Chapter 2
The Twenty-Fifth
You’re picking up where you left off.
From the pantry door, a stack of plates against his stomach, Jef Verhaegen watched the soldiers going down into the belly of the Léopoldville, and he thought he had never seen the ship so heavy.
It was a little after five in the morning, Sunday, December 24. The loading had been going on since two. In the passageway the men filed past, bent under their packs, rifles knocking against the door frames, and every time a helmet hit iron the sound rolled all the way to the far end of the ship. They smelled of wet wool, tobacco, and the kind of fear nobody admits to. They were young. Younger than him, most of them, and Jef was only twenty-three.
He had been on the Léopoldville since 1942. Before that there had been a freighter of the Company's that sailed from Antwerp in May 1940 and never went back, and neither did he. Mess steward: he waited in the officers' saloon, carried the trays, dried the glasses, made up the cabins when he was asked. Before the war the ship had run the line from Antwerp to the Congo, with three hundred and sixty passengers in white, refrigerated holds for fruit, and lounges where people danced on Saturday nights. Jef had only known the other ship, the one that came after, painted gray, where the lounges served as dormitories and nobody danced anymore.
The old hands said she was a lucky ship. They said it the way you knock on wood. Twenty-four times she had crossed the Channel with troops. Twenty-four times without a scratch. She had carried more than a hundred thousand men; somebody had done the arithmetic in the saloon one night. Once, early in the war, she had even brought back the crew of a captured German submarine, pale kids who didn't look at anybody. The ship had never been hit.
This crossing would be the twenty-fifth.
“Kid.”
Albert Lutete was behind him in the pantry, one hand on the door frame. He was a seaman on the deck crew and had no business there, but he often came by at that hour for the coffee they were allowed before their shift. He was thirty and looked twenty-five or forty depending on the light. He was from Matadi. He had been on the Congo run for ten years, and before Jef, before the war, he had known the white lounges and the passengers who danced. He never talked about it.
“You count them?” Albert said.
“Count what?”
“Them.”
He jerked his chin toward the soldiers. Albert counted everything. The steps on the stairs, the davits, the sacks of flour brought aboard, the days since the last letter from Matadi. He said a man who counts always knows where he is.
“No,” Jef said.
“I counted the ones who went down the aft stairs. Since two o'clock. Just the aft stairs.”
“And?”
Albert said a number. Jef didn't remember it, but he remembered what came next.
“There's too many,” Albert said. “For the aft stairs, there's too many.”
Jef shrugged. There were always too many. The Americans filled the ship the way you pack a suitcase before a vacation, leaning on the lid. That wasn't their business. Their business was getting them across, and across was Cherbourg, and they would be in Cherbourg on the evening of Christmas Eve.
“Go drink your coffee,” Jef said.
Albert didn't move. He kept watching the file of soldiers going down a moment longer, then went back into the pantry.
They sailed around nine. The sun was barely coming up over Southampton, a pale glow behind the cranes, and the ship left the dock without a sound, pushed off by the tugs. Jef felt it more than he saw it, in the way the glasses started to chime in the cupboards.
He served the officers breakfast. There were Belgian officers, British officers and, that morning, American officers who couldn't find their men. They talked about it among themselves, in English, too loud: this company had gone on the other ship, that lieutenant didn't know where his platoon was. Jef understood one word in five. He understood mess, which was the word for the room and also for the confusion.
On his way back down to the pantry with what was left of the coffee, he was stopped in the passageway by two soldiers coming up from aft with their mess kits. They were looking for coffee. The first one, a redheaded kid with jug ears, talked nonstop, with his hands, laughing at what he was saying. He pointed at the pot left on the tray, then at his mess kit, and threw out a question that ended with Christmas. Jef didn't understand a thing. He poured the officers' coffee into the mess kit, because that was simpler, and said in French that it was all there was, then in Flemish, which didn't help either. The kid drank, holding the mess kit in his left hand. He laughed again, as if Jef had just said something very funny, and slapped him on the shoulder. The other one, behind him, calmer, taller, said a word that must have been an apology and pulled his buddy away by the sleeve. They disappeared down the aft stairs, the ones Albert had counted.
