Читать книгу Out of the Night - Richard Julius Herman Krebs - Страница 7

Table of Contents

It was springtime in Hamburg. I wanted a ship, a job at sea, and a chance to work myself up to a captain’s rank. For weeks I haunted the water-front, but the great seaport was a sleeping giant. Except for coastal trade and a few food ships from America, the Hamburg harbor was dead. The British blockade was still in force, although it was months after the signing of the Armistice. It was springtime in Versailles, too, where the peace that was to haunt the world was being perfected.

I would awake hungry, and was still hungry when I went to sleep. Hunger wiped out the lines between adolescents and full-grown men. A sack of flour was worth more than a human life. When a fruit cart of a peasant from Vierlanden was turned over in the street and a middle-aged man tried to shoulder me aside in the scramble for the winter apples, what else was there to do but to stand up and hit him in the face? I was in my fifteenth year.

I took part in the plundering of a wholesale fish store in Altona. Tons of fish were dumped on the cobble-stones, and people grabbed the fish and ran. When a policeman interfered, what else was there to do but to slam a ten-pound codfish into his face? When for a fish or a piece of leather cut out of a stolen transmission belt, a boy could have the body of a girl not older than himself or be instructed in lewd practices by a soldier’s widow turned prostitute, what meaning was there in all the pratings of the need for law and order and a decent life?

When one is thrown adrift in a polluted stream, with no dry land in sight, what escape is there? I took no active part in the political riots of this Hamburg spring, but my heart was with the revolutionary workers, perhaps because it was their side which always lost in the end. Whenever I saw a policeman level his rifle against a civilian, I felt the same hatred as at the sight of a teamster cruelly mistreating his emaciated horse. Each day armed workers skirmished with the police. Night after night the sounds of desultory firing echoed over the city. Yet the news that a trawler loaded with flounders or herring was steaming up the river moved the people more than stumbling against a dead man in the gutter, or encountering a lorry piled high with crude coffins, or coming upon a barricade manned by a few determined-looking youths.

I hunted for food and work. But the struggle to conquer and defend power seemed the essence of life. In the Grenzfass, a large beer hall in the St. Pauli district, I heard and met for the first time Herrmann Knueffgen, an incarnation of all the political adventurers of our century. Surrounded by a singularly well-knit assortment of revolutionary toughs, Knueffgen radiated an atmosphere of indestructible aplomb. Of medium height, slight of build, with a mop of almost colorless hair, his pale eyes gleaming with reckless deviltry, he was no more than twenty-two or -three at the time. Early that morning, at the head of his Rollkommando, he had successfully raided a basement arsenal of the Buergerwehr, a counter-revolutionary organization of armed citizens. Knueffgen made a speech. The hall was full of workless dockers.

“The rich must die so that the poor may live,” he cried. There was a thunder of cheers. The sailor’s Messianic fervor fired my imagination, yet there was nothing bloodthirsty about him as there was about many others who had risen from the depths. Shortly after this stirring meeting in the Grenzfass, Knueffgen embarked on an enterprise that made him the idol of water-front radicals the world over. A delegation of the Communist Party of Germany was scheduled to go to Moscow at a time when Russia was closed to the West by the civil war. Herrmann Knueffgen was commissioned to bring this delegation to Moscow dead or alive. He stowed himself and the delegates away in the fish-tank of an out-bound trawler. Once at sea, he emerged with a revolver in each hand, imprisoned the captain and the crew of ten, and took possession of the vessel which he then navigated around the North Cape to Murmansk. The delegation arrived in Moscow to confer with Lenin, and Knueffgen, upon his return to Germany, was convicted and jailed for piracy on the high seas. No prison, however, could hold him long.

The faithful shipping master Wolfert, through his acquaintance with former sailship masters, at last found me a ship. One morning, half drunk as usual and bullying his frightened wife, he thrust a letter into my hands and shouted at me to report to the Shipowners’ Association for duty aboard the former Africa liner Lucy Woerman. As if by sudden magic, I was signed on as ordinary seaman and the following day I packed my canvas bag and went aboard. The ship hulked gray and mournful at her wharf, her flanks covered with creeping rust. The thought of being able to make my living on the good clean sea made me weep with joy.

