by Nigel Barley
“Juli-bumm, what’s 400 meters in feet?” He flicked ash and mouthed at the soggy fag-end.
“Don’t even the British use meters for broadcasting?”
“Do they?” His hand dropped from the switch he had been twisting and his mouth gaped open, the fag staying glued to his bottom lip. “Bugger. That explains a lot, then.”
“Just do the best you can, Hagendurst.” Captains, he realised, said stupid things like that all the time – most captains –von Mueller was the exception, never saying a word that was not strictly necessary. Most captains showered words over their commands as a sign of their authority while proper radio-operators were silent creatures with permanently cocked ears. But Hagendurst was not a real operator and his conversation was all chatter and static.
“Can I have a go at transmitting? It’s a British set so they’d all think we were some poxy British vessel – which we are. I could ask for war news, ask about the location of the Emden.” Eagerness shone in his eyes.
“Best not.” Lauterbach put fat regret on his face. “Our orders are quite precise, to preserve ourselves, whatever the sacrifice, for the mother ship. Carry on Hagendurst.” Everyone was bored. It hurt him to admit it but von Muecke was right. You had to keep them busy. He must think of something.
A rash of bleeps fought through the hiss of the loudspeaker. Hagendurst grabbed a pad and pencilled away furiously, crossing out and revising, then froze, looked up and held the tip to his lips as the transmission died. Schwabe would have liked that.
“It’s Tsingtao,” he said, puffing sternly. “That was a British merchant vessel. The place has been shot to hell but the siege is over and the city’s surrendered to Japan. The British gave them a hand. So that’s that and all about it.” He slammed down the pencil. There were real tears in his eyes.
Lauterbach sighed. In his innocence, never having seen a major land battle, he did not think immediately of destruction, carnage and suffering – no cliches of smoking ruins, blasted flesh and violated maids peopled his imagination. Instead he pictured the absurdity of Japanese officers in British uniforms and shiny boots sitting there stiffly in their Bavarian landhouses, ruling over Chinese in Dirndl dresses and Lederhosen. They would be busy changing all the street names as their first priority. There would be some keen, humourless Japanese who looked just like von Muecke in charge of that. One day they would have a word for such nonsense. Anyway, he knew the Chinese. Those Dirndl and Lederhosen would be slipped off and kimonos shrugged lightly on. The shopkeepers would quietly take down the framed portrait of the German Kaiser, put up that of the Japanese Emperor, hung from the same nail, and indifferently reopen their shutters for business the next day. Maybe they would have time to put the prices up a little. He liked Chinese.
Lauterbach plodded back to the captain’s cabin, heavily and frowsily furnished in dark wood, its one comfort a fat man’s bed with a frilly counterpane. It came ready equipped with tinted photographs of a large and ugly wife and two vacuous children with buck teeth and as he lay there at night, he found himself slipping into the skin of his predecessor, inventing stories about them. Her name was Blodwyn. They lived in Cardiff. Sexually unresponsive, she had yet been viciously unfaithful with a rippling muscular Lascar stoker. When he got back he’d give her what for. In this blistering heat, he often fell asleep thinking about giving her what for.
As he opened the door a big rat stood up on its hind legs, looked at him with brief surprise and sneered before darting away under the bed. Inspiration flashed into his head like Morse. Of course, now there was the answer to the boredom! They could no longer hunt British ships so they would hunt British rats. In the morning, he would set the men to clearing the ship of them.
There were no cats on the Exford but even if there had been, the rats were more than big enough to take them on and win. The bored ratings threw themselves delightedly into the hunt as into a new sport, called up old sea-dog skills in knotwork to make elaborate traps of stout wire that would snare and choke and draped the gangways with them but succeeded only in wounding each other nastily about the ankles. But Genscher, one of the machinists and a big, slow straw-haired country lad, had his family firm-rooted in poaching and the lore of country life. His hands still recalled landlubberly, ancestral craft that he now applied, humming quietly to himself, in dark corners, twisting wire and string and knocking great nails into the woodwork. Lauterbach let him be. They would not be discussing with any landlord the wear and tear on the decor. And bait? What about cheese? Genscher laughed. “Chocolate, captain,” he said with quiet emphasis. “For rats, chocolate.” They plundered the stores for sickly English dairy milk, a sweetmeat that the rats would appreciate more than the men and the use of chocolate somehow lent Lauterbach’s mission a dimension of moral retribution. For days Genscher stalked the ship, a smirking executioner, clutching fat bunches of garotted rats, their faces clotted with blood and cream chocolate.
