The First Watch Officer is looking surly. We gather the knives and forks together in a corner of the leather sofa. Goddam mess! The whole table is smeared with remains of food. Unfair of the Old Man to choose a mealtime!
“The crew has to get used to this sort of thing. The Tommies have no consideration either—practice is half the battle!” The Old Man’s mockery only adds to the confusion.
Thank god. The boat is gradually coming back to an even keel. Now he turns considerate. He fixes the depth at two hundred feet. The steward comes and silently cleans up the mess.
After a quarter of an hour the Chief appears, completely drenched and out of breath. The Commander loans him his own furlined vest and pours out his tea with exaggerated courtesy.
“It all went off very well!”
The Chief acknowledges the praise with a sour look.
“Now, now, now!” says the Commander.
The Chief leans back against the wall and lays his hands in his lap, palms up. They are smeared with oil. The Old Man looks at him disapprovingly. “But Chief—what will our First Watch Officer think if you appear at the table like this?”
The First Watch Officer instantly turns red. The Chief pushes his hands into his trouser pockets and asks, “Better this way? As a matter of fact, I’ve already eaten.”
“But Chief! You’re starting to lose weight. Eat, drink, and be merry my children.” The Old Man is munching away with bulging cheeks. Then in the same derisive tone he asks, “Wasn’t there something you wanted to fix on the port diesel? Now’s the time. And perhaps you’ll have the starboard diesel overhauled while you’re at it? We can stay down as long as it takes. Anything you like!”
What can the Chief do but disappear aft looking resigned?
The Old Man grins around the table and says, “Let’s get some life into this damn tub! That endless loafing around back at base still sticks in my throat.”
Ever since we’ve been at sea, the Commander has appeared to be in high spirits, or at least quietly content. He even came back early from leave. The boat could perfectly well have been readied without him, but no, he had to be there.
From his sacrifice of a whole week’s leave, the crew has naturally enough concluded that he’s not exactly rolling in domestic bliss.
Apparently no one knows anything definite about his private life. Even I can construct a picture of it only from reluctant reminiscences, cynical marginalia, and my own observations. From time to time he looks through letters, all of them written in green ink with enormous handwriting. The lady who wrote them is said to be a flyer’s widow. Her father is a magistrate. The Old Man once let something fall about a piano with candelabra—red candles—and “very beautiful evening dresses.” Looking disgruntled, he made occasional remarks about this last leave as well. He “constantly” had to keep his decoration around his neck; he had to go shopping with her. “And that wasn’t all I had to put up with. Ridiculous. Every evening something going on. Endless company. Makes you dizzy. I was even supposed to give lectures in schools—I just said ‘count me out.’
“What people like us want on leave is simply a change of clothes, and hours in the bathtub. Not to be bothered, no newspapers, no radio, turn everything off, stretch out. But then they lay out a beautifully pressed Sunday afternoon dress uniform, complete with dagger and scabbard. Snowy-white shirt, silk tie, black lisle socks, and crown it all with the hand-polished decoration on an absolutely spotless black, white, and red rep ribbon. God almighty!”
Work in the engine room is over in an hour. The Commander orders us up.
The bridge watch gets ready under the tower hatch.
“Surface!”
“Forward hydroplane up ten, aft hydroplane up five!” The Chief initiates the maneuver.
“Blow the tanks!”
Compressed air hisses out of the steel cylinders into the buoyancy tanks. The water is being driven out through the open flooding doors on the bottom.
“Boat rising. Conning tower free. Boat surfaced!” reports the Chief. The tower hatch is opened and the excess pressure equalized. Ventilate with diesels!”
The watch climbs up. The rocking of the boat has already changed to a forward motion. The lapping of the waves becomes a sharp hissing. When the ventilation has been completed the Commander orders, “Dismiss from diving stations!”
A stoker climbs up into the tower. He lights a cigarette, crouches down on his haunches to the left of the helmsman and gives himself up with closed eyes to the pleasures of tobacco. Before he has finished, there are cries from below of men waiting in line for his place.
