Das Boot

  “He’s right,” the navigator announces from the table. “Fourteen thousand gross tons.” He’s holding the register of ships.

  The Old Man looks from the Spaniard to the navigator, and back again.

  “Say that again,” he says finally in a voice that cuts like a whip.

  “The boat is entered in the supplement, Herr Kaleun.” And when the Old Man still doesn’t react, he adds in an undertone, “The Herr Oberleutnant didn’t consult the supplement.”

  The Old Man clenches his fists and stares at the First Watch Officer. He’s fighting a monumental battle for self-control. Finally he barks: “I—demand—an—explanation!”

  The First Watch Officer turns uncertainly toward the navigator and reaches for the register. A couple of staggering steps toward the chart table, and he comes to a stop. The way he’s propping himself up, you’d think he’d been wounded.

  The Old Man is shaking as if in sudden horror. Before the First Watch Officer can say anything he turns back to the Spaniard, a twisted grin on his face. The Spanish Captain senses the change at once and becomes wildly voluble again. “South Carolina American ship—now Reina Victoria Spanish ship.” Five, six times. Gradually the fear fades from his face.

  “Navigator, take a look at these papers!” the Commander orders. But before he can begin to leaf through them, we get our briefing from the Spanish Captain. “Dos mil pasaieros—por America del Sud—Buenos Aires!”

  The Old Man breathes in very loudly through his nose, then blows out hard through slack lips. His whole body sags. And now he slaps the Spaniard on the shoulder. The eyes of the Second Spaniard—he must be the First Officer—light up like candles on a Christmas tree.

  The Commander is a changed man. He seems to have forgotten the First Watch Officer completely. A bottle of Cognac and three glasses appear as if by magic. “Never say no to an honest drop.” The Spaniard considers this some kind of toast and won’t be outdone. More crazy gibberish and cries of “Eilitler! Eilitler! Eilitler!”

  The First Watch Officer is as white as a sheet. He stammers out a rough translation of the latest outburst. “Their Captain says—he thought we were—we were an English patrol boat. That’s why—that’s the reason that he—allowed himself so much time. It was only when—he realized we weren’t British—that things went crazy. And then the first boat they sent—was, so he says, upset.”

  The Spaniard nods like a rocking horse and adds, “Sí, sí,” again and again. “Sí, sí, sí!”

  “…upset and drifted away. He apologizes.”

  “Apologizes is good!” says the Old Man. “He ought to be on his knees thanking us and the Tommy who ruined our first fish. And wouldn’t you like to tell him that you almost had him standing around in a white nightgown by now? Him and his friend and his two thousand passengers as well! That you almost had the lot of them on your conscience. Why don’t you tell him that?”

  The First Watch Officer’s lower jaw goes slack. He’s finished; he can’t even control his muscles any more.

  When the Spaniards are back in the cutter, the Captain starts shouting offers of phonograph records and fruit: half an hour, and it’ll all be here—very up to date! Spanish music! Flamenco! Marvelous fresh fruit, lots of it, for the whole crew!

  “Push off, you old asshole!” roars one of the men on the upper deck, and shoves the Spanish cutter away from the buoyancy tank. Number One helps with the boat hook. The oars splash into the water. Fragments of Spanish words, and then something that sounds like “Wiedersehen.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” roars the bosun. The Spaniards soon become a dark blob again.

  “They must be! Not even carrying lights,” the navigator scolds after them. “They were within sixty feet of us before we saw them. Completely mad!”

  We all stare after them, but already there’s no trace of the cutter: The night sea has swallowed it up.

  The Old Man takes his time giving engine-room orders.

  He finds the First Watch Officer in the control room.

  “Do you have any idea—do you even have the brains to realize what you almost managed to commit? What I would have committed because my prize specimen of a First Watch Officer isn’t even competent to do something as simple as consulting the register properly? I’ll tell you something—you ought to be court-martialed!”

  There’s nothing left for the First Watch Officer to do but to shoot himself. But the only pistol on board is in possession of the Commander. Securely locked up.

