‘Now, Johnny, you’re not—’
‘Why doesn’t he turn back?’ Nicholls hadn’t even heard the interruption. ‘He’s only got to give the order. What does he want? Death or glory? What’s he after? Immortality at my expense, at our expense?’ He swore, bitterly. ‘Maybe Riley was right. Wonderful headlines. “Captain Richard Vallery, DSO, has been posthumously awarded—”’
‘Shut up!’ Brooks’s eye was as chill as the Arctic ice itself, his voice a biting lash.
‘You dare to talk of Captain Vallery like that!’ he said softly. ‘You dare to besmirch the name of the most honourable . . . ’ He broke off, shook his head in wrathful wonder. He paused to pick his words carefully, his eyes never leaving the other’s white, strained face.
‘He is a good officer, Lieutenant Nicholls, maybe even a great officer: and that just doesn’t matter a damn. What does matter is that he is the finest gentleman—I say “gentleman”—I’ve ever known, that ever walked the face of this graceless, Godforsaken earth. He is not like you or me. He is not like anybody at all. He walks alone, but he is never lonely, for he has company all the way . . . men like Peter, like Bede, like St Francis of Assisi.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Funny, isn’t it—to hear an old reprobate like myself talk like this? Blasphemy, even, you might call it—except that the truth can never be blasphemy. And I know.’
Nicholls said nothing. His face was like a stone.
‘Death, glory, immortality,’ Brooks went on relentlessly. ‘These were your words, weren’t they? Death?’ He smiled and shook his head again. ‘For Richard Vallery, death doesn’t exist. Glory? Sure, he wants glory, we all want glory, but all the London Gazettes and Buckingham Palaces in the world can’t give him the kind of glory he wants: Captain Vallery is no longer a child, and only children play with toys . . . As for immortality.’ He laughed, without a trace of rancour now, laid a hand on Nicholls’s shoulder. ‘I ask you, Johnny— wouldn’t it be damned stupid to ask for what he has already?’
Nicholls said nothing. The silence lengthened and deepened, the rush of the air from the ventilation louvre became oppressively loud. Finally, Brooks coughed, looked meaningfully at the ‘Lysol’ bottle.
Nicholls filled the glasses, brought them back. Brooks caught his eyes, held them, and was filled with sudden pity. What was that classical understatement of Cunningham’s during the German invasion of Crete—‘It is inadvisable to drive men beyond a certain point.’ Trite but true. True even for men like Nicholls. Brooks wondered what particular private kind of hell that boy had gone through that morning, digging out the shattered, torn bodies of what had once been men. And, as the doctor in charge, he would have had to examine them all—or all the pieces he could find . . .
‘Next step up and I’ll be in the gutter.’ Nicholls’s voice was very low. ‘I don’t know what to say, sir. I don’t know what made me say it . . . I’m sorry.’
‘Me too,’ Brooks said sincerely. ‘Shooting off my mouth like that! And I mean it.’ He lifted his glass, inspected the contents lovingly. ‘To our enemies, Johnny: their downfall and confusion, and don’t forget Admiral Starr.’ He drained the glass at a gulp, set it down, looked at Nicholls for a long moment.
‘I think you should hear the rest, too, Johnny. You know, why Vallery doesn’t turn back.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It’s not because there are as many of these damned U-boats behind us as there are in front—which there undoubtedly are.’ He lit a fresh cigarette, went on quietly:
‘The Captain radioed London this morning. Gave it as his considered opinion that FR77 would be a goner—“annihilated” was the word he used and, as a word, they don’t come any stronger—long before it reached the North Cape. He asked at least to be allowed to go north about, instead of east for the Cape . . . Pity there was no sunset tonight, Johnny,’ he added half-humorously. ‘I would have liked to see it.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Nicholls was impatient. ‘And the answer?’
‘Eh! Oh, the answer. Vallery expected it immediately.’ Brooks shrugged. ‘It took four hours to come through.’ He smiled, but there was no laughter in the eyes. ‘There’s something big, something on a huge scale brewing up somewhere. It can only be some major invasion—this under your hat, Johnny?’
‘Of course, sir!’
