by Nigel Barley
“Three cheers for Admiral Graf Spee!”
The situation was bad then, much worse than he had thought. The rest of the Pacific squadron had got out of port fast and sailed for German Samoa to avoid being bottled up by the British. Tsingtao was undefended and would fall if the Japanese came in on the other side. In a few short months Germany would have no coaling stations left in the East and the entire fleet would be immobilised for lack of fuel, whereas the whole British empire could be reduced in naval terms to a series of heaps of Cardiff coal, dumped arrogantly all over the face of the planet. Earlier that day they had passed through the lingering wakes of a big flotilla of ships and there was noisy wireless in code. It could only be the British foolishly chattering and giving their position away. Germany had eight cruisers, Britain alone had thirty-four, not counting their French, Russian and Japanese allies. A less skilled card-player than Lauterbach could see that those were not great odds. But he would not mention Japan. These happy boys would not want to hear it and would hold it against him as a mark of his negative thought and lack of team spirit.
“What about Japan?” he asked. The words fell into a deep, deep silence, like a depth charge tumbling in still blue water after the initial splash. Von Muecke wheeled round, sneered briefly and opened his mouth to speak. Before he could do so he was flung to one side and his pointer sent clattering as the Emden veered hard over to starboard. Lauterbach hardly had time to feel the pleasure of Number One’s discomfort before the rising revolutions and an abrupt thrumming through the steel deck gave sign that the ship was running at full speed. “Action stations” rang out and the audience disappeared in a thunder of feet that reminded him of boys stampeding at the sound of the bell that marked the end of the school day. Lauterbach – Lieutenant Lauterbach – rose to follow at a more measured pace. This was the navy so there were rules of course. Everyone’s precise status was defined by the rings on his sleeve and precedence and rights of way up and down ladders and corridors were clearly marked in the handbook. Lauterbach’s bulk made such rules redundant for he filled every stairway and gangway and moved like a whale through the ocean, leaving smaller fish to avoid him as best they could. Younger men hitched their elbows into the rails and coolly slid down ladders, leaning back and without touching the treads with their feet. Lauterbach plodded down step by step. Ladders were dangerous. You could hurt yourself. He had seen it happen loads of times.
As acting navigation officer his place was on the bridge and he moved solidly along the passageways and upwards to glowworm illumination. The nighttime waves were rough and heavy and the decks were awash. Rain squalls lashed his eyes, reducing vision still further. An eerie phosphorescence glowed from the sea and the prow was rhythmically dipped in running gold sending long dark shadows ghosting through the water. The men would be up, panicking, spotting non-existent submarines all night. As he struggled along the open deck and up the ladder, the wind plucked nastily at his tunic so that he gathered it around him. Important not to catch a chill. He knew they were in the Straits of Tsushima, between Korea and Japan. Japanese ships they could not yet touch. Russian they could and would seize. He passed through the door and saluted.
“Lieutenant Lauterbach on the bridge, sir.” Von Muecke was there before him, saying, “I think it’s a Russian, sir, the Askold.” The Askold would outgun them, blow them to pieces. Bloody hell. Pangs stabbed through his stomach. The captain turned slightly and smiled a superior smile. It was not the Askold then.
“Mr Lauterbach, yes. Take a look, please. The Russian heavy cruiser Askold?” The voice was hushed, little more than a paper-thin whisper. Von Mueller was the most ethereal captain he had ever met. “Mr” Lauterbach? They had been at naval college together but, even then, von Mueller exuded aristocratic Prussian austerity, played no team games, rode alone or performed cool gymnastic exercises in unsweating geometric isolation. His tall gaunt form was shrouded in a long, shapeless overcoat, so that his feet were invisible and he seemed to float. His face was that of an honest preacher. The granitic features emerged pale and haggard and his fingers, as he passed the binoculars, were cold and unfleshed. Lauterbach shivered.to their touch.
He peered through the rain-blurred glass and at first could see only sea and sky, then between gusts of rain caught a sudden glimpse of something else. There was colour out there. Straining his eyes, he could just make out an all-black steamer with twin yellow funnels running fast without lights. Thank God, a civilian.