  Uproar in the petty officers’ quarters: “The navigator knew something was screwy right from the start!”—“The First Watch Officer really got his balls chewed off!”—“We were nearly up the creek!”—“Trust the Old Man—jump in with both feet, then have second thoughts. But he really excelled himself this time.”—“Christ, they don’t know how lucky they were!”—“Damn great ship like that and no launch.”—“Boy, what a horse’s ass!” The last is a reference to the First Watch Officer.

  Hours later the Old Man recapitulates. “Everything suddenly went wrong at once. It was within a hair’s breadth of being a second Laconia incident. If the torpedo’s steering hadn’t been ruined…”

  Silence. Several minutes later, still chewing on his pipestem, he says: “It really shows you—life or death—sheer chance—oh, bullshit!” There’s no doubt that the Old Man’s feeling very uncomfortable about the whole thing, and he’s trying to justify himself. “But the whole thing was so obvious—they did keep delaying—and we gave them more than enough time. They were behaving like maniacs!”

  “Yes, but only because they were assuming they’d been stopped by a British patrol boat. We did hail them in English. Apparently they never even considered the possibility that we might be a German submarine.”

  “Well, that’s what you get for showing off in foreign languages!”

  “They must have been scared shitless when they recognized us!”

  “Tsch!” says the Old Man. “That’s the way things go. One thing leads to another and…”

  He’s silent for a good five minutes. They he says, “It’s also a terrible disadvantage that we’ve no way of measuring the power of our transmitter. Perhaps our inquiry about them never even went out. After all, the antenna was sheared off, and all sorts of other equipment was ruined. A radio on the blink and an incompetent for a First Watch Officer—what more could you ask for?”

  Quite apart from the state of our nerves, I add silently. It was the navigator who was right all along. Always rational, always cool, never flustered. He refused to be seduced by the Old Man’s opinions when he disagreed with them.

  The conciliatory gurgling of the Old Man’s pipe is driving me out of my mind. “The whole thing would have caused the most god almighty stink!” I burst out, “and we’d have been right in the middle of it—”

  “No, we wouldn’t,” the Old Man interrupts harshly.

  I can’t make head or tail of this. So I wait. There’s obviously more to come. But the interval drags on and on, so finally I say: “I don’t understand.”

  “Really? It’s perfectly simple: We’d have had to wipe the slate clean. Typical case…”

  He breaks off, then says in an undertone, “There would have been no survivors!”

  What’s he saying?

  “It would have been the typical situation that you never find in the rules. In cases like this you’re completely on your own. All the Navy does is tell you you have complete discretion, That you should use your own judgment.”

  The cold pipe in his right hand draws circles in the air. He’s straining for words. “They didn’t use their radio. Of course, they know that we can always monitor that, assuming things are normal. Suppose the torpedo’s gyroscopic apparatus had been in order and had blown up its target, then the liner would have ‘hit a mine.’ Sunk so fast there wouldn’t even have been time for a radio signal. In any case, a German U-boat couldn’t let itself be seen as having anything to do with it. In situations like this
there’s no help for it. You have to wipe the slate whether you want to or not! You can’t do these things by half-measures.” He moves off heavily in the direction of the forward hatch.

  The full implications of his gruesome use of the cliché begin to sink in, and I shiver. Instantly I’m assailed by images of lifeboats riddled by machine-gun fire, arms thrown up, waves reddened by streams of blood, faces filled with incredulous horror. I remember scraps of stories that have made my blood run cold. Half-heard babble in the Bar Royal. Only dead men tell no tales. Why did they get it? Why not us? They get us by the short hairs, too.

  My teeth begin to chatter uncontrollably. What next? What else must happen before we’re finally wiped out? A shuddering sob rises from somewhere deep inside me. I clench my fists and grit my teeth as hard as I can, choking it back until the whole lower half of my face is a single knot of pain. And just at that point the Chief turns up.

  “Well, well, what’s the matter now?” he asks, concern in his voice.

  “Nothing,” I manage to say. “Nothing—quite all right!”

  He hands me a glass of apple juice. I seize it with both hands, take a great gulp, then say, “Lie down—I’d just like to lie down for a while.”

