Das Boot

  Twenty-third Day at Sea. The wind has picked up, and the sea has become a gigantic field of breakers. The waves don’t rise all that much, yet all of them break. This makes the sea look gray-white and ancient.

  The sky is dismal, a uniform gray cloth stretched over our heads. A sagging curtain of rain begins to fall from the gray, over to starboard. A single patch of light on the horizon glows faintly through the streaks. The wall of rain is slate-gray, with a trace of violet in it. Haze spreads out like fog on all sides. The wall is advancing slowly but directly at us, so the Commander has his oilskins and sou’-wester brought up. He’s swearing.

  We’re in the midst of a cloudburst. No longer any air. The flail of the rain raises welts on the waves, which hunch their backs under it. No more rising crests, not the slightest glitter of reflection. Only our heavily dripping bow that tears them apart and tosses spray into the air. Streams of rain and spray mix on our faces.

  The glassy green of the water has faded, the white veins have disappeared; the sea has grown older by a thousand years. It is gray, miserable, pock-marked.

  No shimmer, no color. Nothing but uniform, soul-destroying gray.

  The bridge guards stand like blocks of stone beneath a sky that is turning itself inside out. Six of us try to penetrate the wall of water; no point in using glasses now—they’d mist over immediately. It’s as though the rain were trying to drown us.

  Only toward evening does the wild fury of the downpour abate. It’s night before it stops entirely.

  Twenty-fourth Day at Sea. In the control room. The Old Man is talking half to me and half to himself. “Strange how little time one side or the other can hold the upper hand thanks to a new weapon. Never lasts more than a few months. We invented the tactic of hunting in packs, and the enemy built up their defense system. Which also worked. Prien’s boat, Schepke’s, Kretschmer’s, all of them were lost against a single convoy. Now we have the new acoustic torpedo with its homing head, and the Tommies are already towing those damned rattling buoys along on a long steel cable—they divert the torpedoes because they make more racket than the screws. Action and counteraction—always the same. Nothing stimulates the brain cells like a desire to wipe out the other side.”

  For more than three weeks now we have been voyaging into emptiness. The uniform days flow one into another.

  The boat drew a blank on its last patrol. Returned to base after a long, exhausting voyage without having fired a single torpedo. “The bastards seem to be avoiding us,” says the Second Watch Officer, the only one who still keeps up an attempt at the odd joke. It takes us a half day to traverse the attack area assigned to us and reach its northern border. “Time to change course!” the helmsman shouts up through the open hatch.

  “Hard a-port! New course one hundred eighty degrees!” The Watch Officer.

  Slowly the bow swings through a semicircle of the horizon. The wake curls like a snake, and the sun, distorted into a white patch by multiple layers of cloud, pushes itself to the other side of the boat.

  “Heading one hundred eighty degrees!” The voice of the helmsman again.

  The course indicator now stands at 180 degrees. It was at 360 degrees. Otherwise nothing has changed.

  Not much to see from the bridge. The sea has dozed off. Only a few ruffles on a tired, elderly groundswell. The air is motionless. The clouds stand still like captive balloons.

  Bone-weary, I still find myself keeping a watchful eye on the stolid progress of the minute hand around the dial above the galley door. Finally I fall into a semi-trance.

  The thin shell of sleep is suddenly ruptured: the alarm bell shrills. The floor is already tilting.

  Sleep-tousled, the Chief crouches behind the hydroplane operators. The Commander stands motionless beside them. The navigator, who gave the alarm, is holding fast to the ladder. He’s still breathing hard from the effort of sealing the hatch.

  “Raise the stern—forward ten—aft fifteen—up slowly!” the Chief orders.

  “A shadow—at ninety degrees—quite distinct!” the navigator finally explains to me.

  The sound gear is in action; the operator’s head is thrust forward into the gangway. His eyes are blank as he slowly searches the water for noises. “Sound of screws at seventy degrees—receding!” And after a while, “Sounds growing weaker—fading out!”

  “That’s how it goes,” the Commander says, unmoved, and shrugs slightly. “Course one thirty degrees!” and he disappears through the circular hatch. So—we’ll remain submerged for a while.

