He'd rediscovered the authority he'd lost on the deck of the ship. The menacing crowd dissolved, and the soldiers led the cadet away.
We heard Wedel sobbing all the way down the stairs.
Later the same evening the cadet recovered his courage. Another loud drinking session was held in the closed room, and from a corner of the loft someone began cursing the noise. It wasn't bedtime yet, but everything about the cadets was beginning to rile us.
We banged on their door, demanding silence. A brazen, high-pitched boy's voice immediately told us to shut up. "Or we'll cut your prick off, you peasant oaf!"
"What did you say?" the seaman roared back.
The drunken men who sat clustered on benches around the sturdy central table staggered to their feet en masse. Hefting a bench, they swung it back and forth as if calculating its weight, then rammed it right into the cadets' door. On the other side, all went quiet.
"Right," shouted one of the men. "Bet you're not feeling quite so cocky now, are you?"
They stepped back for another salvo, then rammed the door again. This time it gave way and they poured into the room, knocking over a table and sending a bottle smashing to the floor. Someone screamed, and the crowd that was gathering outside the cadets' room started cheering the brawling men. Ejnar and Little Clausen stood at the back on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of the fight but could see nothing through the narrow doorway.
Then the German soldiers turned up, alerted by the uproar. Smashing their way through us with the butts of their guns, they broke up the fight.
The brawlers emerged one by one. The cadets' heads hung low, and it was obvious who had borne the brunt. Wedel's nose was bleeding. Another boy had a swollen eye that had already begun to close up. A third spat out a tooth as he came through the door; blood was streaming down his chin.
A cry rang out from the crowd. "Someone's lost a milk tooth!"
Then Commandant Fleischer arrived. He was a sturdy man, with a high forehead and soft curly hair on the back of his neck. His cheeks were flushed and his lips moist; he had gravy on one corner of his mouth, as if he had just left a dinner party and had forgotten to wipe his face.
He was a major, but he instantly disappointed us all with his jovial tone of voice.
"Listen, men, this won't do. You've got to show your officers a bit of respect. Otherwise I'll have to be very strict with you and I don't really want to do that. So let's all try to get along. You'll be exchanged soon and there's really no need for us to fall out while we wait."
We stared at one another, slack-jawed. Was this supposed to be the enemy? The German, who had blown the deck from under our feet and was now holding us prisoner?
The next few days passed quietly. The pails of schnapps were kept full and we carried on drinking. Jørgen Mærke never missed an opportunity to needle the guards. Monkey asses, he called them. Dogshit. Snakes in the grass. Prickless pygmies. He insulted them with impunity, protected by his entourage who, if a guard approached, instantly formed a protective shield around him.
One day the soldiers finally decided they'd had enough. They'd been keeping an eye on Mærke, and two of them came up to the loft to nab him at the table where he was sitting with his gang. They were arresting him, they said, for drunkenness.
Jørgen Mærke's men laughed out loud at the charge and offered their wrists.
"Better arrest all six hundred of us, then."
One guard grabbed Mærke by the shoulders. He clung to the edge of the table, yelling the usual insults and adding a few fresh ones for good measure. Leaping up, his men jostled the two soldiers, rendering their guns useless, then started shoving them toward the stairs. Scared, the soldiers made little resistance. One stumbled and fell backward down the steps, while the other got a shove that sent him flying. He lost his gun as he fell. It landed a few stairs down.
The rebels looked at one another, then at the gun, then back at one another.
No one moved. It had all gone very quiet.
The soldier on the landing scrambled to his feet. He was too dazed from his fall to notice that he'd lost his gun. When he looked up there was no menace in his eyes, only confusion.
Jørgen Mærke took a step forward.
"Boo!" he shouted, tugging at his caveman beard.
The guard jumped, then turned and hurtled down the stairs. His companion got to his feet and followed him. The men laughed and slapped their thighs. Then their eyes rested on the gun and they fell silent. It was lying so near them! All they had to do was walk down a few steps and pick it up.
"Take me." It seemed to beckon. "Shoot, kill, be a man again!"
