Das Boot

  The gasping somewhere close to me is coming from the controlroom mate. Tin-ear Willie. Deaf ears, perhaps they’d even be a blessing. See nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing; sink into the floor—but they’re iron floor plates, not much good for sinking into. We have fuel oil to burn: granted. But who the hell knows whether we’ll ever need it again. No use pretending: we’re trapped. No creeping away this time, no evasive tactics. We might as well be nailed down. Our tube is holding, granted again, but they’ve turned it into a Coffin. Without buoyancy we can lie here till Judgment Day. The resurrection of the body… from nine hundred feet. Wonderboys of the German Navy!

  Against the dim light at the hydroplane post I can see that the Commander’s shoulders are sagging slightly. Apparently compelled to imitate him, I let myself go loose. I can feel the relief all the way down my back. The rhomboideus—that was what just uncramped itself. The great shoulder muscle, once learned, never forgotten. Anatomy classes in Dresden. The silly snipping away at corpses. Gas victims were good: they lasted better than people who had died of natural causes. The hall full of skeletons, all arranged like antique sculpture. A collection of ludicrous figures of bone: the Discus Thrower, the Votary, the Thorn Puller.

  “Funny,” I hear the Commander whisper in the direction of the manometer. He turns toward me and goes on: “He came at me like this, turned aside, sideslipped a little. All as clear as daylight!”

  I can’t see his hand motions; he confuses me completely. For him, this airplane is the only thing that seems to exist. “Perhaps there were two bombs—I couldn’t make out exactly!”

  The air hangs in smoky blue layers. Hard to breathe. Smell of gas. Two men in the Officers’ Mess are taking off the cover of battery one. In the emergency light through the hatch I can see that one of them is holding a strip of blue litmus paper in his left hand and inserting a measuring stick with his right; he lifts the stick and wets the litmus paper. I stare at the two as if they are altar boys performing at High Mass.

  Breathless orders from the Chief. “Get limewash in there right now. Then find out how many cells have run dry!”

  So the bilge water in the battery compartment contains acid. A lot of battery cells must have cracked and run out, and the sulphuric acid has combined with sea water to form chlorine gas. That’s what’s stinking so hideously.

  The Old Man bid too high, now he’s being called. What can he do about it? That crazy crowd in Kernével, the gentlemen of the Staff, are the ones we can thank for this. We’ll be on their conscience.

  A voice in my head starts to jeer: “Conscience! Some conscience! In Kernével we’re nothing but a number. Cross it out and that’s it. The shipyard builds a new boat. Plenty of crews ready in the personnel reserve.”

  I see the Chief through the haze. His shirt is soaked and open to the navel, his hair hangs in a tangle over his face. There’s a diagonal scratch across his left cheek.

  The Second Engineer comes from astern. I gather from his whispering that the water is still slowly gaining in the motor-room bilge. Then the news is reduced to fragments. “Diesel room making water… a lot… flooding valve for torpedo cell one under tube five has burst… cold-water pipes… motor bearings… crack in the air-cooler pipe…”

  He has to stop to catch his breath.

  Boots scuffle over the floor plates.

  Instantly the Old Man orders silence. Right, dammit—the little ship is still circling around up there.

  Some of the breaches seem to be a complete mystery. The Second Engineer can’t make out where the water is seeping in. It’s rising in the control-room bilge too: The dull gurgling is clearly audible.

  “What about the oil?” the Old Man asks. “Which fuel tank was hit?”

  The Chief disappears aft. After a couple of minutes he returns to report. “At first there was a jet of oil out of the exhaust duct—but it turned to water.”

  “Strange,” says the Old Man.

  This is obviously against the rules. The exhaust duct, I learn, lies close to the diesels. If the tank there had been cracked, the jet of water should have shot out of the exhaust duct under much greater pressure than it actually did. The Commander and the Chief wrack their brains. The tank was still half full—so how could there be such a weak jet? Along with the ordinary fuel tanks, two of our buoyancy tanks were refilled with additional supplies pumped in from the Weser.

  “Strange,” the Chief echoes. “First oil, then water.”