Jef stood there a second with his tray. He thought the talker looked like a boy who had never been afraid of anything, and that he had seen a lot of that kind of boy go by since 1942, in one direction, and fewer in the other.
In the saloon they spoke Flemish. Orders were given in Flemish. The captain, who was seldom seen, a dry, closed-off man, didn't speak English, people said, and didn't care to. When the British had to be talked to, there were officers for that. When the Americans had to be talked to, there was nobody, and they used their hands.
On the way out of the roadstead there was an abandon-ship drill. Jef heard it over the deck loudspeakers, a nasal voice speaking English, then another in Flemish for the crew, and he went to his station by a lifeboat on the port side, the way he'd been taught. The soldiers were formed up on deck in bunches, only a few of them, the ones who had heard. In some of the holds the loudspeakers didn't work, and the men down there never knew there had been a drill. An American officer walked along the lines, looked at the life jackets, tightened one or two, and the drill was over. Nobody showed the soldiers how to lower a boat. Nobody showed them how to jump into the water with a life jacket on. It had never been done on the earlier crossings. It had never been needed.
Past the antisubmarine nets, something happened that nobody had ever seen.
The British destroyer in the lead, the Brilliant, sent a signal, and the Léopoldville began to zigzag. Jef was on deck with a bucket in his hand and he felt the ship turn under his feet, slowly, then turn again the other way. The old hands looked at each other.
“We've never done that,” said the chief steward, who had been at sea since the last war. “Twenty-four times, never.”
“Maybe it's routine,” somebody said.
“Not for us.”
The convoy was small. The Léopoldville in front, the other transport behind, the Cheshire, and around them the escorts, gray shapes cutting across the sea at an angle. Jef learned their names later. That morning they were just ships keeping watch, and if they had his ship zigzagging, they had a reason to watch more closely than usual.
The sea came up during the morning. A long swell out of the northeast that took the ship on the beam with every zig. In the holds, seasickness spread within the hour. Jef went down once to bring buckets and came straight back up. The smell on the stairs was something he didn't want to take away with him. Soldiers had come up on deck to breathe, dozens of them, and they hung on the rail, gray-faced, not saying anything, eyes on the horizon the way they'd been told.
At noon he served the officers lunch. They didn't eat much.
At two-thirty there was an alert.
He didn't know where it came from. A bell, men running, the far-off, muffled sound of a depth charge going off underwater, then a second one. The ship shuddered, barely. In the saloon the glasses jumped in the cupboards. Jef went to his station. Albert was already there, standing, arms folded.
“A submarine?” Jef said.
“They're looking.”
Far off, the destroyer was circling. A quarter of an hour later the alert was called off. At three there was another, and ten minutes later it was called off again. The convoy went back on course, in a diamond, at thirteen knots, and the zigzag started up again too.
“It's over,” Jef said.
Albert didn't answer. His eyes were on the sea, on the side where the destroyer had circled.
“They didn't find anything,” Jef said. “If they had, we'd know.”
“If they didn't find anything,” Albert said, “it means he's still there.”
Jef laughed, but not for long.
Around four, when the light was already starting to go, Albert came to get him in the pantry.
“Come.”
“I've got the officers' tea.”
“After. Come.”
He took him along a passageway on the boat deck to a wooden locker painted gray, under a ladder, that Jef had never noticed. Albert lifted the lid. Inside were life jackets, stacked up, two canvas pads joined by straps, the kind you pull over your head, one in front, one behind.
“The soldiers' are down in the holds,” Albert said. “They got some coming aboard. Not all of them. I looked.”
“How do you know?”
“I counted the crates they brought up at Southampton. And I counted the soldiers.”
He took a life jacket, shook it out, and handed it to Jef.
“There's not enough for everybody,” Albert said. “So you take yours now.”