by Nigel Barley
“He go pilotman ship, hidee in laundry.”
“I see.” So he had not been on board at all for days. He had taken the advance pay and run. A very smart Chinese, young Joseph, mission-educated of course.
“How much you wantee?” He said it to each of them in turn, hoping to divide them, one against another. Obligingly, they immediately began to quarrel. He let the babble run its course for a minute or two, then returned to the one who had spoken first. Small, thin, strong muscles on light bones, a sharp, intelligent face.
“One, how much Joseph say he givee you?” Sloe eyes appraised him cautiously.
“I no One. I Two.”
“Alright Number Two. How much Joseph he payee you?”
“Five dollar.” He told off the sum on fingers red and sore from constant immersion in hot water. He was lying of course. Lauterbach inhaled sharply and shook his head.
“Okay. Four dollar. Number Three getee three dollar. Four getee two dollar.”
Four? Who the hell was Four? They pointed to the little fat one with the currant-bun face who squirmed and blushed coyly at such unaccustomed prominence. If he was Four, then who the hell was One?
Two looked at him evenly. “Mr von Muecke, he Number One. Captain call him Number One alltime.”
“That,” insisted Lauterbach calmly, “is different and you know it. Which one you Number One Washboy?”
They looked at each other and suddenly erupted in giggles, struck out at each other’s shoulders, collapsed in a general hug and fell among the washing, kicking and screaming with their feet in the air.
“Is no One. No one Number One. One no live. Joseph he just takee dollar for Number One.” They screamed in hilarity.
Lauterbach looked on them with love. He liked Chinese. He sat down on the laundry or rather their luggage. Something cracked sharply inside beneath his weight but he ignored it. It was the moment to let them actually see money to focus their minds. He dug in his pocket and extracted a pile of Mexican silver dollars, lined them up on his fat knee, counted them out. They immediately fell silent and looked grave, eyes fixed on the silver, the way chickens are said to stare at a chalk line drawn on the ground.
“Okay. Maskee. I fixee. Likee this way. Number Two getee six dollar, Three getee four, Four getee three dollar. I givee dollar chop-chop” They put heads together, brooded darkly under bobbing pigtails. NumberTwo turned back, clasped his hands together primly.
“How bout One?” he asked. Lauterbach grinned.
“Number One still workee for us. One getee six dollar. Me takee half. You takee half.” They relaxed. This was a world they recognised. If he had killed off non-existant Number One Washboy they would have lost all respect for the white man. They nodded, content. Four whispered an overlooked objection. There was another outburst of quarrelling static.
“One thing-lah.” Two looked worried. “Six dollar only not enough. You payee me six dollar. So you payee Number One eight dollar. He number One Boy – cannot getee same as me, cannot losee face.” Lauterbach held his gaze, stared into the unblinking black pupils. There was no quiver of irony there. He really liked Chinese.
Von Mueller returned silently from the Scharnhorst and slipped, without particular gratitude, into a cool, freshly laundered and ironed tropical tunic. That night, the entire squadron raised anchor and set sail. The bustling lagoon was suddenly empty, haunted by a ghost of black smoke that was the end of German imperial possession, for another message from Tsingtao announced that Japan had declared war on Germany and that its vastly superior fleet was on its way south towards them with a force of occupation. The natives did not yet know that they would now have to throw away their relatively new German grammar books and learn to speak Japanese.
“Emden detached. Good luck.”
Lauterbach read the signal flags on the Scharnhorst and watched carefully as a further signal detailed the collier Markomannia to attend them.
He was reclining in his new cane-backed planter’s chair with its adjustable headrest, extendable footrest and armrest pierced to receive a reviving glass. It had been specially strengthened to bear his weight. Prudence had required that he send an only slightly less desirable example to the captain with his compliments. Von Mueller had taken to it at once, installed it on the bridge, lived in it, slept in it. God knows, with over four hundred men aboard, there were takers enough for a spare cabin. On the captain’s chair, the drink receptacle held ruthlessly sharpened pencils, not gin.
