager let him go and Max collapsed in the bottom of the boat.
How long did he lie there? Three hours? Four? It made no difference. Darkness had fallen by the time his senses returned. The wind had picked up and waves lapped against the wooden sides of the lifeboat in a rhythmic, staccato slap. It was cold now and he shivered in his oil-soaked uniform.
The lifeboat itself was one of the larger ones. It could hold up to sixty men, but as Max looked around in the semidarkness he saw no more than fifteen, perhaps twenty. He tried to speak but the oil had dried his tongue. He spat, the spittle black and viscous.
“The Oberleutnant is awake,” one of the sailors announced, helping Max sit up. His entire body felt bruised; pain stabbed his right side with every breath. Must be broken ribs.
“Here, sir.” The sailor offered him a cup of water. He drank some water, swished it around in his mouth and spit it out. The rest he drank slowly, the liquid cool on the raw tissues of his mouth.
“The ship?” Max asked in a whisper.
“Sunk, just on four hours, Herr Oberleutnant.”
Max hung his head. The image of Dieter in the burning oil came back to him, and he knew that it would keep coming back. “The British cruiser?”
“Picked up the boats and tore away, sir.”
“Not us?”
“We was on the opposite side, drifted inside the smokescreen, Herr Oberleutnant. Couldn’t see us till it blew off and by then they was too far away.”
Max nodded. Silence came over the boat. The war had been a strange and bitter trip. First came the scuttling of Graf Spee, now Meteor had gone to the bottom, Dieter had been incinerated, and Max found himself adrift in a lifeboat, twelve hundred kilometers from land. He hadn’t seen Mareth in two years and would never see her again; they would never be married. He would die here, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, twenty-six years old, and no one would ever know what became of him. The telegrams Mareth and his father received would say only that Max was “missing.” That was how Oberkommando der Wehrmacht—Armed Forces High Command—listed you if your body was never found.
Hundreds of thousands of men from the First War were still listed this way, but these men hadn’t deserted and run off with French girls. They were missing because they’d been blown to bits by an artillery shell, or torn to pieces by machine-gun bullets. Some had been dragged to the ocean floor aboard a sinking ship, others had gotten a sniper’s bullet in the face and fallen into an old shell hole filled with stagnant water and covered with algae. But the telegrams never made this explicit. Mothers all over Germany had gone on for years after the Armistice in 1918, hoping that somehow their precious Fritz had not been ground into the blood-soaked mud of Verdun. They went to church every morning, praying that their wonderful boy, a gentle soul who loved his mother, a handsome boy with a smile bright as sunshine, was suffering from amnesia. Perhaps he had wandered over the Pyrenees into Spain and had been taken in by nuns. At this very moment, he could be sitting on a hillside in Catalonia, herding goats for the good sisters who looked after him.
Max wanted his telegram to tell the truth: With great regret the Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine must inform you that your husband/son/father/brother/lover—then a blank to be filled in with the appropriate name and rank, must get the rank correct—is missing in action at sea. Though his body has not been recovered, we have reason to believe that he was incinerated/drowned/ripped apart by a British shell/trapped in the engine room and suffocated/hit by the collapsing funnel of his ship/choked on viscous fuel oil/starved in a lifeboat/eaten by sharks. He gave his life for Greater Germany. The Führer and the Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine extend their deepest sympathies. Heil Hitler.
Max shut his eyes, swallowed. If he went missing, would the navy send his father and Mareth a copy of the Consolation Book for All Who Mourn for the Fallen, written especially for the bereaved by a navy chaplain? Or did loved ones get a copy only if you were officially dead?
He was the lone officer in a boat filled with mutinous sailors, but none of that mattered. Besides, he was the only one among them who could navigate. Like most lifeboats, this one was equipped with a sextant and a set of charts. He supposed they could make landfall somewhere—if the mast and sail were undamaged; if they didn’t die of hunger or thirst or sunstroke; if they didn’t capsize in a storm or get killed in any of the other numberless ways the sea had of taking men.
It was Harslager who finally spoke up, respect in his voice. “What are your orders, Herr Oberleutnant?”
Max thought. Give them hope? Be harsh? He remembered advice from somewhere: minimize the difficulties at hand. Not so easy in this case. “We sent off a signal to Seekriegsleitung before we sank,” he said.
“You did?”
“Yes, I ordered it from the bridge.”
“Did it go off before the antenna fell?” one of the young sailors asked.
“You will address me as Herr Oberleutnant,” Max reminded him firmly. “I will not overlook this again.”
The sailor stiffened, squaring his shoulders in a gesture of attention. “May I ask the Oberleutnant if the signal went off before the antenna fell?”
“Yes, it did,” Max said, with a certainty he did not feel.
“Are you sure, sir?”
Harslager said, “If the Oberleutnant says it was done, then it was done. Don’t question the officer. So we should stay here, sir?”
“Yes, I believe we should, but I don’t know for how long.”
“Do we have U-boats in the Indian Ocean, sir?”
“Yes, of course we do,” Max said, hoping they believed him.
