by F. R. Tallis
Lorenz laid his book on the table and drifted through the compartments, not in order to offer encouragement or stirring clichés, but to simply make his presence felt, to embody the indomitable spirit of the stricken U-boat. In the gloomy half-light, the crew looked more like a long lost tribe of troglodytes than sailors: streaked faces, bloodshot eyes, wielding wrenches like clubs, and gripping wrenches between exposed teeth, negotiating the narrow confinements of their forgotten underworld. In the torpedo room Kruger was searching for new breaches beneath the waterline. After filling his lungs with air, he squeezed his nostrils together and disappeared beneath the surface. A minute passed before he rose up again coughing and gasping.
On returning to the officers’ mess, Lorenz lifted his book again and simulated reading. He turned the pages at regular intervals and allowed his mind to wander. Superimposed on the blurred text, his imagination supplied a limpid portrait of Faustine. Where was she? Asleep in her bed or sitting in an office typing letters for Monsieur Gilbert? Eating her breakfast in a café or watching the west facade of the cathedral turn gold in the afternoon. He didn’t know what time it was. Faustine was in Paris and he was sitting in a metal tube, balanced on the summit of a mountain under the sea.
A voice roused Lorenz from his thoughts. ‘Kaleun? All of the breaches have been stopped.’
Lorenz lifted his head and saw Graf standing over him. ‘Is that the pump I can hear?’
‘Yes. We just got it going again.’ The two men smiled at each other, but the familiar grinding became labored, the pitch dropped, and then there was silence. Exhausted, Graf leaned back against the woodwork and spat out his frustration. ‘Shit!’
BREATHING WAS BECOMING INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT. Lorenz felt as if a tight harness was constricting the expansion of his chest, and his head ached. The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were perilously high. When he spotted some of the crew twitching he ordered Sauer to distribute the potash cartridges. After hanging the case around his neck, Lorenz placed a clip on his nose and bit on the ‘snorkel’ mouthpiece. The taste of rubber was strong and unpleasant. His headache receded but the mouthpiece made him produce excessive amounts of saliva. He was soon having to wipe away unsightly threads of drool from his chin.
Having previously taken on the appearance of cave dwellers, the cartridge ‘snorkels’ now made the men look like giant insects. The bunks resembled a hive, the result of some outlandish scientific experiment. This fanciful thought seemed to intensify the illusion, and Lorenz shook his head to recalibrate his brain. He was tired, a bone-deep tiredness that made simple activities like raising a hand or just thinking effortful. He could feel the weight of sleep in his body, the pull of its shadowy mass. There was nothing more to do. He had lost count of how many times he had toured the boat, so he retired to his nook and lay down, resting the potash cartridge on his stomach.
At once, he was standing outside the boat on the Mid-Atlantic ridge. The peaks were jagged and stretched to the north and south. To the east and west, rocky slopes descended into dark obscurity. U-330 was leaning to one side and pointing downward, its bow hanging over a wide chasm. The saddle tanks were dented, the deck rails were warped and twisted, and there were scorch marks on the tower. Lorenz could barely make out the scorpion emblem. The boat looked forlorn, almost abandoned—a wreck that would eventually rust away and vanish. Lorenz climbed over uneven ground and when he was next to the boat he slapped the hull, producing a low, resonant ‘thump.’ Some paint flakes were dislodged, and they sank through the water in oscillating arcs like falling feathers. His examination of the battle-scarred hull was disturbed by the sound of thrashing propellers. He scrambled down the slope and stood on a flat ledge. When he looked up, he saw a wolf-pack of U-boats passing overhead, and beyond them, the merest shimmer suggesting the play of light on a surface too far removed to see. The wolf-pack traveled slowly through the green vastness, and the spectacle of its progress was arrestingly beautiful. A giant squid swam by trailing long, suckered tentacles.
