The Cruel Sea (1951) (65 page)

Ericson must have been very sure, thought Lockhart, that the submarine was there, and that
Pergola
– the happy-go-lucky
Pergola –
had for once been on the right track and might well have damaged her: he must have conquered his tiredness with this knowledge that the quarry was immediately to hand. For it was not enough to keep in mind that a ship had been sunk, and men killed in the process: that was a commonplace of the Atlantic, and the revengeful energy it bred soon petered out. It was the professional sense which was now the mainspring of every sustained effort of will: the feeling, present all the time, that senior officers of escorts were specifically hired to sink U-boats, and that for this reason U-boats must never be allowed to go to waste.

Certainly, Ericson clung on to his quarry, or the hope of it, as if he would have been personally ashamed to forfeit the chance of a kill . . . It was six o’clock in the evening when
Saltash
and
Pergola
separated, to start their different schemes of search: it was midnight before any results rewarded either of them. Earlier, down in
Saltash’s
plotting room, Ericson and Raikes had made a detailed appreciation of the prospects, involving three different suppositions. Firstly, the U-boat might have been slightly damaged by
Pergola’s
attack, in which case she would dive deep and stay there, in the hope of fooling the pursuit and patching herself up in the meantime. Alternatively, she might have been badly damaged, and would need to start creeping for the shelter of the nearest home port as soon as she could. Lastly, she might have escaped damage altogether – or have been outside the area of attack in the first place: she would then probably decide, after the initial scare, to follow the convoy at a distance and come in for a second helping later that night. There were variations latent in all these possibilities; but thus the broad outlines had confronted Ericson as he started his reasoned, highly technical guesswork on the plotting table.

The last possibility – that the U-boat would continue to follow the convoy – was something which
Saltash
must now disregard: if the U-boat were going to try again,
Harmer
and the rest of the escort screen must cope with it themselves. That left the other two alternatives: the lurking in the deep, or the immediate creep for home. Lurking meant, for the hunting escort, a long and patient period of waiting up above: it might involve circling the area slowly for as long as twenty-four hours, all the time on the alert for any sign of a breakout. If, on the other hand, the U-boat had already started for home, the journey might be eastwards towards Norway, or south-east to the German coast, or due south to one of the Biscay ports: it meant in any case a rapidly extending range of search, becoming more like a needle-in-the-haystack proposition with every hour that passed.

Of the two, Ericson finally chose for himself the patient, stalking wait, above the spot where the U-boat ought to be: it was the one he thought most likely, and
Saltash’s
superior asdic and radar would give her a decided advantage if the U-boat tried to run for it. The other – the cast for home, in an ever-widening arc – was a somewhat forlorn venture: in assigning it to
Pergola,
he tried not to feel that he was giving the junior ship a dubious chance of distinguishing herself . . . Something of the sort must have occurred to the irrepressible
Pergola,
who, on taking her leave, signalled: ‘Don’t forget it was originally my bird.’

Ericson, hovering between the alternative answers: ‘We’ll go fifty-fifty on the medals’, and ‘Confine your signals to essential traffic’, finally sent none at all. All that he really wanted to say to
Pergola,
as she drew away and the darkness thickened between them, was that she carried his blessing with her. But there was really no official version of this.

The next six hours had not the smallest excitement for anyone aboard
Saltash
: they had, in fact, a deadly sameness, an unrewarding monotony, the hardest thing of all for tired men to support. Ericson remained on the bridge the whole time, hunched in his chair, wide awake, while
Saltash
quartered the suspect area at half-speed; for hour after hour her asdic recorded nothing at all, and her radar simply the diminishing speck of light which was
Pergola
sweeping deeper and deeper to the south-east. Ericson ate a scratch meal at eight o’clock: relays of cocoa reached him at hourly intervals: the moon came up, and then left them again: the sea flattened as the wind died. It was cold: the cold attacked not only the body, it chilled the mind as well, so that to keep alert, to believe that what one was doing was right, became more and more difficult.

