Das Boot

  I’m seeing things in a trance: a gray filter seems to have been intruded in front of the camera. I squint, blink hard, stare: The boat that was there a moment ago is gone. And the airplane? Disappeared. A single bomb? A single pass? A direct hit?

  They’re coming back, I tell myself, and there’ll be a swarm of them. Fighter protection? Why don’t we have any fighter protection? Fat pig Goring—him and his big mouth! Where are our airplanes?

  The sea is flat, polished. No motion—not so much as a wrinkle. A knife-edge of horizon. And there, where the long hull of the boat was lying a moment ago, more of these blobs, a disturbing fault in smooth quicksilver. No whirlpool, no surge, nothing—no clatter of engines—silence.

  Why does no one scream? The stillness is absurd. Gives me the feeling all this is unreal. Our bow has swung toward the drifting blobs. In the glasses they resolve themselves into individual entities, heads suspended in life jackets. The men manning our anti-aircraft gun are still standing there like statues, expressionless, as though they haven’t yet grasped what has just happened. Only the heaving of their chests betrays them.

  Number One is waiting on the upper deck with five men, to take aboard survivors.

  “Goddammit—look out!” he roars.

  On the starboard side the sea is red. Blood in salt water. What are we to do with these wretched creatures?

  I don’t dare look too closely. Better to watch the sky.

  Close behind me, someone says, “Probably they pictured Christmas differently too!”

  A man appears dripping on the bridge and stammers out some kind of report, his hand on his forehead: the other Commander, Bremer.

  His face—innocent as a choirboy’s—is twisted; in spasm. He actually howls. Stares straight ahead as if hypnotized. Clenches his teeth to try to stop his lower jaw clicking like a castanet, but can’t do it. His whole body starts to tremble. A steady flood of tears runs down his twitching cheeks.

  The Old Man looks at him coldly, in silence. Finally he speaks. “Why don’t you go below!”

  Bremer refuses with a violent shake of the head.

  The Old Man issues an order. “Bring up the blankets!” And then, as if in a sudden rage: “Move it! I want blankets up here. Now!”

  As the first blanket is handed up through the tower hatch he himself puts it around Bremer’s shaking shoulders.

  Not sufficient depth of water to dive; no boom-breaker; no antiaircraft protection—what a fucking mess! This mirror-smooth sea. The Halifax. What was that all about? Was it really carrying just one bomb? A crate like that must carry a load of them.

  “I felt—felt it—like a snake around my throat,” Bremer goes on stammering.

  This strange figure on the bridge wrapped in a blanket; the pathetic little handful of men on the upper deck; this silken, pastel sea. A masquerade. I feel I have to break through a membrane if I’m to reach reality.

  “Look out!” yells a control-room assistant, heaving blankets through the hatch behind him. Bremer twitches violently. He’s standing in the way.

  He belongs to another flotilla, and none of our men know him.

  The Old Man’s voice is threatening to crack. He has to cough a couple of times to stop the croaking.

  “Diving’s out.”

  Too shallow, too much current. So we’ll just have to go on drifting over the mines and wait till the Tommies come back. Still no fighter protection! But the other boat had been reported!—Nothing works right any more. Fucking Hermann Goring.

  Anchor? Wouldn’t it be better for us to ride at anchor? Nothing could be worse than letting the tide drag us over the mines.

  The Old Man can’t wait much longer. He has to decide now: to wait for the Tommies or be like Blücher at Waterloo—just charge straight ahead without boom-breaker or mine sweeper.

  He screws up his face, the way he always does when he’s thinking. But now we actually get orders to the engine room and the helmsman. Gradually the bow swings around toward the sun. Just as I thought: charge!

  I’m absolutely wrong. The Old Man orders the diesel run at slow speed, just enough to hold the boat against the tide. We’re running in place.

  The most beautiful of all mornings at sea. I don’t know whether it’s the solemn grandeur of this Christmas morning or the misery on the upper deck that brings tears to my eyes. A sob rises in my throat. I try to choke it back. Mustn’t let go.

