The Cruel Sea

  ‘There is no blame,’ said one of the captains.

  ‘But there may be thoughts,’ said another.

  ‘Naturally there will be thoughts.’

  ‘For thoughts there is gin,’ said the first captain, with an air of logic.

  ‘Skoal!’ said Ericson.

  It went on like that for a very long time. It was neither better, nor worse, than being alone. But when his three visitors had gone, Ericson did not relax; he simply reached out his hand for the bottle again. It was quite true that for thoughts there was gin.

  It was Lockhart who finally found him, some time after midnight, leaning over the rail just outside his cabin, staring down at the water, muttering vaguely. Lockhart himself, though he had had less to drink, was in no better case as far as his private thoughts were concerned. Earlier that evening he had gone ashore with Lieut.-Commander Ramsay, Sorrel’s captain, to see the latter to his billet in the nearby Naval Barracks: it had been a sad, silent walk through streets and crowds whose cheerfulness was not infectious, and they had parted almost as strangers. Now Lockhart was back on board, but he felt quite unable to turn in: he had the jitters, like nearly everyone else in the ship, he was exhausted beyond the point of relaxation, his brain had too much company for sleep.

  But when he came to the end of his pacing of the iron deck, there was the Captain, leaning over the rail in helpless defeat. Someone on board was even worse off than himself . . . The big tough figure stirred as Lockhart approached, and turned towards him.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ asked Lockhart.

  ‘No,’ answered Ericson readily. ‘I don’t mind telling you that I’m not.’ His tone was thick and slurring: it was the first time Lockhart had ever heard it so, and after these two years of close association it was hard to identify the surrendered voice with the competent one he knew so well.

  Lockhart came close to him, and leant against the rail also. They were on the side away from the quay: before them was the harbour, ghostly under the moonlight, and ahead was the black shadow of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, their nearest neighbour, and behind towered the huge Rock of Gibraltar, the haven for which they had been steering for many days and nights. All round them the ship, at rest after her disastrous voyage, was oppressively silent.

  ‘You’ve got to forget all about it,’ said Lockhart, suddenly breaking through the normal barrier of reserve that separated them. ‘It’s no good worrying about it now. You can’t change anything.’

  ‘There was a submarine,’ shouted Ericson in a furious voice. He was now helplessly drunk. ‘I’m bloody well sure of it . . . It’s all in the report.’

  ‘It was my fault, anyway,’ said Lockhart. ‘I identified it as a submarine. If anyone killed those men, I killed them.’

  Ericson looked up at him. Incredibly, there were tears in his eyes which glittered like bright jewels starting from a mask, proclaiming his weakness and his manhood in the same revealing moment. Lockhart looked at them in amazement and compassion: how moving was that pale working face, how comforting, after their ordeal, the glistening tears of this strong man . . . He made as if to speak, wanting to forestall Ericson and save him from further revelation; but the other man suddenly put his hand on his shoulder and said, in an almost normal voice: ‘No one killed them . . . It’s the war, the whole bloody war . . . We’ve just got to do these things, and say our prayers at the end . . . Have you been drinking, Number One?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Lockhart. ‘Quite a lot.’

  ‘So have I . . . First time since we commissioned . . . Goodnight.’

  Without waiting for an answer he turned and lurched towards his cabin entrance. After a moment there was a thud, and Lockhart, following him into the cabin, found that he had collapsed and was lying face downwards in his armchair, dead to the world.

  ‘Sir,’ said Lockhart formally, ‘you’d better get to bed.’

  There was no sound save Ericson’s heavy breathing.

  ‘You poor old bastard,’ said Lockhart, half to himself, half to the prone figure spreadeagled below him, ‘you poor old bastard, you’ve just about had enough, haven’t you?’ He considered getting the other man’s clothes off and somehow bundling him into his bunk, but he knew he would never be able to do it – the helpless fourteen-stone weight would be far too much for him. Instead he began to heave the Captain’s body round so as to settle him comfortably in the armchair, talking out loud as he did so. ‘I can’t get you to bed, my dear and revered Captain, but I can at least snug you down for the night . . . You’ll have quite a head when you wake up, God bless you – I don’t think I’d like to be one of your defaulters tomorrow morning . . . Get your legs out straight . . .’ He eased Ericson’s collar and tie, looked down at him for a moment more as he lay relaxed in the armchair, and then moved towards the doorway. ‘That’s the best I can do for you,’ he murmured, his hand on the light switch. ‘Wish it could be more, wish I could really cure you . . .’ He clicked off the light. ‘Drunk or sober, Ericson, you’re all right.