The men stood spellbound, mute, listening to the gun's whisper.
Then one of them broke the silence.
"We could—" he began, taking a step toward it.
He looked at Jørgen Mærke. He was waiting for a nod, approval, an order: Yes, do it!
But Mærke's eyes were empty, and the mouth behind the caveman beard stayed closed.
The man who'd spoken began to waver. The others took a step back, as if he were no longer one of them. Then he bent down and picked up the gun. He didn't look at anyone as he walked down the stairs, bearing the weapon in outstretched hands with the greatest of care, as it if were a sacrifice. When he reached the lowest landing, he leaned the gun against the whitewashed wall. Then he turned and went back up.
We drank heavily that night and shouted "Hurrah!" countless times. The cadets came out of their room and joined us. We were all brothers now.
The next day we made more model ships, decorated them with tiny paper flags in the Danish colors, and launched them. Bobbing there proudly on the scum of the pond, they reminded us of our nation's power.
We started doing drills in the yard, marching in closed ranks as though preparing for a major battle. Holding three fingers high, we swore that we would never "retreat or desert," but "preserve and defend"—puzzling phrases we barely understood. Nonetheless, they sounded impressive, and we proclaimed them out loud, there in the middle of the yard. Anxious-looking faces appeared above the wooden fence from time to time. They belonged to the townsfolk of Glückstadt, who were spying on us. It was in their honor that we staged these little dramas.
And sure enough, the rumor soon started spreading in Glückstadt that the Danish prisoners were gearing up to conquer the town, and the commandant informed us that from now on we were banned from equipping our model ships with the Danish colors. The people of Glückstadt were upset, it seemed, by the sight of the enemy flag.
We regarded that as a victory.
Now the German had learned to fear us!
Many victories of this kind were won in the weeks to come, and we celebrated every one of them with large quantities of schnapps.
WE WERE MORE THAN four months into our captivity, when, at the end of August, it was decided that we would be exchanged for German prisoners of war. It took us ten days to get to Dybbøl, where the exchange was to take place. We suffered many delays and humiliations on the way, but we took them all in stride because we'd regained our honor by alarming the people of Glückstadt. And when we saw the Danish ships anchored in Sønderborg Harbor, we knew that we were free men. On board the Schleswig, the steamer bound for Copenhagen, they gave us white bread and butter, schnapps, and as much beer as we could drink.
We spent the night on the bare deck, with the ship rolling gently and the wheezing engine vibrating the planks we slept on. It was a cloudless night, and the starlit sky stretched high above us. August 21, 1849, was a good night for shooting stars, and the bright tails of the comets conjured a cannonade very different from the one that heralded our miserable captivity. Laurids breathed a deep sigh. Prison had cut him off from the stars.
When you can't see land, and when the wind, the current, and the clouds tell you nothing, when your sextant has gone overboard and the compass won't work, you navigate by the constellations.
Now he was home.
"Hurrah" was the word we heard m
ost often in the days that followed. On the Baltic Sea we passed a steamer filled with Swedish troops, and from the deck of the Schleswig we shouted three cheers for the brave Swedes. At the Customs House in Copenhagen the crew of the frigate Bellona welcomed us with a triple cheer, to which we immediately responded; soon the entire harbor had erupted in answering hurrahs. Then it was the turn of the officers. They too were celebrated with applause. Commander Paludan took the lead as they walked ashore, just as he'd done when he abandoned the wounded on board the Christian the Eighth. Through his incompetence he was responsible for the loss of two ships, the deaths of 135 men, and the captivity of a thousand. But now he was greeted with respect because he was a hero. We were all heroes. It seemed as if the clapping would never end.
With our sea bags in hand, we went our separate ways to look for lodgings for the night. Soon we were seated in the city's pubs, drinking and cheering. We missed the schnapps pails; since we were now footing the bill ourselves, our drunkenness didn't reach the extremes it might have.