  “Thank god, it’s quiet!”

  “Some fast vessel sailing unescorted—not a chance when it’s this dark.”

  I’m hardly back in my bunk when I pass out.

  “Enemy convoy in sight—UX.”

  “Convoy in sight Square XW, one sixty degrees, speed ten knots—UX.”

  “Enemy following zigzag course around fifty degrees. Speed ten knots—UW.”

  “Convoy traveling in several columns. Surrounded by escort vessels. Course twenty degrees. Speed nine knots—UK.”

  The radio spares us nothing. We know everything that’s going on in the Atlantic theater of war. But we can’t reach a single one of the reported convoys; they’re all in the North Atlantic. We’re positioned much too far to the south of them.

  “If it goes on this way, we’ll still be at sea come Christmas,” Zeitler says.

  “Well, what of it?” Rademacher answers. “That won’t cause any embarrassment. We’ve got a Christmas tree on board.”

  “Come on!”

  “I’m telling you! It’s an artificial, collapsible thing—like an umbrella—in a cardboard carton. If you don’t believe me, go ask Number One.”

  “Typical of the Navy!” says Ensign Ullmann. Then to my surprise he starts telling us about his Christmas experiences. “Someone always died at Christmas in our flotilla. New Year’s Eve, too. In 1940 it was a bosun. It was around twelve o’clock on Christmas Eve when he played his little joke. Wanted to be a daredevil; put his automatic to his forehead and actually crooked his finger around the trigger while we stood and gaped at him. Of course, he had taken the magazine out beforehand. Only he wasn’t smart enough to remember there was already a shell in the barrel—and bang—off flew the back of his skull. Made one hell of a mess!”

  The shattered skull reminds Hinrich of something. “Once we had a fellow who blew his whole face off—New Year’s Eve. That was when I was still serving on a patrol boat. We were all dead drunk. At twelve o’clock on the dot one of the petty officers came on the bridge carrying a kind of hand grenade. Those miserable things were still around at that time and you lit them exactly like a firecracker, with a fuse. He stood beside the railing and put a cigarette to the fuse and blew on it just right. Only then he got his paws mixed up: he hurled the cigarette into the drink and went on holding the grenade right in front of his snout. Of course, it exploded—that was some mess too!”

  I don’t want to listen to any more.

  In the U-room, instruction for petty officers is in progress again. First Watch Officer lecturing. “…fell in action against a convoy…”

  The Old Man rolls his eyes and looks furious.

  “’Fell’? That’s another of those damn fool expressions. I suppose he tripped? I’ve seen thousands of photos of soldiers who ‘fell.’ Well, they didn’t look so good after they ‘landed.’ Why doesn’t anyone have the guts to say that the man they’re talking about was drowned? I get ill when I come across all the nonsense they churn out about us.”

  He pushes himself to his feet and heads for his cubbyhole; comes back holding a news clipping. “Got something here—kept it especially for you.”

  "'Well, First Watch Officer, that's it! Another five thousand gross registered tons. But tomorrow is my wife's birthday. We should do something to mark it, Honor our womenfolk! We must never forget that!' The First Watch Officer grins understandingly and the Commander lies down on his hard couch to make up for lost sleep. But hard
ly an hour has passed when the First Watch Officer shakes him awake. 'Birthday steamer, Herr Kaleun!' The Commander shoots to the bridge: everything happens very fast. 'Tubes one and two stand by for underwater shot!' Both torpedoes are hits. 'At least six thousand gross registered tons!' says the Commander. 'Is Herr Kaleun satisfied with his birthday present?' 'Very!' replies the Commander. And the face of his First Watch Officer is transfigured with joy."

  The Old Man starts cursing again. “And that’s the kind of stuff people are given to read. Incredible.”

  Wherever I look_nothing but clenched teeth, faces dull with disgust, irritation, discontent.

  Almost impossible to imagine there’s still dry land somewhere. Houses. Pleasant rooms. Lamps. The warmth from the stove.

