Petersen shrugged. ‘The men are hungry, so they have to eat. What is it you say, beggars cannot be choosers, eh? Come, eat.’
Clark shook his head. ‘No, this is folly. You will regret it…’
‘All right!’ Petersen said sharply, ‘perhaps a few men will get an attack of diarrhoea, but that is better than starvation.’
‘Send out your men to find seals or walrus,’ Clark remonstrated.
‘Why, we already have four or five hundred kilos,’ Petersen said, moving off in the direction of the bear’s carcass. ‘If you won’t, I am going to eat.’
Clark went back to his own men. Harding was already befouled by blood and Carter was taking tentative bites at a thick slice of red meat, his hands all sticky with gore. Only Storheill held back, biting his lower lip.
‘I’m going to look for a seal,’ Clark said decisively. ‘If we can find a few on the ice, we may catch one before they get back into the sea.’
‘No, don’t forget, sir,’ said Storheill, putting out a hand to restrain Clark. ‘The smell of the dead bear may well attract more. It will be very dangerous out on the ice alone – or even with two of us,’ he added hurriedly.
Storheill proved right. Within an hour, three bears were prowling within sight. An occasional shot warned them off, but Petersen was driven to ordering them all to move on. Having hacked off a quantity of meat from the bear’s carcass, they continued their portage. Even before the last man had left the site, the other polar bears were closing in on their dead fellow.
‘They will dig up the German too,’ Storheill muttered as they trudged off, wincing from the pain in their feet.
The portage turned out to be their worst, lasting twenty hours and resulting in damage to one of the boats. Surveying the tear in the vulcanised rubber fabric, Petersen ordered the thing broken up, some sheets cut from it for tents, the thwarts split for a framework and the compass removed. The rest was set on fire and some of the remaining bear meat was roasted, filling the still air with a delicious aroma and reminding them all of home.
Clark and Storheill were greatly tempted by the delicious smell and the joyous enthusiasm of the sailors, an enthusiasm which was shared equally by Carter and Harding.
‘It’s absolutely smashing, sir,’ Carter said, his eyes bright. ‘It’s saved our lives…’
Clark opened his mouth to speak. He could not recall the details of the warning he had been given all those years earlier, perhaps he had never been given them and had remembered only an old whaler’s cautionary tale, but there was enough of a conviction in the yam to make him apprehensive and, after Carter had shrugged his shoulders at his commander’s obduracy, Storheill nodded.
‘I think you are right, sir,’ he said, frowning. ‘I remember something about bear meat being bad, and something about it killing men. There were some Swedes they found up here, a balloon expedition to the pole that ended in disaster. They ate bear…’
‘You mean the Andrée Expedition,’ Clark said, recalling the story.
‘They found them on Kvitøya… You have the chart?’ And the two navigators sublimated their hunger by poring over the chart. But they failed to locate the White Island.
‘It is too far to the east,’ concluded Storheill at last, pointing off the chart’s margin to the east of North-East Land. They could remember little else, beyond the conviction that the meat of the polar bear was dangerous.
‘But what are we going to eat?’ the ravenous Storheill asked after a long silence.
The Beach
July 1942
It was two days before Clark and Storheill ate anything, two days during which their stupidity at not having joined what, in the war-shortened memories of these young men, had already come to be called ‘the feast of Wahlen’s bear’ was often brought to their attention. Invigorated by the meat, the young U-boat sailors burst into snatches of patriotic song as they laboured, dragging the remaining boat over the ice field towards the distant spires of Spitsbergen’s sharp peaks.