‘What it is I haven’t a clue. Maybe even the long-awaited Second Front. Anyway, the support of the Home Fleet seems to be regarded as vital to success. But the Home Fleet is tied up—by the Tirpitz. And so the orders have gone out—get the Tirpitz. Get it at all costs.’ Brooks smiled, and his face was very cold. ‘We’re big fish, Johnny, we’re important people. We’re the biggest, juiciest bait ever offered up, the biggest, juiciest prize in the world today—although I’m afraid the trap’s a trifle rusty at the hinges . . . The signal came from the First Sea Lord—and Starr. The decision was taken at Cabinet level. We go on. We go east.’
‘We are the “all costs”,’ said Nicholls flatly. ‘We are expendable.’
‘We are expendable,’ Brooks agreed. The speaker above his head clicked on, and he groaned. ‘Hell’s bells, here we go again!’
He waited until the clamour of the Dusk Action Stations’ bugle had died away, stretched out a hand as Nicholls hurried for the door.
‘Not you, Johnny. Not yet. I told you, the skipper wants you. On the bridge, ten minutes after Stations begin.’
‘What? On the bridge? What the hell for?’
‘Your language is unbecoming to a junior officer,’ said Brooks solemnly. ‘How did the men strike you today?’ he went on inconsequently. ‘You were working with them all morning. Their usual selves?’
Nicholls blinked, then recovered.
‘I suppose so.’ He hesitated. ‘Funny, they seemed a lot better a couple of days ago, but—well, now they’re back to the Scapa stage. Walking zombies. Only more so—they can hardly walk now.’ He shook his head. ‘Five, six men to a stretcher. Kept tripping and falling over things. Asleep on their feet—eyes not focusing, too damned tired to look where they’re going.’
Brooks nodded. ‘I know, Johnny, I know. I’ve seen it myself.’
‘Nothing mutinous, nothing sullen about them any more.’ Nicholls was puzzled, seeking tiredly to reduce nebulous, scattered impressions to a homogeneous coherence. ‘They’ve neither the energy nor the initiative left for a mutiny now, anyway, I suppose, but it’s not that. Kept muttering to themselves in the FDR: “Lucky bastard” “He died easy”—things like that. Or “Old Giles—off his bleedin rocker.” And you can imagine the shake of the head. But no humour, none, not even the grisly variety you usually . . . ’ He shook his own head. ‘I just don’t know, sir. Apathetic, indifferent, hopeless—call ’em what you like. I’d call ‘em lost.’
Brooks looked at him a long moment, then added gently:
‘Would you now?’ He mused. ‘And do you know, Johnny, I think you’d be right . . . Anyway,’ he continued briskly, ‘get up there. Captain’s going to make a tour of the ship.’
‘What!’ Nicholls was astounded. ‘During action stations? Leave the bridge?’
‘Just that.’
‘But—but he can’t, sir. It’s—it’s unprecedented!’
‘So’s Captain Vallery. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all evening.’
‘But he’ll kill himself!’ Nicholls protested wildly.
‘That’s what I said,’ Brooks agreed wryly. ‘Clinically, he’s dying. He should be dead. What keeps him going God only knows—literally. It certainly isn’t plasma or drugs . . . Once in a while, Johnny, it’s salutary for us to appreciate the limits of medicine. Anyway, I talked him into taking you with him . . . Better not keep him waiting.’
For Lieutenant Nicholls, the next two hours were borrowed from purgatory. Two hours, the Captain took to his inspection, two hours of constant walking, of climbing over storm-sills and tangled wreckage of steel, of squeezing and twisting through impossibly narrow apertures, of climbing and descending a hundred ladders, two hours of exh
austing torture in the bitter, heart-sapping cold of a sub-zero temperature. But it was a memory that was to stay with him always, that was never to return without filling him with warmth, with a strange and wonderful gratitude.
They started on the poop—Vallery, Nicholls and Chief Petty Officer Hartley—Vallery would have none of Hastings, the Master-At-Arms, who usually accompanied the Captain on his rounds. There was something oddly reassuring about the big, competent Chief. He worked like a Trojan that night, opening and shutting dozens of watertight doors, lifting and lowering countless, heavy hatches, knocking off and securing the thousand clips that held these doors and hatches in place, and before ten minutes had passed, lending a protesting Vallery the support of his powerful arm.
