Once the U-30 had tied up at the pier, Lemp asked one of the men who’d made the boat fast, “Do the Tommies ever pay you a call? Not very far from England to here-a lot closer than from England to Germany.”
“Yes, sir,” the rating agreed. “They’ve come over a few times. But the nights are getting short even faster than they are back home-we’re a long way north, you know. We’ve got good flak, and we’ve got fighter cover. One thing that’s plain as the nose on my face”-he grinned, being the owner of a pretty impressive honker-“is that the bombers can’t fight fighters and can’t run, either.”
“That’s not what people thought before the war started,” Lemp said.
“I know.” The rating lowered his voice a little: “If it weren’t so, though, we would’ve knocked England flat by now, eh?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Lemp said, also quietly. They smiled at each other and went about their business. A man could feel he was bucking the system just by speaking a few plain truths.
A man could also feel good about getting back to terra firma. Supper was chicken stew with fresh vegetables. The crew of the U-30 had been living off sausage and beans and sauerkraut long enough to get sick of them. They kept body and soul together, which was as far as praise would reach. The beer that went with supper was mighty welcome, too.
So were the showers in the barracks. Saltwater soap didn’t get a man clean. Gerhart Beilharz toweled himself off with a blissful grin on his face. “I don’t have to smell myself for a while, let alone everybody else,” the Schnorkel expert said in delight.
“Harder for you to knock your brains out, too,” Lemp replied. Beilharz was two meters tall, not the ideal height for a submariner.
One of the ratings added, “Now I can go to sleep without Heinz sticking his shoe in my ear-and Jens can curl up without my shoe in his.”
“Now I can sleep without curling up,” Beilharz said. As an officer, he got more sleeping room than ordinary sailors, but not enough for a man his size. Even Lemp’s cabin-only a curtain shut it off from the rest of the boat-was tiny and cramped. Everything on a U-boat was cramped.
But none of the men got as much sleep as they all craved, because the RAF did come over that night. Air-raid sirens started screaming about the same time as the antiaircraft guns began to thunder. Between them, they made music to wake the dead. Lemp and the rest of the men from the U-30 staggered toward the zigzag trenches as bombs whistling down added one more horrible note to the symphony.
It was cold out there. Did Namsos ever warm up? Shivering, Lemp had trouble believing it. Next to him stood Beilharz, also shivering, in his white cotton undershirt and long johns. Lemp pointed at him. “Look!” he said dramatically. “A polar bear!”
“Oh, shut up… sir,” Beilharz said.
Crump! Crump! Crump! The bombs went off one after another, not really close but not far enough away, either. Night bombing on both sides was more a matter of luck than of skill. Bad luck for Germany, and some of those bombs would hit the harbor. Bad luck for the U-30’s crew, and some of them would hit right here.
Where were the fighters that dockside rating had bragged about? Night might not last long at this season up here, but it was nighttime now. How was a fighter supposed to find a bomber when he couldn’t see it till he was on the point of running into it? The flak was firing by ear-sight, too: no searchlights working yet to pin bombers in their beams.
After half an hour or so, the engine drone overhead eased toward quiet. The antiaircraft guns banged away for another ten minutes. If falling shrapnel fractured somebody’s skull-or smashed it-well, it was a tough old war for everybody, wasn’t it?
“I wonder if I can go back to sleep,” Gerhart Beilharz said as the sailors trooped into the barracks again. The yawn that followed declared he wasn’t too worried about it.
Neither was Lemp. Some infantrymen were supposed to be able to sleep through air raids. He couldn’t do that, but he wasn’t so far away, either. He hurried to his cot.
Chapter 7
Life went on in spite of everything. Weeds began to grow in the Japanese trenches outside of Vladivostok. Sergeant Hideki Fujita admired the little bits of green amidst dun and dirty white. And, when one of the weeds sprouted little red flowers, he was as happy as if he’d raised it himself.
That meant the men in his section admired the flowers with him. If they were otherwise inclined, the certain knowledge that he would give scoffers a clout in the head kept them from showing it.
“Now I hope the Russians don’t shell the poor thing,” he said, and while he spoke he really was worried about it.
“Don’t fret, Sergeant- san,” Senior Private Hayashi said. “A week from now, a million of these things will pop up all over everywhere. We’ll get so sick of them, we’ll start to hate them.”
“I am not going to hate my plant,” Fujita declared. Hayashi, wise in the ways of noncoms, nodded and shut his mouth.
Except for the plant with the little red flowers, not much seemed to change around the besieged Russian city. Fifty meters here, a hundred meters there, the Japanese lines tightened. Maybe the Red Army men defending the place were scrawnier than they had been when Fujita got there. They still fought as hard as ever, though.
When Fujita wasn’t talking about his precious plant, he would talk about that. “Russians are funny people,” he said wisely, puffing a cigarette. “As long as a Russian has a rifle or a bayonet or an entrenching tool in his hands, he’s as dangerous as one of us would be. Maybe more so, because he’s sneakier.”
“ Hai,” breathed the soldiers gathered around him. After all, he was speaking plain truth. Besides, he outranked them. They weren’t going to argue. There were less painful ways to commit seppuku, if a man was so inclined.
He warmed to his theme: “But when a Russian’s had enough, he just throws down his rifle and throws up his hands and smiles at you like a dog. He expects you to pet him and feed him and take care of his messes from then on out.”
“Hai,” the soldiers chorused again-they’d all been in the trenches long enough to see the same thing for themselves.
“Disgraceful,” somebody added. The men nodded. By Japanese standards, surrender was disgraceful. Facing the choice between surrender and death, a Japanese soldier was trained to choose death every time. He had no honor left if he decided to live. Even worse, he smeared his whole family with his shame. If he gave up, gave in, none of his relatives would be able to hold up their heads ever again.
And, because a man base enough to surrender had no honor left, you could do whatever you pleased with him after he fell into your hands. Russians and other Westerners were said to treat prisoners of war kindly. To Fujita and his comrades, that was incomprehensible softness, even madness.
To most of them, anyhow. Educated Senior Private Hayashi said, “My father fought against the Russians at Port Arthur.” He waited for his own nods, and got them. Not many men in those muddy trenches didn’t have older relatives who’d gone through the Russo-Japanese War. He continued, “He told me orders then were to go easy on prisoners, to treat enemy wounded the same way we treated our own, and not even to be too hard on soldiers who gave up when they weren’t wounded.”
Fujita started to tell him he was full of crap. Before he could, though, another soldier said, “Yeah, I remember hearing the same thing from my old man. Pretty crazy stuff, ain’t it?”
Maybe it really was true, then. No one other than Fujita seemed inclined to contradict Hayashi. Instead of sticking out his own neck, he said, “Well, we aren’t dumb enough to keep on with that kind of nonsense nowadays.”