The ship was bound for South America. She was loaded with crews who were to man and bring home the large fleet of German vessels marooned in the ports of Chile and Peru during the war. Desperately anxious to leave the hunger-ridden Fatherland, thousands schemed and bribed to get a berth aboard the Lucy Woerman. Scores of the nearly four hundred who were signed had been among the mutineers of the Imperial navy; scores of others had never been aboard a ship before; once at sea none manifested the slightest intention of bringing German ships back home, or of ever returning to Germany.

The ship was infested with stowaways. Three boat-loads of them were returned to shore off Cuxhaven. Before the red rock of Heligoland was abeam, five prostitutes were discovered in the boatswain’s locker, and three other young women, who proved to be the wives of former storekeepers, among the crew. All of them were transferred to home-bound fishermen. But many others, found later, remained aboard.

Soon after the Cornwall capes had slipped out of sight astern and the Lucy Woerman bucked westward over the Atlantic rollers, gambling centers and even a brothel set up in business in mess-rooms and cabins overnight. Tattooing booths, bands of musicians, instructors in English and Spanish and jiu-jitsu began to flourish. Spartacists, anarchists and self-styled missionaries launched discussion circles. Gangs of hoodlums assaulted and robbed the more prosperous voyagers. One old man was found with his throat cut. Another elderly man put on holiday clothes and at sunrise jumped into the ocean.

The ship’s officers, reinforced by a few loyal mariners of the pre-war school, barricaded themselves on the bridge and in the engine room. Elsewhere conditions bordering on madness reigned. A Pirate’s Club sprang up, announcing as its purpose seizure of the ship for a journey to the South Seas. Off the Azores, however, such leadership as there could be fell to a man named Herrmann Kruse.

Kruse, an old member of the Spartakus Bund, called a general meeting of his followers aboard the Lucy Woerman and emerged as the head of a newly elected ship Soviet. He formed a ship Tcheka, and by sheer terror subdued all independent marauders in our midst. Kruse, about twenty-five years old, was blond, bearish, quick-tempered, and had a flair for oratory. He brought some order out of the confusion and now he demanded control of the ship. The skipper armed his officers with pistols for the meeting with Kruse’s Soviet. By way of retaliation Kruse’s strong-arm squads seized all available provisions and began a hunger blockade against the bridge and the engine room. Most of the time the steam was kept low, and at times the ship wallowed helplessly without steam at all. In sight of the green shore of Jamaica a passing oil tanker, apparently suspecting trouble aboard the Lucy Woerman, signaled.

“Can I give you assistance?”

“Thank you. I have a cargo of lunatics,” our skipper answered.

But the officers succeeded, despite all difficulties, in bringing the vessel to Colón. One faction on board planned to scuttle the ship in the Panama Canal, to desert, and to walk through the jungles to Mexico or the United States. Herrmann Kruse and his guerrillas, armed with clubs and belaying pins, opposed this. Kruse’s plan was to allow the Lucy to pass through the Canal, then to overpower the officers. After that, we were to steam for the Galapagos Islands, establish a Soviet Republic, and ask Moscow for protection, supplies and women.

Opposing factions shrieked their protest. “Kruse wants to be a dictator! Down with Galapagos! We land right here!” Little did the American authorities at Colón suspect what a mess was passing into the Canal. In defiance of Kruse, “debarkation squads” were hastily formed as we steamed through the Canal. The rush to reach a shore that looked inviting from a little way off was contagious. As a matter of course, I joined one of the squads.

We packed our belongings, put on life preservers, and lined up along the rail for the plunge. The captain shouted from the bridge for us to desist, but he was greeted with laughter. Group after group heaved their bundles overboard and jumped after them. The Canal waters were soon dotted with swimming men.

I, too, jumped. I felt the water rush upward, smooth and warm, and then I swam for dear life, pushing with all my strength to get away from the deadly propeller. Several of my fellow-deserters were cut to shreds. The shore was much farther away than it had seemed from the ship. Close behind me, as I swam, struggled a middle-aged shoemaker. “Das ist schoen,” he kept saying to encourage me, “now, ho! for America!”

