by Nigel Barley
He liked the Chinese and learned the simplicities of survival from them, that to die was always bad, to live much better and to live with money best of all. He quietly turned a blind eye to their little scams that hurt only the customs service or the money-changers, deliberately did not notice the odd, too-intelligent, new face among the crew when the nationalist forces were on the move. But he was prepared to pay them out a good thrashing too, with his own hands, often the best-appreciated currency on the coast. He prided himself that a German thrashing was worth three times a Britisher’s. While they feared him, they knew that if the worst came to the worst he would never simply tip their bodies over the side, like so many European captains, for burial at sea, so that they would end up as hungry ghosts. He could be relied upon to take them to a port where they could be properly buried and decently furnished with burned paper copies of the goods they would need on the other side. So he toiled with them, called them dogs and whores’ sons in fluent pidgin, fought them with his fists and gambled with them, drank them under the table in a hundred, filthy dockside bars and nursed them when they were sick. If they did not exactly love him, they at least respected him as a man to be reckoned with and wreathed him round with silken myth. He was the product of a drunken union between a mad sailor and a witch who had assumed the form of a fox. If roused to wrath he could turn into a bear. He had been seen to eat iron rivets, chomping them down with his great teeth. There was even a Chinese version of the Lauterbach song whose darker linguistic points he did not seek to elucidate. In those years he had crushed life’s grape against his palate and happily spat out the pips. He was young and glad to be free and touched the earth very lightly for such a heavy man.
In the East any white man became upper class, regardless of his origins. He had stayed at the best hotels, dined at the best restaurants and drunk the most subtle vintages. In Shanghai, Lauterbach had sipped pink gins with Kitchener in the International Club and wore a gold ring on his finger given by the Emperor of China, or sometimes it was the other way around. There had been girls – bony Chinese with bodies like bicycle frames, voluptuous, hairy-backed Russians down on their luck. Once, in a casino in Shanghai, he had won a pair of blonde Swedish twins with huge pink breasts like blancmanges and extraordinarily complex underwear you needed a chart to fathom. They had drunk and sung and danced and made love and finally he had recited to them Swedish poetry, remembered from Baltic childhood, and made them cry. To the crash of waves and the throb of mighty engines, Lauterbach had obliged many a lady passenger on the slow Pacific swell, always a generous and unfussy lover, fervent but discreet, so that they usually came back for more of his tasty beef on the bone. As a sailor, he had always prided himself on his bedside manner and his couplings were as efficient and dispassionate as a naval docking procedure. A fat moustache and a touch of gold braid proved an irresistible aphrodisiac to colonial wives who appreciated his discretion which, in fact, rested on his inability to remember any of their names or faces so that he was frequently astonished to wake and see that of a complete stranger on the pillow beside him. But he always retained an encyclopedic memory of the feel of their thighs as they gripped his comforting bulk and scrambled giggling to his summit. The top drawer of his dresser contained a pile of the conventional gold watches, most of them too tight for him to wear, given by unimaginative but grateful women. He made them the small change of friendship to departing Chinese crew, inscrutable but litigious. Sometimes, he knew, these ran a sweepstake on his exploits, especially on the dull Shanghai stretch. Long faces or grins at breakfast showed who had hit the Lauterbach jackpot on the last night. And towards the end of a run, Ah Ping, the steward, had a way of damping down his boilers or opening his throttle wide to guide his efforts towards the desired total. “You take this boi’ egg. You need keep up your strength. I think you get old.” Or. “You only get porridge today. No boi’ egg. Need rest yourself. You do too much.” Sometimes the Lauterbach torpedo was so unpredictably trigger-haired, he thought they must be slipping him other stuff, more than boy eggs or even girl eggs, in the food.
But now war was coming and it was time to batten down the hatches and get under cover. Regulations obliged Lauterbach to serve two months a year in the naval reserve and normally it was a welcome break from the routine of restless motion. They gave him a new uniform, lots of fancy saluting, there was riding, hiking, swimming and banging about with guns. Usually it was here in Tsingtao where the cold inshore winds spared you the humid horror of a summer in Shanghai. You could afford to rent a room, lay in some wine, fix up a comfortable mistress at long-term rates. The onboard food was awful but often you could eat at the Cafe Floessel, run by a fat Duesseldorf lady with a roving eye, and the only really bad part was being under someone else’s orders again, corseted by childish discipline and the starched collar of regulations. It was as good as a holiday. Now Russia would put an end to all that.
