Das Boot

by Lothar-Günther Buchheim

  “They’ll be delivered with the rest of our estate!” Ario reassures him.

  “Shut your trap!” shouts the Gigolo. No one can take that joke.

  “Christmas with the Macaronis! Who’d have guessed it?”

  “How d’you mean, with the Macaronis? If you get leave, it doesn’t matter a shit whether you travel straight through France or straight through Italy…”

  “Up through Italy,” Hagen corrects him.

  “Well yes,” says Ario resignedly. He’s obviously thinking what no one dares say aloud: If we ever get that far…

  “Gibraltar—what’s so bad about that?” the Bible Scholar inquires tentatively.

  “Stupid stays stupid; pills won’t help,” is the answer he gets from one of the hammocks. And from a lower bunk, “A creature like that’s still alive—and Schiller had to die!”

  “Hasn’t an inkling of geography; he’s pathetic! You’ve probably never noticed the way Gibraltar’s constructed. Man, it’s as narrow as a virgin’s slit. We’ll have to smear our scow with Vaseline to get through.”

  “It’s been known to happen,” Hagen says finally.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “A fellow getting stuck and not being able to get out again. Happened to a classmate of mine. There he was jammed, like in a vise.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I promise you, it’s true!”

  “What happened next?”

  “Nothing works, so they get the doctor. He has to give the lady a shot…”

  Turbo, always a stickler for precision, isn’t satisfied. “And how d’you get a doctor if you’re stuck inside the lady?”

  For the moment Gibraltar has lost its terrors.

  “No idea. Scream?”

  “Or wait till the snow falls!”

  I find the Commander in the control room.

  “A change is as good as a rest,” I remark.

  “Terrific!” he says morosely, then turns toward me and stares. As usual, he’s chewing on the stem of his cold pipe. We stand facing each other like statues for a while until he beckons me to sit down beside him on the chart chest.

  “Protecting our supply lines is probably what they call it. Africa’s burning and we’re supposed to play firemen. It’s lunacy—U-boats in the Mediterranean when we haven’t even enough in the Atlantic right now…”

  I try to be sarcastic. “Hardly the right season for the Mediterranean. The C-in-C slipped up…”

  “This doesn’t seem to have been his idea. After all, he did everything he could to keep us from being used for weather reporting. We need every boat for front-line combat. Why else did they build the VII-C’s, except for the Battle of the Atlantic?”

  Up to now, I think, we’ve been lording it over the world as a self-reliant fighting ship. Now we’re no more than a pawn of higher strategy—our nose turned toward Spain by remote control; our plans for the trip home, along with everything that hinges on them, reduced to nothing…

  “He’s having quite a time of it, the Chief,” the Commander begins again haltingly. “It’s his wife—she’s expecting a child some time in the next few days. We had everything so well worked out for his leave. Even allowing for a long patrol. But of course we never figured on something like this. They don’t even have their own apartment. Completely bombed out while he was on the patrol before last. They live with his wife’s parents in Rendsburg. Now he’s afraid things may go wrong. Understandable. There’s something the matter with his wife. She almost died in labor the last time, and the child was stillborn.”

  It’s the first time that anyone’s private life has been discussed. Why is the Old Man telling me all this? It isn’t at all his style.

  An hour after dinner I get the answer. The Old Man is busy writing up the war log when he notices that I’m trying to get past him. He says, “Just a minute!” and pushes me onto his berth. “I intend to put you ashore in Vigo—you and the Chief. The Chief’s due to leave the boat after this patrol anyway—that’s official.”

  “But—”

  “Let’s not have any heroics. I’m working on the signal right now. Somehow, you and the Chief are going to be guided through Spain—disguised as gypsies for all I care.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. It’s too chancy for anyone to try singly. I’ve thought it all out. We have agents there who’ll get you through all right.”

  My thoughts are in chaos. Leave the boat now? How will that look? Straight through Spain? What does he think he’s up to?