At times Ericson’s thoughts wandered so far that the effort to bring them back was like a physical ordeal, a cruel tug on some stretched sinew of the brain. I am very tired, he thought: I have this pain of tiredness in my legs and across my shoulders and under my heart: that thing inside my head is starting to flutter again. This search may go on for hours, this search may go on for ever: we are probably doing the wrong thing, we have probably guessed wrong in every respect, from the very beginning: there were probably a pack of six or eight U-boats in this area all the time, and they are preparing to fall upon the convoy at this moment, while we fool about, fifty miles astern of it. I have weakened the escort screen at this crucial time, I have taken away two ships out of eight, I have been, by one quarter, unforgivably stupid and rash, I am ripe for a court martial . . . The asdic pinged away, like a nagging insect: the tick-tick of the motor on the plotting table reached Ericson continually up the voice-pipe, like some infernal metronome reminding him that everything he did was out of joint. The hours crept past, and the change of course which came every fifteen minutes seemed a futile break in a pattern already futile.

Now and again he spoke to Raikes, the navigator, who had the first watch; and Raikes answered him quietly, unhurriedly, without turning from his place at the front of the bridge. But these exchanges never contained what Ericson really wanted to say, and never what he wanted to hear, either: they simply featured a comment on the weather, a query about the distance run, a neutral remark on any neutral subject that occurred to him. For his own comfort, his own hunger, he wanted to say: do you think we are right, do you think we are wasting our time: is the U-boat here at all, or have I, in diluting the escort screen by a quarter, made what may turn out to be a murderous mistake? But none of these were captain’s questions, and so they remained unasked, prisoners in the brain; while
Saltash
covered the same square of ocean once every hour, and
Pergola
gradually faded out of range, and the black and empty sea, deserted even by the moon, offered to
Saltash
only a cold derisive hissing as she passed.

But the change of watch at midnight marked a change of fortune as well; Allingham and Vincent had hardly taken over from Raikes – indeed, Raikes was still writing up his meagre entry in the deck log – when the pattern of the night quickly flowered, in the only way that could bring any pleasure to the senses. The asdic repeater, which could be heard all over the bridge, and which had been sounding an identical, damnable note for six hours on end, suddenly produced an astonishing variation – a solid echo, an iron contact in a featureless ocean . . . Ericson jumped when he heard it, as did everyone else within earshot: the bridge sprang to life as if the darkness had become charged with an electric fervour that reached them all instantly.

‘Sir!’ began Allingham.

‘Bridge!’ called the asdic rating.

‘Captain, sir!’ said the yeoman of signals.

‘All right,’ said Ericson, slipping down off his chair. ‘I heard it . . . What a nice noise . . . Hold on to it . . . Sound Action Stations . . . Yeoman!’

‘Sir?’ said the yeoman of signals.

‘Make to
Pergola:
“Return to me with all dispatch”.’

That’s a guess, he thought as he said it – but the echo, loud and clear, confirmed him in the belief that this, the blank stretch of ocean which had suddenly blossomed, was now the place for all available hunting escorts to be. Only U-boats sounded like that, only U-boats could produce that beautiful metallic ring; and this U-boat, which had struck once and then lain in hiding for so long, must now be finally cornered. It would take
Pergola
over two hours to get back from her search, even ‘with all dispatch’ – the Navy’s most urgent order; but she deserved to be in at the kill, and she could play a useful supporting role if the U-boat were elusive . . . The asdic echo sharpened: Lockhart, now stationed on the set, called out: ‘Target moving slowly right’: Vincent, from aft, reported his depth-charges ready:
Saltash
began to tremble as the revolutions mounted, and the range shortened down to striking distance.

But this was to be no swift kill: perhaps, indeed, it was to be no kill at all. During the next hour,
Saltash
dropped a total of sixty-eight depth-charges without, apparently, the slightest effect: the echo remained constant, the U-boat still twisted and turned and doubled back, with limitless cunning. It seemed as if no attack, however carefully calculated, was sufficiently accurate to bring her up short; they might have been launching snowballs into the fire, they might have been dropping cotton wool bombs on the nursery floor, for all the difference their efforts made. Time and again
Saltash
swept in for the assault: the depth-charges went down, the surface of the sea leapt and boiled astern of her; but when she came round again, in a tight circle, she found that her searchlight still shone on a blank sea, and presently she would pick up the contact again – always there, always solid, but never to be grasped, and seemingly unaffected by the fury of the attack. Sixty-eight depth-charges, thought Ericson wearily: most of them had been pretty close: the men down there in the U-boat must be going through hell: why doesn’t something happen, why doesn’t it
work
. . . ? He shaped up for yet another attack, on a contact which was as firm as ever; and then he suddenly lifted his head, and sniffed.

