The Cruel Sea (1951) (37 page)

He stood wedged in a corner of the bridge, staring down at the dark oily water which reflected the overcast sky; behind him, Ferraby and Baker, who had the watch, were idly examining the pieces of a Hotchkiss anti-aircraft gun which one of the gunnery ratings was stripping. The asdic set clicked and pinged, monotonously wakeful, the radar aerial circled an invisible horizon: the two lookouts occasionally raised their binoculars and swept through their respective arcs – forward, aft, and forward again.
Compass Rose
was entirely motionless: her ensign hung down without stirring, her vague shadow on the water never moved or altered its outline. She was waiting for two things – for her engine to start again, and for the other thing which might happen to her, without warning and without a chance of defending herself either. Who knew what was below the surface of the dark sea, who knew what malevolent eye might be regarding them, even at this moment? In the nervous and oppressive silence, such thoughts multiplied, with nothing to set against them save the hope of getting going again.

On the quarterdeck aft, some of the hands were fishing. If Ericson had told them that they were fishing in at least a thousand fathoms of water, as was in fact the case, it would probably have made no difference. Fishing – even with breadcrumb bait dangling six thousand feet above the ocean bed – was better than doing nothing, at a moment like this.

Down below in the engine room, Chief E.R.A. Watts had come to a certain decision. It involved considerable delay, and some danger of wrecking everything beyond repair; but there was no choice left to him.

‘We’ll have to saw the pipe up,’ he said to Gracey, at the end of another futile bout of poking and picking at the obstruction. ‘Bit by bit, till we find the stoppage.’

‘What then?’

‘Clear it out, and then braze the whole thing together again.’

‘Take all night if we do that,’ said Gracey sulkily.

‘Take all the war if we don’t,’ retorted Watts. ‘Get a hacksaw, while I tell the Captain.’

Watts was actually up on the bridge when
Viperous
appeared in sight again. She came storming down from the north-westwards at about five o’clock in the afternoon, her big signal lamp flickering as soon as she was over the horizon; she wanted to know everything – the state of their repairs, the chances of their getting going again, and whether they had had any suspicious contacts or seen any aircraft during their stoppage. In consultation with Watts, Ericson answered as best he could: they had located the trouble, and would almost certainly be able to clear it, but it would probably take them most of the night to do it.

Viperous
, who had stopped her swift approach as soon as she was in effective touch, circled lazily about ten miles off them while the signals were exchanged. Then there was a pause, and then she signalled: ‘Afraid I cannot spare you an escort for the night.’

‘That is quite all right,’ Ericson signalled back. ‘We will sleep by ourselves.’ He put that in, in case
Viperous
were feeling sad about the arrangement. It was perfectly true that two escorts could not be spared from the convoy during the night; there could be no argument about the rightness of that decision.

There was another pause.
Viperous
began to shape up towards the northward horizon again. When she was stern-on to them: ‘I must leave you to it,’ she signalled finally. ‘Best of luck.’ She began to draw away. Just before she got out of touch she signalled again: ‘Goodnight, Cinderella.’

‘”Goodnight, dear elder sister”,’ Ericson dictated to Rose. But then he cancelled the message, before Rose started sending. The captain of
Viperous
was just a little bit too elder – in rank – for him to run the risk.

The repairs did not take all the night, but they took many trying hours of it. Watts had to cut the oil pipe eight times before he found the exact point of obstruction: this was at the joint of the elbow, and consisted of a lump of cotton waste hardened and compressed into a solid plug. The question of how it got there gave Watts half an hour of abusive and infuriated speculation, and left Leading-Stoker Gracey, along with the rest of the engine room complement, in sullen contemplation of the whole system of naval discipline. But time was not there to be wasted: even as he raged and questioned, Watts was working swiftly on the pieces of piping, brazing them together again into something like the same length and curve as they had had before. The result did not look very reassuring, and once they were delayed and very nearly defeated by a section which succumbed to the heat of the blowlamp and collapsed into solid metal: but finally the whole pipe was cleared and smoothed off, and they set to work to coax it back into position again.

