We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [13]
The beach was quiet except for the faint moaning of the wounded and the crackling of the still-burning wreckage, when suddenly a loud yell echoed across land and water.
"I've seen Laurids! I've seen Laurids!"
We raised our heads and looked around. We'd recognized Ejnar's voice, and most of us presumed the poor man had lost his mind. Then chaos erupted across the entire beach and everyone began shouting, as if the only way to feel alive was to kick up all the ruckus you could. In the confusion we could have escaped our captors, but we'd lost our nerve—and with it our ability to act. We had to content ourselves with having simply survived: we could run no more.
Our captors weren't much better off. They led us away from the beach, their faces frozen, mute witnesses to the destruction they'd so closely avoided themselves. Our march looked more like a wholesale retreat from the theater of war than an organized transportation of prisoners.
The Germans had routed us, but their faces showed no signs of triumph. Horror at the unthinkable forces that war had unleashed united both victors and vanquished.
THEY TOOK US TO Eckernförde Church. Straw had been spread across the floor so we could collapse and rest our weary bodies. We were soaked through and shivering with cold. Once the sun had set, the April night grew chilly. Those of us who'd managed to save our sea bags changed our clothes and lent our less fortunate comrades what they needed. Soon food rations arrived: whole-grain bread, beer, and smoked bacon collected from the town's grocers. No one in Eckernförde had expected to see the town filled with prisoners of war. On the contrary, they'd been expecting Danish soldiers to be patrolling their streets before the day was out. Now, instead of being under guard themselves, the town's citizens were playing host.
Old women appeared in the church to sell white bread and schnapps to those with money. One of them was Mother Ilse, with the crooked hip. She stroked one prisoner's cheek with a sooty finger and muttered, "You poor lad."
She'd recognized him from his previous visits to the town. We'd all bought schnapps from her in our time. The man grabbed her hand.
"Don't you call me a poor lad. I'm alive."
It was Ejnar.
In the long pause that had followed the hoisting of the signal flag, Ejnar had wandered the deck looking for Kresten, but he could find him among neither the living nor the wounded. Many of the dead were lying face-down, and he'd had to turn them over. Others had had their faces shot off. But Kresten wasn't among the bodies around cannon number seven.
Torvald Bønnelykke, who'd been standing by one of the other cannons, came up to him.
"Are you looking for Kresten?" he asked.
He was a Marstaller and had been party to Kresten's grim premonitions.
"He's lying over there," he said, pointing. "But you won't recognize him. A cannonball took off his head. I was standing next to him when it happened."
"So he was right," Ejnar said. "Bloody awful way to die."
"Death is death," Bønnelykke said. "I don't know if one way is better than another. The result's always the same."
"I'd better go find his sea bag. I promised him I would. Have you seen Little Clausen?"
Bønnelykke shook his head. They asked around, but no one had seen him.
By now it was around ten o'clock. Exhausted, we were getting ready to sleep when the church door opened and yet another