They climbed down the long, vertical ladder to ‘Y’ magazine, a dim and gloomy dungeon thinly lit with pinpoints of garish light. Here were the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers—the non-specialists in the purely offensive branches. ‘Hostilities only’ ratings, almost to a man, in charge of a trained gunner, they had a cold, dirty and unglamorous job, strangely neglected and forgotten—strangely, because so terribly dangerous. The four-inch armour encasing them offered about as much protection as a sheet of newspaper to an eight-inch armour-piercing shell or a torpedo . . .
The magazine walls—walls of shells and cartridge cases—were soaking wet, dripping constantly visibly, with icy condensation. Half the crew were leaning or lying against the racks, blue, pinched, shivering with cold, their breath hanging heavily in the chill air: the others were trudging heavily round and round the hoist, feet splashing in pools of water, lurching, stumbling with sheer exhaustion, gloved hands buried in their pockets, drawn, exhausted faces sunk on their chests. Zombies, Nicholls thought wonderingly, just living zombies. Why don’t they lie down?
Gradually, everyone became aware of Vallery’s presence, stopped walking or struggling painfully erect, eyes too tired, minds too spent for either wonder or surprise.
‘As you were, as you were,’ Vallery said quickly. ‘Who’s in charge here?’
‘I am, sir.’ A stocky, overalled figure walked slowly forward, halted in front of Vallery.
‘Ah, yes. Gardiner, isn’t it?’ He gestured to the men circling the hoist. ‘What in the world is all this for, Gardiner?’
‘Ice,’ said Gardiner succinctly. ‘We have to keep the water moving or it’ll freeze in a couple of minutes. We can’t have ice on the magazine floor, sir.’
‘No, no, of course not! But—but the pumps, the draincocks?’
‘Solid!’
‘But surely—this doesn’t go on all the time?’
‘In flat weather—all the time, sir.’
‘Good God!’ Vallery shook his head incredulously, splashed his way to the centre of the group, where a slight, boyish figure was coughing cruelly into a corner of an enormous green and white muffler. Vallery placed a concerned arm across the shaking shoulders.
‘Are you all right, boy?’
‘Yes, sir. ‘Course, Ah am!’ He lifted a thin white face racked with pain. ‘Ah’m fine,’ he said indignantly.
‘What’s your name?’
‘McQuater, sir.’
‘And what’s your job, McQuater?’
‘Assistant cook, sir.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen, sir.’ Merciful heavens, Vallery thought, this isn’t a cruiser I’m running—it’s a nursery!
‘From Glasgow, eh?’ He smiled.
‘Yes, sir.’ Defensively.
‘I see.’ He looked down at the deck, at McQuater’s boots half-covered in water. ‘Why aren’t you wearing your sea-boots?’ he asked abruptly.
‘We don’t get issued with them, sir.’
‘But your feet, man! They must be soaking!’
‘Ah don’t know, sir. Ah think so. Anyway,’ McQuater said simply, ‘it doesna matter. Ah canna feel them.’
Vallery winced. Nicholls, looking at the Captain, wondered if he realized the distressing, pathetic picture he himself presented with his sunken, bloodless face, red, inflamed eyes, his mouth and nose daubed with crimson, the inevitable dark and sodden hand-towel clutched in his left glove. Suddenly unaccountably, Nicholls felt ashamed of himself: that thought, he knew, could never occur to this man.
Vallery smiled down at McQuater.
‘Tell me son, honestly—are you tired?’
‘Ah am that—Ah mean, aye, aye, sir.’
‘Me too,’ Vallery confessed. ‘But—you can carry on a bit longer?’
He felt the frail shoulders straighten under his arm.
‘’Course Ah can, sir!’ The tone was injured, almost truculent.’ ’Course Ah can!’
Vallery’s gaze travelled slowly over the group, his dark eyes glowing as he heard a murmured chorus of assent. He made to speak, broke off in a harsh coughing and bent his head. He looked up again, his eyes wandering once more over the circle of now-anxious faces, then turned abruptly away.
‘We won’t forget you,’ he murmured indistinctly. ‘I promise you, we won’t forget you.’ He splashed quickly away, out of the pool of water, out of the pool of light, into the darkness at the foot of the ladder.
Ten minutes later, they emerged from ‘Y’ turret. The night sky was cloudless now, brilliant with diamantine stars, little chips of frozen fire in the dark velvet of that fathomless floor. The cold was intense. Captain Vallery shivered involuntarily as the turret door slammed behind them.
