The Ocean Liner

HMS Amphitrite

They let Hufnagel out of the sickbay to get some fresh air. The two burly sailors who went with him everywhere, as though he were a wild beast who might at any moment lash out or leap overboard, had finally relaxed their vigilance. Weakened as he was, he presented little danger to anyone. One of the sailors even solicitously draped a blanket over his shivering shoulders.

‘There you go, Fritz. Don’t catch a chill.’

He nodded his thanks. Clutching the blanket around himself, he went to the rail and looked across the bay at the distant towers of Manhattan. He was remembering his last visit here as a midshipman. The precise phrase which formed in his mind was ‘in my youth’. It was an odd phrase, considering he was not yet twenty-five. But he felt old. Much of himself had gone down with U-113. He was no longer what he had been.

He glanced down at his right arm, which now ended in a bandaged stump, just above the elbow. It was a pity to lose the arm. And the other arm, thanks to Todt’s first shot, still had a doubtful future. He knew the British naval surgeon had done his best, but he was inexperienced and over-eager with the knife. Anyway, there was no use crying over spilled milk. What was done was done. He had saved the Manhattan, and perhaps hundreds of lives. That was something. He had no idea who those passengers were, whose lives had been in his hands for a trembling moment. And they would never know who he was. But that was war. Where ignorant armies clash by night.

He looked again at the New York skyline, thinking of the teeming streets his younger self had once walked, so long ago. It would surely not be long before the might of America joined with Britain against the Axis powers. Then – for all Hitler’s contemptuous dismissal of a ‘mongrel nation’ – the war would take a very different turn.

It made little difference to him now. He would be spending the rest of it, however it turned out, as a POW. He would see the world from behind a fence for years to come, perhaps a decade. Nobody could tell. And after that, he would have to face his life as an amputee, a wounded bird pecking crumbs on windowsills.

He wondered what sort of Germany he would be returning to after it was all over. There was sometimes a vision in his mind of endless fields of smoking rubble, where scarecrow figures huddled. Among the scarecrows in this vision he could see members of his own family. Perhaps that was overly pessimistic. Yet the first month of the war had already shown him that the dream of glory was in reality a nightmare of folly, slaughter and devastation.

‘Don’t upset yourself,’ one of his guards said. ‘We’re all a shower of bastards.’

Hufnagel realised that the remark was meant to be comforting. He realised, too, that the warmth on his cheeks was from tears that were trickling from his eyes. He wiped them away with the rough wool of the blanket. They led him below again.