The flotilla surgeon occupies a neighboring table. He too has a special position. His brain is stuffed with a collection of the most astounding obscenities. Hence he is known concisely as “the filthy pig.” Nine hundred and ninety-five years of the thousand-year Reich are already gone, in the opinion of the flotilla surgeon, an opinion broadcast whenever he sees fit or is drunk.
At thirty, the surgeon enjoys universal respect. On his third sortie against the enemy he took over command and brought his boat back to base after the commander had been killed during a concentrated attack by two aircraft and both lieutenants lay badly wounded in their bunks.
“Somebody die around here? What is this, a wake? What kind of place is this anyway?”
“There’s enough noise as it is,” growls the Old Man, taking a quick swallow.
Monique must have grasped what the surgeon was saying. She brings the microphone close to her scarlet lips as though she means to lick it, flourishes a bundle of violet-colored ostrich feathers with her left hand, and bawls in a smoky voice, “J’attendrai—le four et la nuit!”
The drummer uses his brushes to evoke a sexy whisper from his silver-mounted drum.
Shrieking, sobbing, moaning, Monique acts out the song with contortions, undulating her opulent blue-white, shimmering breasts, valiantly exercising her derriere and performing a lot of hocus-pocus with the feather fan. She holds it behind her head like an Indian war bonnet and taps her pouting lips rapidly with the flat of her hand. Then she draws the fan up from behind and between her legs—le four et la nuit”—and rolls her eyes. Tender stroking of the feathers, bumps and grinds toward the feather bush—drawn up again from below—hips swaying. She pouts again and blows on her fluttering prop.
All at once she winks in the direction of the doorway, over the heads of the men around the tables. Aha, U-boat Commander with his adjutant! This beanpole topped by a diminutive schoolboy’s face is hardly worth more than a brief wink. He doesn’t even give a smile of recognition, but glares around as if looking for another door to escape through unobserved.
“A highly distinguished visitor come to consort with the mob!” roars Trumann, an especially recalcitrant member of the old guard, in the midst of Monique’s sobbing—“…car l’oiseau qui s’enfuit.” He actually staggers over to the Commander-in-Chief’s chair. “Come on, you old Aztec, how about charging the front line? Come on, here’s a good spot—orchestra seat—the whole landscape from underneath… not interested? Well, one man’s meat is another man’s…”
As usual, Trumann is dead drunk. His spiky mop of black hair is covered with a drift of cigarette ash. Three or four butts have become entangled in it. One still smoldering. He may burst into flames at any moment. He wears his Ritterkreuz back to front.
Trumann’s boat is known as “the barrage boat.” Since his fifth patrol his bad luck has become legendary. He’s seldom at sea for more than a week. “Crawling back on knees and nipples,” as he calls it, has become a regular routine for him. Each time he has been caught during his approach to the theater of operations: bombed by flyers, harried by depth bombs. And there were always malfunctions—broken exhaust pipes, ruptured compressors—but no targets. Everyone in the flotilla is privately amazed that he and his men can bear up under their totally disastrous lack of success.
The accordion player stares over his folded bellows as if he’d seen a vision. The mulatto is cut off somewhere around the level of his third shirt button by the moon of his big drum: either he’s a dwarf or his stool is too low. Monique makes her roundest and most carplike mouth and moans into the microphone. “In my solitude…” And Trumann leans closer and closer to her until he suddenly shouts, “Help—poison!” and throws himself over backward. Monique falters. He thrashes about, then starts to get up again and bellows, “A real flame-thrower—she must have eaten a whole string of garlic—god-oh-god-oh-god!”
Trumann’s Chief, August Mayerhofer, appears. Since he wears the German Cross on his jacket, he’s known as “August of the Fried Egg.”
“Well, how did it go in the whorehouse?” Trumann yells at him. “Are you all fucked out? It’s good for the complexion. Old Papa Trumann certainly ought to know by now.”
