"Otto."
Karsten, standing close to the bedside of his companion, placed his hand lightly on the young man's forehead.
"Otto. You are going home, my friend.", he spoke, quietly, conscious of the rift that had opened in his heart since the flashover in the Channel.
He wiped away a tear that had somehow broken through his youthful rigidity. His own boots, he thought, had become the boots of a tyrant, leaving welts on his soul as they had so many years before.
Bring yourself together, you lazy.... His mind began to spin as the waters spilled down over his cheeks.
............
November 6th, 1939
I received a call from port police this morning, bringing me out of my slumber in a terrible way. I had seen it coming... I never wanted to admit that his constitution would falter so early. I had already seen four of my own friends go in much the same way. Sooner or later the heart simply gives up on them. They never come back, no matter how much you want them to.
They had found our sonar operator sitting quietly at the lighthouse, his one remaining eye fixed upon the seas before him. Unresponsive. The coroner told me that the bullet had passed all the way through, taking a portion of his left temple with it. His passing had been instantaneous.
I stayed there a while at the side of Karsten Zinke, son of a successful Berlin contractor and a doting housewife. And for the first time in nearly twenty years I allowed the dam to burst. I cried until I could feel my heart exploding; no point in trying to stop it. All I could think was, "That was number five..."