  I find the Chief in the control room. “I suppose you know already—the Old Man’s going to put us both ashore.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “We’re being put off at Vigo—you and I.”

  “How so?” The Chief sucks in his cheeks. I can see the idea working in him. Finally he just says matter of factly, “All I want to know is how the Old Man’s going to make out with that muttonhead—especially now!” He says no more, and it takes me a few moments to realize that the muttonhead in question is his successor.

  And the ensign, I think—if only we could take the ensign along too.

  Next time I come through the control room, the navigator’s at the chart table. Now at last our route can give him straight lines to draw on his chart again. Everyone’s busy. No one looks up; they’re all privately trying to come to terms with their disappointment and their fears.

  By the second day the fear has subsided. There are still four days at cruising speed between us and the actual approach to the Spanish coast. The crew has got hold of themselves much quicker than might have been expected, considering the low level of their morale. From my berth I hear the familiar chatter resume.

  “Last time I had real luck: all the way from Savenay to Paris in a compartment with no one but a girl from the signal corps. It was really something: no need to work up a sweat, once you’re in—you just let the train do the banging for you. But when we went through the junction, I was almost flung out of her.”

  “I never do it in cars. No room for action. It’s much better if I get her to squat on the front seat, while I ram it in from behind—standing up outside, get it?”

  I looked through the crack in the curtain right into Frenssen’s face, alight with memories. “It rained once. My little chick stayed nice and dry but I was soaking wet. It came down off the roof like out of a drainpipe. But that way I could wash my cock off right away!”

  “Did you go bareback?”

  “Sure. The mouse knows how to be careful.”

  Later I hear: “…and then he went and got himself a girl despite the fact he’d already been married for three years. Word of honor, they’re living together, all three of them.”

  “Well, well.”

  “He can’t be a very sensitive type.”

  “Who needs sensitivity?”

  It’s shortly before noon on the third day after the Gibraltar order, near the end of his watch, when the navigator calls down to report a floating object. I climb onto the bridge behind the Commander. “Forty-five degrees to starboard,” says the navigator.

  The object is still about three thousand feet away. The Commander orders us to steer for it. It’s not a lifeboat—more like a formless, flat lump. The sea is calm. The thing seems to be moving toward us. Over it hangs a strange cloud like a swarm of wasps. Seagulls? The Commander’s mouth tightens and he inhales sharply; otherwise he makes no sound. He lowers his glasses: “Yellow spots—that’s a raft!”

  Now I can recognize it in my own glasses. An unmanned raft with barrels along the sides. Barrels? Or are they fenders?

  “There are people on it!” the navigator says from under his binoculars.

  “So there are.”

  The Old Man gives a change of course. Our bow is now pointing exactly toward the raft.

  “No one moving over there!”

  I stare through my binoculars. The drifting object grows steadily larger. Aren’t those seagull cries I hear?<
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  The Commander sends both lookouts down from the bridge.

  “Navigator, take over their sectors! No sight for the crew,” he murmurs to me.

  He orders the helm to port, and we approach in an extended lefthand curve. Our bow wave brushes the corpses that hang in the water around the raft. One after another, they begin nodding like mechanical dolls in a store window.

  Five dead, all bound tight to the raft. Why aren’t they lying on it? Why are they hanging in the ratlines? The wind! Were they seeking protection from the biting wind?

  Cold and fear, how long can one endure them? How long does one’s body warmth resist the icy paralysis that grips the heart? How quickly do one’s hands die?

  There’s one of the corpses that keeps rising higher out of the water than the others, making stiff bows that seem to go on and on.

  “No name on the raft,” says the Old Man.

  Another of the dead seamen is floating, bloated, on his back. There’s no flesh left on the bones of his face. The seagulls have pecked away everything soft. On his skull there remains only a small scrap of scalp covered with black hair.

  “Seems we got here too late.” The Old Man gives orders to the engine room and helmsman, sounding hoarse. “…the hell out of here,” I hear him mutter.

