“Thank you, Chief. Very well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Ahead of him the convoy was practically in good order. He could go ahead up a lane in safety. “I’ll take the conn, Mr Carling.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Keeling drew away from the ships astern and entered the lane. Ships all round him. Battered ships and nearly new ships, with every colour of paintwork and every style of build. There had been thirty-seven ships when he had taken over escort duty. Now there were thirty; seven had been lost. Heavy losses, no doubt, but convoys had known even heavier than that. He had brought thirty ships through. Out of his escort force he had lost a destroyer; a very grave loss indeed. But he had sunk two probables and a possible. Thou art weighed in the balance--in the balance--he came to himself with a start. While having the conn, while actually in charge of the ship, he had gone to sleep on his feet, here in a convoy lane with danger all round. While I was musing the fire burned. He had never before known such fatigue.
Coffee might help. It was only then that he remembered the pot that had been brought him. It was nearly cold, but he drank it, draining the second cup as they emerged ahead of the convoy.
“Mr Carling! Take the conn.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Take station three miles ahead of the commodore.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Forward look-out reports plane dead ahead, sir.”
It was the PBY back again. Krause watched it alter course patrolling in long leisurely zig-zags far out on either side of the convoy’s course. Oh, that I had wings like a dove. Visibility was excellent, the sea moderate.
“Forward look-out reports object dead ahead, sir.”
Krause raised his binoculars. There was nothing in view. Nothing? Nothing? The tiniest speck on the distant horizon.
“Forward look-out reports object is a ship.”
This was the moment. Wink-wink. Wink-wink-wink. Already a light was flashing there. Overhead he heard the clank of Keeling’s lamp answering. Wink-wink-wink. He could not keep his heart from beating fast. He could not keep his hands from trembling a little.
“Well, we’ve made it, sir,” said Cole beside him.
“We have,” answered Krause. He was aware of a dryness of the throat that affected his voice.
The messenger came running.
SNO TO COMESCORT. WELCOME. KINDLY MAKE VERBAL REPORT TO DIAMOND.
There followed a wave frequency. Krause handed the message pad to Cole and walked over to the T.B.S. It was not easy to walk so far.
“George to Diamond. Do you hear me?”
“Diamond to George. I hear you.” Another of those English voices. “Afraid you’ve had a rough time.”
“Not so rough, sir. We’ve lost seven ships out of the convoy and two slightly damaged.” “Only seven?”
“Yes, sir. King’s Langley, Henrietta - - “
“It doesn’t matter about the names at present.” It was a relief to hear that; it was only with an effort that he could recollect them. “We’ve lost Eagle, too, sir.” “Eagle? That’s bad luck.”
“Yes, sir. She was hit in the engine-room last night.” Last night? It was almost impossible to believe it was only then. Krause steadied his Keeling mind. “And she sank at midnight. Everything was done to save her.”
“I don’t doubt it, Captain. And what is the condition of your command?”
“In this ship we have fuel for fifty-six hours’ steaming at economical speed, sir. We had one slight hit from a four-inch on our main-deck aft with unimportant damage. Three killed and two wounded, sir.”
“A four-inch?”
“A sub fought it out on the surface, sir. We got him. I think we got two more. The conduct of the other ships of the escort was excellent, sir.”
“Three subs.? Well done! I don’t expect you’ve a depth-charge left.”
“We have two, sir.”
“M’m.” It was a vague meditative remark over the T.B.S. “And your other two ships? What are their code names?”
“Harry and Dicky, sir.”
“I’ll ask them to report to me direct.”
Krause heard them reporting. Dodge with her gun out of action, with no depth-charges, serious damage forward, adequately patched, and fuel for thirty-seven hours.
James with three depth-charges and fuel for thirty-one hours.
“It’ll be a tight squeeze for you to make it to ‘Derry,” commented Diamond, who must be Captain the Earl of Banff.