Together we finally reached the muddy bank and ran for the green cover less than fifty yards away. The ground was soggy, and the underbrush dense. But we pushed forward. Soon we came on four other deserters, and the six of us proceeded in single file, carrying our water-soaked bundles and streaming with perspiration. Our leader was a stoker who had once served on Amazon River steamboats. Sometimes the underbrush was so thick that we could not penetrate it; at other times we were confronted with swamps which seemed to stretch out for miles. Once in a while the Amazon River stoker climbed a tree to look around. All he could report was jungle all around, a few hills, and steamers passing in the Canal. The passing steamers looked as if they were threading their way through the tree-tops.

After walking in circles for four or five hours, we struck a lake. We tried to skirt the shore of the lake, but soon ran into swamps. The Amazon River stoker cursed almost without interruption. The shoemaker chattered happily. He told us he had all the tools of his trade in the bundle he carried, and he looked forward to a prosperous existence in some American city. Suddenly our leader halted.

“Look—a railroad,” he exclaimed.

Ahead of us was a railroad embankment, neat, compact, dry.

Someone said: “Let’s stay here and dry out our bundles. When they’re dry, they’ll be easier to carry.” We all agreed.

We opened our bundles and spread the wet things over the tracks: shirts, pants, papers, tobacco. The stoker sent one man a hundred yards in each direction to watch for oncoming trains. We stripped off our clothes and spread them out to dry. The second youngest of our group, who had been a metal worker’s apprentice, had found some wild bananas.

We munched bananas and relaxed in the sun. Our hopes rose. The shoemaker wanted to ride the next train into Panama City. He was anxious to start himself in business without loss of time. The stoker spoke of a foreman’s job in a vast banana plantation.

It was agreed that the men who stood guard on both sides of the tracks should whistle when a train approached. But when a train came from the Atlantic side, the guard did not whistle. Naked, his pants and shirt jammed under his arm, he came running toward us down the tracks. Behind him rumbled the train.

It was too late to save our things. Our leader yelled, “All hands take cover.”

We dived into the jungle. The train ran over our belongings. Then it stopped. Men in khaki uniforms jumped from the train, and began to comb the jungle.

We separated. I crawled through broad-leaved bushes, moving on hands and knees, and when I rose I confronted a grinning soldier.

“Come on,” he said, grasping my shoulders. “You can’t run around here with no clothes on.”

He led me to the train. All my companions had been caught. I put on a shirt which had been cut under the armpits by the train, and a pair of trousers which had but one leg. My comrades did not look much better. We were herded into the train and taken to a station. From there we were marched to a police post. The Americans treated us hospitably. They fed us and plied us with cigarettes.

Before nightfall we were all loaded into a motor launch and returned to the Lucy, which was anchored in Panama Bay. The ship weighed anchor and shaped a course down the west coast of South America, calling at Callao and ports to the south. The majority of the men on the Lucy Woerman refused to man the ships for the voyage home. There were strikes, arrests by the Chilean police, jail breaks. Herrmann Kruse became known all along the Nitrate Coast as the “Commissar from Hamburg.”

I deserted the ship at Antofagasta. Seven months I lingered on the Chile coast. Here I found a freedom I had not known in Europe. The world of political strife, of cold and hunger, seemed as distant as Saturn. Employers and officials asked neither for references nor for papers of identification. I worked in a rigger’s gang engaged in refitting a number of old sailing vessels in the roadsteads of Antofagasta and Iquique, and thus acquired a working knowledge of old-fashioned seamanship and of Spanish. After that job gave out, a labor agent of Antofagasta recruited me for the Chuqui copper mines high up in the barren Andes. My work was that of a splicer of wire cables and my pay was high beyond all expectation—ten pesos a day, for good splicers were rare. Life in the mining camps was rough, particularly after paydays when gambling bouts frequently ended in a flash of knives. Much of the bestiality was due to the absence of women; all but the hardiest prostitutes from the coast shunned the trade with the rabble of the Chuqui mines. Many of my fellow workers had been more or less forcibly conscripted from the jails of the larger towns; they were of many nationalities, a hard-working, hard-drinking, unruly crew. The vision of a Chilean girl, Carmencita, with whom I had become friendly, drew me back to the coast. I arrived in Antofagasta on a copper train, with more than three hundred pesos in my pockets, only to find that Carmencita had become the companion of a jobless Norwegian second mate.