  In the bow compartment Dufte is almost beaten up when he says, “Biscay—let’s hope we get through all right!” This is no time to tempt fate or jog the table that’s supporting our house of cards. Who knows what else can collapse in this beat-up scow? The Old Man must have his reasons for laying a course so close to the coast. The order “Prepare safety gear” still haunts the air.

  The thing we fear most is enemy flyers. If a plane spots us now, we’re finished. Everyone knows that. Crash dives are out of the question. Times have changed: Now we actually pray for bad weather—but only moderately bad. Spare us the hurricane.

  Tomorrow, everything will look even worse. At that point the coast will recede, and the voyage through Biscay begin. How can we cover this stretch without being spotted from the air? Biscay is under the tightest surveillance of all. And if the Old Man was right? If the British Air Force now have some kind of new equipment that makes us visible even on the darkest night?

  What day is it today anyway? Just “today”; it’s meaningless. When we’re gliding along underwater, it’s day. When we’re surfaced and running on the diesel, it’s night. Right now it’s ten o’clock and we’re underwater. So it must be ten a.m.

  But what day of the week is it? My brain labors to work it out. I feel drugged. Finally a word takes shape: calendar. I wonder what day it’s showing today. I can’t get comfortable on this goddam chest I’m sitting on, so I might as well head for the Officers’ Mess. That’s where the calendar is too.

  Wobbly as hell on my feet. Like walking on stilts. Well, get going! Pull yourself together.

  The sound man is staring blankly as usual. Looks like a blowfish behind glass in an aquarium.

  In the Officers’ Mess I use my left hand to support myself on the table. Quite comfortable, standing this way.

  What kind of date is that on the calendar? Ninth of December? We’re way behind the times. Down with the ninth of December! I’ll keep the sheet for my private notebook. Memorable. A kind of Bastille Day! The record from tile barograph and the page from the calendar: evocative souvenirs, and as thrills go, cheap at the price. Eleventh of December. Down with that too. The thirteenth was Explosion Day. Keep that one too. Nineteenth of December. We were lying on tile bottom. Twentieth—the same. Twenty-first, twenty-second. All those days! And now it’s the twenty-third. Which is today. Which makes it Tuesday.

  Then I hear someone say, “Christmas Eve tomorrow!” Some Christmas present! I gulp. Sentimentality? The usual Christmas emotions? The Festival of Love—at sea, on a bombed-out scow. It’s certainly different! We are, of course, superbly equipped for the Festival of Love, thanks to the inimitable foresight of the Navy—there’s the folding Christmas tree that came on board with the rest of the provisions. How will the Old Man handle it? He’s certainly got more important things to worry about.

  He’s considering laying a course for La Rochelle. We could possibly head up the Gironde to Bordeaux, but although Bordeaux lies farther south, it’s really no nearer. From our present position to La Rochelle is still about four hundred miles—four hundred miles straight across the Bay of Biscay: that means at least another thirty-five hours minimum. But since we have to submerge during the day, the calculation looks worse than that. We’ll probably need as much as forty-eight hours. That’s a long time, especially since we don’t know what weather conditions we’ll have to deal with in the next few days, or whether the diesel will hold out.

  The Old Man and the navigator have still further worries. “There’s the question of how we can get in—no notion—very narrow entrance—certain to be all kinds of barriers—coastal shelf very shallow—danger of mines.”

  Subdued voices everywhere. Everyone seems to be on tiptoe, as though the first loud noise would attract the enemy’s attention.

  I notice that everyone who comes through the control room tries to get a look at the chart, but no one dares ask how many miles it is to base; no one is willing to admit how shaky he is. At the same time they all have the same thought: Bay of Biscay, naval graveyard. The worst storms, the most intensive aerial surveillance.

  When the navigator is back at his table I try the direct approach. “How many hours yet?” “Tsch!” is all I get by way of an immediate answer. Presently he’ll start spinning conditional sentences that all begin with “if,” I think to myself. But he’s more diplomatic than that. “What can one say?”

  I watch him out of the corner of my eye until he finally gets going again. “I calculate forty-six hours at least. Altogether, that is—not just counting the time at cruising speed.”

