GOLD FROM CRETE
Short Stories by
C. S. FORESTER
ISBN 0 330 23662 8
© Dorothy E. Forester 1971
Cecil Scott Forester was born in Cairo in 1899 and educated at Alleyn’s School and Dulwich College, afterwards studying medicine at Guy’s Hospital. His first book, a crime novel entitled Payment Deferred (1926), was very successful and was dramatized. With his first wife he went inland voyaging in a dinghy through England, France and Germany, the log being published as The Voyage of the ‘Annie Marble’, followed by The ‘Annie Marble’ in Germany (1930). In 1936-7 he was war correspondent for The Times in Spain. Others of his novels include Brown on Resolution (1929), The Gun (1933), and The Ship (1943). In The Happy Return (1937) he introduced one of the most popular heroes of modem fiction, Captain Hornblower, who appeared also in Flying Colours (1938), and A Ship of the Line (1939), which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Later stories in the same series are The Commodore (1944), Lord Hornblower (1946), Mr Midshipman Hornblower (1950), and Hornblower and the ‘Atropos’ (1953). Long Before Forty (1967) is auotobiographical. C. S. Forester died in 1966.
Gold from Crete
The officers of HMS Apache were sizing up the Captain D. at the same time that he was doing the same to them. A Captain D. - captain commanding destroyers - was a horrible nuisance on board if, as in this case, the ship in which he elected - or was compelled by circumstances - to hoist his distinguishing pendant was not fitted as a flotilla leader. The captain needed cabin space himself, and he brought with him a quartet of staff officers who also needed cabin space. Physically, that meant that four out of the seven officers already on board the Apache would be more uncomfortable than usual, and in a destroyer that meant a great deal. More than that; morally, the effect was still more profound. It meant that with a captain on board, even if he tried not to interfere with the working of the ship, the commander and the other officers, and the lower deck ratings as well, for the matter of that, felt themselves under the scrutiny of higher authority. The captain’s presence would introduce something of the atmosphere of a big ship, and it would undoubtedly cut short the commander’s pleasure in his independent command.
So Commander Hammett and his officers eyed Captain Crowe and his staff, when they met on the scorching iron deck of the Apache in Alexandria Harbour, without any appearance of hospitality. They saw a big man, tall and a little inclined to bulk, who moved with a freedom and ease that hinted at a concealed athleticism. His face was tanned so deeply that it was impossible to guess at his complexion, but under the thick black brows there were a pair of grey eyes that twinkled irrepressibly. They knew his record, of course - much of it was to be read in the rows of coloured ribbon on his chest. There was the DSO he had won as a midshipman at Zeebrugge in 1918 - before Sub-lieutenant Chesterfield had been born - and they knew that they had only to look up the official account of that action to find exactly what Crowe had done there; but everyone knew that midshipmen do not receive DSOs for nothing. The spot of silver that twinkled on the red-and-blue ribbon told of the bar he had received for the part he had played at Narvik last year - not to many men is it given to be decorated for distinguished services twenty-two years apart and still to be hardly entering on middle age. There was the red ribbon that one or two of them recognized as the Bath, and a string of other gay colours that ended in the Victory and General Service ribbons of the last war.
The introductions were brief - most of the officers had at least a nodding acquaintance with one another already. Commander Hammett presented his first lieutenant, Garland, and the other officers down to Sub-lieutenants Chesterfield and Lord Edward Mortimer, RNVR - this last was a fattish and untidy man in the late thirties whose yachting experience had miraculously brought him out of Mayfair drawing-rooms and dropped him on the hard steel deck of the Apache - and Crowe indicated his flotilla gunnery officer and navigating officer and signals officer and secretary.
‘We will proceed as soon as convenient, Commander,’ said Crowe, issuing his first order.
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Hammett, as twenty generations of seamen had answered before him. But at least the age of consideration given to omens had passed; it did not occur to Hammett to ponder on the significance of the fact that Crowe’s first order had been one of action.