  If the sky had been dressed in mourning, in mist and darkness, the scene of the shipwrecked men might have been easier to bear. But this radiance of opal fire and gold that fills the sky and spreads out over the water is in such agonizing contrast to the half-drowned sailors who stand revealed on our upper deck that I want to cry out. They crowd together, huddled like sheep, each man wrapped in a dark-gray blanket. The morning light is too dazzling for me to pick out individual figures; they form a single dark mass. Two of them still have their caps on. One, a stringbean of a man, must be their First Watch Officer. The other is a petty officer, probably their Number One. The engine-room crew certainly didn’t get out. That’s the way it always goes. They seem to be barefoot. One of them has rolled up his trousers as though he were planning to go wading.

  Our bosun and two of our men are trying to salvage an empty float. He’s already piled up six or seven bright-yellow life rafts against the tower.

  Apparently the Old Man won’t take any of them below decks. There isn’t any point. After all, we can’t dive here. And then there are still the mines! Leave the poor beasts where they are.

  It’s high time the escort turned up. The enemy certainly isn’t going to be content with dropping a single bomb. The Halifax must have reported, so the Tommies have known for some time that there’s a second boat sitting waiting for another bomb. Our fucking Navy! The people on shore must have heard the explosion. Or have we no more forces at our disposal in these coastal waters? Aren’t there any more patrol boats? Are we sheltering under the ass of the prophet?

  Down there below the tower the radioman Herrmann, our orderly, and two seamen are busy with the wounded. An older man from the other boat was badly hit. Hands burned, head a ball of blood. Salt water on raw flesh!—A shudder runs through me. I can hardly bear to look.

  Herrmarin wraps the red head with gauze bandages, leaving only the eyes and the mouth showing—like a Tuareg. Then he lights a cigarette and puts it between the Tuareg’s teeth. The Tuareg thanks him with a nod. The others are smoking too, some still sitting in their sodden clothes on the wreckage of our grating.

  The other boat’s First Watch Officer and their petty officer can’t stop searching the skies, but their men seem indifferent. Two or three even let the air out of their life jackets so that they can sit more comfortably.

  The Commander wants to know how many men have been rescued. I count: twenty-three on the foredeck; four aft—all severely wounded. That is barely more than half the crew.

  How calm the sea is! Like unused metal foil. I’ve never seen it so smooth. Not the slightest breath of wind.

  Then the navigator calls, “Object at two hundred seventy degrees!”

  All binoculars swing toward the magnet: a tiny dark spot floating in the silky blue-gray. Impossible to make out what it is. I put down my glasses and squint. The navigator climbs up on the TBT, leans back at an angle, and raises his glasses again. Bremer—openmouthed—peers vaguely in the direction indicated.

  “Recognize anything?” Impatience in the Old Man’s voice.

  “No, Herr Kaleun! But that must be the place where she sank, given the way the current’s running now. It carried us quite a distance during all that rescue work.”

  “Hm.”

  Another two or three minutes, then the Old Man suddenly decides to have the bow turned about and to increase speed. We lay a course for the tiny dot.

  What’s he up to, tearing around in these mine-infested waters on account of a crate or an old oil barrel? Tempting fate? Hasn’t he done enough of that?

  Five minute
s pass. Then the navigator, who hasn’t lowered his glasses for so much as a second, says in an impassive voice: “Someone swimming over there!”

  “Thought so!” the Old Man answers, just as coolly.

  Someone swimming! It must be nearly an hour since Bremer’s boat went down. We’ve been staring ourselves blind, all of us. And there was nothing, nothing at all to disturb the mirrored perfection of the sea.

  The Old Man orders more speed. I have my binoculars to my eyes, and as we approach I too begin to make out the figure of a man. His head shows clearly above the bulge of his life jacket. And now he’s lifting an arm.

  The men on the upper deck have surged forward, until they are clutching the net guard. Hope no one goes overboard at this point. My heart is pounding. Someone really is moving out there! Our ace of a navigator knew right away that it was no flotsam he was looking at.

  I climb down the iron rungs on the outside of the tower to the upper deck: I want to see the sailor they’re about to pull out of the drink. God, I want to cry, you ought to be throwing your arms around the navigator’s neck. That was one in a thousand. Only Kriechbaum could have pulled off something like this. He never stops using his eyes—or his head, for that matter.