  He was already halfway through the doorway when he heard the other man’s voice behind him, vague and sleepy.

  ‘Number One,’ said Ericson, ‘I heard that.’

  ‘That’s all right, sir,’ said Lockhart, without embarrassment. ‘I meant it . . . Goodnight.’

  There was silence as he went out, silence as he climbed down the ladder to the deserted wardroom. All round him, as on the upper deck, the exhausted ship lay in the embrace of sleep, hoping to forget the horrible past. Lockhart dwelt for a moment on that past, and his own guilty part in it; then he unlocked the sideboard, set out a bottle and a glass, and, following what now seemed an excellent example, drank himself into insensibility.

  8

  Morell sat at ease on a balcony overlooking the main street of Gibraltar, gravely sipping a tall glass of Tio Pepe sherry so exquisitely pale and dry that it was an honour to welcome it upon the tongue.

  Below him the crowds were thickening as the liberty men thronged ashore from the many ships in harbour. There was so much here that was new, to do and to see: the shops carried their full cargoes of silk stockings and scents, the gharries threaded their way down the narrow streets with their canopies ruffled by the breeze, and from the cafés and beer halls the music and the laughter beckoned continuously; it was all part of the fun, part of the novel landfall. They always enjoyed their visits to Gibraltar; and now, as far as Compass Rose was concerned, it came as a special balm for their defeat, underlining the wonder of having survived so fearful a voyage. Morell, like the rest of them, was welcoming it all with open hands: after a week in harbour, the hot sunshine, the chance of relaxing in their white tropical rig, the swimming parties to the eastern side of the Rock, the strange faces in the street, the glamour of visiting a foreign port, still showed no signs of palling. There was nothing much on the credit side of that voyage; but if one were lucky enough to be alive at the end of it, instead of dead like most of Sorrel’s crew, Gibraltar seemed a particularly good place to be alive in.

  They felt, too, that they themselves had a special status here. Rumours of the disaster to the convoy had spread swiftly among the personnel of the Base: it was enough to remark, in the Naval Mess ashore: ‘We were with A.G.93,’ for an alert silence to intervene, and for curious speculative glances to focus on the speaker. A.G.93 was a convoy with a reputation: anyone who had sailed with it ought by rights to be either round the bend, or dead . . . It was something to have earned even this dubious cachet, in a port which was playing so dramatic a part in the war and where the big ships, whose base it was, were earning worldwide reputations for courage and daring.

  Ark Royal, for example, lay next ahead of them in the harbour below, the sheer of her bows climbing like an overhanging cliff up to the enormous flight deck that crowned her superstructure. She was now the most hunted ship on the seven seas, the target for the bombs, the torpedoes, and the boastful lies of the enemy: with her were the battle cruiser Renown and the res
t of ‘Force H’, that famous company of ships which had fought the convoys through to Malta in the face of a ferocious opposition, and could still find time to trail the Bismarck to her death, a thousand miles to the northward. Grouped round them in the teeming harbour were the lesser vessels – the destroyer flotillas, the Fleet minesweepers, the clutch of submarines which harassed the coastwise shipping of the western Mediterranean: across the bay in Algeciras, smugly privileged, were the spying eyes of the enemy, sheltering under the wing of Spain whose contribution to victory this was: far to the eastward were Crete and Greece, now in the throes of a bloody rout; and over all the fabulous Rock stood guard, that impregnable honeycomb of tunnels and lifts and ammunition and stores and guns, holding the Straits by the throat, and a thousand square miles of ocean in the same mortal grip.

