by Nigel Barley
Von Muecke considered. “But the Markomannia sails under false colours.”
“She is not – strictly speaking – a vessel of war. Anyway, she was already that way when assigned to us.”
“True.” He got to his feet, put on his cap. It had a smear of the still undried green paint on it. “I will just go and ask him, then.” They were speechless. It was like suggesting one should just nip up and ask God for a clarification after an argument over the mystery of the Trinity. Lauterbach noted with distaste von Muecke’s athletic, feline step towards the door, the mark of a man with an excess of energy.
When he was gone, they had another round of beers drunk in shocked silence – small, parsimonial bottles, not the elaborate, foaming steins of shoreleave.
“He won’t go for it,” opined Franz Josef breaking the silence and pushing a pile of ten silver dollars across the table. There was an explosion of bets and counterbets. “You hold the pot Juli-bumm.”
“It is not seemly to gamble on the ethics of war,” he grinned piously. Howls of derision, lip-farts. He gathered the money in his hat and stowed it, out of sight, on his fat knees under the tablecloth then reached across and forked von Muecke’s left-overs into his mouth.
Von Muecke returned, frowned, sat down. Frustrated thespian that he was, he knew how to work an audience. Silence tautened. Finally someone spoke.
“Well …?”
He broke out in a broad grin and threw himself back in his chair. “He said it was a great idea. The treacherous British always talk about their great sense of humour. It would be,“ he explained earnestly, “a sort of English joke.”
What sounded like a squeal of laughter floated in across the waves, one of the pigs aboard the Markomannia. “Must have flown into something,” thought Lauterbach, astonished and belched. That last slice of bully beef had been very nasty.
They sailed through the narrow straits between Bali and Lombok, in four-funnel disguise, heading south of Java and Sumatra with the Markomannia a safe distance behind. The churning, crowded water and its many prying eyes were the greatest danger they would face in this part of the world. The endless, undisciplined chatter of the British over the radio gave away another of their warships following a similar course at similar speed that they might otherwise have fallen foul of. They coaled once more in Dutch waters and again were caught and ordered to leave. The Dutch official, observing strict neutrality, neither declared their own identity over the radio nor revealed that they had passed within 30 miles of HMS Hampshire and certain annihilation. And there were final additions to the crew. The ship’s cat gave birth to five kittens.
They had been at war for some two months already and achieved virtually nothing. But now the whole of the Indian Ocean and its rich sea lanes suddenly lay open to them. No one even suspected they were there.
Chapter Three
There is nothing so romantic as the stern light of a ship on a moonless night, bobbing on an ink-black sea. Even better when the whole side of a ship is carelessly lit up like a Christmas tree, with copious coils of smoke belching back from a single funnel. But romance was not on their minds. They were sharks. This was prey. The Emden leapt forward, slicing through the water. Real action stations at last. Lauterbach sighed in the tiny cabin and pulled on his boots, tottered as she cut speed again and crept close to fire off two blanks. “Stop engines. Don’t use wireless.” The other ship, shocked, stopped dead in the water. Lauterbach was already on the ladder over the side, ready to board, a torch gripped, for want of a cutlass, between his teeth.
Proximity banished romance still further. She was a small vessel, low in the water, her own good thick ladder on the side, thank God. He examined her papers, ignoring the phlegmatic captain who smelled of garlic and chewed melon seeds, spitting out the shells onto the filthy deck and shouting occasionally to no one in particular, “Greek. Neutral. Pontoporos. Greek.” Wait, what was this? Yes, she was Greek but had been chartered by the British Government to carry 6,000 tons of Bengal coal. That coal was fair game, could be called contraband, and badly needed for the boilers. But if the ship itself were sunk, the German government would receive a hefty bill for it and von Mueller would be furious. A dilemma. Never mind. Lauterbach he fixee.
“Captain,” he said, slipping an arm matily around the chubby, doubtless hairy, shoulders. “I think, as men of the world, as fellow members of the merchant marine, we should have a little talk in your cabin. Do you, by any chance, have any of that very fine brandy for which Greece is justly famous?”
“Eh?”