“Russian Volunteer Fleet, the Rjaesen, built in Schichau, a fast new mailship.” He knew her well. He knew just about every ship on the coast. He had drunk in most of them and blotted his copybook in a few. “Captain Ausen, a fine seaman.” The man was a prat but kept good scotch. Last time he had been on board there was some sort of a disagreement at cards – the reasons were hazy, it had been a long night with drink taken – and Lauterbach had been violently ejected. He had ended up full length in the mud, his hat tossed after him by laughing tars. At least they had thrown him off the landward side and it had taken three Russian sailors to do it. That signified a little respect.
“Confirm Mr Lauterbach that we are in international waters.”
It was touch and go. Sod Ausen. “Confirmed, captain. Well inside.”
“Number one, make a signal. ‘Stop at once – do not wireless.’” Von Muecke barked orders, stood to attention. Soon he would be rapping on something.
“Sparks reports she is sending wireless, requesting help, sir. She’s running for Japanese waters.”
“Jam signals. A blank shot across her bows, Number One.”
The Russian response was to put on more speed, belching black smoke that obscured their view and aim. A shot thudded dangerously close to her bows. Any more of that and they would sink the stupid cow by mistake. Lauterbach settled back in fat contentment bracing himself against the wheel housing.
“Another round, Number One.” Lauterbach had a brief bewildering vision of them back in the Dachsaal in Tsingtao bibulously ordering more beer. He was recalled to reality by a third sharp crump, an exasperated puff of smoke and the clang of a shellcase on the metal deck. Because of the smoke, that shot too had gone closer than politeness allowed. Von Muecke was panting and dancing on the spot with excitement like a dog watching a squirrel up a tree. Lauterbach’s eyes never left the captain, fascinated by his detachment. The thin lips parted then closed and he had a mouth as tight and snug as a cat’s bum.
“Live rounds, commence fire.”
Only on the tenth, after another near miss, did the Russian slow. On the twelfth she stopped entirely. The cold blue eyes swivelled round as in a gun turret.
“Mr Lauterbach, arm yourself. Take the cutter and a boarding party of twenty men. Examine the documents. If all is in accordance with the conventions of war, declare her a prize of the Reich. You are her new master. Pray apologise to the captain for the closeness of our shooting. I will have a word with the gunner. Assure him that I take full responsibility for it. We shall escort her back to Tsingtao for immediate conversion to an armed auxiliary. If we sight enemy warships you will scuttle her immediately and without compunction.”
Lauterbach paused. It would be good to see Ausen’s ugly face as he lost his ship. Maybe he would resist a little and he could have him pitched over the rail by three rough sailors and here there was no landward side. Less cheering was the idea of himself labouring up the slippery steel hull of that great ship, in this filthy weather, swinging like a fat clapper in a bell, and then going down with the vessel. As for apologising to that Russian bastard – forget it.
“Sir. As you know I care nothing for my own discomfort and safety but perhaps the honour of the Imperial Navy requires that the senior officer have the opportunity of performing this historic task. It is, after all, our first prize.”
Von Muecke’s whole face collapsed into surprised sentimentality. “Oh I say. Damn decent of you Lauterbach. May I please sir? Please?”
Von Mueller traced a thin s
mile. “Sorry, Number One. Your place is on board. Next time perhaps. Mr Lauterbach, if you please. Do not forget to take our flag.”
He looked at that wet steel cliff, heaving in the darkness and fearful sweat gushed copiously from crotch and armpit. For Julius Lauterbach the war had just begun.
