The Cruel Sea (1951) (41 page)

Only once did he emerge from his emotional retreat. Later in the voyage, when they were near home, chance took them close alongside
Viperous
, and the flood of congratulations that came over the loudhailer seemed to release some spring within him, unloosing a boyish sense of well-being and cheerfulness. He picked up the microphone.

‘Would you like to see some Germans?’ he asked
Viperous,
across the twenty yards of water that separated them. ‘They’re just about due for an airing . . . Dig them out, Number One,’ he added aside to Lockhart. ‘Fall them in on the fo’c’sle.’

Presently the first of the file of prisoners began to mount the ladder.

‘They’re a scruffy-looking lot,’ Ericson called out apologetically, as the men shambled into view, peering about them like mice leaving the shelter of the wainscot. ‘I think we ought to win the war, don’t you?’

1942: Fighting

The old year, triumphant only at its close, had achieved a level of violence and disaster which set the tone for the new. Just before Christmas, two Allied countries had sustained naval losses of shocking dimensions: Britain had lost two great ships –
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse –
in a single bombing attack, and America, at Pearl Harbour, had suffered a crippling blow which robbed her of half her effective fleet at one stroke. (‘Proper uproar, it must have been,’ Lockhart overheard someone in the mess decks say, and another anonymous voice answered: ‘Biggest surprise since Ma caught ‘er tits in the mangle . . .’) The attack brought America into the war, an ally coming to the rescue at a most crucial moment: but her principal war was never the Atlantic – that lifeline remained, from beginning to end, the ward of the British and the Canadian navies. America turned her eyes to the Pacific, where she had much to do to stem the furious tide of the Japanese advance: in the Atlantic, the battle of escort against U-boats still saw the same contestants in the ring, now coming up for the fourth round, the bloodiest so far.

For now the battle was in spate, now the wild and vicious blows of both sides were storming towards a climax. The U-boats had a clear ascendancy, and they used it with the utmost skill and complete ruthlessness. Germany started the year with a total of 260 of them: she added to it at the rate of 20 a month – a swelling fleet which made it possible for her to keep 100 U-boats at sea in the Atlantic at the same time. Spread in a long line across the convoy routes, they intercepted and reported convoys as a matter of the simplest routine: this interception was combined with a perfected system of pack attack, by which 20 or more U-boats were ‘homed’ on to a convoy and fell upon it, as one team, with a series of repeated blows, until its remnants reached safety. In the face of this crushing opposition, the Allied efforts seemed puny, and their countermeasures like the futile gestures of one slow wrestler caged in a ring with a dozen tormenting opponents.

In the single month of March, 94 ships were sunk: in May, 125: in June, 144 – nearly five a day: the appalling rate of loss continued around the 100 mark, every month for the rest of the year. It was the nadir of the war at sea: it was, in fact, a tempo of destruction which would mean defeat for the Allies within a measurable period of time, if it were allowed to continue. The escorts did their best, aided by new offensive weapons and by the inclusion of small aircraft carriers – converted merchantmen – accompanying the convoys: in addition, they initiated a scheme of ‘support groups’, self-contained striking forces of six or eight escorts which were kept continuously at sea, ready to go to the help of hard-pressed convoys. These combined efforts showed results which were the best of the war so far: in the first seven months of the year, 42 U-boats were sunk, and in the best month of all, November, 16 of them were destroyed: this was double the rate of destruction of the previous year, but then the U-boats were doubling their successes as well . . . On balance, the honours – if that was the right word for so inhuman and treacherous a struggle – were going overwhelmingly to the enemy; unless that tide could be stemmed, and turned backwards, the battle of the Atlantic was going to decide the whole war; and the Allied cause, squeezed and throttled by starvation and the denial of war materials, would collapse in ruins.

‘It is,’ said Mr Churchill at one point, ‘a war of groping and drowning, of ambuscade and stratagem, of science and seamanship.’

