The Cruel Sea (1951) (26 page)

For the most part their reaction, even among themselves, was silence, a tacit contempt which could hardly find expression without acknowledging what they thought of their own job. But sometimes this contempt overflowed. There was one occasion aboard
Compass Rose
when, lunch having been delayed for a full hour by a determined stayer who would not take even the broadest hint that the morning gin session was over, they sat down at the lunch table in a state of frustrated impatience. Ericson was ashore, and Lockhart, sitting at the head of the table and helping himself to nearly-congealed steak-and-kidney pie, voiced the general feeling when he said: ‘That man really is the limit. He comes aboard every single day we’re in harbour, and I don’t suppose he does a stroke of work while he’s here.’ He looked at Morell. ‘What did he do for us this morning?’

‘He had eight gins,’ answered Morell evenly. ‘Apart from that, he said our gun was very nice and clean.’

‘Flotilla Gunnery Officer!’ exclaimed Lockhart savagely. ‘I’d like to take that gun and—’

‘Quite so,’ said Morell. ‘But I claim the right to pull the trigger.’

Ferraby, picking at his food at the bottom of the table, broke in. ‘Don’t you remember him at
King Alfred?
’ he asked Lockhart. ‘He was there the same time as us. He said he was going into Coastal Forces.’

Lockhart nodded. ‘I remember his face vaguely.’

‘You’ve had plenty of time to refresh your memory,’ said Morell.

‘What makes me specially angry,’ went on Lockhart, ‘is his general attitude – the way he looks at the war. He comes aboard here, drinks our gin, doesn’t pretend to be the slightest use to us, and then talks about the war and the Navy as if they were both some kind of racket, specially invented to give him a soft job.’

‘That’s probably exactly what the war has meant for him,’ said Morell. ‘There are hundreds of people like that, you know: they don’t see the point of it, they don’t
want
to see the point of it – they get themselves a nice easy job, with a bit of extra pay attached, and the longer the war goes on the happier they are. They’re not fighting, or helping to fight, because they don’t see the thing as a fight at all. It’s simply a little cosmic accident which has given them a smart uniform and the chance to scrounge cigarettes at duty-free prices.’

‘But how many people do see it as a fight?’ Baker did not often join in wardroom discussions, but this time he seemed to have nerved himself to take part. He looked round the table, rather hesitantly. ‘We all feel pretty close to it here, I suppose, but even so—’ he floundered for a moment, ‘even when we’re at sea, it’s difficult to feel that we’re there because we’ve got to win the war and beat the Germans. Most of the time it’s not like being in a war at all – it’s just doing a job because everyone else is doing it, and if it were the French instead of the Germans we’d do it just the same, without asking any questions.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Lockhart after a pause. ‘Sometimes it
is
like being caught in a machine, a machine which someone else is working and controlling.’ He hesitated. The true answer was of course that one should have taken sufficient interest in politics before the war to understand what the war was about, and to feel a personal and overwhelming desire to win it; but for someone like Baker, barely out of his teens and with the narrowest of interests, the criticism would have been harsh. His trouble was not lack of interest, but immaturity. ‘But all the same,’ he went on, ‘we
are
in it, and we
are
fighting; and even if we don’t consciously give it a melodramatic label like “fighting for democracy” or “putting an end to fascist tyranny”, that’s precisely what we’re doing and that’s the whole meaning of it.’

Morell looked at him curiously. ‘You really feel that, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Then, conscious that the others were looking at him with an equal curiosity, Lockhart relaxed, and smiled. ‘Yes, I’m a very patriotic character. It’s the only thing that keeps me going.’

There was a knock at the wardroom door, and the quartermaster came in.

‘Gunnery Officer, sir,’ he said formally.

‘Yes?’ said Morell.

‘The officer who went ashore awhile ago just came back, sir.’

‘Oh God!’ said Lockhart involuntarily.

‘He asked me to give you this, sir.’ The quartermaster held out an envelope. ‘Said he forgot about it.’

‘Thank you,’ said Morell. He took the envelope, and slit it open with a knife. An imposing-looking sheet of foolscap fell out. Morell glanced at it, and his face assumed a ludicrously startled air. ‘Good heavens!’ he muttered. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘What is it?’ asked Lockhart.

