“Ah, so that was why the SS didn’t trust him, is it?” the admiral said. “Münster is … Münster is a running sore. I don’t know what else to call it, and I wish I did.”
“Sir, Nehring was about as political as your ashtray,” Lemp said, which was nothing less than the truth. “They pulled him off the boat because they had the vapors, not on account of anything he did.”
“Right now, Lemp, coming from Münster is a political act,” Dönitz replied. “You may not like that. The people who come from Münster may not like it, either. But they will not be trusted by the present government, any more than they would be if they were Jews.”
What he said came from his mouth as if he were reading from an official report. How did he feel about the present government and its politics? How did he feel about that General Staff faction he’d mentioned? He had to have opinions. God didn’t issue human beings without them. What they were, though, Lemp couldn’t divine.
He did say, “Right now, I’d take a Jew who was as good an electrician’s mate as Nehring. The rating they gave me isn’t terrible, but he’s not that good. Jews served in U-boats in the last war, didn’t they?”
“They did.” Dönitz bit off the two-word admission. “They do not now. They will not now. And have you any idea how thin the ice is under your feet, Lemp? I have but to repeat what you said now and you will end up envying whatever happened to your Nehring.”
“If I thought you were the kind who repeated such things, sir, I wouldn’t have said it,” Lemp answered. “But I thought you were someone who wanted people to tell him the truth. Maybe I was wrong.”
“Maybe you were,” Dönitz agreed, which made frigid chills run up Lemp’s spine. The admiral continued, “In politics, truth is whatever those in power say it is. As military men, we have to recognize that.”
“Even when the truth looks different to us?”
“Even then. If the truth looks different to you, the leaders will think that is because you are betraying them.”
Even when what they see as the truth leads us into a two-front war, and one we’re losing? Lemp wondered. No wonder Münster was a running sore, in that case. He’d got away with one piece of frankness, just barely. Dönitz’s scowl said he wouldn’t get away with two. All he said, then, was, “Please send us out to sea, sir.”
The commander of the U-boat fleet read his mind entirely too well. “That is not necessarily an escape for you, either,” Dönitz said.
“No? Then I’d always be sure who the enemy was.” Lemp decided to poke again after all.
To his disappointment, he didn’t faze the admiral. “Maybe not. But you might leave me with the feeling that I had blood on my hands.”
“I joined the Kreigsmarine to fight, sir,” Lemp said. “If the Royal Navy sinks me, they get the credit. You don’t get the blame.”
“At the start of the war, I would have agreed with you,” Dönitz answered. “Now … Now I’m not so sure. Our losses have gone up alarmingly the past few months. I feel as if I have blood on my hands every time I send out a U-boat.”
He was a cold-blooded, cold-hearted Navy officer, not Lady Macbeth. That he should say such a thing amazed Lemp. All the same, the U-boat skipper came back with, “Anyone can have a run of bad luck, sir. And we’ve handed the limeys more grief than they’ve given us.”
“I am not quarreling with your courage. I am quarreling with your equipment,” Dönitz said. “England has ways to detect and attack our U-boats for which we’ve found no good countermeasures. Our slide-rule pushers are not even sure they understand all of them.” He held up a broad-palmed hand. “None of that is to leave this room.”
“Yes, sir.” Lemp was too worried by the admission even to think of protesting. “I know their hydrophones beat the devil out of anything they had in the last war, but-”
Dönitz cut him off: “It’s more than that. It’s worse than that. Any time a U-boat surfaces, it seems, an enemy plane or warship rushes at it. It has to be radio detection. We have that, too-we use it to watch for enemy bombers. But we have not been able to build a detector to sense whatever they’re using. It may as well be black magic.”
Lemp thought about some of the RAF and Royal Navy attacks he’d been through. They’d come out of nowhere-or so it seemed to him-and they’d come straight at the U-30. Without a good crew and some luck, he wouldn’t be standing here to listen to the U-boat force commander’s lament.
“None of this is to leave the room, either,” Admiral Dönitz added.
“I wouldn’t think of it, sir,” Lemp answered honestly. He couldn’t stay, and now he couldn’t go out, either. He was in as much trouble as the rest of the Reich.
Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh crouched in some bushes. He had a chicken-wire cover on his tin hat with branches stuck up in it, so he looked something like a bush himself. His uniform, khaki to begin with, was splotched with mud and grass stains. From more than a few feet away, no one who didn’t already know he was there would have had the slightest idea.
The only trouble was, the Germans didn’t care. They had a couple of MG-42s in the ruins of the Belgian farm buildings ahead, along with what seemed like all the ammunition in the world to feed them. They’d fire a burst, traverse a little, and fire another one. They weren’t particularly aiming, or Walsh didn’t think they were. They just wanted to kill anyone who might be in front of them, whether they could see him or not.
Jack Scholes crawled over to Walsh. Only the buttons on the front of his battledress tunic kept him from getting lower to the ground than he was. A snake would have been proud to own him as a cousin. Without raising his head even a quarter of an inch, he said, “Captain ’ammersmif says we’ve got to tyke out them bloody MGs.”
“Jolly good,” Walsh answered sardonically: it was anything but. “And does he say how we’re supposed to do it?”
The tough little Cockney shook his head without getting it any higher off the ground. “ ’E wants you to ’andle it.”
“He would,” Walsh said without heat. This was what he got for being a veteran staff sergeant. Subalterns, lieutenants, even captains were suppose to lean on men like him. Men like him kept junior officers from making too many mistakes that got them and a raft of soldiers killed.
It wasn’t even as if Captain Hammersmith were wrong. They did need to take out those machine guns. Otherwise, the Fritzes would go on murdering Tommies within a two-mile-wide semicircle in front of their position for as long as they had ammo. And, being Fritzes, they would have piles of it.
But attacking the MG-42s would get more men killed. They had plenty of open ground in front and on both flanks, and more soldiers in field-gray to the rear. Coming straight at them, you needed to have made out your last will and testament beforehand, because chances were you wouldn’t stick around to take care of it afterwards.
“Have we got trench mortars? Can we get trench mortars?” Walsh asked. If he could drop bombs down on top of the Germans, he’d solve the problem on the cheap. The new company commander should have been able to figure that out for himself, no matter how unweaned he was.
“Oi’ll arsk ’im,” Scholes said, and slithered away.
“Don’t come back if we have got them,” Walsh called after him. “Don’t give the Germans the chance at you.”
He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging the best scrape he could while flat on his belly. He piled the dirt up in front of him and behind the bush. You commonly needed four sandbags’ worth of dirt to stop a rifle-caliber round: somewhere between a foot and a foot and a half, all well tamped together. Moving that much earth took a while. Well, he had nothing better to do with his time.
And damned if Jack Scholes didn’t come crawling back. “Ain’t got no fuckin’ mortars,” he reported.