The Cruel Sea (1951) (34 page)

Lockhart smiled. ‘Sure thing. But you won’t be doing any more swimming on this trip.’

The man looked straight at him, and jerked his head. ‘You’re dead right there. If anything happens to this lot, we’re snug in our coffin already.’

The afternoon that they rejoined the convoy, another signal came from the Admiralty. ‘There are now eleven U-boats in your area,’ it ran. ‘Destroyers
Lancelot
and
Liberal
will join escort at approximately 1800.’

‘Two L Class destroyers – that’s grand!’ said Baker enthusiastically, down in the wardroom at teatime. ‘They’re terrific ships. Brand new, too.’

‘They’d better be very terrific indeed,’ said Morell, who was reading a copy of the signal. ‘Eleven U-boats works out at one to each ship left in the convoy. I very much doubt,’ he added suavely, ‘whether Their Lordships really intended such a nice balance of forces.’

Lockhart smiled at him. ‘Getting rattled, John?’

Morell considered for a moment: ‘I must admit,’ he said finally, ‘that this is
not
a reassuring occasion. Whatever we do, those damned U-boats get inside the screen every time. We’ve lost almost half our ships, and we’re still two days away from Gibraltar.’ He paused: ‘It’s odd to think that even if nothing else happens, this is probably the worst convoy in the history of sea warfare.’

‘Something to tell your grandchildren.’

‘Yes, indeed. In fact, if you guarantee me grandchildren I shall recover my spirits very quickly.’

‘How can he guarantee that you have grandchildren?’ asked Baker who was, aboard
Compass Rose
at least, a dull conversationalist.

‘If they’re as stupid as you,’ said Morell, with a flash of impatience so rare that he must in truth have been nervous, ‘I hope I don’t have any.’

They were all feeling the same, thought Lockhart in the offended silence that followed: irritable, on edge, inclined to intolerance with each other. The tiredness and strain that had mounted during the past week was reaching an almost unbearable pitch. There could be no cure for it save gaining harbour with the remnants of their convoy, and that was still two days ahead. He suddenly wanted, more than anything else in the world, to be at peace and in safety. Like the rest of them, like all the escorts and all the merchant ships, he had very nearly had enough.

The two destroyers joined punctually at six o’clock, coming up from the south-east to meet the convoy, advancing swiftly towards it, each with an enormous creaming bow wave. They both exhibited, to a special degree, that dramatic quality which was the pride of all destroyers: they were lean, fast, enormously powerful – nearer to light cruisers than destroyers – and clearly worth about three of any normal escort. They made a cheerful addition to the ships in company, thrashing about valiantly at the slightest scare or none at all, darting round and through the convoy at a full thirty-five knots, signalling in three directions at once, and refusing to stay still in any one position for more than five minutes at a time.

‘Proper show off,’ said Leading-Signalman Wells, watching them through his glasses as they sped past on some purely inventive errand. But there was a touch of envy in his voice as he added: ‘All very well for them to dash about like a couple of brand-new tarts – they haven’t had the last week along o’ this lot.’

At dusk the two newcomers settled down, one ahead and one astern of the convoy, completing the atmosphere of last-minute rescue which had accompanied their arrival. They were doubtless well aware of the effect they had produced. But theatrical or not, their presence did seem to make a difference: though there was an attack that night, all that the circling pack of U-boats could account for was one ship, the smallest ship in the convoy. She was hit astern, and she went down slowly: out of her whole company the only casualty was a single Lascar seaman who jumped (as he thought) into the sea with a wild cry and landed head first in one of the lifeboats. In the midst of the wholesale slaughter, this comedy exit had just the right touch of fantasy about it to make it seem really funny . . . But even so, this ship was the eleventh to be lost, out of the original twenty-one: it put them over the halfway mark, establishing a new and atrocious record in U-boat successes. And the next night, the eighth and last of the battle, when they were within three hundred miles of Gibraltar, made up for any apparent slackening in the rate of destruction.

