When Jurgen Mohr closed his eyes the broad oil-black calm that for a time marked a ship’s end filled his mind. He opened them at once and gazed out of the window as the car ground past another parade of shops. The dreary soot-stained brick of north London seemed to stretch for miles.
‘Not far to go, sir.’ The young British officer in the front seat of the car had turned to look at him with a warm smile as if he had read Mohr’s thoughts.
‘Thank you, Lieutenant…’ he could not remember his name. A cheery soul. His escort back from the Admiralty.
It was after five o’clock and the shops along the Seven Sisters Road were closing, queues forming at the bus stops. It would be the same in Berlin with shoppers pouring on to trams in the Kurfurstendamm, Alexanderplatz and the Unter den Linden. Mohr had spent a week’s leave in the city at Christmas, walked its bustling streets alone, gazed into bright windows and tasted the cold clear air. He had enjoyed the bustle of ordinary life without feeling any need to be more than a spectator, and although he dined with friends more than once, it was in his own company that he was happiest. He had marked this growing sense of detachment in himself for some time and no doubt others had too. His family in the east grumbled that he never visited, hardly ever wrote, and it was many weeks since he had spoken and laughed with his friend Marianne. Marianne Rasch: her brother was lost on a U-boat in the first months of the war. She was younger and gayer, and always frustrated that he could not or would not show his feelings. But in war, no one could claim the right to a private life. By now Marianne would know he was a prisoner. She would know too that the Bismarck had been lost.
Mohr had been standing in the eighteenth-century hall where Nelson’s captains had waited on the Lords of the Admiralty. When he was in London ten years earlier, he had walked down Whitehall to stop and stare through the white stone screen at the front, surprised by the modesty of the building. They had not permitted him to wear uniform to visit the First Sea Lord but had found him a dark suit that fitted well enough, and he felt honoured to be there. Then a member of Admiral Pound’s Staff had told him ever so politely that they had sunk the Bismarck. The pride of the German Navy just so much broken flotsam and two thousand men lost.
The Staff officer led him in a trance up the staircase into the oak-panelled Boardroom to take tea with Admiral Pound. It was a very British affair. Sir Dudley made only a brief reference to the Bismarck, a shake of the head, regret for the loss of so much life, as if passing on condolences for the death of a respected friend. He asked many questions about U-boats and Admiral Donitz but did not seem concerned when Mohr declined to answer them. It struck Mohr as strange that the man charged with protecting Great Britain’s ships should take such a dispassionate interest in their destruction. Then Admiral Pound asked him to describe the sinking of his own U-boat and, judging it to be of little importance, he gave him a short, matter-of-fact account.
There at the Admiral’s splendid table, polished to perfection, beneath those elegant oak pillars, he said nothing of the fear or the agony of waiting, the angry kaleidoscope of sights and sounds that was never far from the front of his mind. Even now, sliding about the car’s leather seat, he could imagine the soft splash, splash of depth charges and the shriek of steel as the 112 shuddered and plunged towards destruction. ‘Give it air, give it air,’ he had shouted into the darkness, and they had managed to hold the boat. Then the thrash of propellers, the splash of more charges and detonations that rolled endlessly through the depths. And when the light was restored, grim faces, terrified faces, valves thrown to Open, water above the deck plates — they were too deep for the bilge pumps — and the boat slipping deeper still, its hull groaning and contracting under the pressure. That was the agony of waiting. They had all felt it — stiff and breathless, the air hot with the smell of oil and piss and battery gas. He had experienced it many times but the danger had always passed with a swish of retreating propellers.
‘But my luck ran out,’ he told Admiral Pound with an insincere little smile that the First Sea Lord returned. In the end he had forced the boat to the surface long enough to save the crew. At least he had saved the crew.
The car turned right off the Cockfosters Road and through the gates, and after a brief exchange between the driver and a guard it was soon bumping its way down the long carriageway to Trent Park. The warm sun was shining through the trees, dappling Mohr’s suit and the red leather seat. He was still a prisoner and soon he would be interrogated again, and yet this was a sort of peace.
‘We’re back, sir,’ said the young officer from the front.
The car turned left past the stable block and along the wire fence towards the front of the house.
Two thousand men dead. Admiral Donitz had taught him that honour lay in duty and the harshest will to win. He had believed it to be the meaning in his life, his Weltanschauung. But in the silence of his prison room, he was beginning to wonder what would be left when the victory was won and the slogans no longer had meaning. Who would he be?