  Morell called for another glass of sherry, and sat on in his soft delectable corner of the fortress, watching the declining sun and the lengthening shadows of the evening, sipping the delicate drink in complete contentment. Presently there was vague shouting and the sound of some disturbance in a café further down the street; but he did not bestir himself to look over the balcony rail, nor was he in the least curious about the noise. If it were anyone from Compass Rose in trouble, he would hear all about it in the morning; if not, they could murder each other with jagged bottle tops, for all he cared . . . He wanted nothing more from this moment: no excitement, no complication, no angel in the path. They had had their ordeal, they had survived it, and it was good, very good, to be at ease at last.

  9

  On the sixth day of their journey home, late in the forenoon watch Chief E.R.A. Watts came up to the bridge with a worried, frown on his face. So far, things had been going well with their return convoy: there had been no shadowing aircraft, no scares about U-boats waiting for them, no drama of any sort. It made a nice change . . . But now there was a chance of things not going well at all, and it was he who had to break the news.

  ‘Captain, sir!’ Watts stood at the back of the bridge, awkwardly shifting his feet on the smooth white planking. He never came up there if he could help it, because it made him feel entirely out of place: his proper station was on the engine room ‘plate’ three decks below, among the pipes and the gauges that he understood so well; this open-air stuff, with lookouts and flag signals and water dashing past all round, was not his cup of tea at all. Even his overalls and oily canvas shoes looked funny, with everyone else dolled up in seaboots and duffle coats . . . Ericson, who had been preparing to check their noon position, and enjoying the sunshine at the same time, turned round at the sound of his voice.

  ‘Well, Chief? Anything wrong?’

  ‘Afraid so, sir.’ Watts came forward, rubbing his hands on his overalls. His grey creased face was full of concern. ‘I’ve got a bearing I don’t like the feel of at all. Running hot, it is – nearly red hot. I’d like to stop and have a look at it, sir.’

  ‘Do you mean the main shaft, Chief?’ Ericson knew that his knowledge of the engine room, sufficient for normal purposes, did not include all the technical refinements, and he wanted to get his facts straight.

  ‘Yes, sir. Must be a blocked oil pipe, by the look of it.’

  ‘Any good if we slow down? I don’t want to stop if we can help it.’

  Watts shook his head vigorously. ‘If we keep the shaft turning it’s liable to seize up, sir. And I can’t trace the oil line back from the main feed unless we stop engines. It’s one of those awkward corners – the after bearing, right up against the gland space.’

  Ericson, struggling to give form to the sketchy picture in his mind, frowned in concentration. But the answer seemed fairly clear. If a main bearing was running hot, it wasn’t getting its proper ration of oil: if the oil were continuously denied, and the melting point of the metal were reached, the bearing and the surrounding sleeve would be welded into one, and the main shaft would be locked. That was, comparatively speaking, a straightforward piece of mechanical mystery . . . For a moment he cast about in his mind for possible alternatives, but he knew there were none. They would have to do the least healthy thing in the war at sea – stop in mid-ocean, with their engine put out of commission.

  ‘All right, Chief,’ said Ericson, making up his mind to it. ‘I’ll send a signal, and then ring down for you to stop. Be as quick as you can.’

  ‘I’ll be that, sir.’

  They were just in visual touch with Viperous, who was zigzagging in broad sweeps across the van of the convoy. When Compass Rose signalled her news, the answer was laconic: ‘Act independently. Keep me informed.’

  ‘Acknowledge,’ said Ericson briefly to Rose, who was signalman of the watch. Then: ‘Starboard ten. Stop engines,’ he called down to the wheelhouse; and Compass Rose, turning in a wide sweep away from the convoy, lost way and came gradually to a standstill.

  Up on the bridge they waited in silence, while the convoy steamed past them, and the corvette which had the stern position altered course to pass close by, like an inquisitive terrier which does not know whether to wag its tail or bark. Down below in the engine room, Watts and a leading-stoker called Gracey set to work on their examination of the oil feed. It was indeed an awkward corner, jammed up against a bulkhead and barely approachable: to trace the trouble they had to pick out the suspect oil pipe, from an array of a dozen others, and then take it to pieces in sections to find out which part of it was blocked. The engine room was very hot: they were forced to bend nearly double as they worked, groping for the joints from opposite sides of the piping because there was not room for them to stand side by side: sections of the pipe could not be brought out and examined before other sections of other pipes had been loosened and removed. It was a full two hours before they had located the trouble – an L-shaped, curved section which appeared to be totally blocked.

