We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [6]
We slapped one another's backs in mute victory. Even Kresten appeared to forget his grim premonitions of doom and surrendered to the general ecstasy: war was a thrill, a rush of schnapps that fired up your blood—only the joy was wider and purer. The smoke drifted away and the air cleared. Never before had we seen the world with such clarity. We stared like newborn babies. Rigging, masts, and sails formed a canopy above us like the foliage of a fresh-sprung beech forest. Everything bore an otherworldly sheen.
"Christ, I feel all solemn," Little Clausen said, once our faculties had returned. "Damn, damn, damn." He couldn't stop swearing. "Damn me if I've ever seen the like."
We'd heard the thunder of cannons being tested the previous evening, but actually witnessing their effect—that did something to a man.
"Yes," Ejnar reflected. "Those cannons make Pastor Zachariassen's hellfire seem tame. So what do you say, Kresten?"
Kresten's expression had turned almost pious. "Fancy me living to see this," he said quietly.
"So you've stopped thinking you're going to die?"
"Oh, I'm more certain of it than ever. But I've stopped being scared."
We couldn't claim this incident as our personal baptism of fire, because the sixty-pound cannons that we manned were mounted on the top deck on the port side, and the fighting was to starboard. Our turn would come soon, when we sailed deeper along the fjord toward Eckernförde, where two more batteries awaited on either bank. But this was no great threat, as we saw it. It wasn't yet eight in the morning and the battle was already half won; we even began to fear the war would end before it had begun. We'd just had a taste of it, and now it looked as if the German might be beaten before lunch.
The Gefion continued toward the head of the fjord; the northern battery lay straight ahead. We were only two cable lengths from the southern battery when we shivered the topsails so they spilled the wind. We struck the jib and let go a drag anchor on the port side so that we lay facing the enemy with our broadside, and the Christian the Eighth did likewise. It was time to fire.
Our blood sang. We were like children waiting to see Chinese fireworks. Fear had melted away completely and only anticipation remained. We hadn't yet recovered from our first victory, and a second one awaited us.
Then the Gefion started to move. The drag anchor was failing to hold her and the strong current propelled us toward the southern battery. We looked across to the Christian the Eighth. The huge ship-of-the-line was adrift too and already coming under intense fire from the shore. Its sailors lowered the heavy anchor to stop her from drifting and let off a violent salvo, which burst from her side, from stem to stern. Cannon smoke erupted from the ports, floating across the fjord to form a rapidly growing cloud. But there hadn't been time to adjust the cannons before the ship's unexpected drift toward the shore, and they'd fired too high, hitting the fields behind the batteries.
A moment later it was our turn. We were now close enough to the coast to be within firing range of the German rifles. The current and the wind continued to torment us, and we were crossing the fjord with both broadsides facing the empty water. Only our four stern cannons had a chance to respond to the vicious fire from the battery on shore.
The first hit cleared our aft deck of eleven men. We'd been calling the cannonballs "gray peas," but the thing that shot low across the deck, tearing rail, cannon ports, and people apart in a shower of wooden splinters, was no pea. Ejnar saw its approach and registered every meter of its journey as it swept across the deck, shearing the legs off one man and sending them flying in one direction while the rest of him went in another. It sliced off a shoulder here and smashed a skull there. It was hurtling toward him, with bone splinters, blood, and hair stuck to it. He let himself fall backward and saw it shoot past. He later said that it took off his bootlaces in