Chapter Two
Pagan and the other islands of the Northern Marianas had been bought from Spain in 1899 as a particularly extravagant act of impulse shopping. The natives, of course, had not been consulted in the matter and found the overnight change from Spanish to German disconcerting. Language was like a sink plug that suddenly did not fit any more. Magellan, on his voyage around the world, had given them the irksome name of the Island of Thieves but their principal importance lay now in being the Island of Coal. The entire coal-hungry German Pacific Squadron had gathered to feed in the sheltered bay beneath the volcano that, secure in its own fuel, smoked above them in peaceful parody. Admiral Graf von Spee had surrounded himself with the star vessels Sharnhorst, Gneisenau and Nuernburg with a complete supporting cast of attendant colliers and auxiliaries. In the admiral’s presence, von Mueller had become still more ethereal, disdaining normal meals, spending long hours alone in his cabin doing one knew not what. Sometimes his ghostly voice would whisper through the speaking-tubes calling for a map or a book or soup and rolls. In Pagan he finally became fully invisible. It was rumoured he had been whisked away in the early pre-dawn for endless strategic conferences aboard the flagship. Fearful of British naval dominance in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea, Graf Spee had determined to take his fleet on the long voyage to the West coast of the Americas. All were coaling in preparation.
Von Muecke had always had an odd obsession with making the men swim to improve fitness. In the filth of the port it had been compulsory. He could be seen and heard shouting instructions through a megaphone as they wallowed and gulped in bilge and sewage. With the logic that dogs all navies, bathing was now forbidden in these smooth and limpid waters. The previous night Berlin had radioed through the promotion of the officers’ class of 1911, which had led to a major bout of sewing and some minor celebration of the new badges of rank. Many men were the worse for wear, red-eyed and green-skinned but the sea was allowed to bring no relief. The ratings stared glumly down into the flawless blue depths and sweated as they waited their turn to coal. “Sir, sir. Just a quick dip sir?”
Lauterbach had no intention of involvement in either coaling or swimming. He already swam well enough and anyway, he had an old salt’s conviction that to swim too well was to invite shipwreck. Moreover, he had other fish to fry.
The assigned colliers that moved slowly out to sandwich the Emden were the commandeered Staatsekretaer Kraetke, his own ship, and the Governeur Jaeschke, his previous command. Coaling was the most hated occupation in the entire navy. In harbour, it was only ever done by coolies and only a dire emergency would force European sailors to do it for themselves. It involved hours of backbreaking manual labour in the hot sun, choking on dust, digging and hauling sack after sack of the hated stuff with slashed knuckles and bruised shoulders from one ship to another. Serious accidents were frequent for each bag contained about a hundred pounds. Heatstroke posed a permanent threat. At the end of it, the entire ship was full of grime and had to be scrubbed clean. At the beginning, men did the job in their oldest clothes. As heat and wear and tear took their toll, modesty gave way to exhausted practicality. The bolder natives who paddled out to view this strange spectacle were shocked to see white men transformed into blackface demons, shovelling, spitting and swearing in a state of total nudity. In terror, they swiftly dumped the coconuts they had come out to sell, not even waiting for payment, and fled. Outside, a rhythm established itself – the accelerating pace of feet on a descending gangplank – thud, thud, thud – followed by the rush of falling coal, followed by a groan. Only the nature of the groan was subject to variation.
“Oh, Juli-bumm, your face.” His former officers on the Kraetke stared at him as at one desecrated. “Your beard. Your moustache.”
“It’s the war. They chopped down all those expensive pine trees in Tsingtao for the war. My beard’s the same thing. They’re turning it into socks for the infantry.”
Lauterbach sat in the saloon sipping iced beer and jawing comfortably with his former officers as dust rattled like hail against the sealed portholes. It was good to be with grown-ups again. Von Guerard was nice enough but it was hard to share a cabin with someone who regarded every day as an opportunity for achievement and growth rather than something to be simply got through intact. Losing a glorious beard was one thing, yet he was appalled to see his ostentatiously immaculate craft reduced to the fate of a common collier. It broke his heart to see the mahogany stairrails scored and pitted with grime like a miner’s face, the paintwork copiously chipped and gouged and everything defiled and cheapened. It was a world from which elegance and style had been brusquely put to flight as battleship grey had been sloshed over the whole of social life. It sent a little frisson of regret up his spine that they still called him ‘captain’ here, not ‘lieutenant.’