Both ships wheeled south south-west in a smear of foam, as the rest of the squadron steamed off to their rendezvous with destiny. In November they would annihilate the British naval squadron in Chile. In December the same would happen to them. Thousands would go down in a neat balance of slaughter that would be a matter of simple pride to both navies.
Lauterbach knew at once what it all meant. They had all argued their options in the vomit-green wardroom. The Emden was to become a lone raider, preying on enemy merchant shipping in the great British lake that was the Indian Ocean, living on its wits, knocking on doors and running away, a constant irritant. Since the intended enemy would be unarmed all would be well until they met their inevitable nemesis in an encounter with some bigger vessel of the Royal Navy. Everything depended on what would happen then. Von Mueller was an old-fashioned man and a fine old naval tradition existed of a discreet gentlemanly comparing of the size of one’s ordinance followed by just heaving to and quietly accepting a defeat that seemed inevitable. After all, in naval encounters, the outcome was almost always predictable in advance, barrel inches being everything. Yet there was also a nasty, modern idea that honour required a fight to the death with as many as possible going down with their ship and Lauterbach could all too easily picture the captain’s insubstantial form being sucked down with no more complaint than a great air-bubble. If he were incapacitated, von Muecke would assume command and he was even worse. He would have them doing bayonet charges on the poop and singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” as the sea washed over them. Lauterbach ran his hand over the comforting materiality of his own thigh and stomach and saw big trouble coming. At least the other ships had not given them three cheers, the usual public acknowledgement of a suicide mission.
This would mean setting a new course. He sighed. Before the summons came, he hauled himself to his feet and headed for the bridge. Inside, it was crowded. There was chaos and confusion on all sides. The rest of the squadron was observing radio silence. The German island of Yap could not be raised. The message of a Japanese declaration of war was – it now seemed – garbled and unsure. They travelled cocooned in perilous ignorance. Von Muecke devised an elaborate set of training exercises that kept the men’s hands out of their trouser pockets around the clock. Junior officers were set to erecting anti-shrapnel screens around the guns. Made of woven hemp, they would later prove splendidly incendiary. Gnarled engineers dismantled the boilers, one by one, and replaced their fouled tubes. Prince Franz Josef tinkered whistling with the torpedoes and reset their warheads. And everywhere was coal. Not only the bunkers were full, but it had been piled everywhere on the decks in great tottering stacks, so that the men squelched through it in trenches like on the Western Front, their feet dragging through filthy coal slurry. The ladders and companionways were gritty with it. Soon it was trekked all over the ship. It was under their nails and behind their ears and when they blew their noses, there it was again embedded wetly in their snot.
“A course for the Palau Islands, if you please Mr Lauterbach, port of Angaur.” Von Mueller, endeckchaired, serenely above it all, a board set across his knees with a homely clutter of charts and papers, watching as men poked rifles up the big gun barrels to check their aim without wasting shells. Von Muecke had thought of that. The captain was swaddled up against the weather, like some millionaire invalid on the Atlantic run, though it was warm enough in these latitudes. “And keep us well to the east of Yap. They may well have been taken by the enemy.” Bloody right. He took them a good seventy miles ou
t.
With 6,000 tons of coal aboard, the Markomannia wallowed heavily in their wake, painted in the colours of a British Blue Funnel liner, irritated to be constantly used as their practice target. At the economical steaming speed of twelve knots, it would take them six days. The sea was horribly vast, the ship suffocatingly tight. On the heaving bridge, Lauterbach felt the chords of feat twang through his guts. The whiff of death was borne incontinently on the wind like the smell of excrement in old Tsingtao. He would soon have to go and count his money again to be soothed.
In Angaur, the Princess Alice was an old friend from Tsingtao. She had come from Yap and brought the news that the British had given three hours’ warning there before shelling the radio tower from the sea, blasting it to pieces. Having nosed into the harbour at Angaur, she could not anchor, being a 10,000 tonner, because of the great depth of draft and held her position, screws wastefully turning against the current. Civilians from the local phosphate company came out to beg supplies but the Emden had none to spare. Prince Franz Josef was doing his own more practised aristocratic begging aboard the Alice, pocketing up drink and cigars without formality or embarrassing signs of gratitude. The American newspapers she had brought reported that a great naval battle had occurred in the North Sea with no less than 28 German and 16 British warships sunk, including Jellicoe’s flagship. It was all rubbish of course, an ill-judged attempt to manipulate the stock market. Lauterbach scanned the prices anxiously. He was heavily into American stock and doing nicely.
