The Cruel Sea

  Ericson took Compass Rose in a wide half-circle to starboard, away from the convoy, hunting for the U-boat down what he presumed had been the track of the torpedo; but they found nothing that looked like a contact, and presently he circled back again, towards the ship that had been hit. She had fallen out of line, like one winged bird in a flight of duck, letting the rest of the convoy go by: she was sinking fast, and already her screws were out of water and she was poised for the long plunge. The cries of men in fear came from her, and a thick smell of oil: at one moment, when they had her outlined against the moon, they could see a mass of men packed high in the towering stern, waving and shouting as they felt the ship under them begin to slide down to her grave. Ericson, trying for a cool decision in this moment of pity, was faced with a dilemma: if he stopped to pick up survivors, he would become a sitting target himself, and he would also lose all chance of hunting for the U-boat: if he went on with the hunt, he would, with Sorrel busy elsewhere, be leaving these men to their death. He decided on a compromise, a not-too-dangerous compromise: they would drop a boat, and leave it to collect what survivors it could while Compass Rose took another cast away to starboard. But it must be done quickly.

  Ferraby, summoned to the quarterdeck voice-pipe, put every effort he knew into controlling his voice.

  ‘Ferraby, sir.’

  ‘We’re going to drop a boat, sub. Who’s your leading-hand?’

  ‘Leading-Seaman Tonbridge, sir.’

  ‘Tell him to pick a small crew – not more than four – and row over towards the ship. Tell him to keep well clear until she goes down. They may be able to get some boats away themselves, but if not, he’ll have to do the best he can. We’ll come back for him when we’ve had another look for the submarine.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘Quick as you can, sub. I don’t want to stop too long.’

  Ferraby threw himself into the job with an energy which was a drug for all other feeling: the boat was lowered so swiftly that when Compass Rose drew away from it and left it to its critical errand the torpedoed ship was still afloat. But she was only just afloat, balanced between sea and sky before her last dive; and as Tonbridge took the tiller and glanced in her direction to get his bearings, there was a rending sound which carried clearly over the water, and she started to go down. Tonbridge watched, in awe and fear: he had never seen anything like this, and never had a job of this sort before, and it was an effort to meet it properly. It had been bad enough to be lowered into the darkness from Compass Rose, and to watch her fade away and be left alone in a small boat under the stars, with the convoy also fading and a vast unfriendly sea all round them; but now, with the torpedoed ship disappearing before their eyes, and the men shouting and crying as they splashed about in the water, and the smell of oil coming across to them thick and choking, it was more like a nightmare than anything else. Tonbridge was twenty-three years of age, a product of the London slums conditioned by seven years’ naval training; faced by this ordeal, the fact that he did not run away from it, the fact that he remained effective, was beyond all normal credit.

  They did what they could: rowing about in the darkness, guided by the shouting, appalled by the choking cries of men who drowned before they could be reached, they tried their utmost to rescue and to succour. They collected fourteen men: one was dead, one was dying, eight were wounded, and the rest were shocked and prostrated to a pitiful degree. It was very nearly fifteen men: Tonbridge actually had hold of the fifteenth, who was gasping in the last stages of terror and exhaustion, but the film of oil on his naked body made him impossible to grasp, and he slipped away and sank before a rope could be got round him. When there were no more shadows on the water, and no more cries to follow, they rested on their oars, and waited; alone on the enormous black waste of the Atlantic, alone with the settling wreckage and the reek of oil; and so, presently, Compass Rose found them.

  Ferraby, standing in the waist of the ship as the boat was hooked on, wondered what he would see when the survivors came over the side: he was not prepared for the pity and horror of the appearance. First came the ones who could climb aboard themselves – half a dozen shivering, black-faced men, dressed in the filthy oil-soaked clothes which they had snatched up when the ship was struck: one of them with his scalp streaming with blood, another nursing an arm flayed from wrist to shoulder by scalding steam. They looked about them in wonder, dazed by the swiftness of disaster, by their rescue, by the solid deck beneath their feet. Then, while they were led to the warmth of the mess deck, a sling was rigged for the seriously wounded, and they were lifted over the side on stretchers: some silent, some moaning, some coughing up the fuel oil which was burning and poisoning their intestines: laid side by side in the waist, they made a carpet of pain and distress so naked in suffering that it seemed cruel to watch them. And then, with the boat still bumping alongside in the eerie darkness, came Tonbridge’s voice: ‘Go easy – there’s a dead man down here.’

