An Honorable German (8 page)

By the time Max returned to the bridge,
Spee
had been out of the storm for some hours. The wind and rain had gone, but heavy swells remained and continued to rock the
ship. Max’s wrists ached as he stood at his post, gripping the handrail for balance. The rest of his body ached, too. When
he had changed his uniform before coming on duty, the mirror showed black-and-blue flesh in many places. He had refused the
surgeon’s offer of aspirin. That was foolish. Now he would have to go back for it, and going back would make him feel sheepish.

An hour after daybreak, they sighted
Altmark
, squat in the water like any tanker, her crew sporting white American sailor caps, the Stars and Stripes flying from her
stern and painted on her sides. “A real Yankee Doodle,” Langsdorff said, “full of good Texas oil.” The two ships closed in
to exchange the recognition signals and formally establish each other’s identity. Naval etiquette satisfied, they stood off;
the heavy swell made it impossible for
Altmark
to trail out her fuel hoses or for either ship to launch boats.

“Take station on me,” Langsdorff signaled.

The ships steamed in a wide circle all day—a bothersome delay but one welcomed by the crew of
Graf Spee
. A warm, bright sun shone upon the ship and most off-duty sailors rigged their hammocks on deck and had their first good
sleep in days. Others put on their swimming trunks and sprawled over the teakwood deck, using their towels as pillows, and
took the sun. Even Captain Langsdorff indulged in sun worship, although in uniform. His steward set up two deck chairs by
the aft torpedo tubes where Captain Langsdorff and one of his prisoners, Captain Dove of
Africa Shell
, took the sun and had one of their many private talks. Curiously, they had become friends of a sort and often talked for
hours.

Max found it hard to understand. Did they just avoid the obvious? Perhaps the captain enjoyed Dove’s bold personality. If
the meek shall inherit the earth, then Captain Dove was certainly not going to get anything.

When he had first come aboard, Captain Dove insisted that his ship had been in the territorial waters of neutral Portuguese
Mozambique and that Langsdorff violated international law by seizing his ship. Langsdorff insisted that Dove was still in
international waters and thus liable to be sunk. Then occurred what Max had thought of as the “Battle of the Charts” because
each man produced his own nautical chart and they dueled for two hours, their weapons being dividers and compasses and finally
cigars and scotch. They never did agree about the exact position of their ships at the time
Graf Spee
took
Africa Shell
as a prize of war. The battle ended when Langsdorff suggested Dove write up a document of protest, which both Dove and Langsdorff
later signed, although Captain Langsdorff’s signature simply affirmed that he had officially received the protest, not that
he agreed.

But that had been three weeks ago, and now, safely out of the storm, Max, too, welcomed the short break from the ship’s routine
that gave him extra time to rest. He slept like a dead man between his watches, despite
Spee
’s constant rocking, and felt close to his usual strength again by the next morning when the swell began to die away. Two
hours after dawn, the waves had settled, and the men went to work.

Max supervised a loading party. With another day of bright sunshine, his men again took off their shirts to feel the warmth
on their pale skin, while they worked to strike a mound of 105-millimeter shells belowdecks.
Altmark
had sent the load of shells over in
Graf Spee
’s launch, and, using a block and tackle, Max’s crew hoisted the shells one at a time and lowered them into the refrigerated
magazine. Cordite, the propellant used to blow the shells from the guns, deteriorated and became unstable at high temperatures.

“Easy, easy!” Max shouted as one of the shells swayed over the access hatch. “It’s slipping!” The words had barely left his
mouth when the shell slid free of the harness and dropped six decks to the hold. Max shut his eyes and jammed his fingers
into his ears. Nothing. The sailors grinned at him—everyone, from the assistant cook on up, knew the shells could not explode
without their detonators, which were not inserted until the shells were about to be fired. Without the detonators you could
drop the shells from an aeroplane and they wouldn’t explode. Max had to laugh, too, even if he was embarrassed.

A series of curses drifted up through the hatch from the deck below. “Back to work,” Max ordered, “and be more careful!”