  “Where does the connection from this fuel tank pass through the pressure hull to the outboard flange? And where are the plugs for the exhaust and intake?” Apparently there is still a chance that only the exhaust duct has been hit and that the tank itself has not been cracked.

  The two of them can only guess, since the ducts lie so deeply hidden that no one can get at them.

  The Chief disappears hastily toward the stern again.

  I try to form a picture of the various tanks. In the saddle tanks, oil is floating on water, and the pressure is equalized. No empty spaces. So these tanks are less vulnerable than the fuel tanks. Very likely one of the outer tanks is cracked. But the measurements should show how much oil we have lost. The only question is whether the Chief knows exactly how much oil there should be in the tanks. In any case, the oil gauge is not that accurate. And the calculation of oil used per hour of running time is just as bad. Only the regular measurements give exact amounts. But when were all the tanks last measured?

  The control-room mate arrives, soaked through, to report that a valve in a pipe was broken. He has repaired the damage. So that was the reason for all the water in the control-room bilge.

  All at once I’m aware that the propeller noise has vanished. A trick? Perhaps they’ve stopped their engine? Do we dare breathe easy, or is the damned scow trying something new?

  “Everything’s busted!” I hear someone murmur. It must be Dorian. I strain to hear. Still no propeller.

  “Now they’ve done their duty and retired,” mutters the Old Man. “But he can’t have seen us; it’s impossible.”

  The lap-of-honor boys have lost their audience: no more noise, the Old Man’s stopped thinking about them. It’s the airplane he’s obsessed with… “He couldn’t. Absolutely out of the question—in that darkness… and those clouds. He was there much too suddenly. Flew straight at us.” Then something like “…no radio—bad business. Damned important.” I know what he means. Others must be told about the new device the British have. For some time there’s been a rumor that the Tommies have a new electronic direction finder that’s small enough to fit into a cockpit. We’re proof positive that the rumor is true. If they can spot us from their airplanes, if we’re no longer safe even at night, then it’s “Lash the helm and start praying.”

  The Old Man wants to warn the other U-boats, but we’re not exactly in a position to send out news bulletins.

  In the control room there’s such confusion now that I prefer to move into the Officers’ Mess. But there’s no room here either. Everything is covered with plans and blueprints and sketches. I become aware of the terrifying double meaning of the German word for “sketch”: a break. A break in the pressure hull, a break in the ribs.

  The ribs simply cannot have withstood that hideous impact. Nor the explosions before it. The steel skin may be somewhat elastic, but the ribs are in the form of rings and have no “give.”

  The Chief lays out an electrical diagram. He hastily draws lines with the broken stump of a pencil, murmuring constantly to himself, then with trembling hands he unbends a paper clip and uses that instead. He takes the wire to scratch a sketch in the linoleum of the table, which seems to imply that damage to our furniture—which is usually treated with such care—no longer matters at all.

  The First Watch Officer sits beside him polishing his binoculars. Completely crazy. For the moment, seamanship is absurd—but he doesn’t seem to have grasped this fact. Madness, as though clear vision was what mattered down here! His face, usually so smooth, has t
wo deep folds running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. His long upper lip looks as if it’s in parentheses. Blond stubble on his chin. This is no longer our dapper First Watch Officer.

  A buzzing around the light. The fly! She too has survived. She’ll probably outlive us all.

  How late is it anyway? I discover that my watch is gone. A bad sign! I manage to get a look at the Chief’s. A few minutes past midnight.

  The Commander appears and directs a questioning glance at the Chief. “Can’t be done with available materials,” is what I make of the Chief’s murmured reply.

  Out of what, then? Are we supposed to order up some shipyard workers? Summon the specialists who built the boat?

  All the floor plates have been taken up immediately in front of our table and in the gangway. Two men are working below in battery one. Lengths of cable and tools are being handed down to them from the control room.

  “Fucking shit!” I hear a voice say from below. “Goddam filth!”

  Suddenly Pilgrim appears in the opening. His eyes are streaming. Coughing heavily, he reports in the direction of the control room, since he can’t see the Chief sitting in the Officers’ Mess. “Total of twenty-four battery cells run out!”

