The Cruel Sea (1951) (73 page)

For Ericson, it was a lull that he needed – he and
Saltash
together. One could perhaps divine more of the past history of strain from looking at
Saltash
than from looking at Ericson; but that did not mean that Ericson was not feeling it just as strongly . . . His men had become used to his grey hair, his gruff manner, his stern face which looked with an equal indifference upon a sinking ship, a dead man, a defaulter with a foolish excuse, a pretty visitor to the wardroom. This mask hid his tiredness;
Saltash
had no such camouflage. She had now been running for over two years, hard-driven years with little respite from the weather or the enemy: she was battered, salt-streaked, dented here and there – a typical Western Approaches escort, telling her whole story at a single glance. Ericson, surveying his ship as he put off in the motorboat, sometimes found himself wondering what
Compass Rose
would have looked like, if she had still been alive and afloat. Not as pretty as he remembered her, certainly; for some of the original corvettes, which had seen it through in the Atlantic since 1939 –
Trefoil, Campanula,
their own
Petal
– looked like tough and battered old women who had been streetwalking too long. So do I, by God! thought Ericson grimly. It was his fiftieth year, and he looked and felt every hour of it.

‘I’m thirty-two,’ Lockhart told him on one occasion, in answer to his question. ‘The best years of my life have vanished . . .’ But that was not really true, Lockhart knew well enough: for him, they were not lost years, in spite of the futility and wastefulness of war. He had grown up fast in the meantime, he was a different person from the twenty-seven-year-old, goalless, motiveless, not very good journalist who had joined up in 1939. War had given him something, and the personal cost was not a whit too high: he had missed five years of writing and travel, but he had gained in every other way – in self-discipline, in responsibility, in simple confidence and the rout of fear . . . I should be all right after the war, he told himself sometimes: because they can’t muck me about any more, and I can’t muck myself about, either.

For him as well as for Ericson, the lull in action was welcome, the more so since he saw it as an appropriate part of the pattern; it was the way things ought to be going, at that stage, to ensure that they should have the hoped-for outcome. If I were writing the story of this contest, he thought, this is where the book would tail off, because we’ve reached the moment when nothing happens – we’re just winning the war, and that’s all there is to say. That would be the whole point of the story, really – that in the end nothing happened, and it petered out into silence. The petering out was their victory.

‘”And enterprises of great pith and moment”,’ he quoted to himself vaguely, ‘de dah, de dah, de dah, “and lose the name of action”.’ But thank God the enterprises had done so: thank God for being alive on a fine spring morning in 1945, when he had never really expected to be, and when lots of people, who for five years had been trying to kill him, were dead themselves. Now in truth nothing was happening, and nothing was just what they had been aiming at, all alone.

If only Julie had been alive as well, to share the moment with him, to give it warmth and happiness as well as its cold satisfaction.

April . . . April, in the Atlantic, brought the last few strokes of their war; and one of them, involving a homeward-bound convoy which
Saltash
was taking in to Liverpool, gave them the most unpleasant surprise they had had for many months. After the lull, the recent weeks had been startlingly and dangerously active: The enemy still had about seventy U-boats able to keep at sea, and though the brief and violent flare-up cost thirty-three of them sunk, it cost many merchant ships as well. On one of these occasions,
Saltash
lost a ship on the very front doorstep – inside the Irish Sea, within sight of home. The ship was hit close to the bows, and she sank slowly, with little likelihood that any lives would be lost; but even so, the sudden mischance, at that late hour of the convoy and the war, had an evil element of shock.

They watched
Streamer
counter-attacking, on the other side of the convoy, but they could still scarcely believe that it had happened: it was the end of the war, the U-boats were virtually defeated –
and no U-boats operated in home waters anyway.
They had been aware that April was proving a bad month at sea, and that the enemy seemed to be making a last vicious effort to avert defeat; but it had never been brought so close to them, they had never seen it proved in so violent a fashion. It induced a sense of discomfort, a nervous foreboding, which lasted long after the situation had been set to rights. If this sort of thing could still happen, it not only restored the wicked past – it threatened, in an extreme degree, the promised future as well.

‘You silly bastards!’ said Raikes, aloud, when the flurry was over – the U-boat neatly dispatched by
Streamer,
the merchant seamen rescued from the water: ‘You silly bastards – you might have killed some of us.’ He echoed all their thoughts at that moment: their hopes of staying alive, their prickling haste to get the thing over before they ran into any more danger or took any more chances. In the whole of the rest of the war, there might only be two or three more convoys for them to escort: in the whole of the rest of the war, it was possible that only one more escort ship was going to be sunk. Make it not us, they thought – not at this stage, not so late in the day when we have very nearly finished, very nearly survived . . .

Raikes, up on the bridge, had spoken for all of them; and later, in the wardroom, they returned to the subject, with a readiness which showed how deep an impression the torpedoing had made on everyone in the ship.

‘It gave me the shock of my life!’ said Allingham, downing one drink very quickly and reaching out for the next one. ‘U-boats in the Irish Sea – at this stage? They must be stark staring crazy!’

‘Crazy or not,’ said Scott-Brown, ‘it happened, and it can happen again. Particularly if it’s their last chance, and they know that it is. They’ll go all out, and they won’t care what happens as long as they do some kind of damage. That was a suicidal attack, this afternoon – but they made it, all the same. We’ve probably got to expect that sort of thing, and worse, in the future.’

‘All I hope is that we don’t get in the way of the next one,’ said Raikes. ‘I haven’t lived as long as this, just to stop a torpedo when we’re nearly home and dried.’

‘It would certainly spoil my war aim,’ said the midshipman, with decision.

‘But it’s the end of the fighting!’ said Allingham, violent emphasis in his voice. ‘We’re over the Rhine, we’ve nearly joined up with the Russians, Hitler himself may be dead by now. What do they hope to gain by it?’

