Das Boot

  “There’s only one chance left: If he makes a big tack—a major alteration in course—it’ll lose him his head start,” says the Old Man.

  For a good half hour he sits still, frowning, his eyes half-closed. Then something suddenly brings him to his feet. His abruptness makes me jump. He must have heard something from the bridge. Even before the report comes that the steamer’s in sight again, he’s at the hatch.

  Alarm again. Dive.

  When I get to the control room he’s sitting in the tower behind the periscope eyepiece. I hold my breath. When the raging sea lets up for a moment I hear him cursing under his breath. He’s having his troubles again. How can he keep the steamer in the periscope for more than seconds at a time in an ocean like this?

  “There he is!”

  The cry from above startles me. We stand firmly braced, waiting, but nothing more is heard from above.

  The Old Man bursts into loud curses because he can’t see anything. Then orders to the helmsman. And now—I can’t believe my ears—the Old Man wants both E-motors at full speed. In this weather?

  Another three or four minutes, then, “Crash dive to two hundred feet!” We stare at one another. The control-room mate looks dumbfounded.

  What does this mean?

  It takes the Old Man to relieve our uncertainty; he climbs down the ladder, announcing, “Hard to believe—they saw us! The scow turned directly at us; they were going to ram us. What a nerve—and what a dirty trick. Incredible!”

  He struggles for self-control, and loses. Furiously he slams a glove down on the floor plates. “This filthy weather—this goddam…” Completely out of breath, he sits down on the chart chest and sinks into apathetic silence.

  I stand around, feeling embarrassed and hoping against hope that we’re not going to surface again too soon.

  Sunday. We’re proceeding underwater. The crew is probably secretly praying for bad visibility; bad visibility means staying under and staying under means peace.

  We have become haggard old men, half-starved Robinson Crusoes, though there’s no shortage of food. It’s just that nobody has the faintest desire to touch the stuff.

  The engineers have had the worst of it. They no longer get any fresh air at all. For more than fourteen days now it’s been impossible to go on deck. Admittedly, the Commander has permitted smoking in the tower, “under the spreading chestnut tree,” but the first man who tried to light a cigarette there instantly had his match blown out. The draft is impossible when the diesels are sucking air out of the boat.

  Even Frenssen has become monosyllabic. The evening “uproar in the cable locker,” the gabble and singing in the bow compartment, have also ceased.

  Only the sound room and the hydroplane stations are in action. The control-room mate and his two assistants are on duty, along with the E-motor personnel. The helmsman in the tower has to fight against falling asleep.

  One of the motors is humming. I’ve long since given up trying to figure out which one. The boat’s making five knots, much slower than a bicycle rider and yet faster than we’d be doing on the surface.

  Our lack of success weighs heavily on the Old Man, who’s getting moodier each day. He never was all that loquacious, but he’s hardly approachable at all now. You’d think from his depression that the success or failure of the entire U-boat campaign was his responsibility.

  The humidity in the boat still seems to be worsening daily.

  A vintage season for mold: it’s already taken possession of my spare shirts. It’s different from the variety that produces such spectacular growth on the sausages: less virulent, it forms big blackgreen stains instead. The leather of my sports shoes is filmed with green, and the bunks reek of it. They must be rotting from the inside out. If I leave my seaboots off for a single day, they turn greenishgray from mold and salt.

  Monday. Unless I’m very much deceived, the storm has abated a little.

  “Perfectly normal,” says the Old Man at breakfast. “No reason to rejoice. We may even have reached a fairly quiet zone—depends if we’ve hit the eye of the storm. But if we have, it’s absolutely certain that the whole performance will start up again once we hit the other side.”

  The waves are just as tall as yesterday, but the bridge lookouts are no longer being constantly whiplashed by flying spray. Now and again they can even venture to use their binoculars.

  Tuesday. I no longer have to look around for handholds whenever I want to cross the control room. We can even eat without table rails and we no longer have to brace the pots painstakingly between our knees. There’s a real meal: Navy bacon with potatoes and brussels sprouts. I can feel my appetite returning as I eat.

