“Did you see that fat barmaid at the café?” Liebs said, leaning back against the rim of the well.
The men sometimes went to a tiny café in Urville. The food was horrible and the meals overpriced, and the waitresses treated their customers as if they were vermin.
“No,” Hellwig said. He found the men’s constant preoccupation with sex disgusting. He was secretly delighted when the French whores gave one of the men the clap. Serves them right.
“Big tits,” Liebs said, holding his hands out from his chest in appreciation.
“No, I didn’t see her,” Hellwig said again, hoping his abrupt tone would send a message to Liebs.
“Why don’t you two pay attention to your gun?” Janzen said, appearing next to the well. He unwrapped the straps from around binocular frames and put the lens to his eyes, studying something in the distance.
“We were talking about my gun,” Lieb said, winking broadly at Hellwig. “Didn’t you see that French cunt…?” Hellwig saw Lieb stop talking and focus on Janzen. The bootsmann had stopped sweeping the distance ahead and locked on to something. A feeling of dread swept over Hellwig. Not here, not now. They were too close to home. Surely this was a mistake. Janzen was just playing with him. Just tormenting Hellwig like he always did.
Janzen held up his hand extending three fingers. It was a signal meant for Meurer in the bridge.
“What is it?” Lieb asked, moving to his position on the doorknocker.
Janzen said nothing. Hellwig looked aft, over the low edge of the gun well, for some signal of what was happening. What he saw shocked him. Gun crews were manning their guns. Wait. Something was wrong. They were almost home. He was just an assistant loader. Janh was the loader but he was ill and had been taken off the boat. Now he was the only one to load the gun. It wasn’t fair. He needed help. There should be someone to help him.
Jansen’s eyes never left the binoculars. “Get ready,” he said calmly to Lieb and Hellwig.
Oh, no, no. Not now. They were home. This was a mistake, Hellwig thought, moving quickly to the ready ammunition boxes against the bulkhead. He saw Lieb push his shoulders into the padded mounts of the doorknocker and glance at him as if to say: “Ammunition.” Hellwig hefted a shell pack in his arms, the weight of the explosives one more confirmation that something horrible was happening. He noticed that Janzen was gone and he suddenly missed the rough man’s presence. If he had stayed next to the well everything would have been all right. Now it was just Lieb. The gunner retracted the chamber handle, feeding the first round into the breech.
“Probably some Frenchy out fishing or something,” he muttered, adjusting the shoulder mounts. “Fucking Frenchies lost the war but they behave as if we did. These are restricted waters. But here they come. Stupid bastards.” He threw Hellwig a harsh look. “Ready?”
Hellwig nodded, gripping the shell pack tightly to his chest. He felt the vibration in the deck increase and he knew Meurer was speeding up. His anticipation grew sharply at each meter consumed by the boat, collectively advancing the situation to an inevitable conclusion: he would die.
“See anything?” Lieb said.
Hellwig leaned over the edge of the well. Nothing. The blackness of the bluffs of the French coast and the sharp brightness of a newborn sun. The sky was pretty, he thought, orange and red but just above that a pale blue. He lost himself in the colors for just an instant but then remembered where he was when fear washed over him again.
“No. Nothing,” Hellwig said, moving to the side of the gun. It wasn’t fair. Janh should be here. I can’t do this myself.
“I wish the hell that Janh was here,” Lieb said.
Hellwig was relieved that Liebs agreed with him and thought for an instant that the gun captain would tell Meurer that they must not fight because there was only one man to load the gun. There was only Hellwig. But Meurer would not listen. He didn’t care about them — he barely said anything when Janh was carried off the boat in agony. Appendicitis, they said. Meurer would give them no one else. Now Hellwig had to feed the gun by himself. It wasn’t fair.
S-204 veered sharply to the right, throwing Hellwig against the bulkhead. The sea exploded to port. He heard the order to fire — he thought he did but he couldn’t be sure because he was trying to make his way back to his station. He almost lost the shell pack, but he regained his footing in time to see Lieb train the gun to starboard and depress the trigger.
The world turned to fire and smoke as Hellwig swung under the barrel and fed a shell pack into the magazine. He quickly pulled another from the ready ammunition box as red tracers flashed overhead. He slid the pack into the magazine and pulled another from the box. He could hear Lieb cursing in gasps in between the flat bark of the gun. Explosions surrounded them as Hellwig continued to feed the gun. He exhausted one ammunition box and quickly moved to another — one eye on what he was doing and one on the position of the gun. He had to stay just to the side of the breech, near the hopper, so that he could drop shells into the magazine. But he had to keep an eye on the movement of the gun as Lieb swung it wildly along the horizon. Hellwig suddenly remembered that Janzen had held up three fingers. They were outnumbered three to one.
He flipped the lid open on another box, and at that moment he heard a crash aft. He saw the skullcap blackened and covered in flames, and his bladder emptied.
He turned quickly, shaking so violently that he could barely feed the shell pack into the magazine. He was going to die. This time he would. He knew it. He felt it.
Lieb screamed profanities at the unseen enemy as the doorknocker pumped shell after shell into the darkness.
Hellwig heard the roar of the engines of S-204, but he heard the rumble of other engines as well. The enemy. British or Americans. They were going to kill him. He would die. He prayed frantically, asking God that he be killed quickly, that he not be horribly mutilated and take hours or even days to die.
A blast surrounded Hellwig, and the noise was gone, replaced by a dull rumble and even that seemed muted somehow. He found himself on the deck, lying awkwardly over an ammunition box. He pulled himself to his feet. He saw Lieb shouting angrily at him, but the gunner’s voice had been taken from him and all that remained in Hellwig’s world was the rumble.
He wants shells, Hellwig finally realized. He staggered to an ammunition box and threw back the lid. The world exploded and as Hellwig sailed through the air he thought that somehow he was responsible because he opened the ammunition box.
He hit the water awkwardly and lost his breath. It was black and cold and he felt himself bob to the surface. His life vest saved him. He tried to avoid wearing it in the beginning, explaining to Janzen that he couldn’t handle the shells because the life vest got in his way.
The bootsmannmaat called him an idiot and said that one day he’d thank God for that life vest. Was Janzen dead? Was Lieb dead?
He heard a deep roar and a huge shape slid alongside him. He was saved. S-204 had come to rescue him. Relief filled completely and he thought with joy that they really did like him: Janzen, Meurer, Lieb, and the others. They weren’t going to abandon him. He would write his mother and tell her that these men weren’t such a bad lot after all and maybe after the war they would all get together and his mother could fix them a fine meal.
Then a wave spun him around to show him the flaming wreck of S-204, a hundred meters away. The sight of the burning hulk drifting on the Channel waves numbed him.
He felt something hook into his life vest and he heard voices — loud men talking with words that made no sense to him but did confirm the fact that the English or Americans had him and he would be tortured.