Outside, dusk had come down, and then the night. With its coming they took extraordinary precautions against discovery: Lockhart went round the upper deck three or four times to ensure that the ship was properly darkened and that no chink of light would betray them: the radios in the wardroom and the mess decks were closed down, and stringent orders given against unnecessary noise: the boats were swung out, ready for lowering, and the lashings of the rafts cast off – in case, as Tallow put it morbidly, they had to make a rush job of swimming. ‘And if any of you,’ he added to the hands working on the upper deck, ‘makes a noise tonight, I’ll have his guts for a necktie . . .’ The situation now involved a worse risk than any stopping or loitering had done before, because this time they were quite helpless: if a torpedo passed right underneath them, they could only wave goodbye to it, and wait for the next one. As the hours passed, the tension became unbearable: this was the sea, the very stretch of water which on their outward voyage had seen so many men go to their death, and here they were, sitting on it like a paralysed duck and waiting for the bang.

But there was nothing to do but wait. Watch succeeded watch: the hands tiptoed delicately to their stations, instead of clumping along the deck or stamping their seaboots on the iron ladder, as they usually did:
Compass Rose
floated motionless, with the black water occasionally slapping against her side: a brilliant quarter-moon hung in the mid-Atlantic sky, showing them all the outlines of their hazard. Throughout the ship there was the same tension, the same disbelief in the future, the same rage against the bloody stokers down below who had let the engine get gummed up, and were now loafing and fiddling about . . . Lockhart had it in mind to give the watch on deck, and the other spare hands, something definite to do, to take their attention away from the present danger; but everything he thought of – such as fire drill or lowering a boat to the waterline – involved noise and probably the flashing of torches on the upper deck, and in the end he abandoned the idea and left them alone. Waiting in idleness was bad for the nerves; but the risk attending anything else might be worse still.

Ericson spent all these hours up on the bridge: there was no other station for him at such a moment, and no other choice in his mind. The lookouts changed half-hourly: cocoa came up in relays from the wardroom: the asdic and the radar kept up their incessant watch: curbing his immense impatience, Ericson sat on, enthroned like some wretched ragamuffin chief on the bridge of his useless ship. Mostly he stared at the water and the horizon, sometimes at the bright moon which no cloud would obscure: occasionally he watched the shadowy figures on the upper deck, the men who waited there in silent groups, collected round the guns or the boats, instead of going below and turning in. This was a new thing aboard
Compass Rose.
But he could not find fault with their prudence, he could not blame them for their fear.

There was an example of this nervous strain much closer at hand. Ferraby had not been below decks since the ship came to a stop, and now he was curled up in a blanket at the side of the bridge: he lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, his inflated life jacket ballooning out like some opulent bosom; he had been there since he came off watch, at midnight, and he had never stirred or changed his position. Ericson had thought that he was dozing; but once, taking a turn round the bridge, he had noticed that the other man’s eyes were wide open, and that he was darkly staring at the sky overhead. There was a sheen of perspiration at his temples. He was very far from sleep . . . Ericson paused in his pacing, and looked down at the pale face.

‘All right, sub?’ he asked conversationally.

There was no answer, and no sign that he had been heard. But Ericson did not persist with his question: this was a time to disregard people’s reactions, to look past them without comment. The ship had been stopped, a still and defenceless target, for over twelve hours:
Sorrel
was fresh in all their minds: this was where it had all happened before. It was no wonder that, here and there, nerves stretched to breaking point were jumping and quivering in the effort to hold on.