The giggling Chinese sailors preferred more active, communal methods, driving the pests like hungry ghosts, from one end of the ship to the other with firecrackers and hellish symphonies beaten out on the bottoms of saucepans. Perhaps ghosts would be frightened away too, so, after the rat-cleansing, they would be twice-blessed. At the other end of the drive, crouched the leering Chinese cooks, their trouserlegs tied up with string, hidden behind the sacks. At last they had found a use for the dried potato. They were all adept in the handling of wicked steel choppers that they swung indifferently to whittle firewood, dice cabbage or trim their toenails and as the rats dashed past, they leapt out, stamped out a fandango dance among them, swiped, sliced and eviscerated with cries of glee, to such effect that many rats died and one cook’s assistant lost a finger. That evening, the Germans were appalled by the delicious smell of fresh-cooked meat that suddenly wafted from their quarters and engulfed the entire ship. They sat on deck, arms crossed across their chests, desperately puffing cigarettes to overcome the growling of stomachs simultaneously attracted and repelled.
Lauterbach lay in the stagnant heat of his cabin, resisting the smell for hours, then rose, lumbering, at midnight from his bed and crept, both dribbling and nauseous, to the big, ugly sideboard that he opened with slow hands. Inside, gleamed a great stack of ancient cans, mostly nostalgic English treats such as bloated steak and kidney pudding, left by the former master, though with the occasional oriental novelty of crickets in brine or sago grubs in vinegar to trap the unwary. The tins were dappled with rust and the labels had long unwound in the damp air and been lost. To dine here was a gastronomic lottery. Lauterbach seized a great tubular tin and sloshed it by his ear, appraising the heft, the liquidity of the contents. Whatever was inside was big and mobile but could, with equal possibility, be pilchards in tomato sauce or toads in syrup. He seized the tin opener from the top of the sideboard and hammered through the lid, sliced through the metal in great tears and prised it up carefully. Tins were dangerous. You could cut yourself. Apricot halves. He fingered one out and let it drool down his throat. Then another. Then another. Enough. It was time to set a new course for Padang in the Dutch East Indies, a week’s sailing time away, but an agreeable place to either draw new supplies or be snugly interned for the rest of the war. There they would finally be safe.
The rain gushed down as if from some cosmic drainpipe. They had long since sluiced away their accumulated stench and grime in it and profited from the chance to refill their fresh water tanks but there was just no end to the downpour that filled sky and sea, obliterating the small space in between. It was no longer a blessing but a curse. Lauterbach had always been wisely modest about his skills as a navigator and now visibility was nil and all he had been given as a chart was an old school atlas in alphabetical order whose end pages were flaking away. He could no longer take them to Zululand. And the compass was four points off true anyway. For all he knew they could already be ten miles inland.
“Dead slow ahead.” A little native boat with sails of brown matting had tacked to avo
id them and disappeared back into the hissing curtain of water with a cheery wave. It was thinning a little, out over the prow. There was land out there somewhere. Soon he would have to risk using the radio to try to contact the nearest harbourmaster, asking for a pilot and hoping he was already in the protection of Dutch waters. And then, all at once, they sailed into the stillnesss of a small sunlit glade in the forest of rain … and there, in their path, was a huge ship flying the English white ensign, an armed auxiliary of the Royal Navy. With the Exford’s wallowing pace there was no chance of ducking back into hiding, so now they were on the receiving end of what they had so often handed out. A crump and a puff of smoke and a live round was put across their bows.
“Stop engines. Do not use wireless.”
Lauterbach obeyed and watched appalled as, in a dream, a boat was swung out to bring an armed boarding party over to them, taking an oddly detached and professional interest in the niceties of the proceedings. In a matter of minutes, they were there, no English Lauterbach at their head but a trim, golden-haired child of twenty in a sparkling lieutenant’s uniform. There would be no three cheers from the German crew.