  Now they have him. Barefoot. Eighteen years old at most. Water pouring off him. He leans against the tower but manages to keep to his feet.

  I nod encouragingly. Without saying a word. Now’s not the time to ask how he managed to work his way out of the sunken boat.

  Must be a stoker. Probably the only one who got out of the aftership. But why did it take so long? What went on? Who knows what his story is.

  Nevertheless, I say, “Man alive—lucky, weren’t you?”

  The youngster pants, then nods.

  Number One appears with blankets. Never thought he could be so tender: he wraps the boy up just like a mother. Jesus, he oughtn’t to have done that. The youngster collapses, begins to sob, his teeth chattering.

  “Hand over a cigarette,” Number One orders one of our sailors. “Come on, light it! And fast!”

  Cautiously he lowers the boy onto the gratings, props his back against the tower, and pushes the cigarette into his mouth. “Here, take the butt. Go on, smoke it!”

  “Ship’s time?”

  “08.10 hours!”

  The escort was due at 08.00. God!

  My life jacket is beginning to bother me.

  Lucky for the men on the upper deck that there’s no wind and we have this mild weather. Christmas Day—and not cold. The sun will soon be up, but still we ought to see to it that they get something on their feet, After all, we don’t need our seaboots. Number One has already had all available clothing carted up to them, sweaters especially.

  I climb down to collect some footwear.

  As I pass through the Officers’ Mess I stop dead, thunderstruck. The First Watch Officer has got his typewriter out and is about to start pecking away. I’m speechless: This is too much! I snort disapprovingly, but he doesn’t even look up, lust jabs at the keys with his index finger and keeps his stony seagull eyes fixed straight down. I would really love to take his machine and beat him over the head with it. Instead of which I merely say, “You’re nuts,” work my way farther forward and roar, “Get going—move it, seaboots this way! Move it, man!”

  What can he be pecking out right now? A report of our arrival? God only knows. Perhaps it’s a receipt for Bremer, a properly typed acknowledgment that we’ve taken him aboard together with half his crew.

  A chain is soon organized. The boots come up fast. I climb up after the last pair.

  A shout from Bremer’s navigator. “The escort!” He points forward.

  And there, for a fact, are smoke clouds rising over the horizon. “Too late, gentlemen!” growls the Old Man.

  Right next to my ear I hear a violent, staccato rattle. I turn my head. My god, it’s the other Commander. His teeth are chattering.

  The sun comes up and the sea is iridescent taffeta. The blue outline of the approaching boom-breaker and all her superstructures stands out sharply against the red ball. Over the river mouth hang swollen, misshapen clouds, shaded the subtle blue-gray of doves’ feathers. A broken mauve-red spreads across the sky, and the highest clouds suddenly are bordered in brocade.

  My eyes burn as I stare at the soaring disk of the sun. The Bible Scholar’s Salvation Army jingle echoes in my head.

  Glorious, glorious that day,

  When, no more sin, no more dismay,

  We march into the Promised Land…

  “Crazy the way things work out,” says the Old Man—in an aside, so Bremer won’t hear him, “Now everything checks again: Only one boat was expected and only one turns up.”

  He’s been sizing up the boom-breaker. “Very pretty tub, a good eight thousand tons. Only two small derricks. Where d’you suppose they got them?… What in the world is that?” The last words are drawled out on a rising note.

  Now I see it too: ship after ship coming over the horizon behind the boom-breaker.

  “Gentlemen, you flatter us!” the Old Man says, to no one in particular.

  Then on the boom-breaker a sun beams out. “Call from boombreaker.”

  “Already noted, Second Watch Officer. Hurry up with the signal lamp. Let’s see what they want.”

  The searchlight goes out, flashes again. The Second Watch Officer reads aloud: C-o-r-d-I-a-l-w-e-l-c-o-m-e.

  “No doubt there’s more to it than that!”

  W-h-a-t-h-a-v-e-y-o-u-s-u-n-k.