That last night cost three more ships, and one of them – yet another loaded tanker to be torpedoed and set on fire – was the special concern of
Compass Rose.
It was she who was nearest when the ship was struck, and she circled round as the oil, cascading and spouting from the tanker’s open side, took fire and spread over the surface of the water like a flaming carpet in a pitch-black room. Silhouetted against this roaring backcloth which soon rose to fifty feet in the air,
Compass Rose
must have been visible for miles around: even in swift movement she made a perfect target, and Ericson, trying to decide whether to stop and pick up survivors, or whether the risk would not be justified, could visualise clearly what they would look like when stationary against this wall of flame.
Compass Rose,
with her crew and her painfully collected shipload of survivors, would be a sitting mark from ten miles away . . . But they had been detailed as rescue ship: there were men in the water, there were boats from the tanker already lowered and pulling away from the tower of flame: there was a job to be done, a work of mercy, if the risk were acceptable – if it was worth hazarding two hundred lives in order to gain fifty more, if prudence could be stretched to include humanity.

It was Ericson’s decision alone. It was a captain’s moment, a pure test of nerve: it was, once again, the reality that lay behind the saluting and the graded discipline and the two-and-a-half stripes on the sleeve. While Ericson, silent on the bridge, considered the chances, there was not a man in the ship who would have changed places with him.

The order, when it came, was swift and decisive.

‘Stop engines!’

‘Stop engines, sir . . . Engines stopped, wheel amidships, sir.’

‘Number One!’

‘Sir?’ said Lockhart.

‘Stand by to get those survivors inboard. We won’t lower a boat – they’ll have to swim or row towards us. God knows they can see us easily enough. Use a megaphone to hurry them up.’

‘Aye, aye, sir.’

As Lockhart turned to leave the bridge, the Captain added, almost conversationally: ‘We don’t want to waste any time, Number One.’

All over the ship a prickling silence fell, as
Compass Rose
slowly came to a stop and waited, rolling gently, lit by the glare from the fire. From the bridge, every detail of the upper deck could be picked out: there was no flickering in this huge illumination, simply a steady glow which threw a black shadow on the sea behind them, which showed them naked to the enemy, which endowed the white faces turned towards it with a photographic brilliance. Waiting aft among his depth-charge crews, while the flames roared and three boats crept towards them, and faint shouting and bobbing lights here and there on the water indicated a valiant swimmer making for safety, Ferraby was conscious only of a terror-stricken impatience. Oh God, oh God, oh God, he thought, almost aloud: let them give this up, let them get moving again . . . Twenty feet away from him in the port waist, Lockhart was coolly directing the preliminaries to the work of rescue – rigging a sling for the wounded men, securing the scrambling nets that hung over the side, by which men in the water could pull themselves up.

Ferraby watched him, not with admiration or envy but with a futile hatred. Damn you, he thought, once more almost saying the words out loud: how can you be like that, why don’t you feel like me – or if you do, why don’t you show it? He turned away from the brisk figures and the glowing heat of the flames, his eyes traversing the arch of black sky overhead, a sky blotched and streaked by smoke and whirling sparks; he looked behind him, at the outer darkness which the fire could not pierce, the place where the submarines must be lying and watching them. No submarine within fifty miles could miss this beacon, no submarine within five could resist chancing a torpedo, no submarine within two could fail to hit the silhouetted target, the stationary prey. It was wicked to stop like this, just for a lot of damned merchant navy toughs . . .

A boat drew alongside, bumping and scraping: Lockhart called out: ‘Hook on forrard!’ There were sounds of scrambling: an anonymous voice, foreign, slightly breathless, said: ‘God bless you for stopping!’ The work of collection began.

It did not take long, save in their own minds; but coming towards the end of the long continued ordeal of the voyage, when there was no man in the ship who was not near to exhaustion, those minutes spent motionless in the limelight had a creeping and paralytic tension. It seemed impossible for them to take such a reckless chance, and not be punished for it; there was, in the war at sea, a certain limiting factor to bravery, and beyond that, fate stood waiting with a ferocious rebuke. ‘If we don’t buy it this time,’ said Wainwright, the torpedoman, standing by his depth-charges and staring at the flames, ‘Jerry doesn’t
deserve
to win the war.’ It did seem, indeed, that if
Sorrel
could be hit when she was zigzagging at fourteen knots, there wouldn’t be much trouble with
Compass Rose;
and as the minutes passed, while they collected three boatloads of survivors and a handful of swimmers, and the huge circle of fire gave its steady illumination, they seemed to be getting deeper and deeper into a situation from which they would never be able to retreat. The men who had work to do were lucky: the men who simply waited, like Ericson on the bridge or the stokers below the waterline, knew, in those few agonising minutes, the meaning of fear.