“Might just do it, sir,” said James. “Not too sure,” said Diamond.
Krause heard him say it while a wave of sleep broke over him again; like the waves of a rising tide the need for sleep was reaching higher and higher and submerging his faculties longer on each occasion. He steadied himself. The new force was hull up over the horizon now, four ships in rigid column, Diamond’s destroyer in the lead, three escort vessels astern of her.
“I’m going to detach you three,” said Diamond. “You can make the best of your way to ‘Derry.”
“Sir,” said Krause, goading his mind to think of the right words. “This is George. Submit I stay with the convoy. I’ve fuel to spare.”
“No, I’m afraid not,” said Diamond. “I want you to see these two boys get home all right. They’re not fit to be out by themselves.”
It was said lightly, but there was a positive quality about the words; Krause felt it in the same way as, when his blade slipped along an opponent’s foil, his wrist would feel the transition from foible to forte.
“Aye aye, sir,” he said.
“Form on the left flank of the convoy,” said Diamond. “I’ll come in on the right.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“You’ve done the hell of a good job, Captain,” said Diamond. “We were all worried about you.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Krause.
“Good-bye and good luck,” said Diamond.
“Thank you, sir,” said Krause. “Good-bye. George to Harry. George to Dicky. Form column astern of me. Speed thirteen knots. Course zero-eight-seven.”
Along with his fatigue the blackest depression was settling on him. Something was over, finished. Those last heartening words of Diamond’s might be very gratifying. It was obvious that by bringing his charge within touch of England, and handing it over to the relieving force, he had completed the duty entrusted to him. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course. Could he say that? Perhaps. Yet this unutterable sadness possessed him, even while he mechanically gave the orders that carried him away from the ships he had guarded so long. He looked back at them. There was a long, long war ahead of him, he knew. He would fight, he would know agony and danger, but even if he lived he would be unlikely ever to set eyes on those ships again. He had a last duty to fulfil, a final step to take for the sake of international accord.
“Messenger! Signal-pad and pencil.” He hesitated over the first word. But he would use it once more during these last seconds, COMESCORT TO COMCONVOY. GOOD-BYE. MOST GRATEFUL THANKS FOR YOUR SPLENDID CO-OPERATION. GOD SPEED AND GOOD LUCK.
“Signal bridge,” he said. “Come right to course zero-eight-seven, Mr Carling.”
He heard the quartermaster repeat Carling’s order.
“Right rudder to course zero-eight-seven, sir. Steady on course zero-eight-seven.”
Overhead the shutters of the lamp were clattering as his message went out. James and Dodge were wheeling round to take station astern of him. The relieving force was moving into screening positions, the White Ensign flying. Terrible as an army with banners. He was swaying again on his feet. The Canadian Ensign and the White Ensign were following along behind the Stars and Stripes, but there was no Polish Ensign. The Commodore was winking back at him now. He fought back his fatigue again and waited.
The messenger brought the signal pad. COMCONVOY TO COMESCORT. IT IS FOR US TO THANK YOU FOR YOUR MAGNIFICENT WORK. DEEPEST GRATITUDE FROM US ALL. HEARTIEST GOOD WISHES.
That
was all for now. It was finished. “Very well,” he said to the messenger. “Mr Carling, I’ll be in the sea-cabin if you want me.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Charlie Cole was standing, eyeing him closely, but he had not the strength even to exchange a word with him. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. Blindly he found his way to the cabin.
3
It was swaying round him. He fumbled at the hood which had hung unbuttoned for so long round his face, and a lucky tug dragged it off. He put his hands to the buttons of the sheepskin coat but he did not succeed in unfastening them. He wanted to sleep. He dropped to his knees by the bunk and put his hands before his face.
“Dear Jesus.”