  Ferraby had never seen a dead man before, and he had to force himself to look at this pitiful relic of the sea – stone-cold, stiffening already, its grey head jerking as it was bundled over the side: an old sailor, unseamanlike and disgusting in death. He wanted to run away, he wanted to be sick: he watched with shocked amazement the two ratings who were carrying the corpse: how can you bear what you are doing, he thought, how can you touch – it . . . ? Behind him he heard Lockhart’s voice saying: ‘Bring the whole lot into the fo’c’sle – I can’t see anything here,’ and then he turned away and busied himself with the hoisting of the boat, not looking behind him as the procession of wrecked and brutalised men was borne off. When the boat was inboard, and secure, he turned back again, glad to have escaped some part of the horror. There was nothing left now but the acrid smell of oil, and the patches of blood and water on the deck: nothing, he saw with a gasp of fear and revulsion, but the dead man lying lashed against the rail, a yard from him, rolling as the ship rolled, waiting for daylight and burial. He turned and ran towards the stern, pursued by terror.

  In the big seamen’s mess deck, under the shaded lamps, Lockhart was doing things he had never imagined possible. Now and again he recalled, with a spark of pleasure, his previous doubts: there was plenty of blood here to faint at, but that wasn’t the way things were working out . . . He had stitched up a gash in a man’s head, from the nose to the line of the hair – as he took the catgut from its envelope he had thought: I wish they’d include some directions with this stuff. He had set a broken leg, using part of a bench as a splint. He bound up other cuts and gashes, he did what he could for the man with the burnt arm, who was now insensible with pain: he watched, doing nothing with a curious hurt detachment, as a man who had drenched his intestines and perhaps his lungs with fuel oil slowly died. Some of Compass Rose’s crew made a ring round him, looking at him, helping him when he asked for help: the two stewards brought tea for the cold and shocked survivors, other men offered dry clothing, and Tallow, after an hour or two, came down and gave him the largest tot of rum he had ever seen. It was not too large . . .

  Once, from outside, there was the sound of an explosion, and he looked up: by chance, across the smoky fo’c’sle, the bandaged rows of wounded, the other men still shivering, the twisted corpse, the whole squalid confusion of the night, he met the eye of Leading-Seaman Phillips. Involuntarily, both of them smiled, to mark a thought which could only be smiled at: if a torpedo hit them now, there would be little chance for any of them, and all this bandaging would be wasted.

  Then he bent down again, and went on probing a wound for the splinter of steel which must still be there, if the scream of pain which the movement produced was anything to go by. This was a moment to think only of the essentials, and they were all here with him, and in his care.

  It was nearly daylight before he finished; and he went up to the bridge to report what he had done at a slow dragging walk, completely played out. He met Ericson at the top of the ladder: they had both been working through
out the night, and the two exhausted men looked at each other in silence, unable to put any expression into their stiff drawn faces, yet somehow acknowledging each other’s competence. There was blood on Lockhart’s hands, and on the sleeves of his duffle coat: in the cold light it had a curious metallic sheen, and Ericson looked at it for some time before he realised what it was.

  ‘You must have been busy, Number One,’ he said quietly. ‘What’s the score down there?’

  ‘Two dead, sir,’ answered Lockhart. His voice was very hoarse, and he cleared his throat. ‘One more to go, I think – he’s been swimming and walking about with a badly-burned arm, and the shock is too much. Eleven others. They ought to be all right.’

  ‘Fourteen . . . The crew was thirty-six altogether.’