It never happened: that was the miracle of that night. Perhaps some U-boat fired and missed, perhaps those within range, content with their success, had submerged for safety’s sake and broken off the attack: at any rate,
Compass Rose
was allowed her extraordinary hazard, without having to settle the bill. When there were no more men to pick up, she got under way again: the returning pulse of her engine, heard and felt throughout the ship, came like some incredible last-minute respite, astonishing them all. But the pulse strengthened and quickened, in triumphant chorus, and she drew away from the flames and the smell of oil with her extra load of survivors snatched from the very mouth of danger, and her flaunting gesture unchallenged. They had taken the chance, and it had come off; mixed with the exhilaration of that triumph was a sober thankfulness for deliverance, a certain humility. Perhaps it would not do to think too much about it: perhaps it was better to bury the moment as quickly as possible, and forget it, and not take that chance again.

Another ship, on the opposite wing, went down at four o’clock, just before dawn; and then, as daylight strengthened and the rags of the convoy drew together again, they witnessed the last cruel item of the voyage.

Lagging behind with some engine defect, a third ship was hit, and began to settle down on her way to the bottom. She sank slowly, but owing to bad organisation, or the villainous list which the torpedoing gave her, no boats got away; for her crew, it was a time for swimming, for jumping into the water, and striking out away from the fatal downward suction, and trusting to luck.
Compass Rose,
dropping back to come to her aid, circled round as the ship began to disappear; and then, as she dipped below the level of the sea and the swirling ripples began to spread outwards from a central point which was no longer there, Ericson turned his ship’s bows towards the centre of disaster, and the bobbing heads which dotted the surface of the water. But it was not to be a straightforward rescue; for just as he was opening his mouth to give the order for lowering a boat, the asdic set picked up a contact, an undersea echo so crisp and well-defined that it could only be a U-boat.

Lockhart, at his Action Station in the asdic compartment, felt his heart miss a beat as he heard that echo. At last . . . He called through the open window: ‘Echo bearing two-two-five – moving left!’ and bent over the asdic set in acute concentration. Ericson increased the revolutions again, and turned away from the indicated bearing, meaning to increase the range: if they were to drop depth-charges, they would need a longer run-in to get up speed. In his turn, he called out: ‘What’s it look like, Number One?’ and Lockhart, hearing the harsh pinging noise and watching the mark on the recording set, said: ‘Submarine, sir – can’t be anything else.’ He continued to call out the bearing and the range of the contact: Ericson prepared to take the ship in, at attacking speed, and to drop a pattern of depth-charges on the way; and then, as
Compass Rose
turned inwards towards the target, gathering speed for the onslaught, they all noticed something which had escaped their attention before. The place where the U-boat lay, the point where they must drop their charges, was alive with swimming survivors.

The Captain drew in his breath sharply at the sight. There were about forty men in the water, concentrated in a small space: if he went ahead with the attack he must, for certain, kill them all. He knew well enough, as did everyone on board, the effect of depth-charges exploding underwater – the splitting crash which made the sea jump and boil and spout skywards, the aftermath of torn seaweed and dead fish which always littered the surface after the explosion. Now there were men instead of fish and seaweed, men swimming towards him in confidence and hope . . . And yet the U-boat was there, one of the pack which had been harassing and bleeding them for days on end, the destroying menace which
must
have priority, because of what it might do to other ships and other convoys in the future: he could hear the echo on the relay loudspeaker, he acknowledged Lockhart’s developed judgement where the asdic set was concerned. As the seconds sped by, and the range closed, he fought against his doubts, and against the softening instinct of mercy: the book said: ‘Attack at all costs’, and this was a page out of the book, and the men swimming in the water did not matter at all, when it was a question of bringing one of the killers to account.