Lorenz removed his cap and waved it above his head, and was surprised to feel the water resisting his movements. ‘Help!’ he called. His request was carried upward by a single, irregular, wobbling bubble of air. ‘Help!’ he called again. Hydrophone operators would be listening: surely one of them would hear his call? He noticed a new phenomenon—an unhurried shower of black specks. As they descended they became more readily identifiable as depth charges. They began to explode and their continuous detonation resembled a fireworks display. There were flashes, cracks, and smoldering streamers. One of the submarines was blasted out of the arrowhead formation and it dived toward Lorenz. He watched it gathering speed and he was tempted to run, but he was strangely transfixed and did not budge from the ledge. The boat sailed past him, demolishing the summit of a neighboring peak, before plummeting into the darkness on the other side. A few moments later he saw a fireball ignite in the fathomless deep. The consequent shock wave woke him up.
The overhead showed through the fading vision, and Lorenz became conscious of the weight of the potash cartridge on his stomach. He adjusted the mouthpiece and noticed that his beard was covered in spittle. The boat was remarkably quiet. So quiet, in fact, that he wondered if the crew had suffocated while he had been asleep, and whether he was the sole survivor. He still felt incredibly tired and rolled his head to the side. Through the gap in the curtain he could see a figure, turned away, wearing a long coat—arms angled slightly and distanced from the body—a cap held in the right hand. The back of the man’s head was missing. Instead of an occipital bulge, there was only a gaping cavity, the interior of which glinted beneath an unsteady emergency light. Splinters of bone bristled around the edges of the wound and runnels of cerebrospinal fluid trickled around the man’s ears. Lorenz thought: I am still dreaming. But he knew that he wasn’t. The sound of his shallow breathing was amplified by the ‘snorkel.’ Fear had dispeled the torpor of sleep and sharpened his senses.
Lorenz eased himself up so that his torso was supported by his elbows. He could not believe how solid Sutherland looked. When Lorenz raised himself higher, the dead commander tilted his head, as if listening. Blood had pooled around the stump of the brain stem. This minute movement caused a red cascade to spill over the jagged bone and splash down Sutherland’s coat, creating an archipelago of dark stains. Something inside the cavity loosened and dropped and its wet impact on the base of the skull sounded like the parting of puckered lips. Lorenz blinked, and the figure was gone.
The sense of time flowing forward was restored, he could hear men at work, voices, the clatter of tools, and these indications of life seemed to rush into his nook like air filling a vacuum. He pulled the curtain aside and saw Ziegler asleep in the radio shack. Rising from the mattress he walked across the gangway and shook the radio operator’s shoulder. After removing the mouthpiece of his ‘snorkel,’ Lorenz said, ‘Wake up! Ziegler, wake up!’
Ziegler opened his eyes, mumbled something incomprehensible, and removed his own mouthpiece. ‘Kaleun?’
‘How long have you been asleep?’
‘I don’t know—not long. I was in the middle of these repairs.’ He gestured at a circuit board. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Did you see anything?’
‘Kaleun?’
‘Did you—’ Lorenz stopped himself and started again. ‘Yes, yes . . . it’s difficult, I know.’ Glancing at the wall clock he noted that they had been submerged for sixteen hours.
Lorenz made his way toward the aft of the boat. In the petty officers’ quarters he found Falk checking that the sleepers were breathing through their ‘snorkels.’ The cook was in the galley, trying to save food that had gotten wet or covered in dirt. In the diesel room, the deck plates had been taken up and the heavy machinery beneath was fully exposed. Every surface had been covered with lubricating oil: even the hull was slick and dripping. Fischer, the chief mechanic, was entirely black. The motor room had become a snakepit of tangled cables. Elsewhere, men
were staggering around like drunkards, trying to accomplish difficult tasks while their organs and vessels became clogged with poisons. Time was running out.
On his way back to the officers’ mess Lorenz was stopped by Lehmann. The hyrdrophone operator handed him a pair of headphones. Lorenz placed them over his ears and listened. He could hear the distant rumble of depth charges.
‘Sounds like quite a battle,’ said Lorenz. ‘Are they coming our way?’
‘No,’ Lehmann replied, wiping saliva off his chin with his sleeve. ‘It isn’t getting any louder.’
Lorenz carried on listening. The acoustic changed, and he thought that he heard the constant, even rhythms of speech. Was it English? He focused on the faint perturbations in the hiss, but whatever he had identified as language was almost immediately drowned out by more explosions. Lorenz handed the earphones back to Lehmann, sat down in the officers’ mess, and pretended to read again.
