by Nigel Barley
“Are you English?” they called across.
“Scottish, damn and blast ye.”
Von Mueller was crisply punitive. “For failure to comply at once with my orders, the vessel shall be sunk immediately.”
The cathedral-like holds were an echoing treasurehouse of rich and useless manufactures, luxury cars, typewriters, locomotives that gleamed silently in the dark. Lauterbach stroked the sleek Rolls Royces in quiet reproach, then kicked their tyres in a mixture of respect and vandalism. He was a sword of austerity from the desert, a punisher of the sin of pride and all this vanity was born but to die. But wait, what was this? In a well-strawed stall two nervous and immaculate racehorses thudded their hooves on the planking. Lauterbach considered them in horror and confusion. Never had he seen creatures of such impractical beauty, pared and delicate, uncompromisingly aristocratic. Compared to their sinuous lines and rippling flanks, the boxy Rolls Royces were merely cheap tin toys. He looked into those great liquid eyes and could not bear to think of their terror at an invading wall of cold, hard water surging towards them. If they had been women he would have mounted them, ridden them hard, forced and whipped them over the fences of his pleasure and they would have loved him for it.
“Lieutenant Schall, shoot the horses.”
He went about his business on the upper decks, evacuating the crew, checking the contents of the captain’s safe, pocketing up any useful dollars, trying to block out from his thoughts the inevitable shots that his ears were straining for and it was not until they were embarking in the boats, the explosive charges already set to blow the ship apart, that he asked again whether it had been done.
“Sorry, Juli-bumm. I just couldn’t.”
He climbed back aboard, padded quietly to their stall and shot them down with a single bullet each to the brain, as he kissed their hot foreheads with pure, sad love. They shuddered and died at his fatal lips. It was the first shot he had fired in the war – they the first casualties of the campaign. Barely had their boat cleared the ship, when the charges went off and blew a huge steel plate clanging over their heads. By the time they made it back to the Emden, the Clan Matheson was already taking its proud cargo swirling to the bottom.
Von Muecke showed an unexpected gift for stand-up comedy. A ship at sea is a closed, incestuous community, a sweating mobile factory of love, hate and rumour. Newspapers from captive vessels were sent straight to the bridge as a useful resource. But there was a fear also that access to the propaganda put about by the enemy, for the consumption of their Indian subjects, might unsettle the men. Von Muecke knew that the wildest tales were circulating. It was time to sink them with a few well-placed charges.
He adopted the tactic of reading to the men totally contradictory accounts of the same events from different papers and the more deadly serious he was, the funnier it became. He read out descriptions of their own sinking and imaginary exploits that placed them firmly anywhere from Rangoon to Australia. He reduced them to tears of laughter with stories of simultaneous naval battles with the rest of their squadron in parts of the world they had never even visited. He totted up the casualty figures on the European front and proved that twice the population of Germany had allegedly perished there already. Best of all was a composite picture of British plans for the Reich after their victory. It was a vision of home with the Reich collapsed, penitent generals shooting themselves by battalions and the complete colonial dismemberment of Germany with Bavaria independent and only Thuringia being left intact. The Thuringian stokers rose spontaneously and stalked and pranced up and down arrogantly, as the only true Germans, before these contemptible new foreigners.
They steamed across the Madras-Rangoon and Singapore-Calcutta shipping lanes, horribly aware of the lingering smoke they were making from the foul Indian fuel. The crew were in fine form. Lauterbach had saved them most of the horrors of a recent coaling by secretly hiring the Indian crew of their latest prize to do it for them. Ships of all nations were run on imperial lines, white officers at the top, Chinese stewards between and, in the engine-room below, toiling brown helots. The money had come from a magical inventory of the safes of prize vessels that converted gain into loss and loss into gain by an act of twinkling numerical prestidigitation learnt from doing company accounts. He called it “tickling the kitty.”
“Rather noble of those Lascars to volunteer for such a job,” commented von Muecke. “Just shows what could be done to the British Empire with a few home truths. After just a few days with us they already love Germany. After the war, we shall take charge of India and rule it with a firmness they will appreciate.”
