The Cruel Sea (1951) (42 page)

The solid echo which was presently reported on the radar hardly broke through to their attention at first.

But it was the ship all right, the ship they had been sent to find. They came upon her suddenly: she was masked until the last moment by the gently whirling snow, and then suddenly she emerged and lay before them – a small untidy freighter with Swedish funnel markings. She was derelict, drifting down wind like some wretched tramp sagging his way through a crowd: she listed heavily, her bridge and forepart were blistered and fire-blackened, and her forebridge itself, which seemed to have taken a direct hit from a bomb or a shell, looked like a twisted metal cage from which something violent and strong had ripped a way to freedom. One lifeboat was missing, the other hung down from the falls, half-overturned and empty. There was nothing else in the picture.

Compass Rose
circled slowly, alert for any development, but there was no sound, no movement save the snow falling lightly on the deserted upper deck. They sounded their siren, they fired a blank shot: nothing stirred. Presently they stopped, and lowered a boat: Morell was in charge, and with him were Rose, the young signalman, Leading-Seaman Tonbridge, and a stoker named Evans. As they pulled away from
Compass Rose,
Ericson leant over the side of the bridge, megaphone in hand.

‘We’ll have to keep moving,’ he called out. ‘This ship is too much of an attraction . . . Don’t worry if you lose sight of us.’

Morell waved, but did not answer. He was no longer thinking about
Compass Rose
: he was thinking, with a prickling of his scalp, of what he was going to find when he boarded the derelict.

I am no good at this, he thought, as they pulled across the short stretch of water that separated the two ships: no good at bombs, no good at blood, no good at the brutal elements of disaster . . . When Leading-Seaman Tonbridge jumped on to the sloping deck with the painter, and made the boat fast, it was all Morell could do to follow him over the side: ‘
You
go,’ his subconscious voice was saying to Tonbridge: ‘I’ll wait here, while you take a look.’ It was not that he was afraid, within the normal meaning of the word: simply that he doubted his ability to deal with the disgusting unknown.

In silence he climbed up and stood on the deck: a tall grave young man in a yellow duffle coat and seaboots, looking through falling snow towards the outline of the shattered bridge. He said to Stoker Evans: ‘Have a look below – see how deep she’s flooded,’ and to Tonbridge: ‘Stay by the boat,’ and to Signalman Rose: ‘Come with me.’ Then they began to walk forward: their feet rang loudly on the iron deck, their tracks in the snow were fresh, like children’s in a garden before breakfast: round them was complete silence, complete empty stillness, such as no ship that was not fundamentally cursed would ever show.

It was not as bad as Morell had expected – in the sense that he did not faint, or vomit, or disgrace himself: the actual details were horrifying. The bridge had taken the full force of a direct hit by a bomb: there had been a small fire started, and a larger one farther forward, between the well deck and the fo’c’sle. It was difficult to determine exactly how many people had been on the bridge when it was hit: none of the bodies were complete, and the scattered fragments seemed at a first glance to add up to a whole vanished regiment of men. There must have been about six of them: now they were in dissolution, and their remnants hung like some appalling tapestry round the bulkheads, gleaming here and there with the dull gleam of half-dried paint. The whole gory enclosure seemed to have been decorated with blood and tissue: ‘”When father papered the parlour”,’ hummed Morell to himself, ‘he never thought of this . . .’ The helmsman’s hand was still clutching the wheel – but it was only a hand, it grew out of the air: tatters of uniforms, of entrails, tufts of hair, met the eye at every turn: on one flat surface the imprint of a skull in profile, impregnated into the paintwork, stood out like a revolting street corner caricature, stencilled in human skin and fragments of bone. ‘You died with your mouth open,’ said Morell, looking at this last with eyes which seemed to have lost their capacity to communicate sensation to the brain. ‘I hope you were saying something polite.’