The Alice was to be commandeered and become an auxiliary but Captain Bortfeld was far from pleased, insisting on a meticulous documenting of every militarily appropriated match and safety pin. Meanwhile the Emden coaled again. And when they set sail, the Alice was mysteriously missing. She had no coal. It had evaporated. Her boilers were suddenly fouled and inoperative. She became accidentally lost. It was regretfully impossible to rejoin the flotilla. The ‘vons’ and other swans on the bridge raged and cursed such low bourgeois concern for property and self-preservation that went against the demands of patriotism. Lauterbach thought of his own besmirched command and understood only too well.
“A course for Portuguese Timor, if you please, Mr Lauterbach.”
They crossed the steamy equator somewhere near New Guinea but no time now for japes and duckings, no courtly panoply of King Neptune and hairy-legged mermaids with rolled socks for breasts. Supplies were running low. For days, the cooks had rung every possible change on corned beef and rice. They had fried it, boiled it, roasted it and made it into pies but it was still rice and bully with a lingering aftertaste of flat metal and everyone was sick of it. To add insult to injury, as they headed down for the East Indies, they came upon a fat Japanese passenger ship, stuffed with supplies. They paused, considered each other, neither entirely certain if they were actually at war, and passed with mutual curtsies expressed in the language of punctiliously dipped flags.
Off Timor they stopped to coal again. A supply ship should have been waiting but wireless rendezvous never quite worked. The sailors were becoming petulant. They had been promised excitement, the fun of rough boyish games and glory to follow. All they had got was the grime and boredom of coaling, foul food and an empty sea. In a magnificent gesture, Prince Franz Josef stripped off his imperial tunic and joined in the coaling. Lauterbach, more cautious, offered a bottle of champagne to the first man to spot a prize ship. If it were von Guerard, he could drink it standing on his head. Too late, they finally heard the Japanese declaration of war reported on wireless from Siam.
There are over thirteen thousand islands in the East Indies, from huge masses such as Java and Sumatra to tiny uninhabited outcrops of coral and sand, a perfect maze to hide in. Another rendezvous off Tanahjumpea. The Emden and the near-empty Markomannia glided into the paradisal anchorage, and prepared to drop anchor
Suddenly heavy radio traffic bleeped from the bridge and everyone’s hair stood on end. Action stations rang out. There was no way of working out the Morse code’s point of origin but operators could tell by the signal’s strength whether it was near or far. This was very close and the chances were it was a British warship. A smudge of smoke and suddenly, in the thickening late-afternoon sun, there was a pocket battleship coming at them from a range of 3,000 yards, guns trained and thrust towards them.
Lauterbach scrambled for the armoured bridge. At all costs the open decks must be avoided in a battle. Anyone out there would be shredded in seconds. The men rushed to their posts as the two ships, like knights at a jousting, charged either side of a low-lying spit of land, furiously scanning each other with glasses. Battleflags were hoisted. Full speed ahead was rung up. As the men stood in their asbestos gloves, waiting for the order to open fire, the flags were recognised. It was the Tromp, a warship of neutral Holland. Speed clanged to dead slow, the flags were hauled down, the guns were pointed straight over the bows and the stiff minuet of internaval courtesies began again. Lauterbach sweated and trembled with relief. Von Muecke cursed. “Infernal bad luck. Thought we had a scrap on at last.”
As master of the smaller ship, etiquette decreed that von Mueller had to pay a call on the Dutchman. Boys Two, Three and Four hastily preened and pressed dress uniforms for the captain and the crew of the steam launch while the men scrubbed down the grimy ship’s boat out of sight.