At the end of the second day they came upon another lead and tumbled once more into the boat. But the polynya led them south-west and their progress was hastened by a perceptible current. Clark was dozing when the machine-gun burst split his oblivion and he regained full consciousness to the unruly cheering of the German sailors, for they had rounded a large floe upon which a score of fat harp seals had been basking in the brilliant sunshine. The resulting carnage guaranteed the entire company not only plenty of meat, but a means by which to cook it, for Clark succeeded in making a primitive blubber stove using the biscuit box salvaged from the Carley float. Many of the German seamen, assuming a bravado forced upon them earlier, disdained the cooking of their meat and ate it raw, but Clark insisted Carter and Harding joined Storheill and himself in eating only cooked meat. This they cut into slender strips, finding they cooked relatively quickly and could be savoured. Seeing their obvious enjoyment, Petersen and several of his petty officers and ratings joined them. As they finished the first seal it began to snow and Petersen ordered his men to erect the remnants of the first boat, incorporating irregularities in the ice to provide a shelter for the men. The wind, a katabatic gale from the heights to the west of them, blew for several hours before it gradually abated and they roused themselves to press on.
Six hours later they found themselves a lead to the west but within an hour they reached its end and again began a long portage. Once again the inflatable boat was hauled out. The constant scuffing was reducing the airtight qualities of the rubberised fabric and increasing use had to be made of the small foot-pump which the Germans had brought with them from the Orca. It was clear that, with only one craft available to carry them all, they were now engaged in a race for survival. It would all depend upon whether the boat failed or they reached dry land. In addition to the burden of the inflatable, they had to drag the bodies of the dead seals that constituted their larder. The bloody trail attracted a following of polar bears, but these were kept at bay by an occasional short burst from the machine gun of Bootsmannsmaat Straub, Petersen’s second-in-command.
It was during this tedious trek that the diarrhoea attacks began. At first the sufferers withdrew to the side of the trail, sent on their way with ribald puns about their ‘bear behinds’ so that Petersen, not wanting to lose another man, ordered the column to halt until the defecators rejoined. But as the hours passed, an increasing number of men left the column and anxious shouts of ‘How long do we have to wait, Captain?’ began to ruffle the morale of the Orca’s crew.
‘We wait as long as necessary,’ snapped Petersen, his expression grim.
‘Then we’ll never get anywhere,’ a voice responded.
‘Then we’ll die together, for the Fatherland!’ Petersen shouted, and even Clark’s flesh crawled at the cry. Yes, they would, he thought as they trudged on at last, admiring them despite himself. He was himself in a poor condition now and walking was an agony, for, in common with Storheill, Carter and Harding, his feet were in a bad state. Although he had managed to dry their socks over the blubber stove during the storm and – having bound them up in his torn-off shirt tails – they were easier, they still pained him. At least, he consoled himself as they halted again and half a dozen men fell out of the line to crouch shivering and pallid while they shot yellow faecal liquid on to the ice, at least he had not yet succumbed to this helplessness!
It was when Carter fell out that the trouble started, for Carter was alone and, without a German companion to join him in his humiliation, the U-boat’s crew were not sympathetic or in favour of stopping. Up to that moment they had suffered the enemy in their midst with a good-natured tolerance. The British were prisoners and while there was nothing to eat they might as well help to paddle or pull. At the feast of Wahlen’s bear only half of them had eaten anything and they had been ratings, men like themselves. If the British snob Clark and his treacherous Norwegian familiar wished to starve themselves, then that was their own affair and meant there was more for them
selves. The consumption of the bear and then the seals had thrust back the fears of starvation that each man entertained. They were going to make it to land, and then things would work out. They were young men, too young to die among this wilderness of ice.
Only when Petersen had called on them to die for the Fatherland had the first of them realised this was a battlefield which might claim them as much as any other. It was an inglorious prospect and one made even more so by the sudden indignity of diarrhoea.
But when the Englishman Carter sat shitting by the wayside with the rest of them staring at him, fear lent an urgency to their pleas to press on. Reaching Spitsbergen was their objective and they could see the summits of the mountains in the distance. Carter could catch up.
‘No, we wait!’ Petersen called out and they stood shuffling or sat resentfully on the sagging sides of the boat. When Carter did himself up and rejoined the group, he was cheered. They picked up the inflatable and began to shuffle forward again.
‘Are you all right, Carter?’ Clark asked.
