We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [20]
"What does it say?" he suddenly asked.
We gave him a blank look.
"You're the one doing the reading," Ejnar said.
Little Clausen looked helplessly at them, unable to explain his predicament.
"Well, it says that we lost," Laurids snapped. "But we don't need her to tell us that. And then it says that Kresten's mother has lost her wits from grief. And that your mother has been praying for you."
"My mother has been praying for me?"
Little Clausen looked down and with some difficulty found the line where his mother described her sleepless night. Then he read it again, his lips moving silently as he did so.
"Read on," Ejnar implored him. "What else does she say?"
Marstal had been issued a royal decree to send all its large vessels to the navy immediately, in order to transport troops across the Great Belt. But although every sailor in town had gathered in the schoolroom to listen to the order, not one volunteered to comply. Eighteen vessels were then commandeered—but when the day of their departure dawned, the ships were gone. From the pulpit, Pastor Zachariassen lambasted the people of Marstal for their lack of self-sacrificial spirit, after which the townsfolk began to talk of replacing him. Everything was in confusion. There was a war on, and times were harsh, but if only the good Lord would protect Little Clausen and the rest of Marstal, all this misery would surely have to end someday, and things could return to normal. Little Clausen's mother ended her letter by conveying her most fervent prayers and loving thoughts to her captive son, and expressing the hope that he was getting enough to eat and keeping his clothes neat and clean.
"Lack of self-sacrificial spirit!" Laurids fumed when Little Clausen had concluded his reading. "That pastor's got a nerve! Seven men are dead and the rest of us are prisoners. We're prepared to give up our lives. But is that enough for him, the devil? No: he wants our ships too. But he won't get them. Never!"
The others nodded their agreement.
The mornings began with warm beer, with bland gruel and prunes one day, split peas and meat the next. Our stomachs soon adapted to the pattern; they had no choice, and besides, we'd had worse at sea, working for stingy skippers, so we complained mainly for the sake of complaining. They'd confiscated our knives, so we had to tear our bread or gnaw at it like horses. For one hour, morning and afternoon, we were allowed to stroll around the churchyard and smoke, while the sentries watched over us with loaded guns. There, we'd let our eyes wander from headstone to bayonet and back again, and if we fancied it, philosophize about the meaning of life. That was as much variety as our captivity afforded.
A FORTNIGHT LATER they woke us at five in the morning and ordered us into the churchyard, where they lined us up in ranks. We were six hundred men in all, and we were joined by the junior officers, whom the Germans had been holding in a riding school. Our guards felt we were in need of discipline, and who better to knock it into our heads than our own cadets?
We marched out of Rendsburg with our sea bags on our shoulders and our food bowls tucked under our arms. Our arrival in the small town of Glückstadt was met by thousands of onlookers. No longer covered in powder residue and at last wearing clean clothes, we almost resembled human beings, so it wasn't our appearance so much as our quantity that made an impact on the townsfolk.
We marched down to the harbor, where we were to be billeted in a grain warehouse. Inside there was a lower and an upper loft, with a separate room in each where the cadets were housed. In these vast open spaces the men slept on the floor, 150 to a row; it seemed that one wall was to serve as our headboard while some planks hammered together would be our footboard. Our bedding, once again, was straw. But there were also tables and benches, and a yard at our disposal, so overall it was a change for the better. There was a