  The gulls sweep over us, shrill and evil. I wish I had a shotgun.

  “Those were people from a liner!”

  Good thing the Old Man’s talking.

  “They were wearing those old-fashioned life jackets. You don’t usually find them on warships any more.” And after a while he mutters, “Bad omen,” and gives an order to the helmsman. He waits another ten minutes before ordering the lookouts back on deck.

  I feel ill and climb below. Barely ten minutes later and the Commander comes down too. He sees me sitting on the chart chest and says, “That’s almost always the way it is with gulls. Once we found two lifeboats. Everyone in them dead too. Frozen, probably. And all of them had lost their eyes.”

  How long had they been drifting with the raft? I don’t dare ask him.

  “The best thing,” he says, “is to hit a gasoline tanker. That way everything blows up at once. These problems don’t arise. With crude oil, unfortunately, it’s different.”

  Although the bridge lookouts couldn’t have seen much before the Commander sent them below, there has obviously been talk in the boat. The men speak in monosyllables. The Chief must have noticed something. He stares questioningly at the Old Man, then quickly lowers his eyes.

  In the wardroom there’s no discussion at all. Not even one of the hard-nosed comments that usually disguise the men’s true feelings. You might think that this was a particularly thick-skinned, unfeeling bunch, that other men’s fate left them cold. But the silence that has suddenly fallen, the irritability that hangs in the air, prove otherwise. They’re probably seeing themselves hanging helplessly on a raft or drifting in a boat. Everyone on board knows how small the chances are of a raft being discovered in this area, and what fate awaits it even if the sea is calm. Men who lose their ship in a convoy can cherish some hope of being picked up—search units go to work; it’s known where the disaster occurred, and rescue operations are begun at once. But these were not men from a convoy. Otherwise we would have seen wreckage.

  The approach to Vigo isn’t easy. For days we’ve been unable to get a proper fix on our position. Persistent fog. No sun, no stars. The navigator has done his dead reckoning as well as he possibly can, but it’s impossible for him to estimate the drift—heaven knows how far we are from our calculated position. Swarms of gulls accompany the boat. They have black wing sheaths and narrower and longer pinions than the Atlantic gulls. I have the impression that I can already smell land.

  Suddenly I’m choked with longing for terra firma. How does it look now? Late autumn_early winter. The only way to judge how late in the season we are, here on board, is by watching the nights draw in. As children we used to make potato fires at this time of the year and fly homemade kites that were bigger than we were…

  Then I realize how wrong I am. Potato fire time is long past. Indeed, I’ve lost all real sense of time, But still I see the milky-white smoke from our fire, winding its way over the damp earth like a gigantic maggot. The brushwood won’t burn properly: it takes the rising wind to make the fire glow red. We let our potatoes bake in the hot ashes… the impatient testing with hard sticks to see whether they’re done… the black skin that crackles as it splits open. and then the first bite into their mealy insides… the taste of smoke on our tongues… the smell of smoke that clings to our clothes for days afterward! Chestnuts in all our trouser pockets. Fingers yellow from cracking walnuts. The bits of white meat that taste good only if you’re careful to peel the yellow skin out of all the crevices. Otherwise they’re bitter.

  06.00.

  The dark circle of the tower hatch sways back and forth; I can tell its motion by the wandering of the stars. Squeezing past the helmsman, who’s jammed in among his instruments along the wall on the forward side of the tower, I climb up.

  “Permission to come on the bridge?”

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

  Sunrise.

  The sea today is a miniature range of foothills, all round, smooth, undulating hummocks and intersecting lines. The hills roll past under the boat, cradling us up and down. A good dozen seagulls circle us on motionless wings. They stretch out their heads and look at us with stony eyes.

  It turns foggy during the navigator’s watch. He looks worried. This close to the coast, not knowing the ship’s precise position, and now fog to boot—there couldn’t be a worse combination. Since we have to have a bearing of some kind, whatever the cost, the Old Man orders the diesels slow ahead and we creep closer to the coast.