Not just Russia, naturally – who would probably just support the Serbs against the Austrians as always. The real enemy in Europe would be the French if the lazy British could be kept out. But the most immediate danger out here in the East was the bustling Japanese. Maybe they would fight the Russians again. Last time, half the Russian fleet had run away to hide from them in Tsingtao. No fools, when they had looked to the West for models, the Japanese had based their army on that of the Germans and their fleet on the British Navy. But their spanking new warships were already arrogantly jostling those of the Western powers in the harbour of Shanghai and the real goal for Japan would be the precious city of Tsingtao itself. Tsingtao and all the German colonies of the Pacific – that was what they would want to join the grown-up nations of the world and there was precious little to stop them. A cruise to Mexico? He thought not. The whole world and all the certainties of this new twentieth century were about to blow up in their faces. Not just a war, a world war. Time to get under cover.
Lauterbach’s rickshaw rattled over the railway tracks set into the cobbles and wheeled to a halt in a great arc. It was a comfortingly nautical way to stop. The sweat-soaked rickshaw man slumped on the shafts in a theatrical demonstration of exhaustion and despair as Lauterbach heaved himself creaking down and looked up at his new ship, the harbour water sucking and slapping at her sides while she gently peed bilge from a rust-rounded hole. Sailors were rubbing down and repainting her sunburned nose. All about were stalls selling food, cheap souvenirs, and great heaped crates snarling with German military and technical reference numbers. Around them, hundreds quacked and shrieked in dialects of Chinese, carried things up, carried things away – maybe the same things – scraped pans, smashed bottles, performed unspeakable acts of mutilation on screaming pigs. A woman was throwing greasy water over a wailing child that danced with rage. China had always been a bad place to have a headache and there was no shortage of headaches this morning. Debauched and stubbly sailors, newly mobilised with kit bags on their shoulders, took queasy leave of their local amours in tones of tragedy or relief to the chink of Mexican dollars. Lauterbach’s civilian uniform, provoking neither respect nor salutes, bestowed blessed invisibility. Having newly sacrificed beard and moustache to naval discipline, he seemed, even to himself, like an impostor.
They called His Imperial Majesty’s ship Emden “the swan of the East.” Lauterbach shouted and gesticulated to a stall for hot dumplings and looked her over. He danced the hot food on his tongue, swallowed and grunted, unimpressed. He had visited too many “Pearls of the Orient” and “Venices of the East”, that lay choking in their own garbage, and paid court to too many “oriental beauties”, who turned out to have pyrrhoea and scabies, to pay heed to any of that. Swans, anyway, he had always found to be unpleasant and pointless creatures – like aristocrats. He had looked her up in the naval records, rattled the skeletons in her closet, seen her with no clothes on. She was nothing to write home about.
He knew that, technically at least, the Emden was less a swan than a white elephant. Her keel had been laid a good eig
ht years back in 1906 in Danzig as part of the Kaiser’s first petulant arms race against his British cousins. A policy had sought to cultivate local enthusiasm by naming each vessel after a particular German city. That of Emden was informed, in suitably inflated language, that it had now a ship of its very own and had tried to rise to the occasion with a rash of civic receptions and declarations of patriotism that fatigued both givers and receivers but allegedly pleased the Kaiser. In those days of peace and posturing, the navy’s main duty was to please the Kaiser and numbers were everything as nations fought with reviews of the fleet like little boys showing off their collections of marbles.