He spent the next hour overseeing the inventory of their supplies. They didn’t have a full complement of rations because sailors had been filching them to supplement the short rations they received on Meteor. Max would happily shoot the thief who had stolen provisions from the lifeboat. Stealing emergency supplies was a far more serious crime than lifting a pair of binoculars and a few bottles of whiskey. They had enough water for six days at two pints a man, which wouldn’t be enough to ward off dehydration after the third day. There should have been more water, too. Their food supply—dried biscuits, powdered soup, and chocolate—would last seven days, Max calculated. Maybe eight. He put Harslager in charge of the rations.
When the morning sun came up it baked the greasy oil into his skin, which tightened and even split in some places, but oddly, the oil served as a kind of protective coating. Without it, the others blistered more severely. During the day they huddled under the sail for shade, but it wasn’t big enough to cover every part of them. It barely helped anyway. The canvas was thin and the sun burned them through it. Their skin peeled. Lips cracked. Pus oozed from burst blisters.
Oskar, a cook’s helper with a broken leg, was the first to die—not from the infected leg, Max thought. He simply gave up. They rolled Oskar into the sea, and though all the men were sitting or kneeling in the boat, Max ordered them to salute, something one normally did only while standing. It was late afternoon, the sunlight had softened, and with Max leading, they began to quietly sing “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden”:
I had a comrade
None better have I had
The drum called us to fight,
He always on my right,
In step, through good and bad.
; A bullet it flew toward us,
For him or meant for me?
His life from mine it tore,
At my feet a piece of him,
As if a part of me.
Max dropped his head and put his hands over his eyes so his men would not see the tears that rolled down his face, though he could not hide the trembling of his body. In his mind’s eye he could still see Dieter being incinerated by the burning oil.
His hand reached up to hold mine.
I must reload my gun.
“My friend, I cannot ease your pain,
In life eternal we’ll meet again,
And walk once more as one.”
Max thought back to his first week in the navy when he had met Dieter and how he disliked him in the beginning, thinking him a braggart and a blowhard. But over time Dieter proved to be a true comrade—Max never had a better one. Dieter was also the most audacious person Max ever knew. If there were a prank, Dieter was behind it—in the middle of a January night at the Marineschule Mürwik, they had driven a cow up sixteen flights of stairs to the very top floor of the main building. The cow would go up the stairs, but not down, so it had to be butchered right there, an act that earned the entire crew a fifteen-minute cursing out from the commandant. They glued the boots of the riding instructor to the floor, short-sheeted beds, put salt water in the water pitchers in the officers’ mess.
In song he was my comrade,
None better you could find,
His voice he dedicated
To our choir and elated
Our hearts with song and kind.
Max remembered the times Dieter spoke to him of the father he never knew; of how it felt to be the one who found his father’s body hanging from the noose, a picture he was never able to drive from his constant nightmares.
Now rest your bones, my singer,
All woe and pain is past.
Sing with the angels up above
In praise of God and His love,
My friend, at peace at last.
Soon we will also follow
You through that heavenly door,
It’s there that we shall meet again
To harmonize our old refrain,
With you, my friend, once more.
Max continued to weep quietly until exhaustion overtook him and he slept.
For those who died in the following days, there was no song, no salute—just the grunts of exhausted men as they rolled the bodies into the sea. If no breeze came up, the corpses would float beside the lifeboat far too long, the living staring into the bilge to avoid looking into the eyes of the dead. By the fifth day they were down to twelve, the youngest among them proving the most vulnerable. They’d never faced a crisis before. They gave up and they died.
Max hung on, clinging to life with a part of himself that had been a stranger but now came to the fore with a strength he had never known. If anyone survived, he knew it would be him. There was so much he still wanted: to put his hands on Mareth again, to feel her body against him, to have his life with her; to take revenge on the English for Dieter, to protect his country; and he wanted to see his father at least once more. “You would understand if you had been at Verdun,” was something his father had often said to him. And now he did understand. It wasn’t anger, or love or desire or even fear that kept him alive. It was simply his primal will to survive; an independent force within him, bound neither by logic nor by reason; a force few ever discovered in themselves. He wished it would go away.
By the ninth day his limbs were bloated, his joints ached, his skin blistered. He lay in the bottom of the boat, lips parched, tongue swollen to twice its normal size, his breath short and ragged against his broken ribs. How many alive now? Eight? Nine? Each day for the last seven he had taken a sun sight at noon and then made the men row the boat to their original position, but Max understood now that it was hopeless. The sun beat down till he wanted to scream from the pain. He desperately wanted to immerse himself in the cool sea but knew if he went into the water he would die there; he’d never have the strength to pull himself back into the boat. Then night came and, with it, cold so piercing that his teeth chattered and he curled up with the other men for warmth, all of them piled together in the bilge like dogs.
In a half-sleep, barely conscious, Max often dreamed of home, of his father, of his mother, of waltzing with Mareth on top of the Brandenburg Gate; of playing poker with the English and winning one of their ships; of Dieter burning alive in the sea; of things that had happened and things that had not. And now most of his life seemed this way: unfathomable, dreamlike, an indistinct line between what was real and what was not. But as he lay in the bottom of the lifeboat, he knew from the terrible pain of his burning skin that this travail was not a dream but a reality from a world beyond the worst nightmares he had ever known.