  Twenty-four out of how many? Will twenty-four cripple us, or is that tolerable? The Chief straightens up and orders Pilgrim and his helper to put on rescue gear. Two brown pouches are fetched from the control room. I hand them down.

  While the two are still busy with the rescue gear, the Chief himself works his way down through the hole in front of our table. After a few minutes he twists himself out again, coughing, hastily fetches a plan of the batteries out of the locker, spreads it over the other plans, and studies it intently. He crosses out the individual battery cells—all twenty-four of them.

  “The bridging bars won’t be enough in any case.” He doesn’t even raise his face from the diagram. This means that the smashed cells can simply be taken out and thrown overboard. The Chief wants to bridge them and see whether the few cells remaining intact will function.

  Finding the shortest way to connect the undamaged cells appears to be extremely complicated. The Chief begins to sweat; he draws a line, crosses it out again. Every few seconds he snuffles.

  The Gigolo comes through the wardroom, balancing a big pail of white limewash that slops back and forth. This is to neutralize the sulphuric acid that has run out of the batteries, thereby preventing the formation of chlorine gas. I hear the Gigolo open the door of the can. In there is the drain for the washing faucet that will take the limewash into the battery bilge.

  “Move it, men. Move!” yells the Chief. Then he gets up hesitantly. With the diagram still in his hand, he bends over the manhole to battery one and gives hushed directions to the man below, Pilgrim. I can’t hear Pilgrim’s reply. The Chief might as well be talking into a void. A weird muffled coughing and groaning comes out of the pit.

  The Commander loudly orders white bread and butter. I must be having a stroke: white bread and butter? Now? He’s certainly not hungry. He must be trying to indicate that everything’s really all right, that the Commander has an appetite. And that whoever has an appetite can’t be in serious trouble.

  The steward actually arrives with acrobatic contortions, carrying a huge slice of white bread and a knife. Where can he have found the bread in all that confusion?

  “Have half?” the Commander asks me.

  “No thanks!”

  He produces something like a grin, then leans back and gives a demonstration of how to chew. His lower jaw moves back and forth like that of a ruminating cow.

  Two men manage to get over the opening in the floor by swinging hand-over-hand along a pipe, and see him eating. Which means the news will spread through the boat—exactly as he intended.

  Little Zörner pushes himself up from below and pulls off his nose clip. Sweat is dripping from his bare torso. He sees the Old Man and his mouth falls open with astonishment.

  The Old Man pushes bread and knife aside: end of act.

  The Chief’s exasperated voice comes up from below. “Goddammit! What’s the matter now? Zörner, why’s the light gone?”

  “Shit,” says someone.

  Apparently they’re short-handed below. I catch sight of a lamp in a corner of the mess, reach for it, test it. It works. With my arms braced behind me and the lamp pushed into the waist of my trousers I let myself down. The Chief is complaining again. “What the hell’s the matter? Are we getting some light or aren’t we?”

  And now I appear as the Light of the World—like the Lord God with his halo. The Chief receives me silently. As if getting ready to repair the undersides of a car, I stretch myself out, half on my side, on the flat traveling platform that runs on rails under the floor. A tidy little place down here! I hope the Chief isn’t kidding himself: If the motor dies on us, what we’re doing here is futile. Even I understand that much, Funny that he doesn’t say a word. I see his right leg beside me, lying there like a corpse’s. Good thing I can hear his gasping breath. Now he’s telling me how to hold the lamp, and I see his oil-covered fingers in the beam of light, curling, fanning out, reaching and coming together.

  Silently I beseech him to keep going. Don’t fumble around so nervously. Work cleanly, don’t rush it. Everything depends on this.

  Suddenly I see us from the outside, a picture seen a thousand times, handsome heroes smeared with oil and filth, posing stretched out; movie-star miners with distorted faces and thick beads of sweat on our foreheads.

  Now my free hand is needed too. Pull this tight. All right, I’ve got it. Slowly now, so the wrench won’t slip off. Shit, it did. Try again.

  If only we could move! It’s a mine gallery, except that instead of boring a passage, we work with wrenches, pliers, and bridging bars. The air is hardly bearable now. Pray god the Chief doesn’t break down! He has a wrench in his mouth like an Indian stalking someone with a knife. He crawls forward a good ten feet. I follow him, scraping both my shins in the process.