  Lockhart shrugged. There was no answer to that one, and if there had been he could not have found it in his present mood: the past few hours, spent watching and touching pain, seemed to have deadened all normal feeling. He looked round at the ships on their beam, just emerging as the light grew.

  ‘How about things up here?’ he asked.

  ‘We lost another ship, over the other side of the convoy. That made three.’

  ‘More than one submarine?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. She probably crossed over.’

  ‘Good night’s work.’ Lockhart still could not express more than a formal regret. ‘Do you want to turn in, sir? I can finish this watch.’

  ‘No – you get some sleep. I’ll wait for Ferraby and Baker.’

  ‘Tonbridge did well.’

  ‘Yes . . . So did you, Number One.’

  Lockhart shook his head. ‘It was pretty rough, most of it. I must get a little book on wounds. It’s going to come in handy, if this sort of thing goes on.’

  ‘There’s no reason why it shouldn’t,’ said Ericson. ‘No reason at all, that I can see. Three ships in three hours: probably a hundred men all told. Easy.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lockhart, nodding. ‘A very promising start. After the war, we must ask them how they do it.’

  ‘After the war,’ said Ericson levelly, ‘I hope they’ll be asking us.’

  7

  They sailed on eleven convoys that year: sometimes to Iceland, sometimes to Gibraltar, sometimes to the pinpoint in mid-Atlantic which was their rendezvous with the incoming ships. As winter drew on, the weather took a natural turn for the worse: but once the appalling discomfort and the tiredness were accepted, they grew to welcome the rising wind and the falling glass, for the respite of another kind which these brought. For at least they provided cover for the convoy: a black night, with a stiff sea running, was a form of insurance against attack which they were ready to pay, for as long as was necessary. At that time, U-boats had not reached the stage of development when they could fire torpedoes at almost any level: and the bad weather, in any case, made the ships hard to find and harder to hit. At the beginning, they never thought that they would welcome an Atlantic gale: as time went on, no other sort of weather suited them so well.

  But the wind did not always blow, the moon was not always obscured by cloud. There were many repetitions of that first losing convoy: the tally of survivors gradually mounted, the total of ships lost pursued a steady upward curve. Something, it was clear, would have to be done about this question of survivors, if it was to be worth while fishing them out of the water; for corvettes, which were detailed for the bulk of this rescue work, were really ludicrously inadequate for the job. They needed a doctor, or at least a qualified Sick Berth Attendant, to see to the wounded and the exhausted men: it was futile, it was senseless to risk the ship in picking them up, only to have them die on board, from shock or burns or oil poisoning which could not be properly treated.

  Corvettes needed other things for this work, too: spare clothes, spare blankets, a proper sickbay, drugs to ease pain. They even needed more canvas, for sewing up the dead. A lot of such things, which had not been foreseen, were now emerging into grisly reality.

  It was on this note of inadequacy, this scrambling waste of effort and courage, that nineteen-forty drew to its close. Another, more memorable note, was struck, too, just before the end. On Christmas morning they saw a ship, loaded with iron ore, break in half and sink in less than one minute: she went down like a stone in a pond, leaving nothing save an oily scum and four men on the surface of the water. This was the record so far, out of many quick kills: it still had power to shock. But then all the losses, the deaths, the scale of slaughter, still startled and moved them.

  They should have known that things were just warming up.

  PART THREE

  1941: Grappling

  1

  They started the new year with a piece of domestic drama which in its untidiness and its inherent futility somehow reflected the wider battle.

  The centre of the storm was a small able-seaman by the name of Gregg. Gregg was one of the fo’c’sle party, in Morell’s division: the latter knew little about him save that he was quiet and dependable, and had never been in any sort of trouble during the whole of the fifteen months he had been in Compass Rose. It was therefore something of a surprise when Gregg failed to return on board at the end of their stay in harbour, and was not to be found by the time the ship left on her first convoy of the year. They sailed without him, after leaving with the shore authorities sufficient particulars to ensure that he would not be stranded on the dockside when he returned. The post-mortem and the clearing-up would have to wait; all that was involved now was the nuisance of being short-handed – the trouble in store, like the other details and duties of life in harbour, was shelved, while the sea claimed all their attention.