I traveled south as a deck passenger aboard a slow coastwise steamer, and after a few aimless days in Valparaiso, I decided to visit the nearby capital, Santiago de Chile. Here I found work in a candle factory under a domineering British foreman. It was inside work which I detested heartily. In a café I met a young American who had come from Argentina and spoke enthusiastically about the lusty life in Buenos Aires. Next day I threw up my job of packing candles and bought a trans-Andean railway ticket to Buenos Aires. I arrived in the La Plata metropolis with two pesos and sixty centavos. Mounted carabineros were rounding up beach-combers in large batches, belying Buenos Aires’ reputation as the ideal haven for castaways from all the world. After three days of dodging the energetic carabineros, I signed on as a full-fledged sailor aboard the barque Tiljuca, a supply ship for the Norwegian and British whaling bases on the Antarctic island of South Georgia, and manned entirely by Russians and Germans. Toughened as I was, compared with the toughness of the Tiljuca tars, I was a mere infant. One of them ate his salt pork, seasoned with tobacco, raw. Another answered a letter from his mother, imploring him to come home after so many years, by writing that he would come home as soon as he had found someone rich enough to be killed for his money. They gloried in their toughness. Thoroughly soaked with vino tinto, none of them hesitated to rob an itinerant hawker or to rape an immigrant girl come aboard to beg food, but all of them showed an almost sentimental affection for the Tiljuca’s mongrel dog and the forecastle canary. Perhaps only that combination of life on the Buenos Aires Boca and on the forbidding Antarctic seas is able to produce such types. One four months’ voyage to the bleak island of South Georgia killed off my ambition to become an Antarctic whaler. I left the Tiljuca on her return to Buenos Aires for tramp-ship journeys under the flags of Britain, Norway and Greece which landed me in the fall of 1921 in the negro quarter of Galveston, Texas. I was seventeen.

The black folk were friendly to me. An elderly master painter treated me as if I had been his son until, by a stroke of luck, I found a berth on what, I believe, was the finest and largest sailing ship afloat at that time. It was the Magdalene Vinnen, a four-masted barque, which eventually brought me back to Chile.

One of my shipmates had broken a leg off Tierra del Fuego. The captain of our ship refused to have the injured man transferred to a hospital. There was a near mutiny on board in which I had a hand. To avoid arrest by the Chilean harbor police, I deserted at night in the captain’s gig and repaired to familiar haunts in Antofagasta. Christmas Eve of 1922 found me celebrating with other stranded sailors on the green lawns of Plaza Colón, toasting Mrs. Bready, the chesty female shipping master of Nitrate Coast, who generously had supplied a keg of wine. For a fee of six pounds sterling Mrs. Bready found me a berth aboard an ancient barque, the Obotrita, Captain Dietrich, bound with nitrate around Cape Horn to Hull, England. I paid off in Hull in the early spring of 1923. From there I bought passage to Hamburg.

I came home to study navigation, with the intention of obtaining an officer’s ticket. But the minute I set foot on German soil, I found myself sucked back into a whirlpool of hate and distress even more fierce than the one I had left. I found that my family, my mother and the three younger children, stripped by the cyclonic inflation, badly needed what little money I had.

I saw an aged woman standing at a curb, burning thousand-mark bills, and cackling at the silently watching crowd.

“What’s the matter with the woman?” I asked a bystander.

“The matter?” the man said. “She’s crazy.” And he added: “The country needs a good revolution.”