The Asdic operator shook his head. ‘You were right, sir, that bear was poisonous. I feel awful…’ Carter’s face was white, his skin pearled with sweat and he was shaking. They had not gone 300 yards before Carter fell out again. A groan went up and for a moment a savage murmuring ran among the German seamen. Then another man dropped out, followed by another and another until almost half of their number squatted, squitting hot yellow jets on to the ice.
Petersen walked back towards Clark. He too wore an unhealthy pallor. ‘Is this the bear meat?’ he asked, as if Clark was personally responsible.
Clark nodded. ‘I think so. It’s a bacterium in the uncooked meat. I can’t remember what it’s called…’
‘God damn that!’ Petersen broke in. ‘It’s what it’s doing to us that troubles me.’ Petersen paused a moment and then asked, ‘How far do you think we are from land?’
Clark sighed. ‘It cannot be more than ten miles,’ he replied.
‘That may be ten miles too far,’ Petersen said. ‘If we gain the land…’ He shrugged and moved away again. ‘Hold your arseholes tight!’ he ordered with a savage and impressive authority. ‘We’ll stop every hour. Now, let’s get moving!’
‘That’s very German, don’t you think, sir?’ Storheill remarked ironically. ‘Very organised.’
Despite the gravity of their situation, Clark smiled, and even Carter, who overheard the exchange, managed a wan grin. They moved off again and, by an almost superhuman effort manifested by sundry grunts and pale faces, they staggered along with their burden, their shaking legs banging against the rubber tubes of the sides of the boat. Then an agonised voice cried out, ‘Surely the hour’s up, Captain?’
A chorus of assent joined in. Suddenly, as if on a signal, the inflatable was dropped and the men bearing it turned aside and tore at their breeches. At the head of the line, Petersen himself succumbed and bent to discharge his bowels in a foul stream. Clark turned away from the stink. A wedge of rafted ice fifty yards to their right offered a low eminence from which he might determine the lie of the land. As much to avoid the stink of his companions and gaolers as to spy ahead, he clambered up on to it. What he saw made his heart leap with joy.
Half a mile beyond an ice ridge which, from the level of the trail, marked the western horizon, lay a wide, dark lead. It was dotted with the remains of bergs, and beyond the water bergy bits lay grounded upon the shallow bottom which rose on to a rocky, heavily pebbled beach. Odd splashes of green showed where the low Arctic scrub of lichen and scurvy grass clung to the level rock faces. Rising behind this wide and broken littoral strip, upon which a herd of seals lay sunning themselves, was a range of low foothills, grey-green against the sky until they disappeared in a thin veil of cloud. Far away, beyond the cloud, rose the peaks of Spitsbergen.
‘Land, thank God! And an easier country to traverse,’ Clark muttered and, turning about, took the good news back to the miserable party.
* * *
They camped exhausted on the beach that night, making a prodigious bonfire out of the quantities of pine and fir logs that littered the foreshore, borne thither over countless summers from the Siberian rivers down which they had long ago been swept. So ground by the ice were these tree trunks that they might have been machined as telegraph poles. As the survivors ate roasted seal steaks and withdrew for their by now regular defecations, the mood swung from desperation to relief. Even the endless squatting of the shittery was turned, in sailor fashion, into a joke once more. They would get over it; they were young and tough and they had made dry land!
As the fire crackled and burst into life with a jolly orange glow in the shadow of the hill, Petersen called Clark over. He was clearly unwell and had a better appreciation of their plight than his men. The two cousins began to walk up the beach and over a low ridge where the large stones of the shingle beach gave way to rock and a thin boggy layer of moss and lichen which constituted the ‘soil’ of this remote island. Thus drawing Clark off a little, Petersen lay himself down on a mossy bank, cradling his machine gun, his knees drawn up a little, his face damp with sweat. Behind him a narrow valley, seamed by a dry gully, led upwards into the low hill that rose behind the beach.
‘This is bad, Jack. I don’t know where we are and, while we are safe for a bit, we have miles yet to go to Horn Sound.’
‘Twenty or thirty at the most,’ Clark said encouragingly.