Salutes, piping aboard, a glass of beer in the wardroom. Mynheer must know he was in Dutch waters. It was not permitted for belligerents to be in Dutch waters for more than twenty-four hours every three months for purposes of coaling and repairs. A German supply ship had been detected lurking here in Dutch waters for an excessively long period and been ordered to leave. Mynheer must know that a longer period risked compromising Dutch neutrality and involved the sanction of internment. Von Mueller politely withdrew and the Tromp escorted them to the three-mile limit. More extravagant salutes, courtly farewells. And don’t come back. Von Muecke raged against Hollander pusillanimity, rooted no doubt in English perfidy. Lauterbach saw things more simply.
“The Dutch have no choice but to be neutral, Number One. Theirs is a country where, if you dig a trench, it fills with water and becomes another damned canal.”
That night in the listless heat of the wardroom, as they forked greasy corned beef fritters and grey rice around their plates, von Muecke seemed preoccupied. They still dined, with cruel mockery, off rather fine monogrammed china, linen cloth, with a silver cruet set in the middle of the table. Lauterbach had a little something tucked away in his cabin he could eat later but he had his eye on that slice of beef untouched on von Guerard’s plate. Von Mueller would be in his deckchair, above them, sipping soup. Finally, von Muecke made a face and pushed the food away with decision.
“Did you know, Lauterbach, that I am musical?” What was this? Was he going to do the “Lauterbach” song? Were they to clear the table so that he could leap upon it and hammer out a hornpipe? It might be a trap. Lauterbach looked into the ice-blue eyes and hedged.
“No, Number One, I did not. And what form does this musicality take?”
“Oh,” he smirked self-deprecatingly and flutterd thin, blue-veined hands. “Piano, flute, a little bit on the trumpet.” The trumpet? Von Muecke? Surely not. A piccolo man if ever there was one, just as he himself was destined, in any band, to parp and wheeze on the tuba.
“In my student days, I was most attracted by the romance of the theatre.” Lauterbach was appalled. Von Muecke a star-struck thespian? Young von Guerard winked wickedly, his generous smile plucking any sting from his words.
“We should have a concert party. Number One, you can play the organ and you, Juli-bumm, can put on a bear suit and dance.” Cheers, laughter. Incongruously, in the midst of this tropical sea, miles from land, the sound of sheep bleating blew in the porthole. What enchantment was this? Of course. It was the Markomannia, following their stern light too close. Aboard, she still had two pigs, six cattle and a few well-travelled sheep. Converted into roast joints and sausage, they
had begun to play a role in the men’s dreams. Dr Schwabe there, a follower of the latest psychological fashions, was becoming interested in the subject. Professor Freud was, after all, an Austrian, therefore a sort of ally.
“My principal concern, naturally, was less with acting than with directing others.” Yes, thought Lauterbach, he could see that. Von Mueke with his pointer and wall charts … “and an important part of this was to agree the scenery with the painters, some of them quite talented men but in need of guidance, an overall vision, you understand. They were to produce the large painted backcloths – what we in the theatre,” he blushed, a real insider now, “would call ‘the flats.’” He cleared his throat. Except for long political tirades against the British, this was the longest speech Lauterbach had ever heard him make. “Now, von Guerard. You remarked this evening that you had picked up a Dutch wireless message that mentioned a four-funnelled British destroyer in the Sunda Strait.” Von Guerard nodded, intrigued. “Our principle defining feature, when seen in silhouette,” he turned sideways on, “is our possession of three funnels – not two or four like the British and French – but three. So why do we not rig a fake fourth funnel of canvas – a flat – to confuse the enemy?” Cries of “Brilliant,” “Well done Number One.”
The blue eyes turned to stare at Lauterbach who was pursing his lips. “You do not,” he challenged icily, “like the idea?”
“Oh it’s not that, Number One. It’s an excellent suggestion.” God knows, he would vote for anything that would avoid their being blown out of the water a little bit longer. “God knows, the British papers always claim we hide behind a fake British flag anyway. But what about the old man – I mean the captain? He can be – well – a bit of a stickler in matters of honour. We’d be mutton dressed up as lamb. He wouldn’t like that at all.”