An Honorable German (5 page)

Max wanted badly to draw his pistol and kill the first officer—though he had never felt such an urge before. When
Graf Spee
fired her guns, he didn’t make a personal connection with the shells. Being a naval officer involved shooting big guns at
other ships from time to time, but the combat was detached. They hadn’t even been in a battle yet; the ships they’d sunk had
all been unarmed merchantmen. And firing the guns was actually just a small part of their job. They spent most of their time
simply moving
Graf Spee
from one location to another. Firing at another ship was a relatively rare occurrence.

Like all German naval officers, Max was forbidden to join any political party, including the Nazi Party, so he wasn’t swayed
by fiery speeches about blood and iron, but now he felt a blood-lust, that breath of rage the Führer called for, the Teutonic
fury. These treacherous British swine—you didn’t have to be a Nazi to hate them. Everyone knew how the Royal Navy had maintained
its blockade of Germany during peace negotiations after the Armistice that ended the First War. Food and medicine were allowed
through only if the Germans could pay in cash, of which they had none, and carried in German merchant ships, which had all
been seized. All over Germany, people who had survived the brutal war years starved in the streets in 1919; they died in droves
from Spanish flu. Max’s mother fell sick that May, and they took her off to a quarantine hospital in Kiel. She never came
back. His father was no Nazi, he cared nothing for Hitler’s rhetoric, but Johann Brekendorf knew how to despise the British.
It would be the easiest thing in the world, Max realized: pull the gun from his belt, point it, squeeze the trigger. Instantly,
the trembling Englishman in the bow would cease to exist. It frightened him, the ease.

The coxswain steered the launch under the sling coupling that dangled from
Graf Spee
’s starboard crane. “Hook on,” Max ordered.

The sailors nearest the couplings hooked them to the launch. “Hooked on, Herr Oberleutnant.”

Max tilted his head back and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Give way!” he shouted.

Gears ground, then caught, and the crane jerked the launch from the water, depositing the boat in its chocks on the deck.

The British captain stood at the head of his men, ten paces off. Max, enraged, climbed out of the launch and made straight
for Stubbs, who turned to meet him, throwing his shoulders back and raising his bearded chin. “You filthy swine,” Max said,
pushing his face in very close to the Englishman’s. Max’s hands twitched at his sides; the captain’s sour breath smelled of
pipe tobacco. Max balled his right hand into a fist. “You shit! Goddamn you!”

“Achtung!” a sailor cried. Everyone within earshot came to quivering attention as Captain Langsdorff strode across the deck.

“Oberleutnant Brekendorf!”

Max had come to attention and stared silently ahead.

“You are dismissed,” Langsdorff said.

“This man almost killed…”

“Dismissed, Oberleutnant.”

The discipline of the Kriegsmarine asserted itself. “Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.”

Max executed a parade-ground about-face and marched to the companionway. Behind him, Langsdorff greeted the British officers
with his unshakable calm, his impeccable English, and his drawing room manners.

Once in his cabin, Max pulled off his uniform, blackened with soot, wadded it into a ball, and threw it against the closet
door. He lit a cigarette, filling the cabin with gray fumes much lighter than the ones that had almost choked him on the freighter.
Damn that Englishman and damn the dirty English bastards. Damn them all. He burned quickly through his cigarette, stubbed
the butt, and walked down to the officers’ lavatory for a warm shower. His heart still beat fast, anger mixed with leftover
fear. He breathed deeply, closing his eyes and summoning a picture of Mareth. In August, in Berlin, just two days before Max
sailed, the two of them had taken a hotel room with its own private bath for the weekend, and they had put that shower to
excellent, creative use. Already it seemed like years ago, but the hot water on his skin helped recall the memory.