‘Over those goddamned mountains behind us,’ Petersen said through clenched teeth as a spasm took him. ‘Oh, Christ!’ he scrambled up and withdrew into a fissure between two slabs of rock. As Petersen groaned and Clark heard the wet fart and the sudden eruption of the discharge, he found himself staring at a tiny orange flower, an Arctic poppy. It was the last to bloom in a small, delicate clump, for its companions had already turned into seed pods. For some reason Clark put out his hand and picked them, slipping them into the folded sheet of the chart in his breast pocket.
Petersen returned. Clark saw for the first time the hollow eyes and the first occlusion of death, that misting over of the cornea that signalled a spiritual surrender which would turn physical in its conclusion. ‘We must camp here, make the best of our situation.’ Petersen was gasping. ‘Some of us must go on and find help at Horn Sound. You must go, I trust you. I should go, but if I do who will look after my men?’
‘You are not fit, Hannes. I will leave Storheill, he is in good shape. You can trust him, you know…’
‘I am not an idiot, Jack…’ Petersen said venomously, using the noun with all the implications it had in German.
‘I will give him an order. He will obey me. We are still your prisoners.’ Clark indicated the machine gun.
Johannes smiled and shook his head. ‘You are not a fool, Jack. You could take this gun and shoot me before I could lift a finger. I am done for and so are most of my men. They cannot march over those mountains…’
‘Then let Storheill and I go…’
But his cousin did not seem to have heard him, for Petersen went on, following his own train of thought. ‘No… I do not know what to think. You British are a puzzle. You did not eat the bear meat and look, you are fit and ready to march over the mountains…’
Clark thought of the pain in his feet and said, ‘Let Storheill and I go. We can get help…’
‘Just shoot us, Jack!’
‘Don’t be silly!’
‘Shoot us! It takes courage to throw off your civilised values, but you should not find it too hard. If I was a Pathan or an Indian you British would shoot me without thinking. It might take you a little more courage to shoot us, Jack, your German cousins, but you, you have German blood in you! Come!’ Johannes held out the machine gun with both hands. ‘Take it! Shoot me, Cousin!’
‘Get a hold of yourself, Hannes!’
‘Why did you have torpedoes on your little weather ship, Jack?’ Petersen asked, his pale face sodden with perspiration even while he shuddered helplessly.
‘
What has that got to do with us now?’ Clark felt himself flushing from guilt as the piteous sight of his cousin touched him.
‘Why did you have torpedoes, eh? You came after me, didn’t you? You came because you British knew of our mission to attack your convoys to Archangel! You think we are stupid? I am correct, aren’t I, eh? Why else should you, my cousin, meet me and my U-cruiser in the Barents Sea? And how do you know where to find me? Why, because of that God-forgotten swine of a brother of mine!’
‘That is rubbish!’ Clark said. ‘Mere silly conjecture, and it is entirely a coincidence that we have met like this…’ That much was true, Clark thought, for he had had no idea of the identity of the Orca’s commander. As he looked at his suffering cousin he wondered if Gifford had known. Perhaps…
‘You are smiling,’ Johannes went on. ‘It doesn’t matter for you, you have accomplished your mission and I have failed.’
‘I have accomplished nothing…’ Clark began, but he knew Johannes detected his lie.
‘It was Kurt, wasn’t it? He’s been supplying information to you British for months, God damn him!’
‘How the hell would I know that?’ Clark said, turning aside. ‘Even if it were true – which I very much doubt – I’ve been in the North Atlantic, where I made a name for myself hunting U-boats. The Admiralty thought I was quite good at it and all the time I owed it to young Carter…’
‘It was Kurt, wasn’t it?’
‘Look Johannes,’ Clark said, rounding on his cousin, his eyes blazing, ‘how the bloody hell would I, a mere lieutenant commander, know? D’you think Their Lordships summoned me and told me all about it…?’
‘Yes, that is precisely what I think.’
‘Hannes…’ Clark met his cousin’s eyes. The occlusion had gone and they blazed at Clark with such ferocity that he could not submit to their glare and, as he looked away, Johannes sighed. He knew the extent of Kurt’s treachery.
Dead Man Talking Page 29
