We, the Drowned Read online

  Two steamers arrived, and we recognized the Hekla, the ship we had sailed in from Ærøskøbing. We were now a full squadron. The next day we geared up for battle, settling the cannons in their ports, positioning the pumps and hoses where they could be put to immediate use if fire broke out on board, and placing case shots, grapeshot, and boxes of cartridges by each cannon. Over the past few days we had practiced this drill so many times that we knew most of the naval commands by heart. We were eleven men to each cannon, and from the moment the first command sounded—"Get ready!" followed by "Fuse powder and paper!" and "Insert cartridge!" to the command "Fire!"—we scrambled around one another, terrified of making a mistake. We were used to working in threes or fours on our small boats and ketches but now suddenly we were to be masters of life and death.

  All too often we'd stand there, baffled, while the gun captain screamed something like "Tend the vent!" or "Search the piece!" What the hell did that mean in plain Danish? Whenever we succeeded in performing a complicated routine without errors, the captain would congratulate us and we'd erupt in cheers. Upon which he'd look first at us, then at his cannon, and finally down at the deck, and shake his head.

  "You bunch of puppies," he said. "Just do your best, damn you!"

  ***

  We weren't entirely sure which German we were supposed to be shooting. It surely couldn't be old Ilse with the crooked hip who sold us our beloved schnapps when we moored our boats at Eckernförde Harbor. Nor Eckhart, the grain trader: we'd struck many a fine bargain with him. Then there was Hansen, the innkeeper at Der Rote Hahn. What could be more Danish than the name Hansen? And we'd never seen him anywhere near a gun. None of them could be the German; that much we understood. But the king knew who the German was. As did the captain, who had been cheering with such bravado.

  We approached the fjord. The enemy batteries on the coast started to thunder, but we were outside their range and they soon grew quiet. We were given schnapps rather than the usual tea. At nine o'clock came the beating of the tattoo; it was time to turn in. Seven hours later we were roused from our slumbers. It was Maundy Thursday, April 5, 1849. Again we got schnapps rather than tea, and a barrel of beer awaited us on the deck. We could drink as much as we wanted, so morale was high by the time we raised the anchor and headed into the fjord.

  We had no complaints about the victuals on board His Majesty's ships. Food had been scarce when we'd had to supply it for ourselves. They said you'd never see a seagull in the wake of a Marstal ship, and that was true enough: we never wasted a crumb. But on top of tea and beer, the navy gave us all the bread we could eat and more. Lunch was a pound of fresh meat or half a pound of bacon, dried peas, porridge or soup; in the evening it was four weights of butter, and a schnapps to go with it. Long before we smelled our first whiff of gunpowder smoke, we loved the war.

  Now we were inside Eckernförde Fjord, where the shores were closer and the cannons' positions clearly visible. Kresten Hansen leaned over to Ejnar Jensen and confided in him, yet again, his conviction that he wouldn't survive the battle.

  "I've known it since the day the German demanded the duty coffers. I'm going to die today."

  "You know nothing," Ejnar replied. "You had no idea the battle would be on Maundy Thursday."

  "I've known a long time: the hour is upon us!"

  "Shut your trap," growled Ejnar. He'd suffered Kresten's bleating ever since they'd packed their sea bags and laced their boots.

  But Kresten was unstoppable. Breathing in rapid gasps, he placed a hand on his friend's arm.

  "Promise me you'll bring my sea bag back to Marstal."

  "You can bring it yourself. Now stop it, before you scare the living daylights out of me too."

  Ejnar threw an anxious glance at Kresten. We'd never seen our friend in such a state before. Kresten was the son of the skipper Jochum Hansen, an official with the harbor authority. Kresten took after him, right down to the freckles, the strawberry blond hair, and the silent manner.

  "Here," Ejnar said, handing him a pitcher of beer. "Get that down your neck."

  He held it to Kresten's lips, but the beer went down the wrong way; he spluttered and his eyes grew glassy. Ejnar slapped him on the back, and Kresten gasped and wheezed, the beer pouring from his nostrils.