‘An amendment to the new Flotilla Gunnery Orders that came out yesterday,’ answered Morell. ‘Our friend has justified his existence at last.’

‘Anything important?’

‘Oh yes. In fact it’s fundamental . . .’ Some element of control in his voice made them all look up. ‘I will read it to you. “Flotilla Gunnery Orders”,’ he read out, his inflection infinitely smooth. ‘”Amendment Number One. Page two, line six. For ‘shit’ read ‘shot’”.’

Among the many ships which they encountered regularly at Liverpool were some manned by men of the Allied navies, men who had either escaped in the ships themselves and made their way to Britain, or had been recruited on their arrival and drafted to a British ship which had been turned over to them. There were, among others, several Dutch minesweepers, a Norwegian corvette, and a French submarine chaser of so dramatic a design that it was difficult to tell, at a first glance, whether she was sinking or not. Such ships, and such men, set a curious problem: the problem of whether to take them seriously, and count on them as honest and effective allies, or to discount them altogether and treat them as an unexpected piece of decoration, acceptable as long as they did not get in the way of more serious preoccupations but hardly to be rated as ships of war and men of action.

The trouble was that they varied: sometimes they were convincing, sometimes not. The ‘foreign’ ships were of course essentially self-contained: isolated in a strange country and cut off from their own defeated peoples, their officers and men had a wary reserve in dealing with strangers which was difficult to break down. One wanted to understand them, to make allowances, to sympathise with their position; but there were so many other things to think about that the curious, the almost tender complication of appreciating an exile’s feelings was too much trouble altogether, unless one were in an exceptionally sympathetic mood . . . Sometimes it did seem worth while, when they could be persuaded to talk freely; for many of them had exciting stories to tell of how they came to be fighting for the Allies, stories so very much more significant than simply signing on the dotted line and stepping into an R.N.V.R. uniform: stories of drama and intrigue when their countries were on the verge of defeat, of escape seen as the only salve for honour, of taking desperate decisions under cover of a passive acceptance, of fighting and eluding, of breathing suddenly the free air of England . . . They all shared this basic excitement, in many and varied forms, and they shared also a sadness, a looking backwards towards what they had left behind; but even in sadness they varied, even here there were degrees of plausibility.

The Dutch and the Norwegians seemed essentially serious and dependable: they too had this backward glance – many of them had heard nothing of their friends and families since their countries had been cruelly overrun in 1940 – but they matched it by a forward look as well, a positive effort to regain and re-establish what they had lost, a fighting-back towards home and peace with honour. Their ships always made a remarkable impression, because the men themselves seemed to have remarkable qualities; by cutting themselves off from their homes they had cleared the ground for a single-minded effort, and this effort, involving the seamanlike virtues of cleanliness, patience, and courage, was reflected in all they did and most of what they said. By chance, it was Ericson who summed up this feeling, after spending an evening in one of the Dutch minesweepers in Gladstone Dock.

‘I like those Dutchmen,’ he said to Lockhart next morning, when they were walking round the upper deck during Stand-Easy. ‘They take the whole thing seriously – everything’s related to war, or if it isn’t they don’t want to hear about it. Even when I said it was a pity Princess Juliana had had three daughters in a row, instead of a son, their captain got terribly red in the face and said: “If you think we don’t fight for daughters, I smash you. Come outside”. Of course,’ added Ericson reasonably, ‘we’d had a few glasses of Schnapps – but he was quite determined about it . . . That’s the kind of man I like to have minesweeping in front of a convoy: not these bloody Frogs, all yearning for home and missing the corners.’