  “That’s meant for you,” the Commander says, turning to Bremer, who has opted to remain below in the bridge cockpit and now looks shrunken in contrast to the rest of us up here.

  Bremer glances at us helplessly.

  “Windbags,” says the Second Watch Officer, his eyes fixed on the boom-breaker. “Next thing we know they’ll be sending us Christmas greetings!”

  “Oh the hell with it!” the Old Man says finally. “We’ll simply consider the question addressed to us. Get moving, signal them ‘Two fat freighters.’

  The key of the signal lamp clicks. A few seconds’ pause, then back comes: H-e-a-r-t-y-c-o-n-g-r-a-t-u-l-a-t-I-o-n-s.

  The Old Man makes a face and bites his lower lip.

  “What do you think, shall we give them an explanation?” he asks the navigator.

  “Just keep going, Herr Kaleun. They’ll soon notice who it is they’ve brought in!”

  If there are eyes behind those glasses, I think, they must have seen the sailors on our upper deck long ago. This kind of makebelieve is unusual in the U-boat service. And the rubber rafts our Number One made such a neat pile of are hardly a usual feature of the upper decks of returning boats. They must be aware that something has been going on here. And that it may begin again at any moment. The Tommies will be back. They won’t let us get off scot-free.

  I try to calm down: In any case we’ll soon be safe from the mines. And if an airplane chooses to attack now, it’ll encounter considerably more fire power than two hours ago. The boom-breaker is well equipped with anti-aircraft guns, and the horde of escort vessels now arriving also have their own supply of popguns. But the Old Man doesn’t seem to find this much comfort. Again and again he scowls as he searches the sky, which is gradually shading into blue.

  “They always know when something’s wrong,” says the Second Watch Officer, meaning the seagulls, which are circling the boat in flocks.

  The gulls catch the golden light on their feathers and emit shrill, plaintive cries. As they glide over us, they turn their heads searchingly from side to side.

  I have no ear for the orders to the engine room and the helmsman. Hardly an eye for the approaching armada. I can’t get over the way they’re spewing out smoke so brazenly: in front of them there’s a great thick wreath of it against the pastel background of the morning sky. Perhaps they’re trying to divert attention if the enemy appears again—to concentrate it on themselves instead of us.

  Once more I have my hands f
ull, collecting and handing over a steady supply of blankets and shoes. I finally become aware of a fireboat, just as she arrives broad on our starboard beam. Her black flanks are covered with rashes of red lead. Minutes later there’s a dark colossus to starboard. It’s a dredge that works constantly around here to keep a channel open for major shipping.

  Now finally I can find time to pick up a pair of binoculars and look out over our bow. The shore is still only a thin line, but there are cranes there, as small as toys; I can also see individual figures on the boom-breaker, which is now directly in front of us. And the course it’s holding is taking us straight toward the coast.

  We have to wait in the outer basin. Our sailors ready the lines on the upper deck, moving among the wounded with the utmost care.

  A message from the signal tower. The navigator reads it out: “Enter immediately!” Through our binoculars we see a bridge opening in front of us. Already we can make out a crowd of people on the pier. Thank god, no brass bands.

  A few seagulls screech, and the sound is deafening in the strange silence that descends as the boat creeps slowly between the mosscovered walls of the channel. From the pier small bouquets of flowers with twigs of fir tied around them are tossed down to us. No one picks them up.

  The old revulsion against the people up there. I know that everyone standing here on the bridge feels the same way. We’re like irritable animals, reacting violently to any false gesture.

  Shrill whistling, a signal to the mooring crew on the upper deck. The hawsers lie neatly coiled and ready, fore and aft. Likewise our thick basket fenders.

  Thin lines fly over to the pier, soldiers catch them and pull in the heavy hawsers attached to the other end. Sailors come to their aid and make fast the hawsers to the massive iron piles. The screws stir up the brackish water as they slowly draw the boat in.

  “Stop engine! Crew fall in on the afterdeck!” the Commander’s voice sounds hoarse.

  The men up there can see our shattered upper deck, the shipwrecked men huddled together like sheep, the wounded. I find myself looking into horrified faces.