War, Mutiny and Revolution in the Germany Navy: The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf (Daniel Horn, translator and editor).

Stumpf enlisted in 1912, served as an ordinary seaman on the Helgoland for most of the war, was subsequently transferred to the Wittelsbach and the Lothringen, and was discharged in November 1918. He’d kept his diary from 1914 through 1918, and in 1926 came forward to offer it to the Reichstag Investigating Committe as the testimony of an ordinary sailor. That body had already for 7 years been examining the reasons for the loss of the war and the collapse of the German regime – in which the naval mutinies figured prominently – amid accusations from the Right of Socialist subversion, and counter-accusations from the Left of poor conditions, ill-treatment and disregard for the lives of the sailors. The diary rather shook its readers, as Stumpf was anything but a radical, being a staunch Catholic, politically conservative, and a loyal patriot, to which his diary attested, at the same time as it attested to the sailors’ grievances.

Stumpf was a tinsmith by trade, a Catholic, a trade unionist, nationalistic and conservative. He was also an autodidact who continued to educate himself throughout the war, a critical reader of newspapers and avid collector of other peoples’ information and accounts. Prior to the war he had spent a year as a travelling journeyman in the Tyrols. He also seems to have had a good source in an Executive Officer who kept the men informed and countered rumours and restlessness with
analysis. As best I can determine, this is not the raw diary, since he has worked in information that only later became available to him: for instance, the entry dated August 20 includes a narrative of the Battle of Helgoland, which took place on August 28, with commentary on the information subsequently gained from the examination of unexploded British shells (the British shells were inferior to the German).

I’m not very far in, but Stumpf is a born diarist: he gives a detailed, candid account, moving from objectivity to subjectivity and
back; he frames his information and is responsible in his reporting (allowing for the bigotry of the time). From him I have an important scene in the novel: immediately prior to the outbreak of war, the Helgoland, the ship on which Stumpf was serving, was in the Fiord of Songe, where the Royal Yacht was moored on the Kaiser’s yearly holiday. Stumpf describes the ships putting on a display for the Kaiser, the men in holiday mood, the showy departure, and sketches in the beautiful
natural setting. (I have to find and look through Simon Schama’s book on landscape and culture because I’m sure German romanticism figures strongly in it, and I may be able to use it). Since I’m thinking of a non-linear structure for this novel, moving freely back and forth through time, that idyll will be juxtaposed with one of the grimmer scenes – at present I’m thinking of putting it adjacent to the scuttling of the fleet itself (the final chapter), or adjacent to the scenes from the internment itself. Probably the latter, making it the second last chapter in the book.

This is the first of a nine-novel (I believe) series about Nicholas Everard, a British mariner. The first three are set during WWI (with the setpieces being respectively the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the Zebrugge Raid in 1918, and a submarine run through Gibraltar with the objective being to sink the Yavutz Sultan Selim, formerly the Goeben, in the latter days of the war). The battle of Jutland is a long setpiece, and it’s a model for the writing of such action scenes: based on what his three viewpoint characters describe I believe it would be possible to plot the exact position of his fictional ships: there’s the shocking detonation of the battlecruiser Indefatigable, the out of control Warspite circling between the lines, the eerie appearance of a becalmed frigate with full sail like something from another time (and if I could think of what to do with that beyond the obvious, I’d have a short story!). I have to line up an account in VE Tarrant’s Jutland: The German Perspective of the mysterious damage taken by one of a group of German ships from an unseen enemy with the part of Blooding of the Guns
where, with Nick in command, the ship inadvertantly joins a group of German ships in the dark, realizes it before they do, fires off one torpedo and high tails it. Characterization is not complex, and the characters don’t seem to have much dimension outside their profession. Nick has a passion for Sarah, his young stepmother; so, for that matter, does his uncle Hugh. Sarah is a cypher; you hardly know anything about her as a woman, much less why all the men in her family are fixated on her. I find that kind of blank-projection female character irritating. Outside combat, Nick is a hapless laddie, careless about the career aspects of the navy, while in combat, he’s inspired and lucky. Even hapless, Nick is his own man, while his brother David, their father’s favourite, is defensive and brittle, and, as someone who knows him says to Nick, believes everyone is against him. David cracks, witnessing combat and carnage, and does not survive the sinking of his ship, which I thought was a lost opportunity from a novelist’s point of view, but there does seem to be a morality in war novels that dictate death as a penalty for weakness. I don’t think Fullerton would want to write the novel about a man who cracks, and then has to live on after it. I, on the other hand, have an idea, but it’s the novel after this one.

So it’s a model for the writing of action: the detail and authority are downright intimidating (Fullerton was a submariner in WWII), but what is encouraging is that I am recognizing sources and seeing how they have been used. Less a model for characterization. I have to watch an overemphasis on the home/background material, as I suspect both Fullerton and Monsarrat are right about the intensity of combat, but much of the war at sea in WWI was in fact spent in port, for the larger ships of both navies, and that is crucial to the novel and gives me licence.