Twenty minutes later, the brandy was finished and the charter of the Pontoporos had been switched, with a stroke of the pen, to the German government. It was an intelligent compromise. A wad of US dollars crackled comfortingly in Lauterbach’s hidden pocket. He was the only member of the crew developing a paunch on slim rations. The ship would not be sunk. Instead, the coal would be paid for in full by the Kaiser. The news was flashed in Morse back to the Emden and the dumpy vessel, with a galling top speed of a mere 9 knots, fell in behind her new mother ship. They were elated to have coal, not yet knowing – as Lauterbach knew – that Indian coal was of terrible quality, soft, fouling the boiler tubes and producing huge amounts of treacherous smoke that betrayed their position twenty miles away. In the cabin he had found another treasure, an Indian newspaper with an obliging list of local shipping movements. Von Mueller would love that. Now they could pick and choose and stop sodding about all over the place.
The first victim was the Indus. With her aerials and odd white structures on deck, they thought at first she was a warship but when she cheerfully raised her flag to greet what she assumed was a fellow British vessel, it was a blue ensign not the white of an auxiliary. Her captain cursed as the Emden ran up her own German battleflag and fired the usual warning shot. She turned out to be a troopship and the odd structures were stalls for horses. Soon her crew were being ferried across to the Markomannia, the ‘junkman,’ whose job was to house prisoners and unwanted cargo that could not be sunk. The Indus was crammed with supplies but, as yet, no troops and the inexperienced prize-crew wandered through her like bumpkins at a fair, seizing all and sundry with their hands. When von Mueller saw bright silk kimonos, cushions, knitting wool and bundles of stationery tied up with pink ribbons being brought aboard his ship, he knew it was time to send over Lauterbach to supervise the looting and so save the men from mindless haberdashery.
His eye was discriminating. He knew what was militarily useful and what would appeal below decks. Soon there was fresh food, and fine conserves, drink and tobacco and a wealth of fancy equipment – including a whole radio station. The deckhands were soon kitted out in slick oilskins and binoculars. Instead of coal, the decks were now heaped with the untold wealth and benevolence that flowed from Lauterbach’s cornucopia. A Father Christmas in mufti, he dispensed sausages and sweet bon-bons filled with brandy, rained jam and pilchards down on the men. Hams were strung across the ship in a cheery bobbing display and a saucy tar had seized a supply of female undergarments to be converted into more gay bunting. Twists of tobacco reared up in benodorous mounds and the British now supplied them with fresh bread and live hens. Ironic toasts were drunk to good King George in brandy, as supplied by royal appointment, and then to Lauterbach as his prophet on earth. They sang the Lauterbach song. They were happy. He was happy.
Most sought after of all was soap. The Emden had run so short that the precious suds of the men were collected for the use of the laundrymen, and those of the laundrymen used to scrub the sleazy decks. A few days before had been Prince Franz Josef’s birthday. The band had oompahed patriotically, in his early morning honour, outside his cabin, but best of all was the present of a complete bar of soap mysteriously preserved by Lauterbach. Now the Indus was awash with soap, whole cartons of it. Two, Three and Four fell on it and squirrelled it away with little cries of joy. Cigarettes were so plentiful that von Muecke was found staring at his fake funnel. “How would it be,”
he mused, “if the off-duty stokers were to light up in there and get a bit of smoke going?” It was almost a joke. As the day wore on, a glutted torpor fell over the whole ship. The air thickened. Eyes unfocussed. Reflexes slackened and sagged.
Von Mueller watched from the bridge, sipping milkless lapsang soochong from a paper-thin cup and matching saucer. The men had been good and loyal, had borne danger and deprivation with courage. They must receive their due in the only language they understood, the things of the senses, and must have their fill of laughter, cognac and greasy sausage. He regretted only that he had no women to issue them and that bitter masturbation and those informal practices to which the navy turned a blind eye must for the moment suffice. Dr Schwabe was down there pursuing one of the ratings who had slipped on a bright female kimono, trying desperately to get down an account of his childhood as he waltzed around the deck to screams and catcalls. Von Mueller smiled wanly upon him as upon them all. But every minute spent here was dangerous. A British dreadnought could come over the horizon at any second and catch them napping. There must now be an emotional purgation. He called action stations.