Afternoon. The boat has been running on the surface for two hours—at “twice half speed” for a change, but without the dynamos turning, since the batteries are already fully charged. At this speed, the boats make from fourteen to fifteen miles an hour, no faster than a good cyclist.
ALARM! The bell strikes straight to my heart. I catch my breath.
A man tumbles out of the head with his trousers half down. “Co ahead, shit your fill,” I hear someone behind him call.
The diesels have stopped—the boat is already tilting.
Now what’s going on? Isn’t the Chief ever going to stop the dive?
All at once it dawns on me that this alarm is for real.
We stay submerged for no more than a quarter of an hour. Then the waves are hissing along our steel hull again.
“That strikes me—as being enough—for one day,” the Chief remarks.
“Balls,” says the Old Man.
“The Old Man and the Tommies are a perfect team,” I hear from bosun’s mate Zeitler in the bow compartment. “They keep you moving.”
III FRIGGING AROUND: 1
Wednesday. Fifth Day at Sea. Strumming from the radio half wakes me, then the door to the galley slams into its frame. The room resounds with a confusion of voices. The E-rnate Pilgrim. “Steward, what’s this cunt mess doing here on the table? Get cracking! Out it goes!”
I glance below through the crack in the curtains. The bosun’s mate Wichmann is staring at a blob of mixed-fruit jam on the table and growling, “Looks as though the lady of the house was flying Pennant Z.” Pilgrim and Wichmann seem to have one-track minds, but sometimes I don’t understand either their vocabulary or their references.
“Little Snow White and Rose Red,” Wichmarin says. His eyes are set wide apart and protrude slightly, so his face, despite its narrow chin, is rather like a frog’s. To keep his black hair combed straight back and lying flat, he carefully squeezes a tube of pomade between the teeth of his comb and then distributes it conscientiously over his head. He likes to describe the kind of life he wants—theater, nightclubs, lots of good company—this is what he calls his “dream.” A bragger, who keeps harping on his interrupted college education. But despite his loud talk, Wichmann is considered a good sailor; he is said to have been the first to spot more than one convoy.
The E-mate Pilgrim is from Thuringia, like his colleague Rademacher; he’s small and pale, with a pointed beard. Only he talks more than Rademacher.
Pilgrim and Wichmann are swapping stories about a certain lady in the sailor’s cathouse.
“I can’t take her constant whining. ‘Don’t go off in my hair.’ That’s her problem. Too much ladylike crap!”
“But she knows her stuff all right otherwise.”
“She’s got a good ass, you have to admit that.”
Pause. Then Pilgrim’s voice again. “I screwed that little girl from the flower stall on a bench in the park. But I didn’t get a scumbagful till I got home and went to work on myself.”
I struggle out of my bunk.
My tongue is sticking to the back of my mouth like a piece of leather. Nausea fills my throat.
Finally I make it to the control room and manage a clear enough voice to ask, “Permission to come on the bridge?”
“Jawohl!” The Second Watch Officer cries from above.
Bending over the boat’s railing, I stare at t
he water shooting along below me, roaring and hissing, churned up with air into a milky froth. Bubbles and streamers of foam combine in an endless tapestry of constantly changing patterns. My eyes are drawn aft by the white streamers. A long path a few yards wide marks our course. On it, the high choppy waves are smoothed out as though the train of a long dress had swept over them and flattened all the flashing crests.
I ask the Second Watch Officer, “What is Pennant Z?”
He responds promptly. “The signal for attack. It’s red.”
“Filthy swine,” I exclaim involuntarily.
The Second Watch Officer stares at me in surprise.
“Thanks,” I say, and disappear again down the hatch.
The helmsman in the tower hardly needs to touch the rudder. The same number on the compass card swings back and forth under the central mark. Two hundred sixty-five degrees. We are running on a constant course. According to the navigator, it will take us ten days at cruising speed to reach our area of operations. We could be there sooner if we ran the diesels at high speed. But we’ve chosen cruising speed in order to save fuel. We need all our reserves for the hunt.