The slow Pontoporos was sent off to a distant rendezvous, like an irritating granny with a gammy leg. A passing Norwegian disembarrassed them of prisoners – again three cheers – and obligingly gave details of the movements of enemy warships about the island of Penang. Von Mueller carefully stored that information away. Anyway, sloppy British security and uncoded radio traffic allowed them to keep easy track of their pursuers and so avoid them. Von Mueller took clean, hard coal aboard from the Markomannia and sent her too off to a rendezvous. For the moment the captain exulted in his restored freedom of motion for he had another bold scheme he was itching to realise.
The Emden started in from the east, sailing into darkness, straining to her full speed of 24 knots with her fake fourth funnel in place. The sea was like a mirror. It parted in glossy marcelled waves on either side of the bow while the men’s heartbeats accelerated to match the pitch of her thrusting screws, so that all the world was one great visceral maelstrom moving to the same rhythm. The lifeboats had been filled with water. Everyone had been ordered to take a freshwater shower and change into clean underwear. To sailors that meant they were going into a battle where wounds were expected. Numbers Two, Three and Four disappeared under an avalanche of washing.
The lights of Madras blazed immoderately, not from bravado but sheer stupidity. The harbour was strung with bulbs and illuminated beacons guided the raider conveniently into the main channel where the waterfront welcomed them with fat open arms. Lauterbach alone was worried about the sudden crackling sheet lightning that lit them from behind but all these excited boys had their eyes fixed firmly in front. They would make a good target as they sailed away – if they sailed away. This was, after all, a defended harbour.
“The guns will be big but old, nothing but museum specimens that fire a shell the size of a dustbin,” so von Muecke at the briefing, thinking he was being encouraging. Lauterbach found he had a particular dislike of being hit by a flying dustbin full of explosive. At 3,000 yards they stopped dead, a big easy target, and switched on their huge searchlights, probing the hillside for their goal, the great oil tanks of the Burmah Oil Company, painted an obliging shade of white. Von Mueller had done careful homework with his charts and maps. It seemed like an age before they began to move again. If he lined up his vessel with the six bulging tanks and the flashing navigation lights, he would have the biggest possible target with the smallest risk to local civilians. They brought all the starboard guns to bear and fired off twenty-five crisp salvoes. The noise was like thunder. A tank was hit. Blazing kerosene exploded and gushed as from a volcano, starting other fires, while rockets of burning carburant shot into the sky and flame and thick black smoke danced over the hillside. Lauterbach raised his fine new British binoculars and stared at the city in disbelief. This was a new wonder. Instead of fleeing, excited sightseers – Indian and British – were hurrying down to the harbour to watch openmouthed, clogging the roads with cars, bicycles and rickshaws, blocking the fire-engines and the troops running around like headless chickens. The whole event had become a carnival. After ten minutes, the Emden coolly ceased fire and steamed off to the north east.
“In sea engagements,” von Muecke had pointed out when putting his men through their paces at swimming, “nine tenths of the casualties are from the sea, not the guns. No one would get killed, if sea battles were fought in the harbour or on dry land
.”
“For that to happen we would have to have Lauterbach navigating, Number One.”
Well, they were still in harbour and death was still on offer. The defences were finally brought to bear. Nine shots were returned. Lauterbach counted them all. None of the British shells hit anything. There were no casualties. In a later paper they would discover that most of the guns were unmanned as the British were at a special dinner celebrating yesterday’s hot news – the sinking of that German cruiser, Emden, confidently announced on the wireless. The attack on Madras had been intended to demoralise the Indian population. Instead they laughed. They laughed at the British. Insurance rates on the London Market went through the roof.