  "You dumb oaf," Ejnar laughed. "You won't drown if you're meant to hang. You nearly finished yourself off there. You're doing the German out of a job."

  But Kresten's eyes remained distant.

  "The hour is upon us," he repeated in a hollow voice.

  "Well, I for one am not going to be shot." Little Clausen had joined in the conversation. "I know, because I dreamt it. I was walking down Møllevejen, going into town. There was a soldier on either side of me, ready to shoot. Then a voice called out, 'You shall go!' And so I did. The bullets whizzed past my ears, but none of them hit me. So I'm not going to get shot today. I'm certain of it!"

  We looked across the fjord: the surrounding fields were clad in spring green, and a thatched farmhouse lay snuggled in a small grove of lime trees in bud, with a road flanked by stone walls leading up to it. A cow grazing by the roadside turned her back to us and flicked her tail lazily, oblivious to the war approaching by water.

  The cannon batteries to starboard were closing in; we saw the smoke, then heard their thunder roll across the water like a storm gathering from nowhere.

  Kresten leapt up.

  "The hour is upon us," he said.

  A tongue of fire flashed from the Christian the Eighth's starboard stern. We exchanged puzzled glances. Had she been struck?

  Being unfamiliar with warfare, we did not know what a direct hit might entail. There was no reaction from the ship-of-the-line.

  "Why don't they shoot back?" Ejnar asked.

  "Because they're still not crosswise to the battery," Clausen answered knowledgeably.

  A moment later a cloud of pewter smoke on the starboard side of the Christian announced that they were indeed responding. The battle had begun. Fire and earth exploded on the shore and tiny matchstick if men rushed around. A good easterly wind was blowing and soon it was Gefion's turn to deliver a broadside. The roar from the huge sixty-pound cannons made the whole ship shudder. Our stomachs lurched. We pressed our hands to our ears and screamed from a mixture of fear and elation, astounded by the force of the impact.

  Now the German was getting a real hammering!

  After some minutes, the firing from the battery on the point ceased.

  By now we had to rely solely on our eyes because we couldn't hear a thing. The shore looked like a desert landscape, with sand shoved up in piles. The black barrel of a twenty-four-pounder stuck up in the air, flipped over as if by an earthquake. No one was moving.

  We slapped one another's backs in mute victory. Even Kresten appeared to forget his grim premonitions of doom and surrendered to the general ecstasy: war was a thrill, a rush of schnapps that fired up your blood—only the joy was wider and purer. The smoke drifted away and the air cleared. Never before had we seen the world with such clarity. We stared like newborn babies. Rigging, masts, and sails formed a canopy above us like the foliage of a fresh-sprung beech forest. Everything bore an otherworldly sheen.

  "Christ, I feel all solemn," Little Clausen said, once our faculties had returned. "Damn, damn, damn." He couldn't stop swearing. "Damn me if I've ever seen the like."

  We'd heard the thunder of cannons being tested the previous evening, but actually witnessing their effect—that did something to a man.

  "Yes," Ejnar reflected. "Those cannons make Pastor Zachariassen's hellfire seem tame. So what do you say, Kresten?"

  Kresten's expression had turned almost pious. "Fancy me living to see this," he said quietly.

  "So you've stopped thinking you're going to die?"

  "Oh, I'm more certain of it than ever. But I've stopped being scared."

  We couldn't claim this incident as our personal baptism of fire, because the sixty-pound cannons that we manned were mounte
d on the top deck on the port side, and the fighting was to starboard. Our turn would come soon, when we sailed deeper along the fjord toward Eckernförde, where two more batteries awaited on either bank. But this was no great threat, as we saw it. It wasn't yet eight in the morning and the battle was already half won; we even began to fear the war would end before it had begun. We'd just had a taste of it, and now it looked as if the German might be beaten before lunch.