‘Get yourselves below and sort yourselves out,’ said Crowe to his staff, and as they disappeared he walked forward and ran lightly up to the bridge.
Hammett gave his orders - Crowe was glad to note that he did so without even a side glance out of the tail of his eye at the captain at the end of the bridge - and the ship broke into activity. In response to one order, the yeoman of signals on the bridge bellowed an incomprehensible string of words down to the signal bridge. It passed through Crowe’s mind that yeomen of signals were always as incomprehensible as railway porters calling out the names of stations in England, but the signal rating below understood what was said to him, which was all that mattered. A string of coloured flags ran up the halyards, and a moment later yeoman of signals was bellowing the replies received. The flagship gave permission to proceed; the fussy tug out there by the anti-submarine net began to pull open the gate. The bow was pulled in, the warps cast off. The telegraph rang, the propeller began to turn, and the Apache trembled a little as she moved away. Everything was done as competently as possible; the simple operation was a faint indication that Crowe would not have to worry about the Apache in action, but could confine his attention to the handling of his whole flotilla of twelve destroyers, if and when he should ever succeed in gathering them all together.
A movement just below him caught his attention. The antiaircraft lookouts were being relieved. At the .50-calibre gun here on the starboard side a burly seaman was taking over the earphones and the glasses. He was a huge man, but all Crowe could see of him, besides his huge bulk and the top of his cap, was his cropped red hair and a wide expanse of neck and ear, burned a solid brick-red from the Mediterranean sun. Then there were a pair of thick wrists covered with dense red hair, and two vast hands that held the glasses as they swept back and forth, back and forth, over the sky from horizon to zenith in ceaseless search for hostile planes. At that moment there were six seamen employed on that task in different parts of the deck, and so exacting was the work that a quarter of an hour every hour was all that could be asked of any man.
Commander Hammett turned at that moment and caught the captain’s eye.
‘Sorry to intrude on you like this, Hammett,’ said Crowe.
‘No intrusion at all, sir. Glad to have you, of course.’
Hammett could hardly say anything else, poor devil, thought Crowe, before he went on: ‘Must be a devilish nuisance being turned out of your cabin, all the same.’
‘Not nearly as much nuisance as to the other officers, sir,’ said Hammett. ‘When we’re at sea I never get aft to my sleeping cabin at all. Turn in always in my sea cabin.’
Perfectly true, thought Crowe. No destroyer captain would think of ever going more than one jump from the bridge at sea.
‘Nice of you to spare my feelings,’ said Crowe, with a grin. It had to be said in just the right way - Crowe could guess perfectly well at Hammett’s resentment at his presence.
‘Not at all, sir,’ said Hammett briefly.
Sub-lieutenant Chesterfield gave a fresh course to the quarter-master at this moment and changed the conversation.
They were clear of the minefields now and almost out of sight of the low shore. The myriad Levantine spies would have a hard time to guess whither they were bound.
‘We’ll be in visual touch with the flotilla at dawn, sir,’ said Hammett.
‘Thank you. I’ll let you know if there’s any change of
plan,’ replied Crowe.
He ran down the naked steel ladder to the deck, and walked aft, past the quadruple torpedo tubes and the two pairs of 4.7’s towering above him. On the blast screen a monkey sat and gibbered at him, gesticulating with withered little hands. Crowe hated monkeys; he liked dogs and could tolerate cats; he had been shipmates with pets of all species from goats to baby hippopotamuses, but monkeys were his abomination. He hated the filthy little things, their manners and their habits. He ignored this one stolidly as he walked past it to the accompaniment of screamed monkey obscenities. If he were in command of this destroyer he would have seen to it that the little beast did not remain long on board to plague him; as it was, he thought ruefully to himself, as he was in the immeasurably higher position of commanding a flotilla, he would have to endure its presence for fear of hurting the feelings of those under his command.
