HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) (6 page)

‘What about the bulkhead, Chief?’

‘It’s about the same, sir, I’ve been in once myself, and I’ve a hand listening all the time outside the next watertight door. There’s nothing to report there.’ He turned, and looked behind him down the length of the ship, and then up at the sky. ‘She seems a lot easier, sir.’

‘Yes, the wind’s going down.’ The phrase was like a blessing.

‘By God, we’ll do it yet!’ Chief, preparing to go down again, slurred his feet along the deck and found it sticky. ‘Bit of a mess here,’ he commented.

‘Blood,’ said the Captain shortly. ‘They haven’t cleaned up yet.’

‘We’re going to be pretty short-handed,’ said Chief, following a natural train of thought. ‘But that’s tomorrow’s worry. Good night, sir.’

‘Good night, Chief. Get some sleep if you can.’

But later he himself found sleep almost impossible to achieve, weary as he was after nearly nine hours on the bridge. He lay in his sleeping bag on the hard floor of the asdic hut, feeling underneath him the trials and tremors of the ship’s painful labouring. It was very cold. Poor
Marlborough
, he thought, losing between waking and sleeping the full control of his thoughts. Poor old
Marlborough
. We shouldn’t do this to you. None of us should: not us, or the Germans, or those poor chaps washing about in the fo’c’sle. No ship deserved an ordeal as evil as this. Only human beings, immeasurably base, deserved such punishment.

Bridger woke him at first light, with a mug of tea and an insinuating ‘Seven o’clock, sir!’ so normal as to make him smile. But the smile was not much more than a momentary flicker. Under him he felt the ship very slowly rolling to and fro, without will and without protest: she seemed more a part of the sea itself than a separate burden on it. The weather must have moderated a lot, but
Marlborough
might be deeper in the water as well.

Cold and stiff, he lay for a few minutes before getting up, collecting his thoughts and remembering what was waiting for him outside the asdic hut. It would be bitterly cold, possibly wet as well: the ship would seem deformed and ugly, the damage meeting his eyes at every turn: the blood on the bridge would be dried black. All over the upper deck there would be men, grey-faced and shivering, waking to face the day: not cheerful and noisy as they usually were, but dully astonished that the ship was still afloat and that they had survived so far; unwilling, even, to meet each other’s eye, in the embarrassment of fear and disbelief of the future. And there were those other men down in the fo’c’sle, who would not wake. There were the burials to see to. There was the bulkhead.

He got up.

The bulkhead first, with the Chief and Adams. The rating outside the watertight door said: ‘Haven’t heard anything, sir,’ in a non-committal way, as if he did not really believe that they were not all wasting their time. He was a young stoker: sixteen men in his mess had been caught forward: no hope of any sort had yet been communicated to him. Noting this, the Captain thought: I’ll have to talk to them, some time this morning … Inside, things were as before: there was a little more water, and the atmosphere was now thick and sour: but nothing had shifted, and with the decrease in the ship’s rolling the bulkhead itself was rigid, without sound or movement.

‘I think it’s even improved a bit, sir,’ said the Chief. He ran his hand down the central seam, which before had been leaking: his fingers now came away dry. ‘This seems to have worked itself watertight again. If we could alter the trim a bit, so that even part of this space is above the waterline, we might be able to save it.’

‘That’s going to be today’s job,’ said the Captain, ‘moving everything we can aft, so as to bring her head up a bit. I’ll go into details when we get outside.’

On his way back he visited the boiler and engine rooms. The boiler room was deserted, and already cooling fast: here again the forward bulkhead was a tangle of shores and joists, braced against the angle-pieces that joined the frames.

‘What about this one?’ he asked.

‘Doesn’t seem to be any strain on it, sir,’ Chief answered. ‘I think the space next to it – that’s the drying room and the small bosun’s store – must still be watertight.’

The Captain nodded without saying anything. He was beginning to feel immensely and unreasonably cheerful, but to communicate that feeling to anyone else seemed frivolous in the extreme. There was so little to go on: it might all be a product of what he felt about the ship herself, and unfit to be shared with anyone.