  Watts stepped backwards and straightened up, holding the pipe in one hand and wiping his sweaty forehead with the other. ‘Now what?’ he said rhetorically. ‘How do we find out what’s inside this?’

  ‘Suck it and see, I suppose,’ answered Gracey, who was a lower deck comedian of some note.

  ‘Get a piece of wire,’ said Watts coldly. Some people were allowed to be funny to Chief E.R.As, but leading-stokers were not included in this licensed category. ‘Not too thick . . . I’m going to report to the Captain.’

  After two more hours of steady work they were still no further on. Whatever had got inside the pipe seemed to be stuck there immovably: it couldn’t be blown out, it couldn’t be pushed through, it couldn’t be melted or picked to pieces. Waiting on the bridge of his useless ship, Ericson found it hard to restrain himself from storming down to the engine room and telling them to stop loafing and get on with it; but he knew that this would have been futile, as well as unfair. Watts was doing his best: no one else on board could do better. At four o’clock, with the last ships of the convoy out of sight below the horizon, Ericson had sent a signal by R/T to Viperous, explaining what was happening; there had been no answer beyond a bare acknowledgement and it was clear that Viperous was setting him a good example in trusting him to make the best of the repair and to rejoin as soon as possible.

  He stood wedged in a corner of the bridge, staring down at the dark oily water which reflected the overcast sky; behind him, Ferraby and Baker, who had the watch, were idly examining the pieces of a Hotchkiss anti-aircraft gun which one of the gunnery ratings was stripping. The asdic set clicked and pinged, monotonously wakeful, the radar aerial circled an invisible horizon: the two lookouts occasionally raised their binoculars and swept through their respective arcs – forward, aft, and forward again. Compass Rose was entirely motionless: her ensign hung down without stirring, her vague shadow on the water never moved or altered its outline. She was waiting for two things – for her engine to start again, and for the other thing which might happen to her, without warning and without a chance of defending herself either. Who knew what was below the surface of the dark sea, who knew what malevolent
eye might be regarding them, even at this moment? In the nervous and oppressive silence, such thoughts multiplied, with nothing to set against them save the hope of getting going again.

  On the quarterdeck aft, some of the hands were fishing. If Ericson had told them that they were fishing in at least a thousand fathoms of water, as was in fact the case, it would probably have made no difference. Fishing – even with breadcrumb bait dangling six thousand feet above the ocean bed – was better than doing nothing, at a moment like this.

  Down below in the engine room, Chief E.R.A. Watts had come to a certain decision. It involved considerable delay, and some danger of wrecking everything beyond repair; but there was no choice left to him.

  ‘We’ll have to saw the pipe up,’ he said to Gracey, at the end of another futile bout of poking and picking at the obstruction. ‘Bit by bit, till we find the stoppage.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Clear it out, and then braze the whole thing together again.’

  ‘Take all night if we do that,’ said Gracey sulkily.

  ‘Take all the war if we don’t,’ retorted Watts. ‘Get a hacksaw, while I tell the Captain.’

  Watts was actually up on the bridge when Viperous appeared in sight again. She came storming down from the north-westwards at about five o’clock in the afternoon, her big signal lamp flickering as soon as she was over the horizon; she wanted to know everything – the state of their repairs, the chances of their getting going again, and whether they had had any suspicious contacts or seen any aircraft during their stoppage. In consultation with Watts, Ericson answered as best he could: they had located the trouble, and would almost certainly be able to clear it, but it would probably take them most of the night to do it.

  Viperous, who had stopped her swift approach as soon as she was in effective touch, circled lazily about ten miles off them while the signals were exchanged. Then there was a pause, and then she signalled: ‘Afraid I cannot spare you an escort for the night.’