Three boats from
Altmark
and two launches from
Graf Spee
hauled a warehouse of provisions to the big ship. Canned food, boxes of macaroni, crates of apples, tins of pickled cabbage,
dried fruit, coffee, cigarettes, cases of Beck’s beer, slabs of frozen beef, all piled up on the teak deck boards. Along with
the food came supplies to run the ship: jerry cans of lubricating oil, cylinders of carbolic acid for the refrigeration plant,
replacements for burnt-out engine parts. In turn, the men filled the unloaded boats with most of their British prisoners.
They looked bedraggled and moved slowly into the launches, gripping their small suitcases and kit-bags. Max wondered what
being a prisoner of war would be like. No action, no job, no responsibility. Crushing boredom.

Sweat streamed from his men as they wrestled the stores below. Officers ran around yelling orders, sailors muttered under
their breath, winches screeched, cargo nets rose into the air, swayed over the deck, then down into the holds. Commander Kay,
Graf Spee
’s executive officer—a thin, fussy martinet of a man—darted among the stacks of supplies urging everyone on. “Keep those men
working,” he said to Max, whose bare-chested sailors already pushed and hauled cargo with all their strength.

When Kay saw something he didn’t like, he blew a silver whistle that dangled from a string around his thin neck. By late morning,
Max wanted to grab the whistle and throw it overboard along with the commander.

Still the supplies kept coming to fill
Graf Spee
’s empty storerooms. A thousand men consumed enormous amounts of food. Even with the provisions captured from the British
ships,
Spee
was running low on almost everything. Sacks of dried beans, of flour, cases of tinned milk, boxes of dried eggs, all came
aboard in massive quantities. Freshwater was one of the few items they did not need from
Altmark
.
Graf Spee
’s desalinization equipment produced the fifty tons of water required every day by the crew and the huge diesel engines, which
could not be cooled with salt water because salt corroded their inner parts.

At 1200 Langsdorff passed the word for everyone to put their shirts back on. Several of Max’s men were already a bright shade
of pink, and Max’s own face felt burnt from the morning sun. November was summer in the Southern Hemisphere but it was easy
to be fooled by the wind. A strong southerly breeze kept the air cool, masking the strength of the sun’s rays.

Half the working parties were sent below for lunch but the other half remained on deck. Everyone had been rousted out to load
supplies, even the paymaster’s assistants and pipefitters and dental assistants. Only the band members were exempt, entertaining
the sailors instead. Every hour, the band left its perch aft of turret Bruno and marched twice around the deck, picking its
way through the mounds of supplies. Max pushed his men, now working to unload a net filled with tins of jam. The sun had heated
the teakwood deck planks, and Max shifted from foot to foot—though it was still better than standing on steel. Wood gave the
men better footing, and teak didn’t splinter when hit by a shell. Wooden splinters could be deadly; in the days before ships
were made of steel, the majority of casualties in sea battles had come from flying splinters.

By 1630 hours the sailors were exhausted, their beards dripping with sweat—many bent over, hands on their knees, gulping air.
At 1700 a silence not heard for months came over the ship—the diesels had been stopped, Langsdorff had brought
Graf Spee
to a complete halt. Max and the other men on deck paused and looked to the bridge. The order came over the loudspeaker: “By
divisions, on the starboard side, swimming until dinner is piped.” A cheer went up among the men.

Oberbootsmann Carls and his men dragged cargo nets to the starboard side and hung them down to the water. Max went quickly
to his cabin, put on his swim trunks, returned to the deck, and climbed down one of the nets. The ocean water was cold on
his skin, and the salt stung the bandaged cuts on his wrists, but it felt good. He dived, went under, came up and shook the
water from his head. Damn it felt good. Men poured down the nets, spreading out before the ship’s towering hull. Wagner, one
of the bridge messengers, swam over laughing and dunked Max. Soon all the officers were being dunked by the men. Max laughed
too and splashed the sailors around him. Two days ago going over the side meant certain death. Now they played in the ocean,
surrounded by comrades, a brilliant red sun sinking behind them. The war seemed a rumor from a place far away.