At the next table they’re bawling in chorus: “0 thou We-es-sterwald The flotilla surgeon is leading the halting choir with a wine bottle. There is a big round table close to the podium, which by tacit consent is reserved for the old guard; in the leather chairs around it only the Old Man’s friends and contemporaries sit or sag, more or less drunkenly: Kupsch and Stackmann, “the Siamese Twins”; Merkel, “the Ancient”; Kortmann, “the Indian.” They are all prematurely gray, naval gladiators from the word go, who act nonchalant although they know better than anyone what their chances are. They can loll for hours at a time—almost motionless. On the other hand, they can’t lift a glass without shaking.
They all have more than half a dozen difficult missions behind them, they all have been through the worst kind of nervous tension, refined torture, hopeless situations that swung around to their advantage by some sheer miracle. Not one of them who hasn’t come back with a wrecked boat, against all expectation—upper deck demolished by aircraft bombs, conning tower rammed in, stoved-in bow, cracked pressure hull. But each time they did come back, they were standing bolt upright on the bridge, acting as though the whole mission had been mere routine.
To act as though everything were a matter of course is part of the code. Howling and chattering of teeth are not allowed. U-boat Headquarters keeps the game going. For Headquarters, anyone who still has a neck and a head and all four extremities attached to his torso is all right. For Headquarters, you’re certifiable only when you start to rave. They should long ago have sent out fresh, unscathed men to replace the old commanders in the front-line boats. But, alas, the unscathed novices with their unshaken nerves happen to be far less competent than the old commanders. And the latter make use of every conceivable trick to keep from parting with an experienced watch officer who is really ready to become a commander.
Endrass should never have been allowed to put to sea again in his condition. He was completely done in. But that’s the way it goes: U-boat Headquarters has been struck by blindness. They don’t see when someone is on his last legs, or they don’t want to see. After all, it’s the old aces who brought in the successes—the contents of the little basket for special communiqués.
The combo takes a break. I can again hear fragments of conversation.
“Where is Kallmann?”
“He certainly won’t be coming!”
“You can see why!”
Kallmann came in the day before yesterday with three victory pennants on his half-raised periscope—three steamers. He sank the last one, in shallow coastal waters, with his cannon. “It took more than a hundred rounds! We had a heavy sea. With our boat hove to, we had to shoot at an angle of forty-five degrees. We got the one before that at about 19.00 in the twilight—an underwater shot. Two hits on a twelve thousand gross registered tons—one miss. Then they were after us. Tin cans for eight long hours. They probably used up everything they had on board!”
With his hollow cheeks and his wispy blond beard, Kallmann looked like Jesus on the cross. He kept twisting his hands as if each word were being dragged out of him.
We listened intently, disguising our uneasiness with an exaggerated show of interest. When would he finally ask the question we were dreading?
When he had finished, he stopped twisting his hands and sat motionless, palms pressed together. And then gazing past us over his fingertips he asked with forced indifference, “What news of Bartel?”
No answer. The Commander-in-Chief let his head nod fractionally.
“So—well, I guessed it when there was no further radio contact.” A minute of silence, then he asked urgently, “Doesn’t anyone know anything at all?”
“No.”
“Is there still a chance?”
“No.”
Cigarette smoke hu
ng motionless in front of their mouths.
“We were together the whole time at dock. I ran out with him too,” he said finally. Helpless, embarrassed, It made you want to vomit. We all knew what close friends Kallmann and Bartel were. They always managed to put to sea together. They attacked the same convoys. Once Kallmann had said, “It stiffens your spine if you know you’re not alone.”
Bechtel comes through the swinging door. With his pale, pale hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows, he looks half scalded. When he is as pale as this, his freckles stand out.