She was obsolete when built. The old stove-pipe funnels had a quaint air of tipped top-hats and her torpedoes were of outmoded design and sorely limited range. The prognathous bow echoed a time when ramming was a standard naval manoeuvre while the old piston-driven engines were cumbersome and unresponsive. Ships were split into categories – battleship, destroyer and so on – so that they could be matched between the various nations but then a sort of cheating blurred the distinctions so that a cruiser could be heavy, light or medium. The Emden was a decidedly ‘light‘cruiser. Those of foreign navies already had smooth-running turbines and were faster, better armoured and more heavily gunned than this white-painted swan. They had more watertight compartments and were less easy to sink. Never mind. She had one great charm for Lauterbach. She was not intended to stand and fight other armed vessels but prey on helpless merchantmen. She was designed to be the school bully that kicked little kids and took their sweets off them. If anyone her own size or a teacher turned up, she was to run away.
“You givee one piece dollar I takee travel box inside ship-ship.” The rickshawman was there, interrupting his thoughts, grinning through broken teeth and holding out his hand confidently. Lauterbach paused and sighed. Those young puppies had spoiled the market. He roused himself, deliberately stood against the sun so the great shadow of his bulk fell in the driver’s eyes and pointed to the stack of old, well-used luggage, generously embossed with supplementary straps and reinforcements, raised his fist and gobbed a stream of pidjin in the expectant face.
“I reckon you one piece fella him savvy box velly bloke. Chop-chop you takee bloody travel box. You no takee I givee bloody bamboo chow-chow, damn right.”
The scrawny driver quailed, seized a suitcase, clapped it on his head and jogged off up the gangplank at the exaggerated pace they called “the imperial trot.”
Lauterbach watched him with a satisfied smirk and moved gently up the plank himself, clamping the rail with huge, serial, slow hands. Gangplanks could be slippery and dangerous. This one bent under his weight but that was just a comforting proof of his own solidity. Later, he resolved – point made – the Chinese should have his tip. He was, after all, far from being a harsh man. He just liked things to be clear.
His cabin was tailored for one of those slim boys, a thing of louvred lockers and stick furniture, a doll’s house. Back on the Kraetke, his own command, he had a double bed screwed to the floor and chairs of leather and brass. Here, there was a slim monastic bench of leatherette that, he could foresee, would be too short, too narrow and preclude all hospitality. He sat down on it with a groan – that it returned – lit up a cigarette and stared at the pile of luggage, like a new schoolboy waiting for his feeling of blank emptiness to turn into the inevitable homesickness. Only now he was not moving forward to some new stage in his life, with new experiences and privileges but backwards towards adolescence and loss of power. Already the leatherette was sticking wetly to his buttocks. There was a smart tap at the door and young von Guerard was there, grinning through flawless teeth, beckoning in another rickshaw driver with more luggage.
Lauterbach sat his ground, puffed smoke aggressively. “I think you must have made a mistake, Lieutenant von Guerard. They told me this was my cabin.”
Von Guerard laughed with confident charm – threw a fencing foil twirling into the corner, seized and piled boxes and tennis raquets, gave too large a tip. He sprawled back, legs apart, on his boxes and grinned up at Lauterbach. He had been perfectly and expensively finished in all the best schools of the Reich and acquired gentlemanly accomplishments. Great wealth brought with ir great irresponsibility. He had the ability to drink a bottle of champagne standing on his head whereas Lauterbach, more pedestrian, merely prided himself on drinking one while still standing on his feet.
“Surely you don’t think you’re having this huge cabin and all this space to yourself, Juli-bumm. We’re lucky there are just the two of us. Will you take the bench or the hammock?”
“The hammock.” He could get one of the men to stitch two of them together lengthwise. The mere thought of trying to sleep through rough weather, swinging there like a bat sent a stab of dyspepsia through his stomach and stuffed suffocation up his nostrils.
“This is going to be such fun.” The boy quivered with excitement. “We’ll give the Brits a pasting.”
“Yes. Such fun.”