  After the change of the night watch, I drag myself out of my bunk. The circle of the sky framed in the tower hatch glows barely brighter than the black rim of the hatch itself. I wait a good ten minutes in the control room propped against the navigator’s table before asking, “Permission to come on the bridge?”

  “Jawohl!” The voice of the Second Watch Officer.

  Bommschtjwumm—the waves are booming against the boat, the sounds interspersed with a sharp hissing and then a dull roar. Pale braids of foam gleam on either side and blend into the darkness.

  The water shimmers green down the length of the boat, as if lit up from within, making a silhouette of the boat’s hull against the darkness.

  “Damn phosphorescence!” the Second Watch Officer growls. Moonlight floods down behind the scattered bands of mist. Now and again a star sparkles and is gone.

  “Black as hell,” mutters Dorian. Then shouts to the stern lookouts, “Look alive, you men!”

  As I climb down into the control room at about 23.00 I see two control-room mates at work over the water distributor. On closer inspection, I see they are grating potatoes.

  “What in the world?”

  Then the Old Man’s voice comes from behind me. “Potato pancakes, or whatever the things are called.”

  He takes me with him into the galley. There he asks for a frying pan and some fat. A seaman comes from the control room with a bowl of grated potatoes. Happy as a schoolboy, the Commander lets the fat melt in the frying pan, which he raises to let the hissing lard run from side to side. Then the mixture is dropped in from a height. Hot fat spatters onto my trousers. “Almost time to launch the first one!” The Old Man wrinkles his nose, inhales the rising aroma, strikes an attitude. The great moment has come. A flip, and the pancake flies through the air, performs a somersault and lands back in the pan again, perfectly flat, and golden brown.

  Each of us tears a piece from the first one that’s done and holds it between bared teeth until it’s cooled a little. “Neat, eh?” the Commander asks. Cookie has to get up out of his bunk and fetch big cans of apple sauce.

  Gradually the finished pancakes pile up into a respectable heap. It’s midnight: change of watch in the engine room. The door flies open and the Gigolo comes into the galley, smeared with oil. Disconcerted, he stares at the Commander and is about to rush on through, but the Commander shouts, “Halt! Stop!” The Gigolo freezes as though riveted to the floor.

  Now he’s commanded to close his eyes and open his mouth and the Commander stuffs in a rolled-up potato pancake, then smears a spoonful of apple sauce on top. The Gigolo’s chin gets a layer as well.

  “About face! Next!”

  The procedure is repeated six times. The watch coming on duty gets exactly the same treatment. We eat so fast that the pancakes are gone in no time. Already the bottom of the bowl is bare.

  “Next batch for the sailors!”

  It’s one o’clock before the Commander stretches and rubs the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his jacket. “Go ahead, eat it up!” he says, pushing the last pancake my way.

  Wednesday. In the afternoon I go up with the second watch. The waves have changed completely. No more mountain ridges advancing with long, unbroken slopes to windward and abrupt declivities in the lee. The ordered phalanx of waves has given way
to mad confusion; as far as the narrowed eye can see through the blowing spray, the watery landscape is in upheaval. Huge masses of water are being hurled aloft in every direction, and the waves have no lines at all. The wind must have raised a new groundswell over the old one, making mountainous rollers collide with powerful cross-seas.

  Hardly any visibility. No horizon. Only watery vapor right before our eyes. “These damn seas!” the navigator growls. The boat executes a kind of reeling dance, starting and stumbling, wavering back and forth, unable to find any rhythm at all.

  New torment. It’s turned cold again. The icy blasts of the wind cut my wet face like knives.

  Thursday. The wind’s blowing from the northwest; the barometer’s still falling. I become obsessed with the crazy hope that it’s going to rain oil—a downpour of oil to smooth the seas.

  The Commander appears at dinner, looking morose. For a long time there’s silence. Then he smiles with clenched teeth. “Four weeks! Not bad going!”

  We’ve been taking this pounding for a good four weeks.