A big hello. He’s surrounded by a group of the younger men. He has to stand them drinks, because he’s been “reborn.” Bechtel has gone through an experience that the Old Man described as “really remarkable.” After a fierce pursuit with depth bombs and all sorts of damage to his ship, he surfaced in the gray of dawn to find a hissing canister lying in front of his cannon on the upper deck. The corvette still in the neighborhood and the live bomb in front of the conning tower. It had been set to go off at a greater depth and so hadn’t exploded when it fell on Bechtel’s upper deck at two hundred feet. He immediately ordered both diesels full speed ahead and the bosun had to roll the depth charge overboard like a barrel of tar. “It blew twenty-five seconds later. So it was set for three hundred feet.” And then he had to dive again and took twenty more depth charges.
“I would certainly have brought that firecracker back with me,” Merkel shouted.
“We’d have liked to. Only we couldn’t stop that damn hissing. Simply couldn’t find the button. Absolutely hilarious!”
The room is getting more and more crowded. But Thomsen is still missing.
“Where d’you suppose he can be?”
“Perhaps he’s getting in one last quick one.”
“In the shape he’s in?”
“With the Ritterkreuz around your neck, it must give you a whole new sensation.”
During the awarding of the Ritterkreuz by the Commander-in-Chief of the U-boats this afternoon, Thomsen had stood as rigid as an iron statue. He had such a grip on himself that there was practically no color in his face. In his condition he could hardly have heard a word of the C-in-C’s rousing speech.
“He’d better look out or I’ll eat that lousy cur of his,” Trumann had muttered at the time. “The bitch is there every time he reports in. We’re not running a zoo here.”
“Toy soldier!” he now adds as the Commander-in-Chief withdraws after a manly handshake and a piercing glance. And, cynically to those in the circle, “Great wallpaper,” pointing at the photographs of the dead on the three walls, one little black-framed picture after another. “There beside the door, there’s still space for a few more!”
Already I can see whose photo is going to appear next: Bechmann’s.
Bechmann should have been back long ago. The three-star announcement is sure to be issued very soon. They took him off the Paris train stinking drunk. It required four men to get him out—the express had to wait while they did it. You could have hung him over a clothesline. Completely fucked out. Albino eyes. And that’s the shape he was in twenty-four hours before putting to sea. How in god’s name did the flotilla surgeon get him on his feet again? Probably an airplane caught him. Shortly after he cleared port, reports from him ceased. Hard to believe. The Tommies are coming in now as close as channel buoy Nanni I.
I’m reminded of Bode, the naval staff officer in Kernével, a solitary old man who used to get drunk all alone late at night in the wardroom. Thirty boats had been lost in a single month. “You could turn into a drunk, if you drank to each of them.”
Flechsig, heavy and uncouth, one of the Old Man’s last crew, throws himself into the last empty chair at our table. He got back from Berlin a week ago. Since then, he’s hardly said a word. But now he breaks out. “D’you know what this idiot monkey said to me, this dolled-up staff heinie? ‘The right of commanders to wear white caps is not expressed in any of the regulations regarding uniforms!’ I said, ‘Would respectfully suggest that the omission be rectified.’”
Flechsig takes a couple of powerful swigs of Martell from a tumbler and methodically wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
Erler, a young lieutenant who has completed his first patrol as commander, keeps opening the door so hard that it bangs against the doorstop. From his breast pocket dangles the end of a rosecolored slip. Back from leave just this morning, by afternoon he was in the Majestic waxing eloquent about his experiences. As he told it, they had held a torchlight parade for him back in his home town. He could prove it all with clippings from the newspapers. There he stood on the Rathaus balcony, his right hand raised in the German salute: a German sea hero hailed in his home town.
“Well, he’ll quiet down later on,” mutters the Old Man.
In Erler’s wake come the radio commentator Kress, an oily, intrusive reporter with exaggerated ideas of his own importance, and the former provincial orator, Marks, who now writes inflated inspirational articles on Endurance. They look like Laurel and Hardy in Navy uniforms, the radio creature tall and lanky, the enduring Marks fat and nobbly.
At their appearance the Old Man gives an audible snort.
The favorite word of the radio people is “continuously,” the “continuously increased effort” in munitions, victory statistics, will to attack. Everything must press on con—tin—u—ous—ly.