The engine room was very much alive. Two men – the Chief ERA and a young telegraphist – were working on the main switchboard: the telegraphist, lying flat on his back behind it, was pulling through a length of thick insulated cable and connecting it up. Two more hands were busy on one of the main steam valves. There was an air of purpose here, of men who knew clearly what the next job was to be, and how to set about it.

The Chief ERA, an old pensioner with a smooth bald head in odd contrast with the craggy wrinkles of his face, smiled when he saw the Captain. They came from the same Kentish village, and the Chief ERA’s appointment to
Marlborough
had been the biggest wangle the Captain had ever undertaken. But it had been justified a score of times in the last two years, and obviously it was in the process of being justified again now.

‘Well, Chief?’

‘Going on all right, sir. It won’t be much to look at, but I reckon it’ll serve.’

‘That’s all we want.’ The Captain turned to the engineer officer. ‘Any other troubles down here?’

‘I’m a bit worried about the port engine, sir. That torpedo was a big shock. It may have knocked the shaft out.’

‘It doesn’t matter if we only have one screw. We couldn’t go more than a few knots anyway, with that bulkhead.’

‘That’s what I thought, sir.’

The Chief ERA, presuming on their peacetime friendship in a way which the Captain had anticipated, and did not mind, said: ‘Do you think we’ll be able to steam, sir?’

Everyone in the engine room stopped work to listen to the answer. The Captain hesitated a moment, and then said: ‘If the weather stays like it is now, and we can correct the trim a bit, I think we ought to make a start.’

‘How far to go, sir?’

‘About five hundred miles.’ That was as much as he wanted to talk about it and he nodded and turned to go. With his foot on the ladder he said: ‘I expect we’ll be able to count every one of them.’

The laughter as he began to climb was a tonic for himself as well. It hadn’t been a very good joke, but it was the first one for a long time.

The sick bay next. The doctor was asleep in an armchair when he came in, his young sensitive face turned away from the light, his hands splayed out on the arms of the chair as if each individual finger were resting after an exhaustive effort. The sick-berth attendant was bending over one of the lower cots, where a bandaged figure lay with closed, deeply circled eyes. There were eight men altogether: after the night’s turmoil the room was surprisingly tidy, save for a pile of bloodstained swabs and dressings which had overflowed from the wastebasket. The tidiness and the sharp aseptic smell were reassuring.

He put his hand out, and touched the sleeping figure.

‘Good morning, Doctor.’

Soundlessly the doctor woke, opened his eyes, and sat up. Even this movement seemed part of some controlled competent routine.

‘Hallo, sir.’

‘Busy night?’

‘Very, sir. All right, though.’

‘Just what you were waiting for?’ The Captain smiled.

The doctor looked at the Captain, and smiled back, and said: ‘I haven’t felt so well for years.’

It must be odd to feel like that, about what must have been the goriest night of his life. But it was natural, if you were proud and confident of your professional skill, and for three years you felt you had been utterly wasted. This young man, who had barely been qualified when war broke out, must now feel, with justice, that the initials after his name had at last come to life.

The Captain looked round the sick bay. ‘Where are the rest of them? Adams said you had sixteen.’

‘Four died.’ It was extraordinary how the simplicity of phrase and tone still conveyed an assurance that the lives had been fought for, and only surrendered in the last extremity. ‘I’ve spread the rest over the officers’ cabins, where they’ll be more comfortable. There’s one in yours, sir.’

‘That’s all right … How’s the midshipman?’

‘Bad. In fact going, I’m afraid, sir. That chest wound was too deep, and he lost too much blood. Do you want to take a look at him? He’s in his own cabin.’

‘Is he conscious?’

The doctor shook his head. ‘No. I’ve had to dope him pretty thoroughly. That’s the trouble: if I go on doping him he’ll die of it, and if I let him wake up there’s enough shock and pain to kill him almost immediately. That’s why it’s no good.’ Again the simple tone seemed able to imply an infinity of skill and care, which had proved unavailing.