The following morning we were due to meet at Holmen. The naval minister had announced that four months' captivity merited two weeks' wages. Afterward we were to draw lots to decide who would return to the navy's ships and who would be sent home. Laurids, Little Clausen, and Ejnar returned to Marstal two days later. Here, a celebration arch of spruce branches was constructed in Kirkestræde, where the homecoming men were applauded and the dead mourned.
A terribly deformed creature stood in the midst of the crowd that greeted us. One eye was missing, and the bones of his right cheek and his lower jaw protruded from his skin, which leaked constantly. Even those of us who had witnessed so much on that dreadful day on Eckernförde Fjord had to avert our eyes.
We didn't know who he was until he greeted us.
It was Kresten.
It emerged that not all of his head had been shot off, as Torvald Bønnelykke had told us: only half. He'd been in a hospital in Germany until recently and had been sent home some days before the rest of us. The army surgeon had tried patching him up, but his damaged jaw refused to heal. Now he was back home with his mother—who still hadn't recovered her senses and kept asking after her missing son. When poor Kresten assured her that he was standing right before her, she stuck her finger into the hole in his cheek, just as doubting Thomas had stuck his into the savior's wounds. But unlike Thomas, she didn't turn into a believer. Her Kresten didn't look like this. It was a cruel thing for him to hear: he'd been expecting comfort and joy from the reunion with his mother, despite his ruined face. Tears trickled from the one eye he had left. It would have been better, he said, if he really had died as he'd predicted.
Laurids temporarily regained his fame as a heavenly traveler because Ejnar had described the wondrous event in a letter, and now we all wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth—except for Karoline, who was convinced that it was just another of her husband's tall tales.
The children formed a circle around him, calling out, "Papa tru, tell us a story, tell us a story!"
Albert, the youngest, yelled the loudest and gazed at his father with shining eyes. The two of them were like two peas in a pod.
But Laurids simply looked at them with this new, strange expression he'd acquired in captivity, as though they weren't even his children and the notion of having ever produced them was unthinkable.
So Ejnar had to tell them the story instead, and he did it so well that everyone thought he must have been practicing it for ages. The house filled with people who'd come to see Laurids. Karoline stood out in the kitchen, boiling water to make coffee, and turned her broad back to us, clattering the cups, as she was in the habit of doing whenever she was angry with her husband. But she finally succumbed and joined us in the parlor to listen to Ejnar.
"We will never forget how we fought for Denmark's glory," Ejnar said.
Everyone nodded, suddenly consumed by ardent patriotism.
But what Ejnar said next startled us. "We fought for Denmark's glory," he repeated. "But we found only disgrace. We willingly risked life and limb, and showed undaunted courage, to save the honor of our country. But thanks to a lousy leader, we lost it. I'll never forget how those cannonballs hailed down on us on Maundy Thursday. How we fought and fell and died in smoke and flames, and how that evening we were carted off to Eckernförde like slaves and locked up in God's house. How we lay there on the straw, exhausted and dazed. I won't forget how the Christian the Eighth was blown up and how so many poor souls died; how on Good Friday we were marched to Rendsburg, to another church, and how again we had to sleep on straw and eat stale bread for our Easter lunch. How the house of God became a cage for slaves, full of degradation and blasphemy, and how our captivity was a stretch of dark, miserable days. I'll never forget any of that, as long as I live."
"I saw Laurids," Ejnar continued, "and that became my only hope and comfort in captivity. I saw Laurids fly toward Heaven from the deck of the burning ship, as high as the main, and I saw him come back down again and land on his feet. And that's how I knew we'd be seeing our loved ones again."
"I've told you before, Ejnar, and I'll tell you again, it was the boots."
Laurids stuck out his foot so everyone could see his sturdy leather sea boots.
"The boots saved me. That's all there is to it."
"Didn't you see Saint Peter's bare behind?" asked Laves Petersen, the little carpenter, for this rumor was already spreading like wildfire. Little Clausen had been unable to keep his mouth shut.
"Yes, I saw the behind of Saint Peter," Laurids said.