  The Gefion continued toward the head of the fjord; the northern battery lay straight ahead. We were only two cable lengths from the southern battery when we shivered the topsails so they spilled the wind. We struck the jib and let go a drag anchor on the port side so that we lay facing the enemy with our broadside, and the Christian the Eighth did likewise. It was time to fire.

  Our blood sang. We were like children waiting to see Chinese fireworks. Fear had melted away completely and only anticipation remained. We hadn't yet recovered from our first victory, and a second one awaited us.

  Then the Gefion started to move. The drag anchor was failing to hold her and the strong current propelled us toward the southern battery. We looked across to the Christian the Eighth. The huge ship-of-the-line was adrift too and already coming under intense fire from the shore. Its sailors lowered the heavy anchor to stop her from drifting and let off a violent salvo, which burst from her side, from stem to stern. Cannon smoke erupted from the ports, floating across the fjord to form a rapidly growing cloud. But there hadn't been time to adjust the cannons before the ship's unexpected drift toward the shore, and they'd fired too high, hitting the fields behind the batteries.

  A moment later it was our turn. We were now close enough to the coast to be within firing range of the German rifles. The current and the wind continued to torment us, and we were crossing the fjord with both broadsides facing the empty water. Only our four stern cannons had a chance to respond to the vicious fire from the battery on shore.

  The first hit cleared our aft deck of eleven men. We'd been calling the cannonballs "gray peas," but the thing that shot low across the deck, tearing rail, cannon ports, and people apart in a shower of wooden splinters, was no pea. Ejnar saw its approach and registered every meter of its journey as it swept across the deck, shearing the legs off one man and sending them flying in one direction while the rest of him went in another. It sliced off a shoulder here and smashed a skull there. It was hurtling toward him, with bone splinters, blood, and hair stuck to it. He let himself fall backward and saw it shoot past. He later said that it took off his bootlaces in passing; that's how close it came before it tore out through the quarterdeck aft.

  To Ejnar that cannonball was a monster with a will of its own. It showed him what war was: not a battery that exploded and sent matchstick soldiers fleeing, but a dragon that breathed hot fire on his naked heart.

  The deck was in chaos; a wild-eyed officer screamed at him to go to the mast with the helmsman and a soldier. The order made no sense, but he did as he was told. The soldier collapsed straightaway in a pool of blood. It looked as if he'd imploded: a hole had opened in his chest and blood gushed out. Ejnar saw a man's eye explode into a red mess and another man's skull torn off. That was a strange sight: pink brain matter exposed and splattered as if it were porridge, and someone had slammed a wooden spoon into it. Ejnar had not known that such things could happen to human beings. Then a second cannonball struck and killed the lieutenant. As he witnessed Armageddon, Ejnar went hot and cold and his nose started bleeding from the shock.

  Another officer with blood pouring down his face ordered him to cannon number seven. Ejnar had originally been assigned to number ten, but that one had taken a direct hit and now stood lopsided by the cannon port. Around it lay a roil of motionless bodies in a slowly spreading pool of blood. Small streams of urine formed deltas between their legs. He could not see if Kresten or Little Clausen was among them. A severed foot lay a short distance away. Like the dead men, Ejnar had wet himself. The roar of cannons had caused an earthquake in his intestines, and he'd filled his trousers too. He knew that people emptied their bowels at the moment of death, but he hadn't imagined that it could happen to the living as well. The notion that war made a man of you vanished as he felt the stickiness slide down his thighs. He felt half corpse, half baby, but soon discovered that he was not the only one. The stench of upturned privy buckets wafted across the deck. It wasn't just coming from the slaughtered. Most of those still fighting had soiled pants.

  The gun captain at cannon number seven was still alive, bleeding from a cut above his eyebrow where he'd been hit by a flying splinter. He screamed at Ejnar, who could hear nothing, but when he pointed at the cannon, Ejnar understood that he wanted him to load it. His arms were too short to reach, so he had to climb halfway out of the cannon port in order to stuff the cannonball into the muzzle, exposing himself to the enemy battery. As he worked, only one thought occupied him: when was the next round of schnapps?