It was all that. And sometimes the thing was in terms still cruder: sometimes the blood was thicker than the water.

For
Compass Rose,
there were special times which stuck in the memory, like insects of some unusually disgusting shape or colour, transfixed for ever in a dirty web which no cleansing element could reach.

There was the time of the Dead Helmsman (all these occasions had distinctive labels, given them either when they happened, or on later recollection. It simplified the pleasure of reminiscence). This particular incident had a touch of operatic fantasy about it which prompted Morell to say, at the end: ‘I think we must have strayed into the Flying Dutchman country’: it was a cold-blooded dismissal, but that was the way that all their thoughts and feelings were moving now.

The ship’s lifeboat was first seen by Baker, during the forenoon watch: it was sailing boldly through the convoy, giving way to no man, and pursued by a formidable chorus of sirens as, one after another, the ships had to alter course to avoid collision. The Captain, summoned to the bridge, stared at it through his glasses: he could see that it must have been adrift for many days – the hull was blistered, and the sail, tattered and discoloured, had been strained out of shape and spilled half the wind. But in the stern the single figure of the helmsman, hunched over the tiller, held his course confidently: according to the strict rule of the road he had, as a sailing ship, the right of way, though it took a brave man to put the matter to the test without, at least, paying some attention to the result.

It seemed that he was steering for
Compass Rose,
which was a sensible thing to do, even if it did give several ships’ captains heart failure in the process: the escorts were better equipped for dealing with survivors, and he probably realised it. Ericson stopped his ship, and waited for the small boat to approach: it held its course steadily, and then, at the last moment, veered with a gust of wind and passed close under
Compass Rose’s
stern. A seaman standing on the depth-charge rails threw a heaving line, and they all shouted: the man, so far from making any effort to reach them, did not even look up, and the boat sailed past and began to draw away.

‘He must be deaf,’ said Baker, in a puzzled voice. ‘But he can’t be blind as well . . .’

‘He’s the deafest man you’ll ever meet,’ said Ericson, suddenly grim. He put
Compass Rose
to ‘slow ahead’ again, and brought her round on the same course as the boat was taking. Slowly they overhauled it, stealing the wind so that presently it came to a stop: someone in the waist of the ship threw a grappling hook across, and the boat was drawn alongside.

The man still sat there patiently, seeming unaware of them.

The boat rocked gently as Leading-Seaman Phillips jumped down into it. He smiled at the helmsman: ‘Now then, chum!’ he called out encouragingly – and then, puzzled by some curious air of vacancy in the face opposite, he bent closer, and put out his hand. When he straightened up again, he was grey with shock and disgust.

He looked up at Lockhart, waiting above him in the waist of the ship.

‘Sir,’ he began. Then he flung himself across and vomited over the side of the boat.

It was as Ericson had guessed. The man must have been dead for many days: the bare feet splayed on the floorboards were paper-thin, the hand gripping the tiller was not much more than a claw. The eyes that had seemed to stare so boldly ahead were empty sockets – some seabird’s plunder: the face was burnt black by a hundred suns, pinched and shrivelled by a hundred bitter nights.

The boat had no compass, and no chart; the water barrel was empty, and yawning at the seams. It was impossible to guess how long he had been sailing on that senseless voyage – alone, hopeful in death as in life, but steering directly away from the land, which was already a thousand miles astern.

There was the time of the Bombed Ship, which was the finest exercise in patience they ever had.

It started, in mid-ocean, with a corrupt wireless message, of which the only readable parts were the prefix ‘SOS’ and a position, in latitude and longitude, about four hundred miles to the north of their convoy. The rest was a jumble of code groups which, even when ‘reconstructed’, did not yield much beyond the words ‘bomb’, ‘fire’, and ‘abandon’. It must have been difficult for
Viperous
to decide whether it was worth detaching an escort for this forlorn effort of detection: there was no reason to suppose that the position given was accurate, and they could ill spare a ship for a long search; and this quite apart from the fact that the message might be false – the result of a light-hearted wireless operator amusing himself, or an attempted decoy by a U-boat, both of which had happened before. But evidently
Viperous
decided that it was worth a chance: her next signal was addressed to
Compass Rose,
and read: ‘Search in accordance with SOS timed 1300 today.’ A little later she reopened R/T communication to add: ‘Goodbye.’