But his voice sounded weary and distant, as though he'd already forgotten the episode. We knew immediately that this was all we'd get from him. Most of us believed that just as each man has his own private hell, he also has his own private heaven. And it's his right to keep it to himself.
Those of us who'd been left behind in Marstal couldn't help noticing that Laurids was a changed man. We understood that the war had been a bad time for him and that he'd witnessed things that do a man no good. But he'd already been shipwrecked twice without its affecting him in the slightest. Little Clausen said that the fighting had been like a ship going down, only worse. But Ejnar retorted that Little Clausen had spent most of the battle with his feet in the water and had escaped with nothing more than a cold, while others' heads had been blown off.
As none of the rest of us had experienced battle, we didn't know what to make of Laurids's attitude, and so we left him alone.
Karoline thought that her husband should find himself a job on land, so that both she and the children would get to see more of him. She worried about the change that had come over him and preferred to keep him close by.
Little Clausen and Ejnar were each called up several times during the war, but they always came home in one piece, and we soon grew tired of erecting celebration arches and applauding their return, and started treating them like any other sailors who made it back.
Laurids too was recalled, but by then he had already quit Marstal. He hadn't taken a land job, as Karoline had wanted, but had instead traveled to Hamburg along the Elbe, the same river he'd stared at every day during his imprisonment in Glückstadt. In Hamburg he was hired as third mate on a Dutch ship bearing immigrants bound for Australia; the other crew consisted of three Dutchmen and twenty-four Javanese. There were 160 passengers on board and it was Laurids's task to hand out provisions and keep the accounts. After a six-month voyage, the ship arrived at Hobart Town in Van Diemen's Land, where Laurids signed off. And that was the last we heard of him.
KAROLINE SAW no reason to worry during the first two years of Laurids's absence. He'd been away from home before, for two or three years at a stretch, and letters sent from the other side of the globe don't always reach their destination. Our women, who have no choice but to stay behind in Marstal, live in a state of permanent uncertainty. Even a letter is no proof that the sender is alive; it can be on its way for months, and the sea steals men without warning. But we're al
l so used to enduring periods of anxious waiting that we never share our unease with one another. Which is why there was no visible change in Karoline for the first three years, until the day when her neighbor in Korsgade, Dorothea Hermansen, asked her, "Isn't it about time Laurids came home?"
"Yes," Karoline answered. And she said no more. She knew Dorothea had been working up to putting the question for a long time, and that she wouldn't have done it without first consulting the other women in Korsgade. It was in fact a statement, rather than a question: Laurids wasn't coming back.
That night, once she'd put the children to bed, Karoline cried. She'd wept before, but always tried to suppress it. Now she allowed the tears to flow freely.
The next morning the local women crowded into her parlor to ask if she needed help.
Laurids's demise was now official.
They sat around her dining table, each with a cup of coffee. At first their voices were pragmatic and matter-of-fact as they assessed Karoline's circumstances: when it came to help, she had little in the way of family, having already lost five brothers at sea, and with Laurids's father gone too. Then their voices softened and they started praising Laurids's qualities as a husband and provider.
Karoline started crying again. He came alive for her in these moments, resurrected through the words of others.
The oldest woman, Hansigne Ahrentzen, embraced her, and let her dampen her gray dress with her tears. They stayed until she was all cried out.
Thus ended the first meeting, which introduced Karoline to her new status as a widow.
A message was sent to the Dutch shipping company, but they reported no lost ships, nor did Laurids's name appear on any of their crew lists.
The merciful comfort of a grave to which you can take your children and tell them about their father in front of the headstone that bears his name, the possibility of distracting yourself by clearing weeds or perhaps disappearing into a whispered conversation with the man who lies underground—a sailor's widow is denied all that. Instead, she'll receive an official document declaring that the ship her husband was working on, or perhaps skippered and owned, has been "lost with all hands," gone down on this or that date, in this or that place, often at a depth beyond salvaging, with fish as the only witnesses. And she can put that piece of paper away in a drawer of the bureau. Such are the funeral rites awarded to the drowned.
We, the Drowned Page 6