He walked to the front of the bridge again, and sat down without another word. Ferraby could not help what was happening to him: no blame attached to him for his raw nerves, any more than a newborn child could be blamed for weighing six pounds instead of eight. The womb of war had produced him thus. But somewhere at the back of his mind Ericson was conscious of a strange sort of envy, an irritated consciousness of what a huge relief it would be to relax his grip, to surrender the unmoving mask of competence, to show to the world, if need be, his fatigue or fear . . . Gibraltar, he thought suddenly; I gave up there, Lockhart saw it – but that had been alcohol, alcohol and guilt, nothing else. And it was not to happen again, it was not to happen now . . . Waiting in the darkness, watching the silver ripples crossing the track of the moon, he slowly tightened up again.

Only once during that night was there an interruption of their vigil, but it was an interruption which startled them all. In the stillness that followed the change of the watch, just after midnight, breaking harshly in upon the sound of lapping water, there was a sudden burst of hammering from below, a solid succession of thuds which resounded throughout the ship. Everyone came to attention, and looked at his neighbour in quest of reassurance: secretly they cursed the men working in the engine room, for reawakening their fear and their hatred. The noise could be heard for miles around . . . On the bridge, Ericson turned to Morell, who had just taken over the watch.

‘Go down and see Watts,’ he said crisply. ‘Tell him to stop the hammering or to muffle it somehow. Tell him we can’t afford to make this amount of noise.’ As Morell turned to go, Ericson added, less formally: ‘Tell him the torpedo will hit him first.’

That was perfectly true, thought Morell, as he climbed down successive ladders deep into the heart of the ship: to go below the waterline at a moment such as this was like stepping knowingly into the tomb. He could not help feeling a comradely admiration for the men who had been working patiently, ten feet below the surface of the water, for so many hours on end: it was part of their job, of course, just as it had sometimes been part of his own to be up on the exposed bridge when an aircraft was spraying them with machine gun fire; but the cold-blooded hazard involved in working below decks in the present circumstances seemed to demand a special category of nervous endurance. If a torpedo came, the engine room crew must be an instant casualty: they would have perhaps ten seconds to get out, as the water flooded in, and those ten seconds, for a dozen men fighting to use one ladder in the pitch darkness, would mean the worst end to life that a man could devise . . . But hazard or not, they oughtn’t to make so much noise about what they were doing: that was stretching their necks out too far altogether.

The hammering stopped as he slid down the last oily ladder to the engine room itself, and Watts, hearing his step on the iron plating, turned to greet him.

‘Come to see the fun, sir? It won’t be long now.’

‘That’s my idea of good news, Chief,’ answered Morell. No settled naval hierarchy could ever make him address Watts, who was nearly old enough to be his grandfather, with anything save an informal friendliness. ‘But the Captain’s a bit worried about the noise. Can you do anything to tone it down?’

‘Pretty well finished now, sir,’ said Watts. ‘We were just putting one of those brackets back . . . Could you hear the hammering up top?’

‘Hear it? There were submarines popping up for miles around, complaining about the racket.’

There was a short laugh from the handful of men working round the oil pipe: down there, even the funniest jokes about submarines were only just funny . . . Morell looked round the circle of faces, harshly lit by the naked hand lamp clipped to a nearby stanchion: they all shared the same look, the same factors of expression – tiredness, concentration, fear in the background. He knew them all by sight – Watts, Leading-Stoker Gracey, a couple of young second-class stokers named Binns and Spurway who were always getting drunk ashore, an apprentice E.R.A. called Broughton who was a Roman Catholic – but he had never known them quite like this: the labels and the characters he usually attached to them seemed to have been stripped and melted away, leaving only the basic men whose brains and fingers either could or could not patch up the oil pipe before a submarine caught them, and whose faces reflected this uncertain future. There was no pettiness about them now, no individual foible, no trace of indiscipline: as they worked, Care sat on their shoulders, Time’s winged chariot was at their backs (Morell smiled as the odd phrases, incongruous in the glare and smell of the engine room, returned to him), and they knew this all the time and it had purged them of everything save a driving anxiety to finish what they had to do.