At breakfast I wait in vain for the Commander.
The alarm bell makes me jump. Airplanes, I think. Fucking vermin—you can always count on them!
Then I catch sight of the Old Man through the circular hatch in the control room. He’s looking at his stopwatch. Thank god. Practice alarm. He’s seeing how long it takes the boat to get under water.
I squeeze to one side out of the way of the sudden scramble. The boat is already pitching downward. I try to keep the plates on the table, but two or three slide off.
I can’t help thinking of all the things that have happened during practice alarms. On Kerschbaumer’s boat, they closed the intake valve to the depth manometer by mistake. Kerschbaumer wanted to take his boat down 250 feet fast. The boat went down all right, but the manometer needle didn’t move, so Kretschbaumer thought the boat was stuck on the surface and ordered more flooding, then more, until suddenly they noticed the mistake. But by then the boat was already 600 feet down—with a shipyard guarantee of 300!
We’re at our midday meal when the next practice alarm takes place. The Chief jumps up, knocking a full soup tureen from the table straight into the Second Watch Officer’s lap.
The Old Man still appears dissatisfied after this second alarm. Not a word of appreciation.
At 16.00 on the dot comes the third.
The teacups on the table are smashed to bits.
“If this goes on, we’ll be eating with our paws and drinking out of buckets,” I hear the bosun complaining.
At last the Commander says, “Okay that time!”
Seated at the chart table in the control room, I’m trying to learn more about technical matters. An incipient row between Frenssen and Wichmann—the eternal conflict between engineers and sailors—is headed off by the arrival of the navigator. There’s only enough time for Wichmann to call Frenssen’s diesels “farters” and Frenssen to shove his oil-smeared fists in Wichmann’s face.
With peace restored, I return to concentrating on the layout of the cells. In the diving arrangements of a U-boat the buoyancy cells take first place. There are three of them, located inside and outside the pressure hull. The inside cell is so large that if the two outer ones are damaged the boat can go on floating.
On the underside of the buoyancy cells are the flood doors, above them the air vents. Both must be opened before we can dive. As the air escapes through the vents, the water pours in through the flood doors to replace it. The boat has buoyancy tanks as well as buoyancy cells. These lie in the outer ship, and when the boat leaves base they are full of fuel oil. Only when this oil has been used up do they start to function as air reservoirs, giving the boat additional lift.
In addition to the buoyancy cells and tanks the boat has both regulator and trim cells. Weight lost by consumption of food, water, and fuel is made up for by taking seawater aboard in the regulator cells, located on the ceiling of the control room.
The trim cells serve to control the position of the boat underwater. If the boat is either bow heavy or stern heavy, it can be brought back to even keel by exchange of water between the two cells—that is, by achieving trim state zero. The trim cells are of the utmost importance; they are our balancing pole, for underwater the boat has a tendency to rock lengthwise as well as from side to side. With surface vessels it’s different; in a rough sea, naturally, they roll heavily from side to side, but they don’t tend to stand on their head.
With U-boats underwater, however, pitching of as much as forty degrees is common. In contrast to surface ships the U-boat in its submerged state is extremely sensitive to changes in weight and is hard to keep on an even keel. For this reason the designers gave the trim cells the greatest possible effectiveness by placing them at the extreme ends of the boat.
If a hundredweight of potatoes is moved from the control room to the bow compartment when the boat is submerged, bow heaviness results. To compensate for this, water has to be pumped from the control room to the stern cell—only half the weight of the potatoes, though, because the water for the trim cell is taken from the opposite end of the boat. The foreship is thereby made lighter by one half the weight of the potatoes. If a hundredweight of potatoes were taken from the E-motor room into the bow compartment, the trim calculation would, of course, be different. In that case water would have to be pumped from the bow to the stern.
I memorize the rule of thumb: control cells regulate rise and fall of boat; trim cells regulate position in water.
After the evening meal I climb as quickly as possible into my bunk, dog-tired.