Two more lay dead in the lifeboat on the tenth morning, staring up with sightless eyes. One of them was Harslager. Max wondered if he should have shot him after all. It would have turned out to be merciful. Their food and water were three days gone; another two died that night.
Four men were alive the next day when U-329 found them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PARIS GERMAN-OCCUPIED FRANCE
TEN MONTHS LATER
4 NOVEMBER 1941
ON A BRILLIANTLY SUNNY DAY IN EARLY JUNE OF 1929, WHEN MAX was fourteen, his father took him aboard the warship Emden during the annual Kiel Week celebration, a maritime festival that attracted ships and visitors from around the world. Everything Max saw that day fascinated him: the clipper ships still being used to haul wool from Australia; the modern freighters going into service for Norddeutscher Lloyd; the new high-speed patrol boats built for the navy. But it was his tour of the warship that stayed with him, etched into his memory as sharply as the clean lines of Emden herself. He remembered everything: the outline of the cruiser sharp against the blue sky as she towered above the dock, the pride of the men in their starched uniforms, the order and precision of their movements, the power of the ship, the size of its guns, the coils of thick rope, the smell of the sea. On that day Max decided to become a naval officer. His desire was so strong that his father enrolled him in the Marine Bund, an organization devoted to instilling in young men the virtues necessary to make them good citizens and future officers. The closest branch was in Kiel, twenty kilometers from Bad Wilhelm, but Max’s father drove him to every meeting. The Marine Bund taught Max many of the skills he would need to win a coveted place at the Marineschule Mürwik: Morse code, signal lamp, marching, semaphore, nautical science, sailing. He mastered them as fast as anyone in the group.
Yet to become a Reichsmarine Seekadett was a difficult process—less than three percent of applicants were accepted. Candidates had to pass a series of rigorous tests, some written, some physical, some psychological. The most important was the Mutprobe, the Courage Test, which involved grasping two metal bars through which a steadily increasing electrical current was run.
When the day came for him to take the Mutprobe, Max’s will to succeed was overwhelming. Having made the commitment to become a naval officer, he dared not disappoint himself or, worse, disappoint his father. He had pledged to himself that no force on earth would be enough to make him let go of the bars; he’d repeated this fact to himself over and over as he practiced holding on to a pair of bicycle handlebars in his room, imagining the force of the current. He stood in line on the morning of the test, watching as other boys wilted in the face of their pain, whispering to himself that he would not let go, he would not let go. He did let go, but only after blacking out.
But with his life in the balance, Max would not let go at all. He remembered nothing of his three weeks aboard the U-boat, save a few hazy moments of the doctor’s care. He was fortunate U-329 even carried a doctor. Most U-boats didn’t—their loss rate was too high, the supply of doctors too limited. But U-329 had a naval physician aboard because she was on the backside of an extraordinarily long voyage—to Japan to exch
ange one thousand flasks of mercury for crude rubber, a material Germany needed desperately. The doctor tended the wounded men with the greatest of care, but only Max and a seaman first class named Klaus survived.
“I’m not sure how you managed it,” the chief physician at the base hospital in La Rochelle told Max. “Three broken ribs, dehydration, punctured lung, fracture of the upper right humerus, infected scalp, sun poisoning, exposure, starvation. You should be dead.”
Max shrugged his shoulders. Well he wasn’t dead, now was he?
But it had been a race closely won. For many weeks after his admittance to the base hospital in Lorient, his survival had been in doubt. Only after two months had passed did the doctors even allow Max to be taken by ambulance to the main Kriegsmarine hospital in Paris where the navy’s top specialists could look after him.
Mareth came as soon as she got his telegram. She arrived on his third afternoon in Paris, wearing a simple blue dress with white lilacs printed on the fabric. The fedora on her head might have been a man’s; she wore it with a feather in the band, like Marlene Dietrich.
“Max,” she whispered from the doorway. He opened his eyes and they each simply looked upon the other. Late afternoon sun poured through the window, cut by the blinds into strips of gold. Her hair was a little shorter; she smiled with her small, perfect teeth. She looked the same yet took his breath away. But he could tell from her expression that he still must look a fright, pale as death and thin as a pikestaff.
“Come here,” he tried to say, but his voice wouldn’t work. He motioned her closer with his hand.
She came to the edge of the bed, glanced down at his bony legs beneath the sheet, then back up to his face, pale and rough as the new skin grew in. “Max,” she whispered again. He reached out and she took his hand. Feeling her touch, tears came to his eyes and ran down his face.
She took his hand in both of hers and kissed his fingers. “I’m going to be fine,” he said, voice cracking. “If you help me, I’ll be fine.” He smiled as best he could and Mareth began to cry as well, but she was smiling, too. She took her hands and put them on his face, cradled his head lightly, and brushed her lips across his forehead.
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