Wherever he went, von Guerard expected to be loved and to feel himself immediately and effortlessly at home. He was like some big-footed puppy that had been petted and cosseted all its life. Lauterbach lacked such certainty. He had never found it easy to simply belong or even be accepted. Feeling old and depressed, he rose on shaky feet to stagger to the heads across the way and slam the clanging door shut and sat, fat, mottled knees crammed up hard against the warm metal and held his head. There were the usual pathetic pencilings, “Long live the Kaiser” and “Up the Boys in Blue.” Along the top was a line from a von Eichendorf poem, “Whom God truly favours he sends out into the wide world.” They did you a good class of poems in the navy. Down in one corner, was a further text in a small crabbed hand. He bent to decipher it as von Guerard’s clear happy laughter rang out again in the cabin across the corridor, accompanied by the sound of tennis balls thudding against the bulkhead. It was the optimism and cheerfulness of the young that made them insufferable. “Turpitz fucks pigs,” it read. In support, was offered a sketch of the admiral, hat rakishly askew, engaged in one of the less common forms of congress. It was clear that the artist had studied at no formal school of anatomical drawing and impressed by verve rather than draughtsmanship. Lauterbach sat back and breathed with relief. He was not totally alone in a conformist world, then. To settle and reassure himself further, he reached into the special, waterproof pocket a cunning tailor had sewn into his waistband and pulled out a fat wad of currency and started counting his money out onto his knees. “Ten, twenty, thirty …” There were slick dollars and curlicued marks and arrogant pounds but somehow most reassuring were the fat Chinese notes – soft, thick and friendly as bedsheets. “Forty, fifty, sixty.” A comfort blanket against the world. As he counted, his breathing steadied and his heart slowed back to its accustomed pace. He would survive.
“The situation is as follows …” Von Muecke, the First Officer, was enjoying the chance to perform in public. He raised his pointer with trim authority and rapped firmly on the map pinned to the wall. Early thirties, focussed, a mind devoid of doubt and humour, he reeked of hard beds and cold showers. In his presence, Lauterbach was oddly aware of the dandruff on his own collar. Dandruff was a sort of unpardonable inefficiency. There was no need, he thought with irritation, for von Muecke to rap. Did everything have to be a military parody? At the messroom table, he had noticed him attacking the dumplings in their serving dishes with the sequenced motions of a bayonet charge. He shifted fat buttocks uncomfortably on the hard wooden chair. Von Muecke had made them heroically fling all cushions overboard as part of the change from peace to war footing. The curtains over the portholes had gone too and they had been blacked out with paint. A good nautical fug of armpits, fags and fish supper was building behind them. When on war watch, men slung their hammocks by their stations, slept in their clothes for days and had no time to wash. The stink of a warship was like that of a prison – all balls and boredom. Lauterbach hated it.
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p; “The war is nearly won. Berlin reports that our forces have already scored significant victories in France and Belgium …” Von Muecke’s pointer coolly moved whole divisions effortlessly across borders through barbed wire and machine guns. War was then not a thing of rotting green corpses and foul decay but of crisp lines etched on a map. “It was feared that the British, unable to confront Germany as an equal, would take the coward’s route yet again and fight its battles through others. Luckily that has not occurred and Britain has let slip the mask and we see, at last, the naked face of our enemy’s jealous hatred. English greed for wealth and power has deceived and humbled France and Russia, now also enemies, and reveals the sole purpose of that perfidious nation to be nothing less than the total annihilation of peaceful Germany.” His beaky little nose pecked the air with satisfaction. Its silhouette fell across the map of Europe seizing Paris in an ambitious pincer movement between nostrils and upper lip. The eyes gleamed fervently. “Our glorious victory is certain. The land war will be over in a matter of months. Our mighty fleet has gained the open sea. Tsingtao is an impregnable citadel, a secure part of the fatherland, that will vigorously defend the honour of German arms. If we are to deck our beloved vessel with a champion’s laurels we must all lend ourselves swiftly to that great purpose, before our foes bend on trembling knee to sign their unconditional surrender” The pointer became a sword for the flourishing. “Three cheers for the Kaiser!”
The ratings leapt to their feet, crying out lustily, fisting the air, cheers ricocheting around the steel walls like shrapnel. Lauterbach flourished his pipe silently in token participation, mimed cheers slack-mouthed, being irrelevantly distracted by the irritating image of foes trying to sign while on bended knee. He had no hatred for the British. He had met lots of decent British seamen and the world for him was divided along a simpler line – that between sailors and landlubbers. The sea belonged to no state, neither did sailors so that a seaman’s vocation was its own nationality and brotherhood. One of the turning points in his early life had come with the realisation that his father’s mind was irrevocably decayed when he developed a sudden rabid interest in national politics.