For the Frenchmen were different: that was something which could not be denied. It happened that Lockhart went aboard the French ship on a good many occasions, to take advantage of the food (which was exquisite) and the chance of talking French; and he could not help being aware of a dubious quality, a fugitive relaxation which seemed to infect the whole ship. It was not that their basic allegiance was in question, but that they had been defeated by events and were not wholly convinced that France could now be rescued from her degrading situation. They talked of General de Gaulle with respect, but they seemed always to leave a margin for events to deteriorate: if de Gaulle failed, they were going to shrug it off –
faut pas penser, faut accepter –
and put their money on a different horse, even the one labelled Laval and running in the colours of collaboration . . . They were no longer proud, as the Dutch and the Norwegians were proud: they talked much more of their homes and their families, much less of the job they were doing: they longed openly for home, home on any terms, home by surrender if it could not be regained by victory: at times it seemed that their mainspring was not
la patrie
but
l
’
amour
– a four-letter urge which, by an odd coincidence, seemed to render them impotent . . . It was a pity; Lockhart, who had lived in Paris and admired all things French, found it profoundly sad; but it was a manifestation of the Gallic spirit in adversity which could not be disguised.

In the course of an argument the captain of the French ship, somewhat less than sober, said to Lockhart one night: ‘You don’t really trust us, do you?’ He used the tone of voice, the bitter inflection, which seemed to add: ‘We do not mind, because you are a barbarous nation anyway.’ But the stain was there, and was thus acknowledged; and the charge of Anglo-Saxon insensibility could not wipe it out, nor pretend that it was the product of a simple misunderstanding.

There were, as yet, no Americans officially upon the scene: their two years’ profitable neutrality had not yet been ended by the galvanic shot-in-the-arm of Pearl Harbour. But here and there they were to be met: flyers relaxing at Liverpool between trans-ocean trips, and sailors in the anonymous middle reaches of the Atlantic. For they were now escorting some of the convoys, from American ports to a point where they could be taken over by the British escort: strange-looking destroyers, with long names often beginning with ‘Jacob’ or ‘Ephraim’, would appear from the mist, and spell out Morse messages very slowly and gently, for the dull British to assimilate as best they could. ‘They must think we’re a lot of kids,’ said Leading-Signalman Wells disgustedly one day, when an exceptionally prudent American operator had tried his patience to the limit. ‘It’s like Lesson Number One back in barracks. And what a bloody ignorant way to spell “harbour” . . .’ But the main reaction was a pleasant sense of comradeship: it was good to have some more ships lending a hand, at this time of strain, and the fact that the transatlantic link was being completed in this natural way, Americans handing over to British, gave the latter a grateful and brotherly satisfaction. The Americans were still out of the war; but between Lend-Lease, and this unobtrusive naval effort, they were certainly doing their best round the edges.

Others were not. There are degrees of neutrality, just as there are degrees of unfaithfulness: one may forgive a woman an occasional cold spell, but not her continued and smiling repose in other men’s arms. Even in the grossest betrayal, however, whether of the marriage vow or the contract of humanity, there could be variations of guilt: for example, one could understand, though one could not condone, the point of view of such countries as Spain or the Argentine, which had political affinities with Germany and did not disguise their hatred of England and their hopes of her defeat. They had never been married to democracy in the first place . . . But it was difficult to withhold one’s contempt from a country such as Ireland, whose battle this was and whose chances of freedom and independence in the event of a German victory were nil. The fact that Ireland was standing aside from the conflict at this moment posed, from the naval angle, special problems which affected, sometimes mortally, all sailors engaged in the Atlantic, and earned their particular loathing.

Irish neutrality, on which she placed a generous interpretation, permitted the Germans to maintain in Dublin an espionage centre, a window into Britain, which operated throughout the war and did incalculable harm to the Allied cause. But from the naval point of view there was an even more deadly factor: this was the loss of the naval bases in southern and western Ireland, which had been available to the Royal Navy during the First World War but were now forbidden them. To compute how many men and how many ships this denial was costing, month after month, was hardly possible; but the total was substantial and tragic. From these bases escorts could have sailed farther out into the Atlantic, and provided additional cover for the hard-pressed convoys: from these bases, destroyers and corvettes could have been refuelled quickly, and tugs sent out to ships in distress: from these bases, the Battle of the Atlantic might have been fought on something like equal terms. As it was, the bases were denied: escorts had to go ‘the long way round’ to get to the battlefield, and return to harbour at least two days earlier than would have been necessary: the cost, in men and ships, added months to the struggle, and ran up a score which Irish eyes a-smiling on the day of Allied victory were not going to cancel.