  I didn’t have the faintest notion that the battery under the floor plates we walked on every day was so big. I’d always pictured a “battery” as being something much smaller. This is a gigantic enlargement of the automobile variety, but how much of it is usable? If there are more holes than knitting in a sock then it just isn’t a sock any more and goes into the ragbag. What we have here is junk already—they’ve turned the whole boat into junk, the bastards.

  Air! For god’s sake, just send down some air! The steel clamps around my chest are squeezing me to death.

  A face appears from above. I have a sudden impulse to seize hold of it. I can’t make out whose it is, because it’s turned a hundred eighty degrees: It’s hard to recognize someone who’s standing on his head.

  The Chief gives me a sign. We have to get out of here. Helping hands are extended. I’m breathing in sharp, jerky gasps.

  “Nice fuck-up, eh?” someone asks. I only dimly hear the voice. I can’t even say “Yes!” No breath. My lungs heave. Fortunately there’s a little space for me among all the diagrams on the Chief’s sofa. I hear someone say it’s two o’clock. Only two?

  The Chief reports to the Old Man that we need wire. The bridging bars turned out to be insufficient even for this one half battery.

  All at once it feels as though our real problem isn’t getting to the surface, but hunting up wire: Wire is the Chief’s solution to all our problems. Even the Second Watch Officer gets involved in the search.

  Lovely, gleaming torpedoes in the tubes, in the bow compartment, and in the upper-deck compartment: twenty thousand marks apiece—but a bit of old wire? All we need is five marks’ worth of the stuff. We’re up to here in shells—but wire… It makes you laugh! We have plenty of ammunition for the damn fool cannon—both high explosive and incendiary! But the cannon’s lying even deeper than we are, marking the spot where we’d be right now if the Old Man hadn’t made his dash south. Ten high explosive shells for thirty feet of wire—it
’d be a bargain!

  The bosun has disappeared into the bow compartment. Lord knows where he expects to find wire there. And if the bosun doesn’t find it in all his scrambling about, and if the Second Watch Officer doesn’t, and the navigator doesn’t and the control-room mate doesn’t—what then?

  I hear, “Tear out the electric wiring,” and, “Twist them together.” That probably won’t amount to anything very much. The wire has to be of a certain diameter. So we braid a number of strands together? The only question is how long such a time-consuming repair will take.

  We’re growing perceptibly more stern heavy. The stern torpedo tube breach is reported to be two-thirds underwater. If the motor is swamped, then this whole business about the wire is meaningless.

  What day of the month is it? The calendar has vanished from the wall. Gone, like my wristwatch. “A brief span of life was appointed us…”

  A few minutes, and the Officers’ Mess becomes unendurable. I maneuver my way back over the open floor plates into the control room. My whole body aches from my contortions. There’s a stabbing sensation between my shoulder blades and a rending pain all the way down my back. Even my ass hurts.

  On the floor plates, close to the periscope housing, lies the barograph, knocked out of the rim of the gimbals on which it rested. Two of its glass plates are smashed. The recording hand has been bent over like a hairpin. The rising and falling curve on the paper drum has ended in a downward plunge and a thick ink blot. I’m tempted to tear the paper off the drum and keep it. If we ever get out of this, I’ll frame the thing and hang it on my wall. A genuine, documentary piece of graphic art!

  The Chief has developed a system of priorities in his fight against our disasters. First things first. Contain the fastest spreading damage. Stamp out the growing fire before the wind catches it. Here on board, every system is of vital importance—there are no superfluous installations—but our crisis has defined the difference between the vital and the merely essential.

  The Commander and the Chief are whispering together. The chief mechanic Johann appears from astern; the control-room mate joins in; even the chief mechanic Franz is allowed to participate. The boat’s technical braintrust is holding a meeting in the control room—the only man missing is the Second Engineer, who’s in the motor room. As far as I can tell, work in the stern is going ahead steadily and methodically. The Chief has turned over the trouble with the battery to the two E-mates. Will they be able to cope?