  Meanwhile, the Gefion had managed to reposition herself so her broadsides were aligned with both shores. But the steamer Geiser, which had tried to come to our aid with a hawser, had taken a hit to her engine and was being pulled out of the battle, and so was the Hekla, whose rudder was shot to pieces. The wind was due east and the loss of the two steamers, which were supposed to tow us, meant that we were unable to retreat if things went wrong.

  However, our luck was about to change. The northern battery took one direct hit after another, and we saw the matchstick soldiers on the beach run for cover. Their cannons were undamaged and new soldiers kept running to man them, so there was hardly any respite from their fire, but still, it was halfway to victory. The quartermaster came around with a pail of schnapps, and we accepted the outstretched mug solemnly, as if it were communion wine. Fortunately the beer barrel had survived intact and we paid it frequent visits. We felt utterly lost. The constant bombardment and the randomness with which death scythed us down had exhausted us, although the battle was only a few hours old. We kept skidding in sticky pools of blood and there was no avoiding the spectacle of all the horrifically maimed bodies. Only one sense was spared: our deafness prevented us from hearing the screams of the wounded.

  We were afraid to look around, for fear of staring straight into the face of a friend, snared by eyes that might plead for relief one moment and burn with hatred the next, as though the fallen blamed us for our luck and wanted nothing more in this world than to exchange fates with us. No one could offer a single word of comfort; it would pass unheard in the din from the cannons. A hand on the shoulder would have to do. But already those of us who were still uninjured were keeping to ourselves and avoiding the stricken, even though they were the ones in need of consolation. The living closed ranks against those marked for death.

  We reloaded the cannons and aimed as the gun captains ordered us, but we'd stopped thinking in terms of victory or defeat. Our battle was to escape the sight of the wounded, and questions rang in our heads like an echo of the destruction around us: Why him, or him? Why not me? But we didn't want to heed them: we wanted to survive. Nothing existed beyond what we could see through the barrel of a gun.

  The schnapps had worked its blessed magic. Drunk now, we surrendered to a blankness born of terror. We sailed on a black sea and we had only one goal: not to look down and drown in it.

  Ejnar climbed in and out of the cannon port. It was a beautiful spring day and every time he appeared in the mild sunshine, he expected a bullet to his chest. He was muttering to himself, though he'd no idea what he was saying. He was a sight to behold, smeared in soot and blood, with a bleeding nose, which from time to time he would wipe with his sleeve before tilting his head back to try and stanch the flow. There was an acrid taste in his mouth that only repeated swigs of schnapps could relieve. Eventually his tension loosened into lethargy and his movements became mechanical. But he was in no worse a state than the rest of us, with his bloodstained appearance or his soiled trousers: none of us looked alive anymore. We resembled ghosts fr
om a battle fought long ago: corpses on a muddy battlefield where we'd lain for weeks, forgotten in the pouring rain.

  Three times we saw the men on the northern battery relieved, and not one of the shots fired by the matchstick soldiers appeared to miss its target. It seemed that the batteries on both sides of the fjord had concentrated their fire on us.

  At one o'clock a signal flag was hoisted on the mangled rigging of the Gefion. Its message was intended for the crew of the Christian the Eighth: we can do no more. Most of our cannons were now abandoned and the ones firing were undermanned. Those of us still standing were working amid piles of corpses and the dying, who reached out for us in their delirium, pleading for company in the mire of guts, blood, and voided bowels.

  The signal we sent was in code. The enemy on the shores of Eckernförde Fjord couldn't understand it, but the Christian the Eighth knew exactly what it meant.

  On the ship-of-the-line there was no significant loss of life as yet. Early that morning a quartermaster from Nyborg had been killed and since then two men had been wounded, but the vessel had been spared any major hits. At the same time, Commander Paludan was forced to acknowledge that our squadron's bombardment of the batteries on the northern and southern shores had inflicted no significant damage. The battle had now been raging for more than six hours and there was no prospect of victory. Retreat was impossible; anyone could see that.