  The Old Man strikes the table with his left fist; he takes a deep breath, holds it, finally blows it out noisily through closed lips, closes his eyes, and lets his head hang to one side: a picture of resignation. We sit around, wallowing in our misery.

  The navigator reports that the horizon is clearing, so the northwest wind must have blown away the low-hanging clouds and given us back our sight.

  Friday. The sea is a huge, green tattered quilt, shedding its white lining at every tear. The Commander tries every possible trick to protect the boat from the waves—sealing the watertight forecastle, blowing the diving cells—but nothing helps. Finally there is nothing left but to alter course.

  With aching eyes I scan holes, trenches, folds, gullies, and channels out into the distance—but there’s no darker spot—nothing! We no longer even think about aircraft. What plane could stay aloft in this storm? Whose eye could spot us in this tumult? Ve aren’t even leaving a wake, so there’s no trail to betray us.

  Once more we shoot into a valley while the next wave rises diagonally behind us. The Second Watch Officer stares at it but doesn’t duck—he just stands there stiffly as if smitten with lumbago.

  “Something there…” I hear him roar, but the sea has already hit the tower. I press my chin against my chest, hold my breath, brace myself, become a dead weight to prevent the sucking whirlpool from dragging me off my feet. Then up with the head again to search the heaving waves. One trough after the other.

  Nothing.

  “There was something there!” the Second Watch Officer shouts again. “At two hundred sixty degrees!”

  He bawls at the port lookout aft: “Hey—you—see anything?”

  Once again we are carried upward by a roaring elevator. I’m standing shoulder to shoulder with the Second Watch Officer, and there! A dark shape suddenly heaves up under the blowing spray—next moment it’s gone.

  A barrel? And how far off?

  The Second Watch Officer pulls out the plug and presses the speaking tube to his mouth. Ordering binoculars. The hatch is thrust open from below and the glasses handed out just in time to avoid the next flood. The Second Watch Officer hastily kicks the hatch shut. The binoculars remain more or less dry.

  I duck down beside him as he protects the glasses from the spray with his left hand, waiting tensely for the floating object to rise again. But there’s nothing to be seen except a tumult of white-striped hills. We’re in a deep trough.

  As we rise again, we narrow our eyes, try to concentrate.

  “Goddammit, dammit, dammit!” Abruptly the Second Watch Officer claps the glasses to his eyes. I stare at him. Suddenly he roars, “There!” No doubt about it. He’s right: there was something! And again! A dark shape. It soars up, pauses for a couple of heartbeats, and sinks out of sight again.

  The Second Watch Officer puts the glasses down and shouts, “That was actually…”

  “What?”

  The Second Watch Officer bites off a syllable between his teeth. Then he turns his face full at me and bursts out, “That—must be—a submarine!”

  A submarine? That corkscrewing barrel a submarine? Am I hearing things? He must be crazy!

  “Fire a recognition rocket?” asks the bosun’s mate.

  “No—not yet—wait a bit—not absolutely certain!” The Second Watch Officer bends over the speaking tube again. “Leather cloths to the bridge! And fast!”

  He hunches down behind the bulwark, like a harpooner on a whaling ship preparing to strike, and waits for us to be lifted up again. I fill my lungs to their bursting point and hold my breath—as if this would improve my sight as I stare out over the boiling waves.

  Nothing!

  The Second Watch Officer hands me the binoculars. I brace myself like a mountain climber in a rock chimney and swing the glasses through 260 degrees. A circular section of gray-white sea. Nothing more.

  “There!” roars the Second Watch Officer and flings out his right hand. I hastily hand him the glasses. He stares doggedly then puts the glasses down. One leap and he’s at the speaking tube. “To the Commander: submarine on our port quarter!”

  The Second Watch Officer hands me the binoculars. I don’t dare lift them because a huge wave is rising astern. I cling fast and try to protect them with my body, but the swirling flood rises to my navel.

  “Dammit!”

  The gigantic wave is taking us up. I put the glasses to my eyes, search for two to three seconds across the raging watery waste—and there I have it. No doubt about it: the Second Watch Officer is right. A conning tower. A few seconds, and it’s gone like a ghost.