It was the attitude and the words he had used when he was a child, when the beloved mother so shadowy in his memory had told him about the gentle Christ-child, to whom a little boy could take his troubles. The sunshine of his childhood was round him. The sun had always shone when he was little. He had been enfolded in love. When the sweet mother had faded from his life the dear father had loved him enough for two, the father whose desolate mouth could always smile for him. The dear father; the sun had shone when they went fishing together--the sun had brightened their happiness and their excitement as they took the train to Carquinez Straits to fish for bass and on the very few, the memorable occasions when they had taken the ferry across the bay and had places in a boat through the Golden Gate out on to the tossing ocean under the golden sun. He had learned his texts, he had read his Bible for that, because when he knew his texts they could go fishing, and only then; the father was sad when he did not know them.
Krause forgot the sunshine; his knees were uncomfortable on the steel deck and his face was buried in his hands on the bunk. In a second of returning consciousness he squirmed forward and upward on to the bunk, lying breast downward on it with his face turned to one side. He lay spreadeagled, the sprouting beard disfiguring his dirty face, his mouth a little open, as heavily asleep as if he were dead.
He had learned texts at home while he learned mathematics at high school. He had learned about duty and honour, too, the two inseparables. He had learned about charity, about being kind, to think well of everybody but impartially about himself even while the sun shone on him. The sunshine ceased when his father died, leaving him an orphan just graduating from high school when America was entering into a war. The Senator had nominated the much-loved pastor’s orphan son to Annapolis, a nomination strange for those days as it brought no political benefit, strengthened no political alliance, even though the nomination was old-fashioned enough in that no attempt was made to select the most academically suitable candidate.
Three hundred dollars; that was the estate his father left him when he died, when his books and furniture had been sold. It paid Krause’s fare to Annapolis; he could have managed without the balance, living on his pay as midshipman; the class of 1922 graduated in 1921 in the aftermath of war, and Krause graduated with it, half-way up the list, not specially noted for anything except for the above average skill in fencing which he unexpectedly discovered. He had learned something of discipline and subordination and self-control to supplement his childhood training. The Senator’s nomination had directed a considerable potential into a channel that Krause would never have selected for himself. It was one of those freaks of chance that may change the fate of nations. Without his Annapolis training Krause would have grown up into a very similar man, but perhaps without the unrelenting realism that stiffened his humanity. Severe and logical discipline, grained into him, produced an odd effect when reinforcing an undeviating Christian spirit that already knew little of compromise.
The United States Navy was his home and he knew no other for so many years. He had no family, not a relation in the world, and when the chances of service brought him back to the scenes of his childhood the changes that had taken place there cut him off from that past as if with a knife. Oakland was noisy and different, and the Berkeley hills were built over. Carquinez Straits with so many happy memories were now crossed by a vast and terrible bridge of steel jammed with squawking traffic, and soon the ferries on the Bay were replaced by other bridges over which the traffic hurtled with a pitiless single-mindedness so unlike what he remembered. The sun did not shine as warmly; the kindness and the kindliness seemed to have disappeared.
The transition was abrupt; it seemed as if he had never lived here. Some other little boy, about whom he had heard in much detail, had lived here, had trotted to the grocery store holding his mother’s hand, had sat enchanted at the circus, had walked to school round those corners which were now so different. It was not he; he had no past, no roots. What he knew as home was enclosed between four steel bulkheads; what he knew as family life went on in the wardroom and at captain’s mast. Promotion came, to lieutenant junior grade, to lieutenant, to lieutenant-commander, responsibility expanding with his experience. For seventeen years, from eighteen to thirty-five, he lived for nothing but his duty; that was why those hateful words “fitted and retained” hit him so hard, even though he knew that in the service of which he was a part there could only be one commander for every ten lieutenant-commanders.