Erler plants himself in front of the Old Man and snappily invites him to a round of drinks. For quite a while the Old Man does not react at all, then he lays his head to one side as if for a shave and announces distinctly, “We always have time for a quick swig!”
I already know what comes next. In the middle of the room Erler demonstrates his method of uncorking champagne bottles with a single sharp blow of the back of a knife against the bulge in the neck. He’s great at it. The cork and the glass lip fly off without leaving a splinter and the champagne shoots up as though from a foaming fire extinguisher. I am instantly reminded of an exercise of the Dresden fire department. In front of the Opera House they had erected a steel mast with a swastika made of pipes in celebration of Reich Fire Prevention Day. Around the mast a herd of red firewagons had been drawn up. The immense square was jammed with an expectant crowd. The command was barked from the loudspeaker: “Foam, forward march!” and out of the four ends of the swastika shot the foam; it began to rotate, faster and faster, becoming a spouting windmill. The crowd went “Aaah!” And the foam gradually turned rosy, then red, then violet, then blue, then green, then yellow. The crowd applauded while an ankle-deep slime of analine spread out in front of the Opera House…
Again the door crashes open. It’s Thomsen—at last. Half supported, half pushed by his officers, he staggers in, glassy-eyed. I quickly drag up a chair so that we can take him into our circle.
Monique is singing: “Perhaps I am Napoleon, perhaps I am the King…”
I gather the wilted flowers from the table and strew them over Thomsen’s head. Grinning, he allows himself to be adorned.
“Where’s the Commander-in-Chief hiding?” asks the Old Man.
It’s the first time we realize that the C-in-C has disappeared again. Before the real celebration has begun. Kugler is no longer here either.
“Cowardly bastards!” Trumann growls, then rises laboriously and staggers off between the tables. He returns with a toilet brush in his hand.
“What the hell’s that thing for?” the Old Man bursts out.
But Trumann only staggers closer. He places himself in front of Thomsen with his left hand propped on our table, breathes deeply a couple of times, and at the top of his voice roars, “Silence in the cathouse!”
Instantly the music stops. Trumann moves the dripping toilet brush up and down right in front of Thomsen’s face and babbles tearfully, “Our magnificent, esteemed, abstinent, and unwed Führer, who in his glorious ascension from painter’s apprentice to the greatest battle-leader of all time… is something wrong?”
Trumann wallows for a few seconds
in boozy emotion before going on to declaim, “The great naval expert, the unexcelled ocean strategist, to whom it has occurred in his infinite wisdom… how does it go from there?”
Trumann throws a questioning glance around the circle, belches deeply, and starts up again. “The great naval leader who showed that English bedwetter, that cigar-smoking syphilitic… ha, what else has he dreamed up? Let’s see… has shown that asshole of a Churchill just who knows which end is up!”
Trumann lets himself sink back into his chair exhausted, and blows his Cognac breath straight into my face. In the bad light he looks green. “…we dub him knight—we consecrate the new knight! The shitty clown and the shitty Churchill!”
Laurel and Hardy force their chairs into our circle. They’re brown-nosing Thomsen, using his drunkenness to learn something about his last patrol. No one knows exactly why they spend their time trying to get interviews for their clichéd articles. But Thomsen is long past the point of communication. He stares at the two almost idiotically and simply growls as they busily put words in his mouth: “Yes, exactly right—blew up promptly—as expected! A hit just beyond the bridge—Blue-Funnel Steamer. D’you understand? No, not funny—funnel!”
Kress feels that Thomsen is stringing him along and swallows dryly. Looks like a fool with his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
The Old Man is enjoying his embarrassment and wouldn’t dream of helping him out.
Thomsen is finally incapable of taking in anything at all.
“All shit! Shitty fish!” he shouts.
I know what he means. In the last few weeks there’s been one torpedo failure after another. So many defects are no accident. There’s been talk of sabotage.
Das Boot Page 2