OVER TWENTY-FOUR HOURS HAD PASSED. Lorenz was sitting with his head thrown back and his eyes closed, occupying a twilight state of consciousness somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. Nonsensical thoughts ran continuously through his mind and he was beginning to feel feverish. The clip on his nose had become extremely painful. He was tempted to rip it off but resisted the urge because he was obliged to lead by example. For some time he had been aware of a grinding sound, infiltrating his malaise, a sound that he had only identified as a nonspecific background irritation, something preventing him from obtaining restorative sleep. Then it occurred to him that this sound, this familiar periodicity, was actually very significant, and he forced his eyelids open. He saw Graf swaying on the opposite side of the table, ragged, filthy, his ‘snorkel’ tucked behind the cartridge strap. The engineer steadied himself and started speaking in a hoarse, cracked voice. ‘We’ve pumped out most of the water. The batteries are working: we bridged the cells. The motors are ready. The forward hydroplane is ready—I think. Of course, we won’t know for sure until we start moving. The diesels are secured and ready. The gyroscopic compass is ready.’ Graf continued his lengthy recitation of accomplishments, and at its conclusion he fell backward. Falk caught him and raised him up again. Lorenz stood, his eyes glistening with emotion. ‘What took you so long?’ He squeezed out from behind the table, straightened his cap, and made his way directly to the control room where he switched on the public-address system. ‘Well, before we left I said that a crew is only ever as good as its captain, but sometimes a captain is only ever as good as his crew. Prepare to surface.’ A mournful, strangulated chorus served in lieu of a cheer.
The crew made valiant efforts to conceal their shattered nerves. Juhl had assembled the watch, Müller was poring over charts, and Graf was standing at his customary post behind the hydroplane operators. The community of fate was beginning to repair itself. All of them, without exception, looked weary and haggard.
‘Blow the tanks,’ said Lorenz—angry, defiant—as if issuing a personal challenge to the forces of destiny.
Valves were opened and compressed air hissed. All eyes were on the motionless manometer needle. Lorenz was forced to consider again the enormous weight of water pressing down on the hull, the tiny mathematical margins that would determine whether they all lived or died. The hissing continued but the needle remained fixed. A scraping noise came up through the underside of the casing, there were groans, screeches, and a shrill whistle that became intermittent like Morse code. Everything began to shake and rattle, and a shard of glass that hadn’t been removed from one of the damaged dials dropped and shattered. Finally, the boat started to rock. The bow was rising and it continued to rise until the deck was horizontal. Further increments angled the boat upward. There was more scraping, which stopped abruptly and allowed the hum of the electric motors to be heard. The manometer needle trembled and jerked back.
‘Let’s get off this rock pile,’ said Lorenz.
Two hundred and fifty-five meters, two hundred and fifty meters, two hundred and forty meters . . .
The ascent was slow and the stressed frame of the boat continued to complain. A minor breach had to be plugged at 190 meters, but the boat maintained its smooth upward climb without further incident. At fifty meters Lorenz consulted Lehmann. The hydrophones were still silent.
Forty meters, thirty meters, fifteen meters . . .
The observation periscope was raised. It was safe to surface.
‘Tower clear!’ Graf cried.
Lorenz climbed the ladder and opened the hatch. The cold, clean air burned his throat and seared his lungs; its frigid purity was almost intolerable. He felt dizzy, slightly delirious. The diesels started and released a cloud of black smoke. ‘Quickly,’ he said to the watchmen. ‘Get into position—concentrate. That was all very diverting but now it’s back to work.’
The weather conditions were much the same as they were when they had been attacked: intimidating clouds over a roughcast sea. It was as though their ordeal had happened out of time. He imagined the great mountain range 260 meters below the soles of his boots, its pinnacles and dark spaces—and shivered.
‘Permission to come up.’ It was Pullman.
‘Granted.’ Lorenz was feeling magnanimous.
The photographer appeared with his camera. He looked fragile, shaken, and less assured. ‘May I?’ he said, raising the lens.
‘If you must,’ said Lorenz. ‘But I can’t help feeling that I’m not looking my best.’