God knows the sailors I share the compartment with are at no pains to restrain themselves out of any consideration for me. When I’m lying in my bunk, they return with complete abandon to topic number one. Apparently all I need to do is close my curtain and I cease to exist for them. I remind myself of a zoologist: the animals I’m studying have become accustomed to me.
The day began with Pilgrim and Wichmann; now Frenssen and Zeitler see me to bed. Their obscene imaginations appear to be inexhaustible. I would give a lot to find out whether they really have had all the adventures they’re always boasting about. Are they actually the seasoned whorehouse veterans they pretend to be? It’s not hard to credit them with almost anything.
The bosun’s mate Zeitler is a North German. His pale, innocent face with its sparse growth of beard suits neither his cynical talk nor his weightlifter’s build. He’s said to be a first-rate sailor; nothing upsets him. He belongs to the first watch. If I’m not wrong, the Old Man thinks more of him than of the First Watch Officer.
The diesel mechanic mate Frenssen is a thick-set fellow who exudes arrogant self-assurance wherever he goes. Not the slightest hint of self-doubt ever creases his forehead.
Frenssen comes from Kottbus. He likes to appear hard-nosed; the perfect cynical desperado from a third-rate cowboy film. His grim, slit-eyed stare is something he must have practiced in front of a mirror. The diesel stokers Ario and Sablonski, who are in his watch, can’t have a very easy time of it. He’s not more than twenty-two. His bunk is directly under mine.
Through my half-drawn curtain I hear, “It stinks like a pigpen in here.”
“What do you expect it to smell like—a cathouse?”
Groans and yawns.
“So something really happened?”
“I’ll say!”
For a while there is only munching to be heard.
“You’re just jealous because you only got your finger up.”
“Fuck off! Anything you can do with your cock I can do better with my big toe.”
“Yeah, if you come from Kottbus, you do it with your toe!”
Sounds of the exhaust pumps, organ-like yawns and gasps.
“In any case, no more fucking now. Somebody else is humping them all, yours included.”
“What a brain! You ought to ge
t yourself promoted to the General Staff with a bright little head like yours. They need people like you to stick the little flags in.”
“Ought to have corked her up to keep out any cunt-mates!”
Rattle of dishes, scraping of boots.
My curtain bulges inward as someone makes his way between the table and the starboard bunks. Then I hear their voices again.
“A little recreation wouldn’t hurt at all after a leave like that. One air raid after another. It’s downright peaceful here by comparison.”
“Just keep your fingers crossed!”
“Can’t get laid properly any more. Not even at noon in the arbor.”
Then comes the explanation: “You know, they have a garden with a kind of summerhouse in it. Sofa, icebox_everything ready to go. But you barely get started when the fucking sirens go off, and the dumb twat gets nervous—and there’s the end of your fun!”
Thursday. Sixth Day at Sea. In the morning, before breakfast, I’m on the bridge with the Commander.
The sky is covered with turquoise batik clouds bound together by fine veins. Everywhere a reddish background shows through. Slowly the background begins to brighten and outshine the blue of the clouds. A red glitter takes over the eastern sky, breaking through at every opening. The expanses of cloud are penetrated by brilliant points of light. Then slowly the flashing and glittering grow paler, as though the light were going out. The colors soften; the sun has risen behind the cloud cover.
“Pleasant sea today!” says the Commander.
At the changing of the watch I think I’ve discovered new faces.
“Never seen that man,” I mutter as another unknown comes out of the tower hatch.
“Fifty men are a lot,” says the Old Man. “There have been times when I myself didn’t recognize members of my own crew. Some of them are real masters of disguise, of course, absolutely unrecognizable when their Passion-play beards are gone. After getting back to port, when they’ve shaved and then come on watch, I ask myself how on earth I could have put to sea with this kindergarten. They’re just kids, nurslings who belong at their mothers’ breasts… I’ve often thought: please, god, only photos of returning boats for the newsreels and the papers; with bearded crews. No departure pictures, if only out of consideration for the enemy’s feelings.”
Das Boot Page 11