I walked away. The country was sick. During my years at sea, which had almost made me forget the old hates, my country had had no peace. In 1920, the militarists under Kapp had struck at the Weimar Republic. Ministers of the Republic had been assassinated. In 1921, armed insurrections in Saxony and Thuringia had been crushed without mercy. In January, 1923, French and Belgian armies had invaded the Ruhr to enforce payment of war reparations. Separatist bands rioted in the Rhineland. Inflation stalked the land with giant strides. Foreign scavengers descended upon Germany in droves, exchanging for a pittance the products of native toil. Prices leaped ahead of wages in a mad dance.

Between the city of Hamburg and its great harbor flows the river Elbe. I was at the ferry landing when the thousands of dockers returned from work. The dockers were met by their wives and daughters who seized their day’s pay and rushed to the nearest stores to buy food because next day this money would be worthless.

On the ferry landing stood a squad of customs officials and harbor police. Each worker, before he was allowed to pass, was searched for contraband by the officers. One worker had concealed under his coat a small bag of flour he had taken from some ship’s hold.

A policeman held the bag with flour aloft.

“You are under arrest,” he said.

“I took this flour from a broken bag,” the worker protested. “It was spilled into the hold anyway.”

The officer snapped: “I know all about your broken bags. You fellows rip open the bags with your hooks. Come on, now.”

He took the worker by the sleeve to lead him away.

The worker tore himself free. “Give me back my flour,” he demanded. “It’s mine!”

Two other policemen stepped up and tried to put handcuffs on the worker. A scuffle ensued. Another stevedore stepped in. “You fat-necked parasites,” he roared at the policemen. “Let my friend go. Give him his flour back.”

“Nothing doing. Keep moving.”

Other dockers joined the struggling group. The policemen drew their rubber truncheons, formed a skirmish line, drove the workers back from the wharf. A worker, young and lean, with the five-point star, the emblem of the Communist Party, on his blue cap, sprang on a bitt and shouted:

“Down with the police. Down with the lackeys of capitalism. Throw them into the harbor!”

That night, on my way to the dingy room I had rented in a tenement in the water-front district, I was accosted by two women. One was about forty, the other barely over sixteen.

The older woman tugged at my sleeve and said, “You have a good face. Please help us.”

They were refugees from the Rhineland. The older woman’s husband had been a member of a sabotage brigade against the French. He had helped blow up a railway line to prevent shipment of German coal to France. He had been arrested, convicted to twelve years of penal servitude by a military court, and had been carried off into France. His family had been told to leave the zone of occupation within twelve hours. Their house and their garden were seized. They had wandered for weeks, pushed on from town to town by unwilling authorities. The older woman was terribly emaciated.

“It’s bitter cold,” she said. “Please give us a place to sleep.”

“I have only a small, cold room,” I explained.

The woman’s eyes lit up. “We can sleep on the floor,” she said. “We are thankful just to have a roof over the head.”

I hesitated. I thought of giving her some money, but then I remembered that the stores were closed, that the hotels demanded foreign currency, that the money would be useless. It was German money.

“All right,” I said. “You can come with me.”

I took them to my room and we had a supper of tea and black bread.

The woman said: “My daughter can sleep with you in the bed and I will sleep on the floor.”

I was not astonished. In their home town they had been respectable people. But it was the custom all over the land, in the degeneration of post-war years, that refugee girls had to peddle their bodies for bread and a place to sleep.

I looked at the girl.

“I am not afraid,” the girl said. “I’ve had to do it before.”

I said no. I thought of their man languishing in some distant French prison. He had blown up a railway. In such times, it seemed to me, the best thing one could do would be to blow up the whole world. I told the women to use the bed. Then I walked down to the street. There a group of young workers were busy pasting posters on the walls.

“Communism alone brings national and social freedom,” the posters said.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

The leader of the group brought his face close to mine. He seemed satisfied.

“Sure,” he said.

For two hours I helped the young workers put up posters. Often we climbed on one another’s shoulders to place the posters so high that they could not be torn off. Very little was said. Three of us worked, and two stood at the corners watching for police. Twice police patrols surprised us. They came running, swinging their clubs. But we ran faster and escaped.

“Some day,” the leader of the Young Communist group said, “we won’t run. We’ll have guns and fight them on the barricades. Ten dead policemen for every dead worker.”

His eyes blazed hate.

