We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [9]
Laurids Madsen sat by himself with his bread, busy satisfying his hunger and as yet unaware of his fate.
By now thousands of people had spilled out of the town of Eckernförde and were crowding both shores. Watching them as he munched his bread, Laurids soon realized that it was not curiosity that had brought them out. They were lighting huge fires in the fields and collecting the cannonballs that lay scattered on the beach, then shoving them in the fires and heating them until the iron glowed red before transporting them to their own cannons. Horse-drawn land artillery appeared on the high road from Kiel and spread out behind the stone walls that bordered the surrounding fields.
Laurids recalled his father's account of the war against the English, when Marstal came under attack. Two English frigates had anchored south of the town; they had come to hijack the town's ships, of which there were roughly fifty in the harbor. The English sent out three launches crammed with armed soldiers, but the inhabitants of Marstal, together with some grenadiers from Jutland, managed to drive them off. They could scarcely believe their own eyes when the English started retreating.
"Well, I never did understand what that war was really about," his father said afterward. "The English are good sailors, and I've no quarrel with them. But our livelihoods were at stake. If they took our ships, that would be the end of us. That's why we won. We had no choice."
On the deck of the Christian the Eighth Laurids sat beneath the flag of truce, watching the teeming crowds on the shores. He wasn't sure he understood war any better than his father had. They were defending the Danish flag against the Germans, and that had sufficed for him up until a moment ago. War was like sailing. You could learn about clouds, wind direction, and currents, but the sea remained forever unpredictable. All you could do was adapt to it and try to return home alive. Here the enemy was the cannon fire in Eckernförde Fjord. Once it had been silenced, the way home would lie clear. That was the war, as far as he was concerned. He was no patriot, nor was he the opposite. He took life as it came. His horizon was one of mast tops, mill wings, and the ridged turret on the church: the skyline of Marstal, as we saw it when we approached from the sea. Here were ordinary people throwing themselves into war: not just soldiers, but people from Eckernförde, a port where he'd often docked with cargoes of grain, the very place he'd sailed from on the evening he'd turned all of Ærø upside-down. Now the Eckernfördeners stood shoulder to shoulder on the beach, just as the Marstallers had once done. So what the hell was this war all about?
A boat was launched from the beach. In it sat the lieutenant from the Christian the Eighth, returning from a third round of negotiations. On each occasion the battle had been deferred. The ceasefire had lasted two and a half hours and it was now half past four. From the furious way the sailors were tugging at the oars, it was clear that something decisive had happened. Then out of nowhere the cannons on the beach burst into a roar. The flag of truce was still fluttering from the mast, but the war had resumed.
The Christian the Eighth returned fire immediately, while the Gefion, silent as a ghost ship, tried to get out of the way. We had given up and were using our last strength to inch ourselves forward with the kedge.
Now the enemy changed tactics, aiming the batteries on both sides of the fjord at the Christian the Eighth rather than us, in an attempt to set her alight. Many of the cannonballs that struck her were red-hot from lying on the field fires half the afternoon. The Eckernfördeners had made good use of their time.
Within seconds, the deck was covered with fallen and wounded men. The attack had come out of the blue. Fires flared in several places, and we immediately deployed pumps and hoses to swill death off the deck, but the crackling flames had already taken hold.
Commander Paludan now saw that the