  As the wave drains away the hatch flies open. The Commander pushes himself up and gets the details from the Second Watch Officer.

  “You’re right!” he mutters from under the binoculars.

  Then: “They aren’t diving, are they? Surely they can’t be. Quick, bring up the signal lamp!”

  The seconds pass, but despite three pairs of eyes, there’s nothing more to be seen. I catch a distracted look on the Commander’s face. Then a speck appears in the light greenish gray—the up-ended barrel!

  The Old Man orders an approach with both engines. What does he intend to do? Why isn’t he firing a recognition signal? Why hasn’t the other boat? Can they have missed us?

  Spray and foam are dashing heavily across the bridge, but I push myself higher. An alpine ridge with snow-covered summits is bearing down on us from astern. For a couple of heartbeats I’m petrified: The first gigantic wave could rise at the wrong moment and break over us. Then there’s a sharp hissing: It’s running past, under the boat—but the next instant it’s thrown up a huge wall in front of our eyes, as high as a house. And the next wave cuts us off from astern.

  Suddenly the tower of the other boat appears, high over the foaming crests, like a cork shot out of a bottle. The cork dances for a while, then disappears. Minutes pass, and there’s nothing to be seen.

  The Second Watch Officer is shouting—not words, just an inarticulate roar. The Commander raises the hatch cover and bellows down: “How long do I have to wait for that lamp?”

  It’s handed up. The Commander wedges himself between the periscope housing and the bulwark and grips the lamp with both hands. I brace myself against his thighs to give him more support and leverage. I can already hear him pressing the key: dot—dot—dash. He stops. That’s it. I steal a quick glance around. The other boat is gone; it might as well have been sucked into an abyss. Nothing to be seen but a watery gray wilderness.

  “Crazy! Absolutely crazy!” I hear the Commander say.

  Then, before I can spot the tower of the other boat again, there’s a flash in the heaving gray: A white sun glares at us through the flying spray, goes out, glares again: dot—dash—dash. For a while, nothing; then more glare in the general chaos.

  “That’s Thomsen!” roars the Old Man.

  Braced at an angle, I hang onto his left thigh with all my strengt
h; the Second Vatch Officer is now beside me, hanging onto the right. Our lamp is in action again. The Commander is sending a message, but I have to keep my head down, so I can’t see what he’s tapping out. However, I can hear him dictating loudly. “Maintain—course—and—speed—we—will—come—-closer…”

  A mountain of water greater than any we’ve seen is overtaking us. White spindrift whirls from its crest in plumes like clouds of powdered snow. The Commander hands down the lamp and quickly lowers himself, using our shoulders for support.

  My breath is cut short. The roaring and hissing of this four-story wall drowns out the noise of all the others. We press our backs against the forward bulwark. The Second Watch Officer has his forearm in front of his face for protection, like a boxer.

  No one has eyes for the other boat. We stare at this gigantic wave that is approaching us with unearthly deliberation, heavy as lead, slowed down by its own monstrous bulk. On its back the foam glints wickedly. The nearer it comes, the more it swells, rising higher and again higher above the gray-green tumult. Suddenly the wind ceases. Little waves splash aimlessly around the boat. Then it dawns on me: This father of all waves has thrown up a great barrier against the storm. We are in its lee against the wind.

  “Hold hard!—Watch out!—Duck!” roars the Commander at the top of his voice.

  I shrink down still farther, tense every muscle so as to clamp myself viselike between the bulwark and the column of the TBT. My heart turns over. If this wave breaks—God help us! The boat will never get out from under.

  All other sounds are now lost in a single sharp, evil hissing. For the space of a few oppressive moments I don’t even breathe. Then I feel the boat being heaved up from astern; on and on it rises, transfixed at an angle against the crumpled ridges of the slope, higher than ever before. The stranglehold of fear is beginning to relax its grip on me—and then the crest breaks. A monstrous cudgel strikes the tower and makes it ring, sending a shudder through the whole boat. I hear a shrill, gurgling whine, and a maelstrom of water shoots swirling into the bridge.