The Cruel Sea (1951) (64 page)

No gale of this force could last for ever, or the very fabric of the globe would long ago have been torn to bits; and presently, as a grudging act of grace, the weather took a turn for the better. The sea was still jumbled and violent, but it was no longer on the attack: the wind still sang on a high note, but it had lost its venom: the ship still rolled and staggered, but she could, at least, now steer a single fixed course. There came a day when the upper deck began to dry off, and a start could be made with cleaning up the shambles below: when a hot meal could be cooked and eaten in comfort: when a man could climb from the fo’c’sle to the bridge without running a gauntlet of green seas that might toss him into the scuppers, or straight overboard: when the Captain could leave the bridge for more than half a watch, and sleep for more than an hour at a stretch . . . The sun pierced the clouds, for the first time for many days, and set the grey water gleaming: it warmed the shoulders of their duffle coats, and sent up a small haze of steam from the drying decks. It also showed them exactly three ships in sight, over a space of a hundred square miles of ocean which should have held fifty-four vessels in orderly convoy formation.

But perhaps that was too much to expect . . . The process of rounding up the convoy took
Saltash
nearly forty-eight hours, steaming all the time at an average of twenty knots on a dozen different schemes of search: it was not eased by the fact that each individual escort was doing this same thing simultaneously, trying to marshal whatever merchantmen were in their immediate area, and that there were at one time six of these small convoys of half a dozen ships each, all trying to attract fresh customers to the only true fold, and all steering different courses. On one occasion,
Saltash,
coming across the frigate
Streamer
with five ships in company, signalled to her: ‘The convoy is 200 degrees, fourteen miles from you,’ only to receive the answer: ‘The convoy is here.’ It was, for a tired Senior Officer on the edge of irritation, a pregnant moment which Ericson longed to exploit.

But for him there could be no such delaying luxury: the crisp orders which went to
Streamer
were neither brutal, nor sarcastic, simply explicit and not to be argued. They formed a pattern with all the other crisp orders of the last two days, and presently, as a result, things were under control again; presently,
Saltash
could station herself at the van of what really looked something like a convoy – straggling, woefully battered, but still a body of ships which could be honestly reported to Their Lordships as Convoy R.C. 17. Ericson made this report, and disposed of his escorts in their night positions, and handed over to Allingham, who was officer-of-the-watch; and then, with a drugged thankfulness, he took his aching body down the ladder, in search of the shelter of his cabin, and of longed-for rest.

The weather was still wild; but with the convoy intact and the main chaos retrieved, the hours ahead seemed bearable and hopeful, and above all suitable for oblivion.

Then, not a mile astern of
Saltash,
a ship was torpedoed.

Ericson had just passed the first sweet margin of sleep when the alarm bells clanged: for a moment he could not really believe that they were ringing, and then, as he felt the loathed sound drilling deep into his brain, he had such a violent upsurge of rage and disappointment that he came near to childish tears. It was too much altogether, it wasn’t fair . . . He heaved himself out of his bunk, and followed the many other running feet up the ladder again, conscious only of an enormous weariness, and a brain suddenly and brutally robbed of the sleep it craved. How could a man, or a ship, cope with this? How could they be expected to fight anything except the weather?

It seemed that they would have to: it seemed that, as soon as the weather gave a foot of ground, the other enemy, ready in the wings, stepped in with fresh violence, fresh treachery. The scene that greeted Ericson had a pattern made familiar by a hundred convoys: it showed the ships in station, the dusk gathering round them, the heaving sea, and then the ugly deformity which meant disaster – the single winged ship sagging away out of line, already listing mortally, already doomed. She was a small ship: she must, as a prelude to her defeat, have had a special form of hell during the last week of storm . . . Ericson looked at Allingham.

‘What happened, Guns?’

‘She just went, sir.’ The Australian accent, as usual in moments of excitement, was thick and somehow reassuring. ‘Fired a distress rocket, about a minute ago. But how the hell could they hit her, in this sort of weather?’