He returned to his cabin and slept, waking at 1800 hours to put on a clean uniform for the evening meal. Other officers had
just come off duty and the atmosphere in the officers’ mess was like a slightly raucous gentlemen’s club. Langsdorff dined
in his sea cabin, as he often did when the ship was under way. His presence in the mess put his officers on their most correct
and formal behavior, not allowing them to relax. Max looked around for Dieter. Some officers were drinking at the bar, others
played skat in the back, but he couldn’t see his friend. He found a seat instead with Reinhold, one of the gunnery officers,
and Hollendorf, second navigation officer.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, guten Abend,” Max said, dropping into a chair. Reinhold was an older man, but Hollendorf—a squat Bavarian—was,
like Max and Dieter, a member of Crew 33, the small group of young officer cadets who had come to the Marineschule Mürwik
in 1933.

One of the civilian mess stewards poured Max a cup of coffee. Nigger sweat, the men called it. All the coffee they were drinking
and all the fresh food they were eating had come from captured British ships. Fresh eggs from S.S.
Trevanion
; coffee and tea from S.S.
Huntsman
; beef, mutton, and chicken from S.S.
Newton Beach
; potatoes and sugar from S.S.
Ashlea
. The British fed them well. They had captured nine ships now and sank them all, save one used to house overflow prisoners.
Still, with today’s capture, more than a hundred prisoners bunked aboard
Graf Spee
herself, and a damned lot of complainers they were, too.

One of the English captains insisted that he had to have Brill’s patent medicine for seasickness, as if such a ridiculous
item could even be found on a German man-o’-war. Another, Captain Dove of the tanker
Africa Shell
, captured off Mozambique, refused to leave his ship without his new set of golfing clubs. “Cost me twenty quid custom made
in Mombasa and I’ll be damned if I leave them for you, Fritz,” he said to Max, who threw his hands in the air and let the
man bring the bloody clubs across to
Graf Spee
along with half a dozen bottles of Gordon’s gin. “I’ll not leave good gin for Davy Jones’s locker.”

Despite their constant grumbling, Captain Langsdorff extended every courtesy to his British prisoners. He fed them the same
rations allotted to
Spee
’s own crew, supplied them with beer and cigarettes, with English books and magazines seized from captured merchantmen, with
copies of newscasts from the BBC, an occasional bottle of whiskey—and for Captain Dove, champagne on his birthday. Langsdorff
had even given one of his own pipes and a packet of tobacco to a British captain who had lost his. They even buried one British
officer—dead from a heart attack—with full military honors: the body covered with the Red Duster of the British Merchant Navy;
a British merchant captain reading the Church of England service; Langsdorff, Max, and other officers attending, each in full
dress uniform, backed up by a starched honor guard of German sailors. Max had been required to wear his sword, which he could
not abide because it was so easy to trip over. He had tripped over it, in fact, in his cabin as he dressed for the funeral,
and banged his skull against the bulkhead. Still, it occurred to him then, and not for the first time, that
Graf Spee
might be acting with unreasonable generosity toward its prisoners. Military courtesy and the brotherhood of the sea only
went so far—the Brits remained the enemy. Standing with Langsdorff on deck after the burial, Max ventured to ask the captain
why he felt compelled to be so kind.

Langsdorff smiled patiently. “International law, Oberleutnant.”

“I understand, Herr Kapitän, but we go far beyond those requirements. We don’t owe this to the English, sir. You know what
they did to us after the First War. They meant to destroy us then and they mean to destroy us now.”

The captain looked at Max. His smile faded at the edges. Quietly he said, “Who meant to destroy us, Maximilian? The bosun’s
mate from
Huntsman
? The crew of
Ashlea
? These men are sailors, as are we. They follow their orders, as do we. They love their country, as do we. And they are honorable
men, as I hope that we are, too. Do they not deserve our respect?”

Max looked away for a moment to master his anger, then turned again to Langsdorff. “Proper military etiquette is owed to them,
Herr Kapitän, but not our respect. Sir, you
commended
the wireless operator of S.S.
Tairoa
for his bravery in continuing to broadcast a distress signal while we machine-gunned her!”

“Was he not brave, Maximilian?”

“Herr Kapitän, that doesn’t matter. He’s English!”

Captain Langsdorff looked calmly at Max for a few moments. “And you are a German naval officer, Oberleutnant Brekendorf, and
our country and our navy will be judged by your conduct, which is why you must always uphold the honor of our flag and our
navy. Always.”