  In the bow compartment I discover that Ario was being tormented by worries of his own while the boat was on the bottom. Ario has a collection of contraceptives in his seabag. Plus some very expensive special items. He enumerates them: “Ones with rubber knobs, fancy ticklers, even a ‘hedgehog’ or two This was the embarrassment of riches that had been weighing on his mind the whole time. “Well, how would it look if stuff like that turned up among my things? And, besides, they’d be wasted on my next of kin… I can tell you one thing—before the next patrol, I’m going to blow up every single condom and pop the lot.”

  “You needn’t have worried; the flotilla sees to it that they disappear. All our stuff is carefully sifted,” Bockstiegel explains. “Filthy photos and rubbers, everything that might not amuse the widows and mourning relatives. I saw it done once; the paymaster has a whole team of specialists. Before your gear’s turned over, it’s as clean as a whistle. You can rely on that!”

  For the bridge johnny, whose mind runs along economical lines, there are still open questions. “So what does the paymaster do with all those condoms? After all, they’re private property, aren’t they?”

  “He puts them on a list, meathead. What else would he do? And someone makes two copies. And then they’re all cross-referenced.”

  “Trust the Navy!” says Schwalle.

  The Old Man spends his time commuting from the engine room to the bow compartment and back to the control room, always followed by the Chief, trying to form a realistic picture of the boat’s condition, though he certainly won’t be able to make an accurate assessment of everything that’s out of order. The ribs, for instance, can’t be examined because of the built-in installations.

  “This boat is ready for the ashcan!” I hear him say as he passes.

  The navigator reports that we’re at the latitude of Cape Ortegal. So the crossing of Biscay is underway.

  The Old Man includes the First Watch Officer in the consultation, perhaps out of some impulse of sympathy, so that the man won’t feel completely annihilated. A precise sailing program is laid out, but the factors in the calculation must remain constant if the plan is to succeed. The prime requirement is that the diesel hold out
.

  The Old Man slumps on the sofa in the Officers’ Mess; he starts to speak: “The Blessed Feast of Our Lord…” then falls silent. I can see he’s fidgeting—it’s not difficult to guess why he’s troubled.

  He clears his throat, trying to lure me into saying something. But what am I supposed to say? That nobody’s exactly in the mood for a floating Christmas party?

  “Oh, screw the whole thing!” he bursts out, while I’m still searching for words. “We’ll simply postpone the festivities. Christmas Eve for us is when we have solid ground under our feet again. Or do you attribute some importance to this humbug? I suppose you’ll be wanting to read aloud the Gospel according to Saint Luke?”

  “No,” is all I can say. Nothing witty occurs to me.

  “Well then!” says the Old Man in relief. “We’ll simply behave as though it isn’t time yet.”

  Christmas. Since I turned fourteen something always went wrong. Sad Christmases, melodramatic Christmases, overdoses of emotional nonsense. Wailing and police in the house. And then the drunken Christmases…

  The Old Man’s right. What is all this wallowing in sentimentality? Just let the day run its normal course. A normal day, Christ! Better not throw days around like that. Better stick to thinking in terms of hours. Don’t call down a jinx. No celebrations. Out of the question.

  The Old Man is obviously feeling better. One problem less. I’m simply curious as to how he’s going to communicate his postponement of festivities to the crew. Then I get my answer. “Tell the petty officers—it’ll get around!”

  Apparently the diesel isn’t functioning as well as it seemed to be at first. There are bugs in it that are worrying the Chief. Nothing really ominous, just disturbing. For the next few hours he doesn’t leave the engine room.

  The men know that we’re no longer close to shore, and the boat has become even quieter. Nerves show in fits of trembling at the most harmless noises. The Chief’s the worst. Even at the best of times he reacts to the tiniest sound from the engines—sounds that no one else even registers—with the sensitivity of an exceptionally greedy dog hearing the faint rustling of a biscuit package. But this time he scared even me. As we were sitting side by side in the Officers’ Mess, he leaped up so suddenly that I went cold; he listened for a fraction of a second with staring eyes, then dashed into the control room. Fiendish hubbub instantly broke out. The Chief’s voice was cracking with rage. “Have you gone mad—damn and goddammit—since when—something like this—just take it away—get moving!”