They rendezvoused with the Markomannia and headed south towards Ceylon over smooth seas. For most of the day, the pall of smoke on the horizon was visible as the oil of Madras continued to burn. The whole ship was still crackling with excitement and exultation. The crew spoke in grins. When you brushed against them, they tingled with electricity and when von Mueller appeared, unsmiling, from the bridge they cheered like British prisoners. Tars liked, Lauterbach realised, to be sent to their pointless deaths by a proper gentleman. But he knew this exploit meant not glory but trouble. They had singed the British lion’s beard, shown it to be toothless and stupid, roused native contempt against it. Now it would stop at nothing to get them with its great grasping claws.
They gathered in a few more ships, gleaned just off Ceylon. Most were in ballast or uninteresting. With so much documentation imperfect or destroyed, it was often difficult for a prize officer to reach a rapid decision about the neutrality or contraband status of a vessel and its contents. Lauterbach always hoped for some moment of wordless understanding with fellow seamen but mostly the captains could not, or would not, understand that their vessels might just be favourably viewed by a well-disposed and adequately lubricated assessor. He lived a metaphorical being in a painfully literalist world where everything had to made laboriously explicit. One waxed insulting, shouting of dishonesty and peculation and Lauterbach had him arrested for fomenting military indiscipline, slapped in chains and his vessel sent to the bottom without compunction. This might have made him more cautious but did not. Peculation was his art. It possessed him and he could no more forsake it than any other artist could his particular muse.
Their supply of coal was running low. If a British warship happened across them, they would not even be able to lift their skirts and run. And then they took the Buresk with 7,000 tons – a whole month’s supply – of hard Cardiff coal aboard her, the best in the world. An hour or so’s wheedling and headshaking and a little well-placed money produced an excellent result. The British captain, officers and steward would stay aboard, with a crew hired from amongst the Arab prisoners of the junkman, and follow German orders. The remaining crews of the latest six victims were shipped off to freedom – or at least India. Von Muecke would insist on making the distinction. There was a final coaling from the Markomannia in the Maldives and she too was sent off to rendezvous with the Pontoporos. The men were finally permitted to send mail to their loved ones at home, that would be posted by her in the East Indies. By the time it arrived, many of them would be dead.
Von Mueller knew that troopships were being sent from Australia and New Zealand via Aden, hauling more fodder for the insatiable land war to chomp on. On the outward voyage they would have a heavy escort but on the way back, as empty vessels, would more than likely be unaccompanied. By sinking them, he could break the circle and cause widespread havoc like a man who refuses to send back his empty beer bottles. What he needed first was a quiet place for rest and repairs for, from radio traffic in code and in clear, it seemed that no less than sixteen enemy vessels were now scouring the seas for the Emden. Von Mueller scanned the charts. And his eyes lit up. Diego Garcia, that little dot of coral and sand in the most remote part of the Pacific, would do nicely.
The expat population of Diego Garcia was not large. In fact its total was two, an Englishman and a resolutely francophone Malagasy. Twice a year a small sailing schooner put in and brought supplies of tobacco, bully beef and strong drink and bore off the copra – delivered by the pretty and philoprogenitive inhabitants – that justified the imperial presence. It was not an eventful life. They ate fish, drank coconut milk and coconut sap and their many derivatives, alcoholic and not, and read and re-read the same few books beneath a benevolently distant British rule.
The Emden hauled itself on four clogged boilers into the coral bay and dropped its greased and fouled anchor into the limpid water as the sailors looked around at the waving palms and the gently pulsing waves and sighed. The Buresk slipped in and anchored coyly alongside the Emden, tucked behind its apron. Peace. Calm.
Then action stations rang out. A Union Jack rose suddenly above the trees at the edge of the shore. They all scrambled for their posts again. Glasses scanned the shadows for the feared battleship about to emerge from around the curve. A splash, another flash of British colours … and a small rowing boat slid into view near the shore, pulled rapidly across the smooth water by two bare-chested natives. In the prow sat two obviously benign human beings, one waving a holed straw hat above his head like a halo, the other brandishing a large bunch of bananas Even to von Muecke, it did not look like hostile military action.
“Ahoy there …”
“Bonjour messieurs …”
“… Hallo chaps. Get out of my way you damn Froggie fool.”
“… Do not push. Always you push.”
