The Adventures of the U-202 An Actual Narrative

Excerpt

OUR FIRST SUCCESS

At the hunting grounds North Sea, April 12, 19— Course: northwest. Wind: southwest, strength 3-4. Sea: strength 3. View: good. Both machines in high speed.

We were very comfortable in the conning tower because the weather was fine and the sun burned with its heat our field-gray skin jackets.

“Soon we will have summer,” I said to the officer on guard, Lieutenant Petersen, who was sitting with me on the conning tower’s platform. I felt entirely too hot in my thick underwear.

Petersen, who, like me, was sitting with his legs dangling in the open hatch on whose edge we had placed ourselves, put his hand on the deck and loosened the thick, camel’s wool scarf, twice wrapped around his neck, as if suddenly he realized it was too hot for him, too.

“I think I’ll soon discharge this one from service,” said Petersen, and pulled at the faithful winter friend as if he wished to strip it off.

“Don’t be too hasty, my dear lieutenant,” I replied laughing. “Just wait until to-night, and then I am sure that you will repent and take your faithful friend back into the service.”

“Are we going to keep above the water to-night, Herr Captain-Lieutenant, or are we to submerge?” he asked me.

“It depends on what comes up,” I answered. “It rests as usual with the weather.”

Thus we were talking and smoking on the conning tower while our eyes scanned the horizon and kept a sharp lookout all around us.

On the little platform, which in a sharp angle triangle unites itself from behind with the tower, the subordinate officer corporal was on guard, and with a skin cloth was cleaning the lenses on his double spy-glass, which were wet.

“Did you also get a dousing, Krappohl?” I asked. “Then you didn’t look out, either. That rascal soaked my cigarette just as he did the lenses on your spy-glass. That’s the dickens of a trick.”

With the word “rascal” I meant the splashing wave, which, while the sea was in a perfect calm, without any reason climbed up to us on the tower. If there had been a storm it would have been nothing to mention. Then we often did not have a dry thread on our bodies. But such a shameless scoundrel, which in the midst of the most beautiful weather suddenly throws himself over a person, is something to make one angry.

We made good speed. The water, which was thrown aside by the bow, passed by us in two wide white formed streaks. The motor rattled and rumbled, and the ventilation machine in the so-called “Centrale” right under our feet made a monotonous buzzing. Through the only opening where the air could pass out, the open tower hatch, all kinds of odors flowed one after another from the lower regions right by our noses. First we smelled smear-oil. Then the fragrance of oranges (we had with us a large shipment, which we had received as a gift of love), and now—ah! Now it was coffee, a strong aromatic coffee odor.

Lieutenant Petersen moved back and forth unrestingly on the “swimwest,” with which he had tried to make it a little more comfortable for himself on the hard sitting place, bent deeper and deeper down into the hatch inhaling with greed the odor from below, and said, as he in pleasant anticipation began to rub his hands together:

“Now we’ll have coffee, Herr Captain-Lieutenant!”

I had just with a great deal of trouble pulled out a cigarette-case from the inside pocket of my skin jacket and was groping in my other pockets for matches, when a hand (the gloves number 9½) with outstretched forefinger reached towards me from behind and the subordinate officer’s excited voice announced:

“A cloud of smoke four points port.”

As quickly as lightning the spy-glass was placed to the eye....