He walked to the open side of the bridge, high above the water, and looked out. The snow still fell gently and lazily, dusting the surface of the sea for a moment before it melted. There was nothing round them except anonymous greyness: the afternoon light was failing:
Compass Rose
came into view momentarily, and then vanished. He turned back to Rose who stood waiting with his signal lamp, and they stared at each other across the space of the bridge: each of their faces had the same serious concentration, the same wish to accept this charnel house and be unmoved by it. It was part of their war, the sort of thing they were trained for, the sort of thing they now took in their stride – sometimes without effort, sometimes with . . . I suppose Rose has looked at all this, and looked away again, thought Morell: I suppose he is waiting for me to say something, or to take him down the ladder and away from the bridge. That would be my own choice too . . . He cleared his throat.

‘We’ll see what Evans has to say, and then send a signal.’

The ship could not be got going again, but she was fit to be towed: though the engine room and one hold were deeply flooded, the water was no longer coming in and she might remain afloat indefinitely. That was the outline of the signal which Rose presently sent across to
Compass Rose:
reading it, Ericson had to make up his mind whether to start the towing straight away, or to cast around for the missing boat and its survivors. After two nights adrift in this bitter weather, there was little chance of their being alive; but if the bombed ship would remain afloat, it would not matter spending another day or so on the search. Perhaps Morell had better stay where he was, though: he could keep an eye on things, and there must be a lot of tidying up to do.

‘Remain on board,’ he signalled to Morell finally. ‘I am going to search for the lifeboat, and return tomorrow morning.’ Something made him add: ‘Are you quite happy about being left?’

Happy, thought Morell: now
there
was a word . . . It was now nearly nightfall: they were to be left alone in this floating coffin for over twelve hours of darkness, with the snow to stare at, the sea to listen to, and a bridge full of corpses for company. ‘”Happiness is relative”,’ he began dictating to Rose, and then he changed his mind. The moment did not really deserve humour. ‘Reply: “Quite all right”,’ he said shortly. Then he called to Tonbridge and Evans, and took them back with him to the bridge. That was where a start must be made.

Morell was never to forget that night. They used the remains of daylight for cleaning up: the increasing gloom was a blessing, making just tolerable this disgusting operation. They worked in silence, hard-breathing, not looking closely at what they were doing: the things they had to dispose of disappeared steadily over the side, and were hidden by the merciful sea. Only once was the silence broken, by Leading-Seaman Tonbridge. ‘Pity we haven’t got a hose, sir,’ he said, straightening up from a corner of the bridge which had kept him busy for some minutes. Morell did not answer him: no one did. The place where they stood, though blurred now by shadow, was eloquent enough.

They made a meal off the emergency rations in the boat, and boiled some tea on the spirit stove they found in the galley; then they settled down for the night, in the cramped chartroom behind the bridge. There were mattresses and blankets, and a lamp to give them some warmth: it was good enough for one night on board, if they did not start thinking.

Morell started thinking: his thoughts destroyed the hope of sleep, and drove him outside on to the upper deck – there was no comfort in the sleeping men close to him, only anger at the relief they had found: he felt that if he stayed he would have to invent some pretext for waking them up. He made his footfalls soft as he went down the ladder, he made his breathing imperceptible as he crossed the well deck: the hand that pushed aside the canvas curtain screening the fo’c’sle was the hand of a conspirator. He took a step forward, and felt in front of him a hollow emptiness: he struck a match, and found that he was in a large mess hall, full of shadows, full of its own deserted silence. The match flared: he saw a long table, with plates set out on it – plates with half-eaten helpings of stew, crumbled squares of bread, knives and forks set down hurriedly at the moment of crisis. None of those meals would ever be finished now: all the men who had set down the knives and forks were almost certainly dead. I am thinking in clichés, he thought, as the match spluttered and went out. But clichés were as effective as thoughts freshly minted, when the reality which they clothed pressed in so closely and was backed by such weight of crude fact.