WAR DIARY
10.13Two aircraft sighted. Alarm.
11.00Mist, light swell. The after starboard lookout has reported a faint shadow at 10° on the port quarter. We alter course and travel toward it at ¾ speed.
11.40We sail ahead of shadow, our intention being to intercept later.
11.45To the west and south the horizon is overcast whereas to the north and east it is bright. Average visibility, 5–8 nm. Gradually it becomes clear that the shadow is the conning tower of a submarine; however, it is impossible to establish type.
12.13The submarine alters course hard a-port.
12.30We dive as it is too light for a surface attack.
12.50Through the periscope the submarine is identified: British T-class. Bearing 340° true. Course 220°, speed 10 knots, range 2,000 m. We alter course hard a-port to 270° and proceed at ¾ speed. The mist thickens. Contact lost.
13.15The hydrophone operator reports propeller noises at 320°. Enemy reappears, proceeding 60°, passing at a high speed, range of 200 m on our port beam. We alter course hard a-starboard to 60°. Port engine at ¾ speed. There are three watch men all of whom are looking away to port but without binoculars. No watch men on the starboard side. We prepare to fire, but the enemy submarine then turns about 150 m ahead of us and withdraws at an inclination of 180°.
13.37We alter course to 90°. Port engine dead slow, periscope depth. The enemy submarine appears to be patrolling along a NE–SW course line. We will wait for it to return.
14.00Mist thickens again. We lose sight of enemy. Course 80°. Inclination 180°.
14.20Bright, but cloudy. Light swell from the SW. Enemy in sight once again.
14.27We prepare a single shot from tube I. The bow cap does not open.
14.35We prepare a single shot from tube III. Torpedo speed set 30 knots, depth 10 m, enemy speed 8 knots, inclination 35°, bows left, range 600 m. Inclination now automatically updated by computer.
14.40Enemy steers a straight course. I order the boat hard a-port, starboard engine ¾ speed. Enemy course 215°. We pull ahead of the enemy in order to keep the parallax angle small.
14.44Just before firing we enter new data for enemy speed of 5 knots. Range 500 m.
14.46Tube III fire! Enemy speed 5 knots, inclination 70°, bows left, range 500 m, aim-off angle 8.7°. No aim-off adjustment required as enemy speed is slow. We keep the rudder hard a-port so that the enemy bearing is always 350°–10° ahead. After a running time of 34.7 seconds (= 520 m) a detonation. We feel the shock wave. A huge explosion can be seen with pie
ces of wreckage rising into the air. There is nothing more. Only a large patch of oil and air bubbles.
15.02We retire, steering course 90°. Port engine dead slow.
15.04I shall not complain, though I now founder, And perish in watery depths! Nevermore shall my gaze be cheered, By the sight of my love’s star (Better not type this, Ziegler—the Lion doesn’t like Ludwig Tieck. ‘Despair’—a beautiful poem. The last words are ‘I am a lost man.’ We are all lost men—sooner or later.)
Siegfried Lorenz
Every member of the crew had become preoccupied and inward-looking. They only spoke to each other out of necessity, and when they did, their voices were hushed. The fact that the vessel they had just destroyed was a submarine magnified the usual considerations. Yes, they were British, but in all probability they were no different to themselves, with similar hopes and fears, doing their duty, obeying orders. The logical endpoint of such thinking was a meditation on personal vulnerability and the likelihood of meeting the same fate, a conclusion that was reinforced by superstitious propensities (an eye for an eye, a submarine for a submarine) and a belief in arcane laws that preserved primitive forms of natural justice.
Lorenz was seated in his nook. He had been observing Lehmann, who was listening out for enemy vessels. The hydrophone operator looked particularly troubled. His face seemed to be caving in, his cheeks were sunken, and the skin beneath his eyes had sagged and darkened. Occasionally he would stop turning his wheel and just stare at the dial. It was obvious he wasn’t registering the figures, but rather focusing on something that existed only in his imagination. Lorenz got up and walked across the gangway. As he approached, Lehmann turned. ‘Kaleun?’ The hydrophone operator knocked one of the headphones back exposing his left ear. Lorenz spoke in a hushed, confidential whisper. ‘What is it, Lehmann?’
