We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [101]
Then the Flag War started. The great colonial powers had planted their flags around the island, where they had no business being in the first place. First, a shot was fired at a British flag. Then an American flag was burned, and the Germans were blamed for it. German troops came ashore to find themselves surrounded by Kanaks, who made short work of fifty of them. It was said that the house where the Germans held out had more holes than a fisherman's net by the time the Kanaks had finished. The Germans inside had been killed by American bullets, supplied by the British, and all of a sudden the bay outside Apia was packed with seven warships from three nations. Everyone was waiting for the first shot.
It was never fired though, and that was the whole point of the story, Peter said. Because the sea attacked before the cannons had a chance.
The barometer fell to 29.11. Any sailor who knows the Bay of Apia knows what that means: get out to sea as quickly as you can. But the officers on board these naval ships hadn't a clue. They just wanted to challenge one another, and the poor fools didn't realize that their worst enemy was the ocean. The wind built to hurricane force and the waves in the bay grew big enough to frighten even those of us who'd witnessed an autumn storm in the Skagerrak or the North Atlantic.
The next morning revealed a sight to match any horrors of war. Three warships had run aground on the reef, two lay on the beach with their keels bared, and two had sunk to the bottom of the bay. The sea had swallowed cannons and ammunition and wrought its own destruction in their absence. Drowned sailors bobbed face-down in the frothy surf before finally being washed ashore.
The sun rose, and its glorious rays spread across a sky swept clear of clouds. But the beach was a different sight altogether. The recovered bodies were lined up, while mute survivors wandered up and down between the rows, trembling either from exhaustion or from a lingering terror of the sea's power. These were troops, not seamen: they'd been destined for other forms of victory and defeat, death and survival than the kind we knew. They were soldiers who'd tasted a sailor's fate.
They never made history. No one would remember them. The Battle of Samoa was not won by the Americans, the British, or the Germans. It was won by the Pacific.
Laurids walked among the waterlogged bodies placed face-down in the sand. No one knew why they'd been arranged that way. Perhaps those who laid them out thought it too gruesome to look so many dead people in the face at once. The day before, these people had been ready to shoot one another. Now it was impossible to tell who was German, American, or British. Laurids kept pointing at them as though taking a tally, and each body he counted seemed to cheer him.
"When I saw that, I thought he really had lost his mind," Peter Clausen said later.
He too had come down to the beach that morning. But unlike Laurids, he wasn't counting the dead; he was counting the survivors. Every one of them was a potential customer, now that the fleets of three nations had been smashed to pieces and all provisions had been lost, along with a whole swath of crew.
"Fortunately, there were more living than dead," Peter Clausen said. Whether he meant fortunate for them or for his business wasn't clear, but at any rate, the disaster in the Bay of Apia proved to be a turning point in the fortunes of his trading station.
"All I know," Clausen said, returning to the subject of Laurids, "is that if he really had once lost his reason, he got it back that day. I can't say whether he became his old self again, since I've no idea what he was like before. But he turned up at my door, asking if there was anything he could do. That was new. In the old days he showed up only when he wanted something—which he always did. Don't get me wrong. I was happy to help him, within reason. I never refused him a meal and a cup of coffee. After all, we were both from Marstal. But he wasn't someone whose company I enjoyed. He never