_________

The mess waiter set a large steak topped with fried eggs in front of Max. They spoke little as they bolted the meal. The sea
gave a man an appetite, and who knew when he would eat again? Future mealtimes might find you at your action station with
nothing save Pervitin and the emergency ration of chocolate bars to keep you going. Crockery and silverware clattered, glasses
clinked, a laugh sounded at the card table. They ate substantially better on the war cruise than they had back home, where
even men of the Wehrmacht were subject to the hardships of strict rationing. The program had been in place for years, and
one had to look high and low throughout the Reich to find a fat man, except for Reichs-marshall Göring—“der dickie,” the Fat
One, everyone called him. “Guns will make us strong. Butter will only make us fat,” he said. “That’s because we received the
guns and he got all the butter,” so the joke went. The Führer had ordered that, in this war, Germany not be caught short of
food, as it had been in the last. The nation had spent most of the previous decade building up its food stores in preparation
for war—an end to the rationing would be one more reward for defeating the Allies quickly.

After finishing his meal, Max pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. Steak, eggs, coffee, tobacco; he felt expansive.
He clapped Hollendorf on the back. “And so, young Hollendorf, where to next?”

Hollendorf looked at Max through horn-rimmed glasses. “Sorry, old boy, that’s on a need-to-know basis.”

“My good man, don’t you think as a deck officer responsible for steering the ship I need to know?”

Hollendorf laughed. “All right, El Maximo, but only because of all those times you polished my shoes before inspection. We
are to rendezvous with
Altmark
in three days to take on fuel and stores, and then we’re bound for the estuary of the Rio Plata to pick up merchant traffic
outbound from Uruguay and Argentina.”

Altmark
belonged to the Secret Naval Supply Service. Disguised under neutral colors, she served as a supply ship to U-boats and surface
raiders like
Graf Spee
.

“And then?”

“To London, where we bombard Buckingham Palace, of course.”

“If you can find it.”

“I have a Michelin guide,” the navigator said.

They laughed. It was a running joke—the deck officers claimed the navigators never knew where they were going, and the navigators
said the deck officers were always steering off course, doing such things as turning the ship to avoid hitting a porpoise.

Lempke, one of the supply officers, came and sat in a vacant chair. “Anyone for bridge with your brandy and cigars?”

“I can’t,” Max said. “Paperwork.”

“And these other young officers?”

“I fear the complexities of the game are beyond these simpletons.”

His friends laughed and tossed their napkins at Max. He smiled and rose from the table. “I bid you fine gentlemen good evening.
Some of us have important work to do.” He bowed low to his colleagues and made for the administrative quarters.

The passageways of the ship were deserted, the men either on watch or still eating. A sad blue gleam illuminated the passageways—the
interior of the ship lighted this way after sundown to protect the crew’s night vision. Max returned the salute of the armed
sentry on duty and entered the administrative office. The sentry stood guard over the ship’s payroll. Inside, Fest, the chief
paymaster, labored over his accounts. He nodded at Max, his bald head gleaming in the light from the lamp above his metal
desk. Odd that in the middle of a war such details as calculating men’s pay went on. Max had almost been killed today, and
here sat Fest, doing sums and consulting wage tables. And he would have been doing it just the same even if Max had died.

Sailors were paid monthly in accordance with the number of specialties they’d mastered. The calculations necessary to determine
the wages for everyone on a ship the size of
Graf Spee
were incredibly complex. Every man in the Wehrmacht carried a paybook in which his wage calculations were entered, along
with a detailed catalog of additional information: what equipment he had been issued, what decorations he was entitled to
wear, the units he had served in, how many wounds he had sustained. The list went on and on. The paybooks doubled as identity
papers. “Produce your paybook” was the only phrase those blockheads in the Feldgendarmerie seemed to know; Max had seen them
drag soldiers off trains all over Germany for not having their paybooks in order. Even an officer could be arrested for a
discrepancy in his paybook. Rank mattered little to the Feldgendarmerie because they reported outside the chain of command.
Even at sea, the men checked their monthly pay carefully, scrutinizing the calculations, and delighted in finding errors that
could be called to the paymaster’s attention.