  The First Watch Officer is also on the bridge. We all peer forward intently into the watery milk soup. Something solidifies into a lump in the gray gloom and quickly takes shape: a fishing boat cutting across our bow.

  “We could always ask him where we are,” growls the Old Man. “First Watch Officer, d’you know Spanish?”

  “Jawohl, Herr Kaleun!”

  It takes a while for the First Watch Officer to realize the Old Man’s joking.

  Gradually the wind rises, the fog thins out, and a rocky cliff suddenly rises in front of us.

  “Goddammit!” the Old Man says, “Stop engines—stop!”

  We’ve come much too close.

  “Let’s hope there are no Spaniards out there,” he mutters. “Well, it’s hardly the weather for an outing.”

  Our bow wave collapses. The sudden silence takes my breath away. The bridge begins to sway. The Old Man is staring through his binoculars, and Kriechbaum too is searching the coast intently.

  “Good work, navigator!” the Old Man says finally. “We seem to be almost exactly where we wanted to be—except a bit too close! Well now, let’s worm our way nice and quietly up to the entrance and then take a look at the traffic. Both engines slow speed ahead! Steer thirty degrees!”

  The helmsman acknowledges the order.

  “Water depth?” the Commander asks.

  The First Watch Officer bends over the hatch and repeats the question.

  “Two hundred fifty feet!” comes the answer from below.

  “Continuous soundings!”

  The veils of mist are sweeping in once more.

  “Perhaps not altogether unfavorable,” says the Commander. “A kind of camouflage overcoat. Look sharp, men; see that we don’t smash anyone to bits!”

  We’ve made landfall on this coast a good two hours earlier than originally calculated.

  “The best thing, it seems to me,” the Old Man begins slowly, “is to use the northern entrance—underwater—then maybe out the same way again. Spend the night provisioning and then beat it before daybreak, say around four o’clock. Navigator, if possible, I want to be beside the provision ship by 22.00. Six hours—that should be enough. We’ll just have
to hurry like hell with the transfers!”

  No lights, no bearings, no entrance buoys. Nothing. Even in the easiest harbors there’s a pilot to help every steamer enter and depart; even with the most up-to-date charts and the clearest possible weather, there must always be a pilot on board—only for us, these regulations are totally irrelevant.

  The veils of mist rise again.

  “Neither here nor there. Better to wait till dark I hear the Old Man say.

  I leave the bridge.

  Shortly thereafter the Old Man orders us down to periscope depth.

  Using the electric motors we worm our way gradually closer and closer to the harbor entrance.

  The Old Man sits in the tower in the periscope saddle, his cap turned backward the way old-fashioned motorcycle riders used to wear them.

  “What’s that noise?” he asks urgently. We all listen. I can clearly hear a high-pitched, uniform swishing, overlaid by a dull, hammering sound.

  “No idea!” says the navigator.

  “Odd!”

  The Old Man lets the periscope motor run for a second and then stops it, so as to leave our asparagus stalk sticking the minimum distance out.

  “To the sound room: What do you have, bearing one hundred twenty degrees?”

  “A small diesel!”

  “Probably some little coastal vessel. And another—and another—and yet another, must be a gathering of the clans. But that one’s moving—Duck!” And after a while: “Bad visibility again. Can hardly see a damn thing, we’ll have to find some tub and follow her in.”

  “A hundred twenty-five feet!” reports the mate at the hydrophone.

  “How would it be if we just anchored here?” the Old Man asks through the hatch.

  The navigator is silent. Obviously he’s not taking the question seriously.

  Anchor? Actually, we do carry one of those symbols of hope around with us, just like a steamer. I wonder if a U-boat has ever used one.

  The Commander calls the First Watch Officer to relieve him at the periscope and climbs down heavily. “In two hours it’ll be dark; that’s when we’ll run in—one way or another!”