‘Perhaps nothing.’ Vincent, who had been sitting quietly by the stove, spoke suddenly. ‘They’re just going on fighting, that’s all . . . If it were we who were near defeat, wouldn’t we do the same thing, however hopeless it looked?’

He glanced round the wardroom, waiting for an answer.

‘I should do exactly what I was told,’ said the midshipman, modestly. ‘But I don’t think I’d volunteer for anything special . . .’

‘But if it were really hopeless—’ Allingham began, and then stopped. After a moment he smiled at Vincent. ‘You’re right, Vin – it
is
the only thing for them to do, and I hope we would do the same. They’ve got bags of guts, you know – you’ve got to hand it to them.’

‘They can have any sort of testimonial they like,’ said Scott-Brown, ‘as long as they don’t try to earn it by sinking
Saltash.’

Raikes nodded. ‘That’s just what I thought this afternoon. It may sound a bit selfish – but this is such a bloody silly time to be killed.’

May – and now, surely, now at last nothing could go wrong, nothing could steal their victory, nor take their lives.

Saltash,
divorced from the rest of her group, had been on independent passage from Iceland when she received the unusual signal: ‘Remain on patrol in vicinity of Rockall’; and there she now was, steaming in a five-mile square round the isolated, inexplicable pinpoint of rock which was really the tip of a mountain in mid-ocean – Rockall, rising from the depths of the Atlantic to break surface, by a few feet only, 300 miles from land: Rockall, the unlighted, shunned graveyard of countless ships, countless U-boats. But, Ericson wondered, why Rockall? – unless Their Lordships wished to place a finger on
Saltash
in case of need; and why ‘on patrol’? – unless she were waiting for something which did not require an escort group, something which one single ship could do.

‘I think this is the end of it,’ said Ericson privately to Johnson, when they were discussing the fuel situation. ‘How much oil have you got in hand, Chief?’

‘About two hundred tons, sir. Say fourteen days’ steaming, at normal speed.’

‘I don’t think we’ll be moving very fast. We’re just hanging around, at the moment.’

Johnson looked at him curiously. ‘How long for, sir?’

‘I don’t know, Chief. Till the bell strikes.’

Saltash
steamed her slow circle. There were no ships to be seen, there were no convoys in her area: it was just a stretch of grey, flat calm sea, with the gaunt rock in the middle, the horizon round them, the dull sky overhead. The radar screen was blank, the asdic probed an endless empty sea:
Saltash
turned ninety degrees to port every half-hour, and in between times traced an uneven zigzag course, in case anyone were watching them. We’ve done this before, thought Ericson – in this ship, and in
Compass Rose
as well: once when we were hove-to with a damaged merchantman, once when we did a box search for survivors, once when we were too early at a rendezvous. It had always been the same sort of exercise – waiting patiently, searching endlessly, keeping on the move in case of surprises. Now they waited, in the same way, but this time not knowing what it was they waited or searched for. They turned their ordained circles, first under a grey sky, then under a black, then under a grey again; they sweated out the successive watches, steaming at a steady ten knots and getting nowhere, doing what they were told and hoping the answer would come soon, before something went wrong, before this simple merry-go-round turned to wicked witchcraft, on the authentic Atlantic pattern.

Ericson told no one what it was about, because he did not know himself, and there was therefore nothing to tell; there was just the bare signal log, which anyone could see, and the order ‘Remain on patrol’. In his private mind, he knew that they were waiting for the end of the war – but that was guesswork, not to be shared because it had no backing from authority. The signal log, the last explicit order from the Admiralty, was all they had to go on.

Once Raikes, when he was Officer-of-the-Watch, said: ‘I hope they don’t try any tricks. It’s a rotten time to be killed.’

Ericson frowned. ‘That hadn’t struck me,’ he said, somewhat coldly. ‘But it’ll be a rotten time for anyone who tries to kill
us.’

The expected signal came at dawn, on a dull calm morning which saw
Saltash
still circling the rock, still occasionally weaving a cunning variation of her course, still plodding along as ordered, and serving three meals a day, and remaining keyed up for any danger, any last attack.

‘Hostilities terminated,’ it said. ‘All U-boats have been ordered to surrender by German High Command. The surrender signal is a large black flag. You should take appropriate precautions against individual enterprise. The two U-boats which are presumed to be still in your immediate area should be escorted to Loch Ewe.’

‘Immediate area?’ said Ericson. ‘It’s a libel . . . We’ll wait for them to show up.’

The beaten foe emerged.

All over the broad Atlantic, wherever they had been working or lying hid, the U-boats surfaced, confessing the war’s end. A few of them, prompted by determination or struck by guilt, scuttled or destroyed themselves, or ran for shelter, not knowing that there was none; but mostly they did what they had been told to do, mostly they hoisted their black surrender flags, and said where they were, and waited for orders.

They rose, dripping and silent, in the Irish Sea, and at the mouth of the Clyde, and off the Lizard in the English Channel, and at the top of the Minches where the tides raced: they rose near Iceland, where
Compass Rose
was sunk, and off the north-west tip of Ireland, and close to the Faroes, and on the Gibraltar run where the sunk ships lay so thick, and near St John’s and Halifax, and in the deep of the Atlantic, with three thousand fathoms of water beneath their keel.

They surfaced in secret places, betraying themselves and their frustrated plans: they rose within sight of land, they rose far away in mortal waters where, on the map of the battle, the crosses that were sunken ships were etched so many and so close that the ink ran together. They surfaced above their handiwork, in hatred or in fear: sometimes snarling their continued rage, sometimes accepting thankfully a truce they had never offered to other ships, other sailors.

They rose, and lay wherever they were on the battlefield, waiting for the victors to claim their victory.