  But certainly the trouble was there when they got back home. Absence without leave was sufficiently serious: to miss one’s ship completely was in a higher scale of crime altogether, since if one did so, and the ship was involved in any kind of action, one was liable to a charge of desertion in the face of the enemy as well. Ericson, surveying Able-Seaman Gregg when he was brought up at Captain’s Defaulters, on the morning after their return to harbour, waited with some interest to hear what he had to say. He might conceivably have some legitimate excuse which would disentangle him altogether – though it was hard to see what this could be. Alternatively, there might be something which would lessen the seriousness of the charge. Ericson hoped for this extenuation, since Gregg was a decent kid who had not been in trouble before: otherwise the thing might involve sending him to detention, and he would probably be permanently spoilt.

  The crisis broke when Gregg refused to say anything at all.

  The evidence on one side was simple: he had left the ship one afternoon, he had missed her when she sailed, he had reported back on board the morning she returned to harbour: the absence without leave for seventeen days was not disputable. But when Ericson asked for an explanation, he was met by a shake of the head, and a muttered ‘Nothing to say, sir,’ which brought him up short.

  ‘You must have something to say,’ said Ericson sharply. He looked at the small sandy-haired figure in front of him, and tried to analyse the man’s expression. It was not quite apologetic, it was not quite shy, it was certainly not rebellious; it had a sort of submissive determination which was, in the circumstances, rather brave . . . ‘I want to know why you left the ship,’ Ericson went on, ‘and what you’ve been doing while we’ve been at sea. You’ve got to account for yourself – otherwise you’ll be in serious trouble.’

  They all stared at Gregg: the Captain, Lockhart, Morell, and Tallow who had marched him up to the table. The expressions on the ring of faces varied: the Captain, as judge, was non-committal, Morell looked puzzled, Lockhart wore his First Lieutenant’s disciplinary frown, and Tallow exhibited the professional disgust of a man who had no patience with defaulters and not the smallest belief in their excuses. In the middle of it all, braving the storm, Able-Seaman Gregg preserved his unblinking air of reserve. ‘When did you last see your father?’ thought Lockhart inconsequently, and
frowned yet more determinedly still. This sort of thing was no longer allowed to be funny.

  ‘Well,’ said Ericson after a pause. ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘Nothing to say, sir,’ repeated Gregg in the same flat tone. Tallow drew in his breath with a sharp hiss, and Ericson, hearing it, was somehow reminded of the whole weight of tradition, the machinery of Naval justice, that lay behind this moment. Soon he would have to apply that tradition, balancing the see-saw of crime and punishment, and the idea seemed wasteful and futile, when all it boiled down to was himself and a forlorn able-seaman who would not try to save his own skin.

  He wanted to find the real reason that lay behind it, and he wanted to rescue Gregg from a situation which, with the best will in the world, must always be weighted against him. He tried again.

  ‘That’s just silly,’ he said reasonably. ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to cover up, but I shouldn’t think it’s worth it. You know that I can send you to detention for this?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ mumbled Gregg.

  ‘I don’t want to do that, because you haven’t been in trouble before and your divisional officer tells me you’re a good worker. But unless you give me an explanation I haven’t any alternative.’ He paused. ‘How did you come to miss the ship and what have you been doing the last seventeen days?’

  There was still no answer. Gregg looked stolidly out in front of him, his eyes just below the level of Ericson’s chin, maintaining the foolish contest of wills which could only have one end. The noises of the ship and the dockside seemed suspended, waiting for the scene to resolve itself. To Lockhart it seemed, fancifully, that this might never happen, that Gregg need never answer, that they might wait there for ever, till they all grew old and the war was over and no one cared any more . . . Perhaps Ericson had something of the same feeling, for he straightened up suddenly and said: ‘Stand over.’