ABOARD
ADMIRAL GRAF SPEE

13 DECEMBER 1939

EARLY MORNING

M
AX SIPPED COFFEE AND LISTENED TO
D
IETER EXPLAIN ANOTHER
one of his get-rich-quick schemes. They sat in the officers’ mess, preparing to go on duty.

“After the war is over, there will be a big demand for glass eyes, you see, tens of thousands will be needed, maybe even more.
And how many glass-eye factories do you think there are in the Gross-deutsches Reich?”

“I don’t know,” Max said, “how many?

Dieter furrowed his brow. “I don’t know either, but there couldn’t be many or you would’ve heard about them. So I propose
to set up this venture and all I need is a few farsighted investors, if you’ll excuse the expression, to come up with twenty
thousand reichsmarks.”

“Perhaps your friends will help you.”

“Exactly. Now I know why you’re an officer—such perception.”

Max laughed. He was tightfisted; his father had drummed that into him. It pained him to waste money as he had with the B-Service
cardsharps. Save two, spend one, his father always said.

But Dieter spent two, then spent two more, then borrowed a few and spent those as well.

An officers’ steward interrupted them. “Zero three forty-five, Herr Oberleutnant.”

“I have to go relieve the watch,” Max said, “and so I must take my leave from the future founder of Germany’s great glass-eye
empire.”

Dieter grinned behind his dark beard. “They laughed at Krupp when he said he could build a better cannon.” Of course Krupp,
the great arms dealer, was now the biggest supplier of cannons to the Wehrmacht. His name could be found on every one of the
huge naval guns on the deck of
Graf Spee
.

“When you are rich, mein Herr, remember me.”

“I will, I will. What was your name again?”

Max grinned and shook his head as he left the officers’ mess. Dieter was a reckless schemer, but he came by it honestly. He
was third-generation navy—his father, too, had been an engineer, and the lone heir of an old and prominent family in Kiel.
But the mutiny of the High Seas Fleet at the end of the First War had destroyed Lothar Freiherr von Falkenheyn emotionally,
and postwar inflation had wiped out his fortune. His circumstances much reduced, the Kaiser in exile, the aristocracy abolished,
the navy he loved now nothing more than a glorified coast guard, he hanged himself from a crossbeam in his dining room in
1922.

Max knew that Dieter’s bravado was a front, and that his dreams of easy money carried with them a bitter edge. With her husband
gone, her jewelry pawned, Dieter’s mother had been forced to turn their home into a boarding house for retired naval officers
trying to survive on military pensions, pensions rendered almost worthless as the terrible inflation of the early Weimar years
destroyed the finances of all but the wealthiest. Not Dieter’s father, nor his mother, nor anyone they knew could ever have
imagined that the First World War would bring such catastrophe and that every single pillar of their stable lives would collapse.
And the fall had been precipitous. To Dieter and his mother and to so many others this bitterness became the dominant emotion
of their lives.

Coming out onto the deck, Max paused and breathed in the clean night air. This war would be different; it would end in no
such disgrace, but rather in triumph and pride, and Germany would take back all that had been wrenched away from her two decades
before. Above him, a blanket of stars spread across the blue-black sky. He picked out the Southern Cross, shining bright in
the Southern Hemisphere. Like every sailor for a millennium, Max knew the night sky by heart; the unchanging position of the
stars was still a crucial guide in the navigation of any ship, be it merchantman, man-o’-war, clipper under sail, or even
one of the new cruise liners that sailed to exotic tropical locales. Maybe he and Mareth would take a cruise someday, if he
could ever bring himself to step off a dock again once the war was over. On a calm, clear night like this, it seemed a pleasant
idea. Mareth had been on several cruises with her father around the Mediterranean, but Max had only heard her stories. Together
they could do the Hamburg-to-Rio run on the Hamburg-America Line. Tea at four on the deck. Dining at seven—gentlemen in dinner
jackets, please. Dancing at nine. Cigars and brandy. Reading in a deck chair, legs wrapped in a blanket, and then a brisk
turn around the deck, nodding to the officers.