Rose and Privett, respectively over- and under- manager of the copra plantation, clambered aboard with rheumatoid difficulty and comic synchrony, the entente cordiale become Feydeau farce. Rose was rubicund and very British, Privett an old Malagasy Creole, grown wizened and wattled under tropical sun. They dressed alike, much like the popular vision of an artist in the south of France, white flannels, cotton shirts, straw hats, espadrilles. One spoke only English, the other only French and being much rubbed together, they had been reduced to a bitter parody of an old married couple, each finishing the other’s sentences and speaking of the other in the tones of withering contempt usually reserved by a wife for talking publicly of her husband.
Lauterbach took his hand off his pistol butt to aid them aboard and switched awkwardly back and forth from French to English as appropriate. They grinned, they beamed, they chuckled aloud at the sheer pleasure of seeing the enemies of their nation. The native rowers, too, waved and smiled up at Lauterbach with those incredible white teeth you can only have if you have a mahogany face to set them in. Lauterbach realised at once that in the Arcadia of Diego Garcia nobody even knew there was a war that was larger than their own domestic feuds. Ergo there was no war. Innocence was its own reward. In this palm-fringed paradise they were finally, totally, safe.
“I bring eggs,” explained the Creole expansively in highly accented English, “Fruit, fish, turnips …” Turnips?
“He calls them turnips – excuse his stupidity – he means yams.” They were handed aloft from the bottom of the boat There had been no schooner for many months, they explained. They knew nothing of world events, had no radio. Pray give us some news. We are thirsty for it. Lauterbach whispered orders. Newspapers were to be hidden, the captain to be informed of the situation. Men from the Buresk, including its British officers, to be confined to the vessel, their hopes of female diversion dashed.
“A drink,” Lauterbach invited, stony-faced as a butler. “Have the gentleness to please come into the wardroom for a drink. Whisky and soda? And now – ice?” They slavered at that “ice”.
Being His Britannic Majesty’s consular representative, Rose had put on a tie and claimed the right to go first. As they moved into the wardroom, he froze, sniffed the air like an old dog.
“Hang on,” he said, adjusting wire-rimmed glasses and staring at the framed portrait of the Kaiser. “That’s not King George. You’re not Brits. You’re Germans.”
It had never occurred to Lau
terbach that anyone could mistake them up close for a British vessel. Perhaps von Muecke’s false funnel was an unnecessary ingenuity. Now they sat, side by side, in creaking Lauterbach chairs, tinkled cubes of unaccustomed ice, rapturously, in pale Scotch – supplied by German appointment – sipped, gulped, drained. Another?
“Well, monsieur is too kind.”
“Jolly good don’t mind if I do but don’t give him too much.”
Privett scuffled awkwardly under his buttocks, with one hand, like a man having trouble with his underwear, wrestled out a crushed and forgotten newspaper and spread it out. Alas he knew not to read the English but perhaps he might pass it to his colleague over there whose tongue it was. Now that word there ‘Crisis’ what was that all about then?
Lauterbach completed servings of scotch with his own hasty hands, clumsily shovelled ice into the runners like a stoker Cardiff coal, whisked the paper away. “Excuses. Fouled by cats. Steward, please destroy at once this shockingly besmirched newspaper. The Pope,” he said. “His Holiness Pius X has – alas – died. It is said he choked on a wafer biscuit.”
“Good God!” cried Privett, toasting then crossing himself. “The Pope? What else?”
“There was a great fire in Madras, started by a hail of flaming meteors that ignited a chapati factory and the oil depot.”
“Madras? Chapatis? Merciful heavens,” cried Rose. “What else?”
“Great sadness. A British ship was lost not far from here. Apparently the crew tell a tale of being beguiled by German-speaking mermaids.”
Privett gaped. “Mermaids is it? And in German? Such a thing has never made itself heard of. Drink had a hand in it I declare.”
“Terrible drinkers the people round here,” confirmed Rose, glaring at Privett. “Might I have a little more of that there …? Not so much for my under-manager. So many disasters. But is there no good news?”