‘M’m.’ Ericson grunted. The astonishing question had already occurred to him, but it was useless to speculate. Probably there was yet another new weapon: probably U-boats could now fire a torpedo vertically from the bed of the ocean, and hit a ship plumb in its guts. One could think of a nice expressive name for it. But it was no use being surprised at anything in this bloody, this immensely long war . . . ‘Who’s the wing escort?’

‘Pergola
, sir. She’s making a sweep to starboard.’

Ericson grunted again. That was all that could be done, at the moment:
Pergola
could sweep the suspect area, the stern escort could pick up the bits.
Saltash
could plod along at the head of the convoy, he himself could think it all out, with cutting logic, using an ice-cold brain . . . He saw Allingham looking at him with a rough sort of compassion in his glance, taking in his inflamed eyes, half-sunk in sleep, his swollen face, the twitching of his cheekbone – all the marks of exhaustion which Ericson was aware of himself and which could not be disguised. He smiled ruefully.

‘I’d just got my head down.’

‘Bad luck, sir.’ Allingham paused. ‘Shall I go along to the fo’c’sle, sir? Or stay up here?’

Ericson smiled again, acknowledging the line of thought. ‘You go down, Guns. I’ve got the ship.’

When he had gone, there was silence among the men now gathered at Action Stations on the bridge. Ericson watched the convoy, Lockhart watched the sinking ship. Holt and the signalmen watched
Pergola,
the lookouts watched their appointed arcs, the bridge messenger watched Ericson. It was a closed circle, of men in danger doing nothing at a moment when active movement would have been a relief, carried in a ship which might herself be doing the wrong thing for want of a single clue. When Ericson said, suddenly and aloud: ‘We’ll wait’, it was as much to bridge the dubious pause in his own mind as to inform the men round him.

But the pause was not long. There was an exclamation from Holt, the midshipman, and then he said excitedly:
‘Pergola’s
got a signal hoisted!’ He stared through his glasses at the corvette, rooting away to starboard like a questing terrier. ‘Large flag, sir.’

The yeoman of signals called out: ‘
Pergola
in contact, sir.’

I wonder, thought Ericson; but he did not say it aloud.
Pergola,
young and enthusiastic, was always ready to depth-charge anything, from a clump of seaweed to a shoal of sardines, but he did not want to discourage her. Depth-charges were cheap, ships and men were not . . . Now all of them, save the stolid lookouts dedicated to their arc of vision, turned to watch
Pergola.
Three miles to starboard, she was steering obliquely away from the convoy: she was rolling and pitching drunkenly, and her increased speed sent the spray in great clouds over her bridge. Steaming full ahead, thought Ericson appraisingly: she must be going to drop some for luck. And as he thought it, and wished that
Saltash
might have an excuse for doing the same, another flag fluttered up to
Pergola’s
crosstrees, and the yeoman of signals called out:
‘Pergola
attacking, sir.’

Now they all watched with fresh attention, wondering how good the asdic contact was, knowing with professional insight just how difficult it must be for
Pergola
to get her depth-charges cleared away and ready for dropping, while steaming full ahead in this immensely troubled sea.
Compass Rose
used to do this sort of thing, thought Lockhart, as
Pergola
gave an especially vicious lurch and shipped a green sea on her quarter:
Compass Rose
used to sweep into action balanced inelegantly on one ear and one leg, while poor old Ferraby danced a jig round the depth-charge rails as he tried to get his charges ready, with a bunch of ham-handed stokers to help him, and plenty of caustic comment from the bridge. It was nice to have graduated from corvettes . . . Lockhart watched
Pergola
reminiscently: Holt and the signalmen watched her with a professional eye to her signals: below on the plotting table, Raikes the navigator watched her with the searching beam of the radar set; and Ericson watched her with a proprietary interest. For him, she was simply an extension of his own armament, a probing steel finger sent out from
Saltash
to find and hit the enemy. The torpedoed ship had been his, and
Pergola
was his too: if the one balanced the account of the other, it would not be so bad, it would justify the escort screen, it would appease the sense of failure that nagged his tired brain, it would let him sleep once more.