“Blood must flow,” said another.

We parted. All night I walked aimlessly through cold streets. Near the Sternschanze Station I passed a house in front of which stood an ambulance. Attendants carried an old woman out of the house. The old woman was dead.

“She has hanged herself,” someone said. “Hanged herself with a piece of wire.”

“Why?”

“She had a pension, but her month’s pension couldn’t buy her a box of matches.”

A man standing nearby spat vigorously.

“The poor grow poorer and the rich grow richer,” he growled.

“Good night,” I said, moving on.

The man raised his right fist. “Red front!” he bellowed.

In the gray of early dawn I found myself in an outlying section where long streets were lined with drab one-family houses which resembled one another like so many eggs in a box. In front of the stores, at the street corners, women began to line up. They shivered in the cold and counted the paper in their hands. They counted hundreds of thousands, millions. They were determined to be first to spend this money when the stores opened.

As it grew lighter I came to a house where a town official argued heatedly with a housewife. The housewife looked unhappy. She had her arm tightly around the shoulder of a boy about ten. At the curb stood a truck. Two sinewy truck-men were waiting. I stopped and listened to the argument.

The woman could not pay her rent. The official showed her a warrant of eviction. Every day there were mass evictions. To attract the least attention, they were carried through in the early morning hours.

“We shall transport your belongings to the city storage,” the official said. He pushed the woman aside and entered the house, and the two truck-men followed him.

A minute later they began loading the furniture into the truck. A passing man who carried a big bundle of newspapers under his arm halted and asked the woman: “An eviction?”

The woman nodded. “I don’t know where we shall go now,” she said dejectedly.

“I’ll call up the Red Self-Help,” the man said.

He placed his newspapers on the sidewalk and ran to the nearest store. Then he sauntered back and told the truck-men: “You can’t drive away with this woman’s furniture.”

The woman waited nervously. In less than ten minutes the truck was loaded and the truck-men were tightening the ropes around their load. At this moment a column of roughly-clad men swept around the corner on bicycles. All of them had the red five-pointed star on blue caps.

The truck-men, seeing the raiders approach, stood aside. The official came running out of the house. The man with the newspapers pounced on the official and started beating him. The others leaped from their bicycles, cut the ropes on the truck. Each of them seized a piece of furniture and carried it back into the house. Two minutes later the truck drove away, empty, and the official had fled. People gathered. The men of the Red Self-Help formed a picket line in front of the house. Others marched along the street, shouting in chorus:

“Refuse to pay rent to the landlords!”

“Form Red Self-Help squads in every block!”

“Only Communism gives you freedom and bread!”

Slowly I walked from the scene. Three blocks away I saw a lorry loaded with green-uniformed Security Police speed past me down the street.

I wanted to ship out, to get away, to go back to the far seas. I made the rounds of the British and Scandinavian shipping masters. They had no ship for me. Their offices were besieged by stranded foreign seamen.

“Our nationals come first,” they told me. “You’d better go and sign aboard a German ship.”

I went down to the riverfront, to the central shipping office of the Shipowners’ Association. I walked through a filthy back-yard and up a flight of iron steps. The shipping office was a dark, gloomy hall. Thousands of men lounged in the back-yard and in the hall. All seamen out of a job.

I went to one of the barred windows and threw in my papers. The clerk looked at them, shoved them back.

“What do you want?”

“I want to register for a berth,” I said.

“On deck?”

“On deck, yes.”

“I can’t register you.”

“Why not?”

“All your discharges show foreign service.”

“Want me to starve to death?”

“No; you can apply for a dole.”

“To hell with your dole. I want a ship.”

“Can’t give you a ship. You’ve sailed on foreigners. You’ve paid no taxes in Germany. I can’t give you a ship, I tell you.”

“Listen! I’m a sailor. I’m a German. This is a German shipping office. I’m willing to work. Any ship. Anywhere.”

“Aw, get out!”

At this instant a broad-shouldered man with bronzed features, who had stood in the crowd around the windows, shoved me aside.

“Come on, partner,” he said to the clerk, “register this fellow. An equal deal to everybody.”