And the chatter too was all of war, war, war. At least, in the cabin, von Guerard sometimes talked about sport and horses even if shy of talking of women. They were entranced by the westward thrust of the Reich’s army but worried by what the Russian peasant troops and their bayonets might be doing to their relatives in East Prussia. What else, he asked, was happening in dear old Tsingtao? The coolies were leaving, streaming out in thousands on foot, by sea, by rail. Like rats. German soldiers were driving them back at bayonet point. Bayonets again. The Austrians had scuttled their old cruiser, the Kaiserin Elisabeth, outside the harbour. There had been a run on the bank. Lauterbach was pleased to have prudently arranged the transfer of his own funds to sit snug in a dollar account in Shanghai. But the sinking of the Emden, he now learned, had already been confidently announced by Reuters. Another rumour had it that the Russian heavy cruiser, Askold, was sunk by them. Then again, they had been clearly identified fearfully fleeing from Tsingtao, flying the British flag, in the face of a lurking Japanese force blockading the harbour. In the eyes of most of the world the Emden was already a ghost-ship.
Lauterbach cared little for such wounds on the face of truth. Wars were fought from the backside up. His crackling leather armchair was a rare treat to the rump after the Muecke-imposed austerities of the Emden. During the journey from Tsingtao, with iconoclastic zeal, the sea-puppies had ripped out the ship’s wood panelling, as a fire-risk, fed it to the boilers in proof and painted the walls a bilious green that troubled his equanimity. The measure of his stoked-up discomfort, it seemed, was to be the measure of their patriotism. Since all volatile chemicals had been diverted for military use, the paint would not dry. It dribbled and ran icontinently and formed a crusty patina of grime and human hair. Everyone had it on their hands and shoulders. Enough. He drew a mental line under this war and promptly made arrangements for the surreptitious transshipment of his wine-cellar, his library with its gentlemanly works of sepia pornography and a set of comfortable deckchairs to the Emden. Henceforth, he would make it a matter of self-respect that he should always be more at ease than his superiors.
When he returned to the Emden, several hours later, Lauterbach was calmed and refreshed – indeed he was refreshed to the point of befuddlement. As he made his way carefully down the difficult and boisterous gangway from the collier, he saw young Fleischer, a subaltern expert in dumb insolence, sweat streaking his black body like huge tears, hunched brokenly over the rail and looking wistfully into the cool water as von Muecke shouted on about duty to the fatherland and the inexpressible glory of one shovelling team beating the other shovelling team that was shovelling from the other vessel. With a stumble, Lauterbach sent their coal-sacks, stacked on the rail, flying into the water where the ebb tide began to carry them circling away towards the open sea.
“Don’t just stand there, you clumsy swine!” he screamed, winking – vo
n Muecke on his blind side. “You men, jump in and fetch them back. That’s navy property, that is. Any lost sack gets docked from your pay. Jump to it, lads!”
With a cheer they dropped shovels and leaped into the sea, knees tucked under their chins, plunging deep. Von Muecke looked on suspiciously. It would take a good fifteen minutes of swimming and diving and laughingly throwing sacks from man to man to get them all back. He was, he felt, very far from being a harsh man.
In the waist of the ship were the three Chinese washermen, known simply as Boy One, Two and Three, sitting on knotted bundles of laundry and waiting with oriental patience. Lauterbach, it seemed, was the only white devil with whom they would speak.
“We go Tsingtao, chop-chop. Boom-boom no good. We no die-die dead. Too long no getee dollar.” Their faces were set and blank. Of course, they were wearing their best shirts and trousers and new wooden clogs and clutching straw hats, dressed to leave. Those bundles there were not just washing, then, they were these men’s few treasures. They were talking of life and death but pidjin English turned everything into one of those stupid comic operas the British loved to perform in all their outstations of empire. But this, he knew, could not be rushed, would require long, slow excavation with buttressing at every point like an archaeological dig. He leaned on the rail and settled gently into the discussion.
“Where Joseph?” Joseph was the fixer, the middleman, the compradore. The only one you could argue with.
“Joseph in Tsingtao. No givee dollar.”
“How? When?” Lauterbach had negotiated with Joseph for the washermen at the same time as they had dispensed with the coolie stokers. It had been understood that dapper, sharp-faced Joseph was first amongst them, that he was entitled to levy a tithe on their pay and that his personal duties were not to exceed a little light starching.
