We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [24]
Now the German had learned to fear us!
Many victories of this kind were won in the weeks to come, and we celebrated every one of them with large quantities of schnapps.
WE WERE MORE THAN four months into our captivity, when, at the end of August, it was decided that we would be exchanged for German prisoners of war. It took us ten days to get to Dybbøl, where the exchange was to take place. We suffered many delays and humiliations on the way, but we took them all in stride because we'd regained our honor by alarming the people of Glückstadt. And when we saw the Danish ships anchored in Sønderborg Harbor, we knew that we were free men. On board the Schleswig, the steamer bound for Copenhagen, they gave us white bread and butter, schnapps, and as much beer as we could drink.
We spent the night on the bare deck, with the ship rolling gently and the wheezing engine vibrating the planks we slept on. It was a cloudless night, and the starlit sky stretched high above us. August 21, 1849, was a good night for shooting stars, and the bright tails of the comets conjured a cannonade very different from the one that heralded our miserable captivity. Laurids breathed a deep sigh. Prison had cut him off from the stars.
When you can't see land, and when the wind, the current, and the clouds tell you nothing, when your sextant has gone overboard and the compass won't work, you navigate by the constellations.
Now he was home.
"Hurrah" was the word we heard most often in the days that followed. On the Baltic Sea we passed a steamer filled with Swedish troops, and from the deck of the Schleswig we shouted three cheers for the brave Swedes. At the Customs House in Copenhagen the crew of the frigate Bellona welcomed us with a triple cheer, to which we immediately responded; soon the entire harbor had erupted in answering hurrahs. Then it was the turn of the officers. They too were celebrated with applause. Commander Paludan took the lead as they walked ashore, just as he'd done when he abandoned the wounded on board the Christian the Eighth. Through his incompetence he was responsible for the loss of two ships, the deaths of 135 men, and the captivity of a thousand. But now he was greeted with respect because he was a hero. We were all heroes. It seemed as if the clapping would never end.
With our sea bags in hand, we went our separate ways to look for lodgings for the night. Soon we were seated in the city's pubs, drinking and cheering. We missed the schnapps pails; since we were now footing the bill ourselves, our drunkenness didn't reach the extremes it might have.
The following morning we were due to meet at Holmen. The naval minister had announced that four months' captivity merited two weeks' wages. Afterward we were to draw lots to decide who would return to the navy's ships and who would be sent home. Laurids, Little Clausen, and Ejnar returned to Marstal two days later. Here, a celebration arch of spruce branches was constructed in Kirkestræde, where the homecoming men were applauded and the dead mourned.
A terribly deformed creature stood in the midst of the crowd that greeted us. One eye was missing, and the bones of his right cheek and his lower jaw protruded from his skin, which leaked constantly. Even those of us who had witnessed so much on that dreadful day on Eckernförde Fjord had to avert our eyes.
We didn't know who he was until he greeted us.
It was Kresten.
It emerged that not all of his head had been shot off, as Torvald Bønnelykke had told us: only half. He'd been in a hospital in Germany until recently and had been sent home some days before the rest of us. The army surgeon had tried patching him up, but his damaged jaw refused to heal. Now he was back home with his mother—who still hadn't recovered her senses and kept asking after her missing son. When poor Kresten assured her that he was standing right before her, she stuck her finger into the hole in his cheek, just as doubting Thomas had stuck his into the savior's wounds. But unlike Thomas, she didn't turn into