But that came after he had met Evelyn, which made it all the harder. He had loved her as only a single-minded man can love a woman; the first love of a man of thirty-five, and she was in her early twenties and both brilliant and beautiful--he thought so, which was all that mattered--but for all her brilliance she had failed to appreciate the tragic implications of “fitted and retained.” He could not believe her to be unsympathetic, and still less could he believe her to be stupid, and so the deductions to be made regarding himself cut still more deeply. He had loved her so madly, so frantically. He had known an intoxication, an active happiness, quite unlike any other experience, and it had been so overwhelming that it had stilled completely the doubts he might have felt regarding his unworthiness of so much happiness and his uneasy feeling that no man should be so deficient in self-control. It had been a supreme moment. There was the house in Coronado; during those weeks roots began to sprout; Southern California with its sun-baked beaches and its barren hills began to be “home.”
And then “fitted and retained.” Evelyn’s inability to understand. The unworthy, hideous suspicion that the idol had feet of clay; the suspicion strengthened by Evelyn’s lack of sympathy towards his determination to do his duty--and that determination strengthened, contrariwise, by the service’s opinion of him expressed in “fitted and retained.” The quarrels had begun, the bitter, bitter quarrels, when everything combined to goad him into insane rages, and the rages were followed by black remorse that he could have ever said such things to Evelyn, that he could have said such things to any woman at all, and further that he could have lost his self-control to such a frightening extent, just as he had forgotten his self-control when he was in bed--uneasy thought.
Yet all this did little or nothing to lessen the pain when Evelyn told him about the black-haired lawyer. That was pain such that he did not know could ever be suffered by anyone. The dreadful pain when she told him; unrelieved unhappiness; not even pride could help him. The pain persisted as he went through the necessary formalities, rising to fresh peaks sometimes as he went on with them, when he was confronted afresh by the inability to retrace a single step--not to halt the legal proceedings, but to undo deeds that had been done, and to unsay words that had been said. Then there was the culminating peak of pain on the wedding day, and the wedding night.
There was still duty to be done and life to be lived; and it did not clash with duty to ask BuPers for assignment to the Atlantic seaboard, away from Southern California and the house in Coronado; to tear off the fragile roots that had begun to sprout; to face the rest of life with duty as his sole companion. Chance--the chance that elevated a paranoiac to supreme power in Germany and a military clique to power in Japan--dictated that when it was too late he should receive the coveted promotion to command
er, if it can be called chance. Chance had made him an orphan; chance had brought about the Senator’s nomination. Chance had put him in command of the convoy escort. Chance had made him the man he was and had given that man the duty he had to carry out.
Now he was asleep. He could be called happy now, lying spreadeagled and face downward on his bunk, utterly unconscious.
Glossary
Bedspring: the radar antenna.
BuPers: Bureau of Naval Personnel, which issues orders to assign all U.S. Navy personnel.
Code names: “George”--the destroyer Keeling, under Krause’s command.
“Eagle”--the Polish destroyer Viktor.
“Harry”--the corvette H.M.S. James.
“Dicky”--the Canadian corvette Dodge.
Comconvoy: Commander of the convoy.
Comescort: Commander of ships protecting the convoy.
Condition Two: Readiness condition short of general quarters (see below) with ships’ guns partly manned.
Doppler: Doppler’s Effect, in physics, is the change in frequency of sound-waves emitted by an approaching and, subsequently, a receding object. The phenomenon may be observed in the continuously higher note of the whistle of an approaching express train and the lower note heard after the train has passed the observer. In the application of this principle to submarine detection the term “Up Doppler” can imply the approach of a submerged U-boat to the searching destroyer.
Fitted and retained: An officer so evaluated by a promotion board is retained on active duty in his present grade but is not promoted.
General quarters: Everyone at action stations.
Head, the: Lavatory aboard ship.
Huff-Duff: High-frequency direction-finding apparatus.
O.D., O.O.D.: Officer of the deck.
PBY: U.S. designation of Catalina aircraft.
Pelorus: A device for taking bearings.
Pillenwerfer: U-boat’s defensive device producing large bubbles which, floating to the surface, might deceive sonar (see below). (The Royal Navy called them S.B.T.s--Submarine Bubble Targets.)