Down below, Paymaster-Lieutenant Scroggs, his secretary, was waiting for him in the day cabin. Scroggs was looking through a mass of message forms - intercepted wireless messages which gave, when pieced together, a vague and shadowy picture of the progress of the fighting in Crete.
‘I don’t like the looks of it at all, sir,’ said Scroggs.
Neither did Crowe, but he could see no possible good in saying so. His hearty and sanguine temperament could act on bad news, but refused to dwell on it. He had digested the contents of those messages long ago, and he had no desire to worry himself with them again.
‘We’ll know more about it when we get there,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I shan’t want you for a bit, Scroggs.’
Scroggs acted on the hint and left the cabin, while Crowe sat himself at the table and drew the notepaper to him and began his Thursday letter:
My dear Miriam,
There has been little enough happening this week--
On Thursdays he wrote to Miriam; on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays he wrote respectively to Jane and Susan and Dorothy. On Fridays he wrote to old friends of his own sex, and he kept Saturdays to clear off arrears of official correspondence, and he hoped on Sundays never to take a pen in hand.
He often thought about using a typewriter and doing four copies at once, but Miriam and Dorothy and Jane and Susan were not fools - he would never have bothered about them in the first place if they were - and they could spot a carbon copy anywhere. There was nothing for it but to write toilsomely to each one by hand, although it did not matter if he repeated the phraseology; not one of those girls knew any of the others, thank God, and if they did, they wouldn’t compare notes about him, seeing what a delicate affair each affair was.
Scroggs re-entered the room abruptly. ‘Message just arrived, sir,’ he said, passing over the decoded note.
It was for Captain D. from the vice-admiral, Alexandria, and was marked ‘Priority’. It ran:
MUCH GREEK GOLD AWAITING SHIPMENT MERKA BAY.
REMOVE IF POSSIBLE. END.
‘Not acknowledged, of course?’ said Crowe.
‘No, sir,’ said Scroggs.
Any acknowledgement would violate standing orders for wireless silence.
‘All right, Scroggs. I’ll call you when I want you.’
Crowe sat and thought about this new development. ‘Much Greek gold.’ A thousand pounds? A million pounds? The Greek government gold reserves must amount to a good deal more than a million pounds. If Crete was going to be lost - and it looked very much as if it was going to be - it would be highly desirable to keep that much gold from falling into the hands of the Germans. But it was the ‘if possible’ that complicated the question. Actually it was a compliment - it gave him discretion. It was for him to decide whether to stake the Apache against the gold, but it was the devil of a decision to make. The ordinary naval problem was easy by comparison, for the value of the Apache could be easily computed against other standards. It would always be worthwhile, for instance, to risk the Apache in exchange for a chance to destroy a light cruiser. But in exchange for gold? When she was built, the Apache cost less than half a million sterling, but that was in peacetime. In time of war, destroyers might be considered to be worth their weight in gold - or was that strictly true?
There was the question of the odds too. If he took the Apache into Merka Bay tomorrow at dawn and risked the Stukas, what would be the chances of getting her out again? Obviously, if he were quite sure of it, he should try for the gold; and on the other hand, if he were sure that she would be destroyed, it would not be worth making the attempt, not for all the gold in the Americas. The actual odds lay somewhere between the one extreme and the other - two to one against success, say. Was it a profitable gamble to risk the Apache on a two-to-one chance, in the hope of gaining an indefinite number of millions?
He had only to raise his voice to summon the staff that a thoughtful government had provided. Three brilliant young officers, all graduates of the Naval Staff College, and the main reason for their presence on board was to advise. Crowe thought about his staff and grinned to himself. They would tell him, solemnly, the very things he had just been thinking out for himself, and, after all that, the ultimate decision would still lie with him alone. There could be no shifting of that responsibility - and Crowe suddenly realized that he did not want to shift it. Responsibility was the air he breathed. He sat making up his mind, while the Apache rose and fell gently on the Mediterranean swell and the propellers throbbed steadily; he still held the message in idle fingers, and looked at it with unseeing eyes. When at last he rose, he had reached his decision, and it remained only to communicate it to his staff to tell them that he intended to go into Merka Bay to fetch away some gold, and to look over the chart with them and settle the details.
