Baron von Spiegel, Schwieger’s friend, said of him, “He was a wonderful man. He couldn’t kill a fly.”
Schwieger set the tone for life aboard U-20 early in his tenure. The boat was ordered to leave on patrol on Christmas Eve, 1914, a depressing time to be going to sea and to war. It was Zentner’s first cruise. The boat was assigned to patrol the Heligoland Bight. The next day, Christmas—the first Christmas of the war—the crew awoke to a brilliant December morning, with bright sun, “frosty air,” and a calm sea in its winter hue of blue-black. U-20 remained on the surface throughout the day, the better to watch for targets. In clear weather like this, the smoke from a steamer’s funnels could be spotted twenty miles off. The lookouts saw nothing all day. “Apparently the enemy was at home spending Christmas as a Christian should,” said Zentner.
That night, Schwieger ordered a dive to the sea bottom, 60 feet below the surface. He chose a spot where his charts indicated sand, not rock. For a time everyone was silent, listening as always for sounds of dripping or flowing water. The crew monitored gauges that measured interior pressure, keeping watch for the kind of sudden increase that might indicate a high volume of water penetrating the crew compartment. The refrain “All is tight” was relayed from bow to stern.
Spending the night on the ocean floor was common practice for U-boats in the North Sea, where depths rarely exceeded the maximum allowable for submarines. On the bottom, Schwieger and his crew could sleep without fear of being run over in the dark by a steamer or stumbling across a British destroyer. It was the one time a U-boat captain dared undress for bed. But on this particular night, Schwieger had something in mind other than sleep. “And now,” Schwieger said, “we can celebrate Christmas.”
A wreath was hung at one end of the mess room. The men piled food on the table. “It all came out of cans, but we didn’t mind that,” Zentner said. Schwieger and U-20’s three other officers usually dined by themselves in a small officer’s dining area, but now they joined the crew, thirty-six men in all. They spiked their tea with rum. “I lost count of the number of toasts that were drunk,” Zentner said.
Schwieger stood and gave a little speech, “and a jolly ovation it was,” said Zentner. Then came music. “Yes,” Zentner said, “we had an orchestra.” One man played a violin, another a mandolin. A third—a squat fisherman with a giant flaring red beard—brought out his accordion. He looked like a gnome and could neither read nor write but apparently had a certain appeal to the opposite sex, for twice Schwieger received letters from women demanding that he allow the sailor to go on leave to marry them. No effective means yet existed that allowed surface ships to track a submarine underwater, so no one aboard took much care about noise. The trio “played with soul,” Zentner said, especially the accordionist. “His little eyes were half closed with ecstasy, and his bearded mouth was curved with a grin that was like the crescent of the moon.”
The music and drinking went on into the night; the sea outside was cold, black, and impenetrable.