  The warmth from the stove. Suddenly I catch the smell of baked apples, wafting through the iron grating of the green stove that reached to the ceiling in our living room at 28 Bahnhofstrasse. There were always baked apples at this time of year. I inhale their sweet, spicy smell; I juggle one—hot, hot, hot—rejoicing in the play of color of the burst skin: smooth, gleaming, polished. Apples from our own trees, the kind with red streaks on a yellow background; at the center of the red rays is the blossom. It looks as if transparent red lacquer had been dripped over each one.

  “Nice here. No mail, no telephone,” the Old Man remarks suddenly, sitting down on the leather sofa beside me. “Well-ventilated boat, handsome wood veneer, open house. On the whole we’ve made out pretty well.”

  “…horse shit,” says the Chief, appearing like a jack-in-the-box. “He’s certainly made out all right, hasn’t he? And he doesn’t have to worry about promotion any more—he’s even allowed to smoke.”

  The Old Man is thoroughly disconcerted.

  Meanwhile the others have assembled around the table for the daily squeezing of lemons, a self-imposed task that little by little has assumed the character of ritual. We are haunted by images of the devastation that can result from a lack of vitamin C. I see the circle around the table as hideous, toothless ghosts painfully gumming hard crusts of bread: that’s scurvy.

  Everyone has his own method of downing lemon juice. The Chief first cuts the fruit in two, systematically pierces the juice cells in each half as though expecting to spend the whole evening at it, then sticks a small piece of lump sugar into each of the halves and sucks the juice noisily through the sugar. No regard for etiquette.

  The Second Watch Officer has hit upon a particularly striking procedure. He squeezes the lemon juice into a glass, mixes it with sugar and then adds a dash of condensed milk. The milk curdles immediately and the whole thing looks loathsome. It makes the Old Man shudder every time, but the Second Watch Officer pays no attention. He proudly names his drink “The U-boat Special,” inquires if the rest of us are jealous, and then slowly swallows the concoction, rolling his eyes in ecstasy.

  The Second Engineer is the only one who takes no trouble at all. He follows the vulgar practice of sinking his healthy teeth into the two halves and eats the pulp along with the juice.

  The Old Man watches him with obvious disapproval.

  I can’t get over the Second Engineer. At first I decided he was simply obstinate. But now I know that he’s just a man devoid of natural sensibility and equipped instead with a hide like an elephant’s. He plays up his imperturbability and calm, emphasizes his strength of character, when he’s nothing but dull and thick-skinned. Also he’s very slow to think and just as slow to act—mentally and physically the exact opposite of the Chief. God knows how he happened to hit on becoming an engineer, and how—given his ponderous ineptitude—he wangled his way through the courses and examinations.

  That’s the difference between him and the Old Man: the Old Man pretends to be ponderous and indolent—while the Second Engineer really is.

  For a while we all concentrate on our lemons. As the squeezed or sucked-out halves in the middle of the table turn into a mountain, the steward appears and with a sweeping gesture of his arm collects them all in his garbage pail. Then he mops up the vitamin-rich juice with an evil-smelling rag.

  The ship’s day still has about six hours to run. Our little gray cells are on vacation. We simply sit and vegetate—like old-age pensioners on a park bench. Actually all we lack are walking sticks to lean on.

  The Second Watch Officer has immersed himself in French newspapers. He makes a practice of reading them all the way through, including the advertisements. This time he’s come across an item he can’t understand. Over a photograph of five girls is a large headline stating: “On a couronné les rosiêres.” It has to do with the bestowal of a prize founded by a now-deceased lady of Nancy for virtuous daughters of that city. I have to translate the whole article, including the songs of praise to the virtue of the five chosen virgins. There is a touching description of how the young ladies made a pilgrimage to the cemetery where the founder was buried and adorned her grave on the Sunday when the prizes were given out.

  “How much per capita!”

  “Two hundred francs apiece.”

  The Second Watch Officer is dumbfounded. “That’s only about ten marks, isn’t it?” It takes him some time to draw the obvious conclusion. “It’s crazy. If the ladies had forgotten about their virtue, they’d have shown a much tidier profit…”

  “Nicely put.”