The first part of the assignment was easy: it boiled down to turning ninety degrees to port, increasing to fifteen knots, and holding that course and speed for twenty-six hours on end. It was the sort of run they all enjoyed, like a dog let off a leash normally in the grasp of the slowest old lady in the world: now there was no restraint on them, no convoy to worry about, no Senior Officer to wake from his siesta and ask them what on earth they were doing.
Compass Rose
raced on, with a rising wind and sea on her quarter sometimes making her sheer widely, till the quartermaster could haul her back on her course again: she was alone, like a ship in a picture, crossing cold grey waves towards an untenanted horizon.

She ran all through the night, and all next morning: not a stick, not a sail, not a smudge of smoke did she see: it was a continuous reminder of how vast this ocean was, how formidable a hiding place. There were hundreds of ships at sea in the Atlantic all the time, and yet
Compass Rose
seemed to have it to herself, with nothing to show that she was not, suddenly, the last ship left afloat in the world.

But when they had run the distance and reached the likely search area, the phrase ‘hiding place’ returned again, this time to mock them. It was mid-afternoon of a brisk lowering February day, with darkness due to fall within three hours: they were looking for a ship which might have been bombed, might have been sunk, might have been playing the fool, might be in a different longitude altogether, and halfway round the world from this one. On a sheet of squared tracing paper Ericson plotted out a ‘box search’ – a course for
Compass Rose
consisting of a series of squares, gradually extending down wind in the direction the ship should have drifted. Its sides were each seven miles long: every two hours, the area shifted another seven miles to the north-eastward. Then he laid it off on the chart, so as to keep a check on their final position, and they settled down to quarter the ocean according to this pattern.

It was very cold. Darkness came down, and with it the first drift of snow: as hour succeeded hour, with nothing sighted and no hint of a contact on the radar screen, they began to lose the immediate sense of quest and to be preoccupied only with the weather. The wind was keen, the snow was penetratingly cold, the water racing past was wild and noisy: these were the realities, and the early feeling of urgency in their search was progressively blunted, progressively forgotten. Hours before, it seemed, there
had
been something about a carefully worked out, meticulous investigation of this area; but that was a very long time ago, and the bombed ship (if she existed) and her crew (if they still lived) were probably somewhere quite different, and in the meantime it was excruciatingly cold and unpleasant . . . At midnight the snow was a whirling blizzard: at 4 a.m., when Lockhart came on watch, it was to a bitter, pitch-black darkness that stung his face to the marrow when he had scarcely mounted the bridge.

‘Any sign of them?’ he shouted to Morell.

‘Nothing . . . If they’re adrift in this, God help them.’

It was ‘nothing’ all that watch, and ‘nothing’ when daylight came, and ‘nothing’ all the morning: at midday the wind fell light and the snow diminished to an occasional drift, wafting gently past them as if hoping to be included in a Christmas card. Individually, without sharing their doubts, they began to wonder if the thing had not gone on long enough: the search had taken two days already, and during the last twenty-four hours they had ‘swept’ nearly six hundred square miles of water. The contract could not call for very much more . . . ‘I’ve just remembered it’s St Valentine’s Day,’ said Ferraby suddenly to Baker, during the idle hours of the afternoon watch. ‘Put it down in the log,’ growled Ericson, overhearing. ‘There won’t be any other entries . . .’ It was unusual for him to admit openly to any sort of doubt or hesitation: they felt free now to question the situation themselves, even to give up and turn back and forget about it.