‘I won’t bother, then.’ The phrase sounded callous, but he did not bother to qualify it: he was suddenly impatient to leave this antiseptic corner, and get to work on the ship. She, at least, was still among the living: no dope, no ordered deathbed for her. He had skill and care of his own sort ...

As he came out on the quarter-deck he checked his step, for there, arranged in neat rows, which somehow seemed a caricature of the whole idea of burial, were the sewn-up bodies which he must later commit to the deep. Nineteen of them: three officers and sixteen men. There had not been enough ensigns to cover them all, he noted: here and there three of them shared one flag, crowding under it in a pathetic last-minute symbolism … Adams, who had been waiting for him, straightened up as he emerged. He had only been bending down to adjust one of the formal canvas packages; but the Captain had a sudden ghoulish fancy that Adams had been giving it the traditional ‘last stitch’ – the needle and thread through the nose, by which the sailmaker used to satisfy himself that the body he was sewing up was beyond doubt that of a dead man. The Captain looked away, and up at the sky. It was full light now: a grey cold day, the veiled sun shedding the thinnest watery gleam, the waste of water round them reduced to a long flat swell. The passing of the storm, or some lull in its centre had brought a windless day for their respite.

Chief, who had waited behind in the engine room, now joined them, and together the three men crossed the upper deck towards the fo’c’sle. The Captain led the party, picking his way past the bloody ruin of ‘X’ gun, and the men who were at work cleaning up. He was conscious of them looking at him; conscious, for example, that Leading Seaman Tapper, not an outstanding personality, had this morning assumed a new, almost heroic bearing. As the only leading seaman left alive, he was already rising to the challenge … With the coming of daylight all these men had won back what the stoker, working and waiting below decks, still lacked: hope in the future, confidence in themselves and the ship. ‘The ship is your best lifebelt’ – a phrase in his Standing Orders for damage control returned to him. By God, that was still true; and all the men up here trusted and believed it.

Presently they were standing on the fo’c’sle by ‘A’ gun. From here the deck, buckled and distorted, led steeply downwards, till the bullring in the bows was not more than three or four feet from the water: and even allowing for this downward curve of the deck
Marlborough
must be drawing about twenty-eight feet instead of her normal sixteen. Obviously, the first essential was to correct this if possible: not only to ease the pressure forward when they started moving, but also to bring the screws fully underwater again.

The Captain stepped forward carefully till he was standing directly over the explosion area: there he leant over the rail, staring down into the water a few feet away. From somewhere below an oily scum oozed out, trailing aft and away like some disgusting suppuration; but of the wound itself nothing could be seen. Unprofessionally, he was glad of that: it was sufficiently distressing to note the broad outlines of
Marlborough
’s plight on this cold, grey morning, without being confronted with the gross details. He realized suddenly that this must now be treated as a technical problem, and nothing more, and after a quick look round the rest of the fo’c’sle he turned back to the Chief and Adams.

‘I’ve got three ideas,’ he said briskly. ‘You may have some more … For a start, we’ll get rid of as much as possible of this’ – he tapped one of the lowered barrels of ‘A’ gun, askew on its drooping platform. ‘It wouldn’t be safe to fire them anyway, so we can ditch the barrels – and even the mounting itself if we can lift it clear.’

‘The derrick can deal with the barrels, sir,’ said Adams. ‘I don’t know about the rest.’

‘We’ll see … Then there are the anchors. We can either let them run out altogether, with their cables, or else let the anchors go by themselves, and manhandle the cable aft as a counterweight. What do you think, Chief?’

‘The second idea is the best one, sir. But without steam on the windlass we can’t get the cable out of the locker.’

‘We’ll have to do that by hand.’ The Captain turned to Adams again. ‘We’ve still got one of those weapons, haven’t we? – the ratchet-and-pawl lever?’

‘Yes, sir. It’s a long job though.’