‘Number One!’ he called out.

‘Sir?’ said Lockhart.

‘Smell anything?’

After a pause: ‘Yes – oil,’ said Lockhart.

Oil. The hateful smell, which to them had always meant a sinking ship, could now mean a sinking U-boat instead . . .

Ericson, walking to the wing of the bridge, sniffed violently again, and the smell of oil came thick and strong to his nostrils: taken at its face value, it meant damage, it meant, at least, a crushed and leaking bulkhead inside the U-boat, and it could mean total success. He ordered the searchlight to be trained right ahead, and there, where they had dropped their last charges, they presently saw the patch of oil itself – glistening, sluggish, reflecting the light most prettily, and spreading outwards in a heartening circle. They dropped another pattern of depth-charges as they rode over the area; and then, as they turned in again, the asdic faded, and Lockhart reported: ‘Lost contact’.

The silence that fell on the bridge seemed to be a self-congratulatory one, but it was not so for Ericson. He would have liked to believe in that patch of oil, and that fading contact which everyone else took to be the U-boat slowly sinking beneath the beam of the asdic; but he suddenly found that he could not believe it. Oil, for his private satisfaction, was not nearly enough: he wanted wreckage, woodwork, an underwater explosion, bits of men weaving gently to the surface. Oil could come from a minor leak, oil could even be a subterfuge; the U-boat might have released some on purpose, and then crept away, leaving the feeble English sailors to celebrate their kill in feeble English beer. Oil, like wine, could be a mocker . . . She has gone deep again, he thought, with sudden, illogical conviction: maybe she is damaged, but she is not yet done to death: she will wait, and then come up again. We will wait too, he told himself grimly, with a new access of determination which must have come from the very core of his brain; and then aloud to Lockhart, he called out: ‘Carry out lost-contact procedure. I’m going to go on with the attack.’

To his tautened nerves, it seemed as if the bridge personnel and indeed the whole tired ship had sighed as he said the words. I do not care how sick of it you are, he said, almost aloud, instantly angry: if I am the last man to keep awake in this ship, if I am the last man left alive, I will drive her, and you, and myself, for just as long as I want to . . . But no one had sighed, and no one had spoken, save Lockhart who repeated: ‘Lost-contact procedure’ to his asdic operator; and
Saltash,
settling down to her steady half-speed progress, began again her interminable search, as if the past six hours now counted for nothing, and they were starting again from the beginning.

The trouble was that, ludicrously, there was nothing to start on. For the second time the U-boat, with her leak or her oil decoy, with her shaken or exultant crew, with her dubious amount of damage, had vanished.

Surveying the fact dispassionately, Ericson found it hard to believe: continuing to survey it, his dispassion gave way to the beginnings of a blind rage. When Lockhart had reported ‘Lost contact’, he imagined that it was because of the disturbed state of the water, and that they would pick the U-boat up again in a matter of minutes, as had happened before; but when those minutes went by, and added up to five, and then ten, and then twenty, without a single trace of an echo on the asdic, he found himself face to face with the fact that they might have lost her. After seven hours of trying, after nearly eighty depth-charges, after this enormous and sustained effort which was eating into the last reserves of his endurance . . . He stood over the two operators at the asdic set, and looked down at the backs of their stupid doltish heads, and wanted above all else to take a revolver from the rack and put a bullet through the pair of them.
This could not happen to him
– the U-boat was
there
– they had had her almost in their hands, and now Lockhart and his two bloody fools of operators and his rotten set had let her slip away again . . . When Lockhart reported, for the tenth time: ‘No contact,’ and added: ‘She could have been sunk, don’t you think, sir?’ Ericson, with a spurt of anger, answered: ‘I wish to Christ you’d mind your own business and get on with your job!’ and strode out of the asdic compartment as if he could bear the infected air no longer.