That was what he did, and the flotilla gunnery officer and the signals officer and the navigating officer listened to him attentively. It was only a matter of a few minutes to decide on everything. Rowles, the navigating officer, measured off the distance on his dividers, while the others asked questions that Crowe could not answer. Crowe had not the least idea how much gold there was in Crete. Nor could he say offhand how much a million sterling in gold should weigh. Nickleby, the gunner, came to a conclusion about that, after a brief glance at his tables of specific gravities and a minute with his slide rule. ‘About ten tons, there or thereabouts,’ he announced.
‘This is troy weight, twelve ounces to the pound, you know,’ cautioned Holby, the signals officer.
‘Yes, I allowed for that,’ said Nickleby triumphantly.
‘But what about inflation?’ demanded Rowles, looking up from the map. ‘I heard you say something about an ounce being worth four pounds - you know what I mean, four sovereigns. But that’s a long time ago, when people used to buy gold. Now it’s all locked up and it’s doubled in value, pretty nearly. So a million would weigh twenty tons.’
‘Five tons, you mean, stupid,’ said Holby. That started another argument as to whether inflation would increase or diminish the weight of a million sterling.
Crowe listened to them for a moment and then left them to it. There was still a little while left before dinner, and he had to finish that letter. As the Apache turned her bows towards Merka Bay, Crowe took up his pen again:
... but it is most infernally hot and I suppose it will get hotter as the year grows older. I have thought about you a great deal, of course--
That damned monkey was chattering at him through the scuttle. It was bad enough to have to grind out this weekly letter to Miriam, without having monkeys to irritate one. The monkey was far more in Crowe’s thoughts than the Stukas he would be facing at any moment. The Stukas were something to which he had devoted all the consideration the situation demanded; it would do him no good to think about them further. But that monkey would not let Crowe stop thinking about him. Crowe cursed again.
--especially that dinner we had at the Berkeley, when we had to keep back behind the palms so that old Lady Crewkerne shouldn’t see us. I wonder what the poor old thing is doing now.
That was half a page, an
yway, in Crowe’s large handwriting. He had only to finish the page and make some appearance of a wholehearted attempt on the second. He scribbled on steadily, half his mind on the letter and the other half divided between the monkey, the approach of dinner-time, Hammett’s attitude and the heat. He was not aware of the way in which somewhere inside him his mental digestion was still at work on the data for the approaching operation. With a sigh of relief he wrote:
Always yours,
George
and added at the foot, for the benefit of the censor:
From Captain George Crowe,
CB, DSO, RN.
The worst business of the day was over and he could dine with a clear conscience, untroubled until morning.
The dark hours that followed midnight found the Apache in Merka Bay. She had glided silently in and had dropped anchor unobserved by anyone, apparently, while all around her in the distance were the signs and thunder of war. Overhead in the darkness had passed droning death, not once or twice but many times, passing by on mysterious and unknown errands. Crowe, on the bridge beside Hammett, had heard the queer bumbling of German bombers, the more incisive note of fighter planes. Out on the distant horizon along the coast they had seen the great flashes of the nightmare battle that was being fought out there, sometimes the pyrotechnic sparkle of antiaircraft fire, and they had heard the murmur of the firing. Now Nickleby had slipped ashore in the dinghy to make contact with the Greeks.
‘He’s the devil of a long time, sir,’ grumbled Rowles. ‘We’ll never get away before daylight, at this rate.’
‘I never expected to,’ said Crowe soothingly. He felt immeasurably older than Rowles as he spoke, immeasurably wiser. Rowles was still young enough to have illusions, to expect everything to go off without delay or friction, something in the manner of a staff exercise on paper. If Rowles was still so incorrigibly optimistic after a year and a half of war, he could not be expected ever to improve in this respect.