He saluted. “In the name of His Britannic Majesty I take command of this ship and declare you and your men prisoners of war.” He made it sound like some sort of congratulations.
Lauterbach looked down at the old-fashioned rifles, clutched awkwardly in the hands of the British sailors, unused to this manoeuvre, and up at the huge guns trained on them from what was – he now saw – the Empress of Japan. They were nervous. They had never done this before. Try bluster. You could never tell.
“We are in Dutch territorial waters. This is an outrage. I protest. You will please leave my ship immediately”
The waif shrugged and grinned, waggled his ears, an old party trick. He had a big schoolboy spot full of pus on his chin.
“Not according to our reckoning, old cock. You’re slap bang in international waters. Not that it matters much anyway. My commander’s given his orders and you’re nicked. May as well make the best of it, old socks. ”
Cocks? Socks? What was all this? Did he know, then, that he was dealing with Lauterbach of the socks song fame?
“I shall protest to the highest authorities. I shall …” Oh what the hell. Grease. It was like cleaning boots, there was a moment to switch from stiff bristle to smarmy grease. “I bear you no personal grudge, lieutenant. You are only obeying orders, which is the right thing for a military man to do. You will have noticed that I have a largely Chinese crew. I trust you will honour their neutrality and put them ashore in the nearest Dutch territory? Do you like Chinese food by the way?” Lauterbach slipped a paternal arm around him and guided him towards the mess room. “I have an excellent cook who would be glad to offer you some lunch, something really special, very fresh.”
The lieutenant disengaged himself. “Sorry chum. No time for that now and as for the other, we’re bound for Singapore. Me for rest and recreation. You for a prison camp, unless I’m very much mistaken. I dare say your Chinese crew will be released, though. Would you tell your chaps to lay down any arms they may be bearing and I’ll take a quick shufty round the ship and we can all get under way again.” He saluted, formal again. “Please be ready to leave the ship immediately with all other naval personnel. Personal effects may be taken.”
Lauterbach stiffened. His money was down there, locked in a trunk, subject, no doubt, to seizure by some light-fingered British official. He must get it safely stuffed in the cummerbund pocket double quick. What was this child waffling on about and smirking?
“What?”
“I said that it was not all bad news. In special recognition of your gallantry, the First Sea Lord has exceptionally decreed that members of the Emden may retain their swords.” Lauterbach was speechless. He made a face like a man who has silently broken wind on a crowded omnibus and wants to pretend it was one of the horses.
“A sword?” What the hell was he to do with a sword? Were there more rats to be killed on the English ship?
“But you may as well tell me right now where the others are hiding and save us all a lot of trouble. You can’t hope to keep them hidden for long.” The child did a sort of comic yawn and stretch routine and waggled his ears again.
Now Lauterbach was totally perplexed. “Others? What others?” His mouth gaped clownishly. His piggy eyes half glimpsed an opportunity here to be exploited.
“Oh come on.” The boy was picking at his spot and making it bleed. Lauterbach had a terrible urge to smack his hand away. “The landing party from Cocos Keeling, three officers and forty-five men, the First Officer of the Emden and the rest.”
“The landing … You mean von Muecke?” Lauterbach felt suddenly unbearably weary, a terrible, unfaceable truth was about to be confirmed. Smothering in a blanket of fatigue and frustration, he leant against the rail and took a deep breath. It was one of those situations you got into with women, where your total ignorance of what it was you had done was the ultimate proof that your offence was unforgiveable. “Perhaps, lieutenant,” he hissed through clenched teeth, “you had better fill me in. I have, you see, no idea what happened to either my ship or my men …”
Book Two
THE SEPOY MUTINY
Chapter Six
Lauterbach, Lauterbach, the best mate a bloke ever had.”