‘Hartley?’
‘Sir?’
‘I smelt rum in there!’
‘Yes, sir. So did I.’ The Chief was cheerful, unperturbed. ‘Proper stinking with it. Don’t worry about it though, sir. Half the men in the ship bottle their rum ration, keep it for action stations.’
‘Completely forbidden in regulations, Chief. You know that as well as I do!’
‘I know. But there’s no harm, sir. Warms ’em up—and if it gives them Dutch courage, all the better. Remember that night the for’ard pom-pom got two Stukas?’
‘Of course.’
‘Canned to the wide. Never have done it otherwise . . . And now, sir, they need it.’
‘Suppose you’re right, Chief. They do and I don’t blame them.’ He chuckled. ‘And don’t worry about my knowing—I’ve always known. But it smelled like a saloon bar in there . . . ’
They climbed up to ‘X’ turret—the marine turret—then down to the magazine. Wherever he went, as in ‘Y’ magazine, Vallery left the men the better for his coming. In personal contact, he had some strange indefinable power that lifted men above themselves, that brought out in them something they had never known to exist. To see dull apathy and hopelessness slowly give way to resolution, albeit a kind of numbed and desperate resolve, was to see something that baffled the understanding. Physically and mentally, Nicholls knew, these men had long since passed the point of no return.
Vaguely, he tried to figure it out, to study the approach and technique. But the approach varied every time, he saw, was no more than a natural reaction to different sets of circumstances as they presented themselves, a reaction utterly lacking in calculation or finesse. There was no technique. Was pity, then, the activating force, pity for the heart-breaking gallantry of a man so clearly dying? Or was it shame—if he can do it, if he can still drive that wasted mockery of a body, if he can kill himself just to come to see if we’re all right—if he can do that and smile—then, by God, we can stick it out, too? That’s it, Nicholls said to himself, that’s what it is, pity and shame, and he hated himself for thinking it, and not because of the thought, but because he knew he lied . . . He was too tired to think anyway. His mind was woolly, fuzzy round the edges, his thoughts disjointed, uncontrolled. Like everyone else’s. Even Andy Carpenter, the last man you would suspect of it—he felt that way, too, and admitted it . . . He wondered what the Kapok Kid would have to say to this . . . The Kid was probably wandering too, but wandering in his own way, back as always on the banks of the Thames. He wondered what the
girl in Henley was like. Her name started with ‘J’—Joan, Jean—he didn’t know: the Kapok Kid had a big golden ‘J’ on the right breast of his kapok suit—she had put it there. But what was she like? Blonde and gay, like the Kid himself? Or dark and kind and gentle, like St Francis of Assisi? St Francis of Assisi? Why in the world did he—ah, yes, old Socrates had been talking about him. Wasn’t he the man of whom Axel Munthe . . .
‘Nicholls! Are you all right?’ Vallery’s voice was sharp with anxiety.
‘Yes, of course, sir.’ Nicholls shook his head, as if to clear it. ‘Just gathering wool. Where to now, sir?’
‘Engineers’ Flat, Damage Control parties, Switchboard, Number 3 Low Power room—no, of course, that’s gone—Noyes was killed there, wasn’t he? . . . Hartley, I’d appreciate it if you’d let my feet touch the deck occasionally . . . ’
All these places they visited in turn and a dozen others besides— not even the remotest corner, the most impossible of access, did Vallery pass by, if he knew a man was there, closed up to his action station.
They came at last to the engine and boiler-rooms, to the gulping pressure changes on unaccustomed eardrums as they went through the airlocks, to the antithetically breath-taking blast of heat as they passed inside. In ‘A’ boiler-room, Nicholls insisted on Vallery’s resting for some minutes. He was grey with pain and weakness, his breathing very distressed. Nicholls noticed Hartley talking in a corner, was dimly aware of someone leaving the boiler-room.
Then his eyes caught sight of a burly, swarthy stoker, with bruised cheeks and the remnants of a gorgeous black eye, stalking across the floor. He carried a canvas chair, set it down with a thump behind Vallery.
‘A seat, sir,’ he growled.
‘Thank you, thank you.’ Vallery lowered himself gratefully, then looked up in surprise. ‘Riley?’ he murmured, then switched his glance to Hendry, the Chief Stoker. ‘Doing his duty with a minimum of grace, eh?’