  There is a real library on board. In a locker on the side wall of the Commander’s cubbyhole. But it’s far less popular than the detective stories strewn around in the bow compartment. They have covers with bloodthirsty scenes and titles such as The Black Cotton Noose, Shot in the Back, Three Shadows at the Window, Expiated Sins, The Innocent Bullet. Most of them have been passed from hand to hand so often that the covers are in rags and the greasy pages are coming apart at the seams. As of now, seaman Schwalle holds the record. On the last cruise he’s said to have got through twenty of them; this trip he’s already up to eighteen.

  Twenty-seventh Day at Sea. A radio signal comes in. “To Wolf Pack: Assume new advance patrol position. Course three hundred ten degrees. Speed seven knots. Advance position will be reached on twenty-third at 07.00—BdU (Donitz).” This means a new course, otherwise no change.

  A voice from the radio, “…unyielding martial spirit…”

  “Shut it off!” The Chief shouts so loud that I jump.

  “It seems as if they’ve got the hang of it now,” says the Old Man and looks at me grimly. “Just read through the last radiograms. ‘Dive to escape flyers—forced away—contact lost—dive to escape destroyers—depth charges.’ Always the same story. It’s beginning to look as if the balance has swung their way. I’d hate to be in the BdU’s skin right now. The Greatest Field Marshal of All Time, old Adolf, will make mincemeat out of him if nothing comes through soon for the special announcement basket.”

  “Well, after all, the balance can swing both ways.”

  The Old Man looks up. “Do you really believe… ?”

  “Believe—sounds too much like church.”

  But the Old Man won’t allow himself to be provoked.

  “Where exactly are we?” Frenssen the diesel mechanic mate asks as he comes off duty into the control room.

  “Almost off the coast of Iceland.”

  “Well, what do you know? And I thought we were close to America.”

  I can only shake my head in amazement: typical of an engineroom man. They don’t give a damn where the boat is operating. It’s the same on all ships: engine-room people mend and tend their diesels and motors and don’t care whether it’s day or night. They shy away from fresh air and are baffled by the real sailors.

  Our little seafaring band is riddled with caste divisions. The two main ones are the sailors and the engineers. Upper deck and lower deck. Below decks is subdivided into electricians and diesel men. In addition, there’s a control-room caste, a torpedo mechanics’ caste, and the small select caste of radio and sonar men.

  It comes out that the bosun has some cans of pigs’ feet hidden
among his supplies. Plus some cans of sauerkraut. The Commander immediately orders a feast for the next day. “About time, too!” is all he adds.

  At noon the steward comes in with the steaming dishes, and the Commander’s face lights up as if this is Christmas dinner. He leaps to his feet in anticipation, sniffing the fragrant steam that rises from the rose-gray mound of pork on a great aluminum platter with the jagged bones and white cartilage showing. The huge pieces are garnished with slices of onion and pickle and arranged in the proper way—on a bed of sauerkraut.

  “Beer wouldn’t be bad with this,” hints the Chief, knowing perfectly well that only a single bottle per man is on board, to be opened after a victory. But the Commander seems ready for anything today. “Must celebrate holidays as they come. A half bottle of beer per man—that’s one full bottle between every two men!”

  The news is flashed to the bow compartment and a roar goes up. With a sharp jerk on the hinge of a locker the Chief opens the three bottles that come to the Officers’ Mess, and even before we can seize our glasses, thick white froth streams out of the bottlenecks, like foam out of a fire extinguisher.

  “Prost!” the Commander lifts his glass. “Here’s to the end of this damn frigging around!”

  The Chief drains his glass at a single gulp and tilts his head right back to catch the last drops. Then he licks the foam from the inside of the rim and smacks his lips. He concludes with groans of sheer pleasure.

  When the bare bones of the feast have been carried away, the steward appears once more. I can’t believe my eyes. He’s bearing a large cake covered with black chocolate icing.

  The Commander has the cook summoned immediately. The cook looks confused but is ready with his excuse: the eggs had to be used; otherwise they would have gone bad.