To deliberately sink a ship is a terrible thing. They had been trained to think of themselves as fearless stalkers and hunters of wild beasts but to destroy a captured ship was more like beating a placid cow on the head with an iron bar until it died. The seacocks on the Indus were brutally smashed so that water shot into engine room and bunkers in great grey geysers. As soon as the scuttling crew had themselves scuttled clear, the forward gunners coldly pumped six shells into the vessel. A terrible hush fell over the spectators lining the rails of the little fleet, suddenly horribly sober. The Indus shivered as though with a spasm of sudden internal agony, steadied and settled a little lower in the water. Then, as the crew watched in suspense, she seemed to fight for life, showing a terrible will to survive her implacable fate. As the minutes ticked by, little by little, she started slipping down, accelerating as she went, gulping down great final draughts through hatchways and stairs and coughing them back out through open portholes. With a groan she twisted on her side and blew huge gouts of filthy oil through the ventilation shafts like a dying whale and the funnels screamed as they were torn apart and rushed to the bottom in a terrible whirlpool. When it seemed that nothing was left but a monstrous vat of boiling water, mighty beams, ripped loose in the depths, shot up in the air and crashed back into the sea and a terrible funereal belch.roared up from the abyss to envelope them in a rank stench of gross decay. Lastly, the lifeboats surfaced, righted themselves correctly according to design, and bobbed cheerfully in the sun. They would give away the fate of the vessel so the Emden tried to run them down like puppies in the road. They swept playfully out of the way, twinkled their sterns and floated happily off towards India. Never mind. They would not be found for several days. The Emden, Pontoporos and Markomannia turned and sailed on towards Calcutta. The captain of the Indus stood on the deck and wept openly and without shame. It sent a shiver up every seaman’s spine.
The next day they sank the Lovat, another troop transport. The crew were courteously allowed time to gather their personal effects before being installed on the junkman. Just off Calcutta, perilously close to the harbour entrance, they took the Kabinga, carrying British goods to North America. In fact, they were so close to land that they mistook a temple stupa in Puri for a ship and steamed towards it. Lauterbach had never been one of the world’s great navigators and now he was the butt of shipboard humour with lookouts spotting the Brandenburg gate and the Eiffel tower in mid ocean. The Kabinga’s goods were deemed neutral so that the ship could not be sunk. Lauterbach rebuked his own crass sentimentality – the master had his wife and child on board – for settling for only a very small sweetener to explain to von Mueller the need to spare the vessel.
Then they took the Killin. More foul Indian coal, unwanted, so she would be sent straight to the bottom. The morning was ended with a pleasant lunch, the officers playing bridge or sitting in Lauterbach’s easy chairs thumbing Lauterbach’s books – young von Guerard, – himself the ship’s pet – tousled, unshaven, giggling in delicious agony at the kittens boiling in his lap and poking their tiny claws through the thin stuff of his uniform and into his thighs. Their fur had already added itself as the latest crust on the sticky green paint.
“We have given them names Juli-bumm. Ah! Eee! They are Pontoporos, Indus, and so on – one for each of the ships we have sunk. What do you think?”
“Find more cats,” growled Lauterbach.
Then the brand-new Diplomat, smelling of paint and full of costly imperial tea, the apoplectic British captain outraged that they would not porter across his golf clubs, sporting trophies and Indian curios. Lauterbach disliked his braying, patrician tone of voice, that transported him back to the childhood days of tight-arsed respectable relatives. They would all go to the bottom and the captain with them if he had his way. Yet part of him was endlessly intrigued by the bizarre objects by which people defined their own identities, the things they prized and wanted to save. Portraits of wives and children, of course, but there had been a man aboard the Indus who brought only a pair of knitted mittens and several gnarled old tars came aboard tenderly clutching debauched teddy bears. He would mention it to Schwabe.