“I can’t,” protested the clerk, “that’s against the regulations.”

“Damn your regulations. If you don’t register this man, he can’t even get a dole.”

“Who are you anyhow?”

“Never mind that,” said the man, “I’m a stoker. And I tell you this man will be registered.”

“Getting tough?”

“You bet your teeth.”

“Hah, beat it.”

The stoker thrust his sun-blackened head close to the bars.

“Listen, Bonze,” he growled, “do you know what’ll happen if you don’t register this comrade?”

“What?”

“I’ll get a hundred men to take those benches and smash up the place. Smash your cocoanut, too, for that matter.”

“I’ll call the police.”

“You’ve called them many times. That won’t save this new partition. Remember how we smashed the other one? Touch that telephone and we’ll dance with you.”

The clerk did not touch the telephone. He went into a private office and returned with the director. The director looked like a walrus. His name was Captain Brahms. When he spoke, he thundered as if he was shouting through a megaphone.

“What’s all the noise about?” he thundered.

“This man must be registered,” demanded the stoker.

“Is he your brother?”

“Don’t try to be funny.”

“Oh, it’s you,” barked the walrus, “what’s your name?”

“You won’t get it,” said the stoker truculently.

“Are you not the hellion who brought a gang with stink-bombs in here a week ago? You’re ripe for arrest.”

“Go ahead, you old crook.”

“Are you inciting riot?”

“Sure,” said the stoker, “we’re tired of your special lists for boys who come with recommendations and bribes. We’re tired of rotting on your black lists.”

“There are no black lists,” shouted Captain Brahms.

By that time hundreds of men stood packed around the window. Loud calls burst from the charivari of voices.

“Down with the politician!” . . . “Pull off his beard!” . . . “Beat him!”

“Register this man!” the stoker roared.

Captain Brahms walked calmly to a telephone. He called the police.

Eight or ten men had seized one of the heavy benches and used it as a ramming pole. The clerks fortified themselves behind their desks which they hastily pushed together. Outside, from the yard, rocks hurtled through the windows.

The stoker roared: “Down with the special lists! Abolish secret placement! We’re years ashore and can’t get a ship! Down with the hunger regime!”

After two blows the partition splintered. A score of sailors raised havoc with furniture and files. Others pounced on the clerks who defended themselves with broken-off chair legs. Captain Brahms crawled under a table. The broad-shouldered stoker pounded the captain’s hind-quarters with both fists. The thousands in the hall and down in the yard milled about, laughing, shouting, cursing. In the center of the hall a group of fifty men stood massed, yelling in chorus: “Hunger! Hunger! We want a ship!”

A high-pitched scream came from the yard.

“Ueberfallkommando!”

Police. Sirens pierced the air. Three large trucks full of men in green uniforms clashed to a halt. Before they had stopped, a hundred policemen leaped to the pavement. They drew their rubber truncheons while they ran. They pitched into the crowds, dealing vicious blows left and right. Those who resisted were handcuffed and led to the trucks. A voice roared:

“Arbeitermoerder!” Murderers!

A policeman had lost his footing on the stairs. Four, five seamen were on top of him, hitting, kicking, robbing him of his truncheon and pistol. In the yard a young policeman ran to the shelter of a doorway. He drew his pistol and took careful aim. An instant later a youngster in a gray sweater spun around and pitched on his face. There was a thousandfold howl of rage.

“Murderers!”

“Re-mem-ber . . . the police chief is a socialist!”

“Down with the socialist traitors!”

Suddenly all policemen had pistols in their hands. They were nervous and badly scared. Voices barked:

“Strasse frei! Es wird geschossen!”

Men ran away in all directions, often trampling one another underfoot. Women, appearing from nowhere, shouted abuse. Others threw garbage cans from windows at pursuing policemen. Half-stunned, I made my way to the Cathedral of St. Michael. Beside me walked an old mariner. He was serene, as if nothing had happened.

“Even if they had registered you,” he said, “you’d have waited all of two years for your turn to ship out.”

“They killed a man up there,” I said.

“That’s all right, you’ll get used to that. . . . Let’s have a beer.”