Lauterbach was glad to be back in Singapore again, a steaming, teeming town where all the races and religions on earth poured their essence into a single malodorous pool. He breathed in the pungent city air where the smells of Klings and Chinese and Malays and Buginese jostled and warred on each other, as they spoke their different tongues, sang their different songs to their different gods and made a good living hating each other under the British flag. In the harbour, across from the little Malay houses built out over the water on poles, lay the Pontoporos, her status currently undergoing ill-natured legal investigation in several other languages. Lauterbach hoped to be called as a witness and would lie gloriously in whatever fashion would cause most trouble for everyone. He felt truly himself again, a foreigner, an alien, all his senses heightened. Not far from there, the Exford rested on the rocks, the bottom torn out of her by the embarrassed young lieutenant. Lauterbach had forgotten to mention the matter of the faulty compass to him. It was a shame really. He had been nice enough, even asked schoolboyishly for an Emden cap badge as a souvenir for his girl. Still, a sensible sailor would have checked. Now he would never make captain. The wreck was a vast monument to Lauterbach’s own sheer bloody-mindedness.
They had been driven through town in a rattling open truck, guarded by two stick-legged Tommies, with terrible teeth, in baggy shorts. As the biggest British military base East of Suez, Singapore normally wore a pall of khaki and grey and so had changed relatively little from the place he had known before the war. Indeed most of the troops had been called away to the West so there were, if anything, fewer of them about and almost all Indians. Here were the scenes he remembered from a dozen peacetime shore leaves – the Esplanade, the cricket club, St. Andrew’s Cathedral. All inculcated in the natives a caricature of village-green Englishness under tropical skies. He caught a tantalising glimpse of the white facade of the Raffles Hotel and its fanned traveller’s palms and was assailed by a terrible thirst for the haven of the bar with its ancient ‘boys’ and yarning expats. But it was snatched away from him in a swirl of honking traffic. Orchard Road bustled with all its accustomed flocks of memsahibs in hats and gloves followed by troops of parcel-carrying servants. It was the dance of life from which he was, it seemed, to be banished for an indefinite future.
“Lauterbach, Lauterbach, the best mate a bloke ever had.” A beardstubbled madman in a torn Tsingtao captain’s army uniform rushed up, hugged Lauterbach, looked round smirkingly at the onlookers through crazed grey eyes, basking in reflected glory. Lauterbach did not recognise him and paused nonplussed as Sikh guards seized Schulz and slashed him to the ground with practised elegant strokes of
their bamboo batons. “Best bloke a mate …” he muttered and succumbed.
In the absence of von Mueller – imprisoned in Malta – and von Muecke – God knew where on the high seas – Lauterbach alone inherited the chivalrous mantle of Emden’s glory in arms. Soon he was installed in the old Tanglin Barracks in a spare but spacious bungalow that echoed to dripping taps and his further reward was to be allowed unrestricted visitors and electricity after the normal ten o’clock lights-out. Abruptly, he was a man of substance. For the first time in his life Lauterbach was famous, feted by rude soldiery and camp followers alike, indeed for the first few days a permanent guard was necessary to protect him from their excessive enthusiasm. The German ratings from the Pontoporos were in the same compound and cheered him as their leader. Their reputation, too, rode so high that a considerable black-market currency had now developed in Emden cap badges within the city. Lauterbach swiftly arranged to have more made by a clever Chinese tailor and found them useful for the purchase of food, drink and sexual favours but, as a man of the world, knew it was only a matter of time before the tailor, like any self-respecting Chinese, went into business on his own account and spoiled the market.
The camp was a series of bleak wooden barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and with sentry posts every hundred yards, manned exorbitantly by twenty British officers, six hundred Indians and apparently numberless Malays. That, in turn, was encompassed by an electrified fence and beyond that a deep ditch as though for the trapping of tigers. Lauterbach felt finally safe. No one, it seemed, could get at him here. It had been explained that if he gave his word as an officer and a gentleman not to try to escape he might install himself more commodiously in a hotel in town. He could have his own batman there if he cared to. And who would pay for all that? They had shrugged. As a gentleman he naturally must pay for it himself from his private means. Not bloody likely. He would rather sit in the camp than fritter away his hard-earned cash on trivia such as daily food and board. Since joining the merchant marine, he had never paid for either and did not intend to start now. King George had put him in jail and King George would pay the bill.