Then a neutral Italian ship that was allowed on its way but hastened to improperly denounce the Emden’s position to the British authorities. Why? Lauterbach had always liked Italians. He had never done them any harm. Shipping in the area was promptly suspended and five British and Japanese cruisers were called out in emergency to search for them. The Italian captain, they heard later, was given a gold watch and chain by the grateful British.
They headed east, culling the Trabboch on the way, and finally released the Kabinga, now crowded with prisoners, to return to India. As they were freed, the captive crews crowded the rails and stared at them.
“What are they doing?” asked von Muecke, nervously. “Are they going to try to board us? This is madness. Shoot anyone who attempts to approach the side.” Then …
“Hip, hip hooray!” Caps were tossed in the air, smiles waves. They were giving their astonished German captors three hearty cheers. In captured newspapers, the crew would now begin to see a legend take form that would cast the Emden, and more particularly von Mueller, as exponents of a gentlemanly and courteous kind of warfare that marked a return to the rules of knightly chivalry and was totally at odds with the emerging horrors of the Flanders trenches. The squalour and despair of the land war had led to a contempt for life that often included one’s own, so that only in the air and at sea did conditions allow men to retain that sense of self-worth that bred humane behaviour and honour-governed, gladiatorial combat. It was, naturally, von Mueller’s high aristocratic principles that received all the credit for this. The Germans, it seemed, were fighting to preserve British values.
Lauterbach smiled to himself, the latest newspaper from a victim vessel across his knee. It was full of the doings of the Emden and threw around words like “sportsman” and “fair play,” “gallantry” and “gentleman of war” as if war were a genteel match of golf but, as a man of the material world, Lauterbach knew such abstract virtue rested squarely on the abundant supplies delivered by his own astute looting. It was his low purpose rather than their high principle that kept this ship afloat. He folded the paper and bent to enjoy a plate of puffed-up, high-principled Apfelstrudel, conjured up specially for him by the cook to whom he had given looted British flour and base grease.
“Mmm. Just the way I like it.” He tongued through the outer carapace. “… dry and rough to on the outside and smooth, moist and sticky within.”
He opened his eyes to see Schwabe looking at him excitedly, notebook irritatingly poised, pencil ready-licked for the taking of notes. Lauterbach glimpsed odd little sketches in the margins and thought of that of Turpitz in the heads. Surely he could not be the artist? It was an intriguing thought. Her would return to it in moments of contemplatio
n in the latrines. Before Schwabe could say anything, Lauterbach struck first.
“Tell me Schwabe. What does your Dr Freud say on the subject of people who lick the tips of their pencils?”
“Er. Well …” He stowed it rapidly away, blushing.
“Have you read this?” Lauterbach chuckled, swallowing dabbed-up crumbs, ostentatiously finger-licking and flourishing the paper in a great paw. “‘There is no doubt that the German cruiser Emden had knowledge that the Indus was carrying 150 cases of North-West Soap Company’s celebrated ELYSIUM Soap, and hence the pursuit. The men on the Emden and their clothes are now clean and sweet, thanks to ELYSIUM Soap. Try it!’ They are using us to sell soap to Indians.”
But an attentive eye would have seen that Lauterbach’s tunic, taut now over his swelling paunch, unlike those of his slim fellow-officers, was not just clean and sweet. It was discreetly starched at cuffs and collar and the buttons were hand-burnished. Before delivery, the top pocket had received a final dressing of four chinking silver dollars, half the pay of non-existant Number One Washboy. Lauterbach felt he was finally beginning to get the measure of His Imperial Majesty’s navy.
He felt breath on his neck and turned to see von Muecke reading, incredulous, over his shoulder. “We are the most popular ship in the Indian Ocean even though we are their enemies. The English are truly mad.” Von Muecke, headshaking. “They speak of our campaign as if we were shoppers.”
“Ah, yes, Number One, but not just ordinary shoppers. We are at least carriage-trade.”
But the water in these latitudes was getting too hot for comfort and they would head south for a coaling in the remote Andamans, peopled by neutrally hostile aborigines who fired their arrows at all visitors with an easy indifference to nationality. On the way they picked up the Clan Matheson, more by habit than design. She made the mistake of running before them and they chased her as unreflectingly as a dog does a fleeing cat.