Pergola
went in like an express train somehow diverted on to a switchback railway. They saw her charges go down, they saw her sweep round to port as soon as they were dropped: then, after a few moments, the huge columns of grey-green water were tossed into the air by the explosion. When the spray settled, they waited again, their glasses trained on the place of execution; but the surface of the sea was innocent, the expected black shape did not appear.
Pergola,
now at half-speed, headed back towards the explosion area, uncertainly, like a small boy who has made far too much noise in his mother’s drawing room and wishes he were safely and anonymously back in the nursery. There was a pause, and then a third flag went up from her bridge.

‘From
Pergola,
sir,’ said the yeoman of signals promptly. ‘”Lost contact”.’

‘Call her up,’ said Ericson. ‘Make: “Continue to search your area. Report nature of original contact”.’

The lamps flickered between the two ships.

‘Contact was firm, moving left, classified as U-boat,’ came
Pergola’
s answer.

‘What is your estimate now?’ was Ericson’s next signal.

‘I still think it was a U-boat,’ said
Pergola
manfully. Then she added, as if with an ingenuous smile: ‘It was where a U-boat ought to have been.’

Now, there, thought Ericson, there I agree with you. The attack had certainly come from that side, the U-boat would naturally have tried to move away to starboard, she would have been steering the course that
Pergola
indicated; she might well have been just about where
Pergola
had dropped her depth-charges. That being so, it was worth while
Pergola
staying where she was, and continuing the hunt: in fact, he thought with sudden vehemence, it was worth while staying there himself, and organising the hunt on a two-ship basis. He would be taking a chance if he detached two escorts from the screen; but it was very unlikely that the U-boat was one of a pack: in this weather, the convoy could only have been sighted by chance, from close to, and there would have been no time to assemble other craft for a concentrated attack. She was therefore a lone wolf, sinking her fangs once, swiftly, and then slinking off into the forest again. Lone wolves of this sort deserved special attention, special treatment. The chance was worth taking.

The pattern of action emerged new-minted from his brain, as if, however tired he were, he had only to press a button marked ‘Detach two escorts for independent search’ in order to produce a typed schedule of operational orders. The necessary directions were dictated in a smooth series which kept all three signalmen busy at the same time. Signals went to the Admiralty and the commodore of the convoy, to tell them what was happening: to
Harmer,
to take over as Senior Officer: to
Pergola,
to continue her search until
Saltash
joined her: to
Rose Arbour,
to take
Pergola’s
place on the screen: to
Streamer,
to despatch the sinking merchantman by gunfire, and then rejoin: and to the other escorts, to station themselves according to the new diagram. Then Ericson summoned Lockhart and Johnson, the engineer officer, to the bridge, to explain what he proposed to do: he conferred, lengthily and technically, with Raikes at the plotting table; and then he took
Saltash
round in a wide sweep to starboard, and, coming up on
Pergola’s
quarter, started sending a final long signal beginning: ‘We will organise our search in accordance with two alternative possibilities.’

Lockhart had never admired the Captain more than during the twelve hours that followed. In the end, he thought, for all these new machines and scientific stuff, war depends on men . . . He knew that Ericson must have been desperately tired, even before the new crisis arrived: if the exacting trip northbound to Murmansk, and the last five days of battering weather, did not suggest it, then his grey lined face and humped shoulders supplied a reliable clue. And yet there was in all his actions, both now, and during the subsequent long, intricate, and determined hunt for the submarine, no trace of tiredness or of readiness to compromise: he rose to the moment, and kept at the required pitch of alertness, as if he had come to the task fresh from a six weeks’ holiday; and the result, in addition to being a remarkable physical effort, was, in the realm of submarine detection, a tactical masterpiece as well.