Pursued by ghosts, he walked aft along the snow-covered upper deck. The wind whined on a strange note in the rigging: the water gurgled close under his feet: the ship was restless, needing to fight the sea all the time. There was no comfort to be found under the open sky: the deck held too many shadows, the unfamiliar shape of it had too many surprises. And suppose there were
other
surprises: suppose the ship were not deserted, suppose a mad seaman with an axe rushed him from the next blind corner: suppose he found fresh footprints in the snow, where none of them had trodden.

At the base of the mast a shadow moved. Morell gripped the pockets of his duffle coat, his nerves screaming. The shadow moved again, sliding away from him.

He roared out: ‘Stop!’

The cat mewed, and fled.

Morning came, and with it
Compass Rose.
She had nothing to report – no boats, no survivors – and Morell, in a sense, had nothing to report either. A heaving line was passed from
Compass Rose,
and then a light grass rope, and then the heavy towing hawser: there was no windlass to haul this on board the bombed ship, and Morell’s party had to manhandle it in foot by foot, straining against a dead weight of wire which at times seemed as if it would never reach them. But finally they made it fast, and gave the signal, and the tow started.

They made less than three knots, even in good weather: it took them ten days of crawling to finish the journey. Each morning, as soon as it was light, Morell waved a greeting to Lockhart: each evening, as ‘Darken Ship’ was piped, Lockhart waved goodbye to Morell. Day after day, night after night, the two ships crept over the water, both useless save for this single purpose, both doomed by the umbilical tie to be any U-boat’s sitting shot. When, at the mouth of the Mersey, they parted at last and Morell came aboard, it was like waking from a nightmare which one had despaired of surviving.

‘Sorry to leave?’ asked Lockhart ironically, as Morell came up to the bridge.

‘No,’ answered Morell, fingering his ten days’ growth of beard, ‘no, I’m not.’ He looked at the ship astern of them, now in the charge of two harbour tugs. ‘I may say that the idea of the convict missing his chains is purely a novelist’s conception of life.’

There was the time which was rather difficult to label: they mostly knew it as the time of the Captain’s Meeting.

This time was on a Gibraltar convoy, a convoy in the same bad tradition as most of the Gibraltar rims: there had been a steady wastage of ships all the way southwards, and although they were now within two days of the end of the trip the U-boat pack was still with them. Ericson seemed to be showing particular interest in a ship in the front line of the convoy: often he would train his glasses on her for minutes at a time, and she was the one he always looked for first as soon as daylight came up. She survived until the last day; and then, when dawn broke after a night of disaster, she was no longer in her station, and her place in the van of the convoy had been taken by the next ship astern.

At first light the customary signal came from
Viperous:
‘Following ships were sunk last night:
Fort James, Eriskay, Bulstrode Manor, Glen MacCurtain.
Amend convoy lists accordingly.’

There was something in Ericson’s manner as he read this signal which discouraged comment. He remained on the bridge for a full hour, staring silently at the convoy, before saying suddenly to Wells: ‘Take a signal . . . “To Escorts in company, from
Compass Rose.
Please report any survivors you may have from
Glen MacCurtain”.’

The answering signals came in very slowly: they did not make cheerful reading.
Viperous
and two other escorts sent ‘nil’ reports. The corvette in the rear position signalled: ‘Two seamen, one Chinese fireman.’ The rescue ship detailed to look after survivors sent: ‘First Officer, two seamen, one fireman, five lascars.’

They waited, but that seemed to be all.
Glen MacCurtain
must have gone down quickly. Ferraby, who had the watch, said tentatively: ‘Not many picked up, sir?’

‘No,’ said Ericson. ‘Not many.’ He looked towards the horizon astern of them, and then walked to his chair and sat down heavily.

Presently a merchant ship in the rear of the convoy started flashing to them. Wells took the signal, muttering impatiently to himself: evidently the operating was not up to acceptable Naval standards.

‘Message from that Polish packet, sir,’ he said to Ericson. ‘It’s a bit rocky . . . “We did see your signal by mistake”,’ he read out, his voice slightly disparaging. ‘”We have one man from that ship”.’