The Cruel Sea (1951) (33 page)

They all knew it must be
Sorrel
, because at that distance it could not be any other ship, and also because of an earlier signal which they had relayed to her from
Viperous.
‘In case of an attack tonight,’ said the signal, ‘
Sorrel
will proceed five miles astern and to seaward of the convoy, and create a diversion by dropping depth-charges, firing rockets, etc. This may draw the main attack away from the convoy.’ They had seen the rockets earlier that night, and disregarded them: they only meant that
Sorrel,
busy in a corner, was doing her stuff according to plan . . . Probably that plan had been effective, if the last two hours’ lull were anything to go by: certainly it had, from one point of view, been an ideal exercise, diverting at least one attack from its proper mark. But in the process, someone had to suffer: it had not cancelled the stalking approach, it did not stop the torpedo being fired:
Sorrel
became the mark, in default of a richer prize, meeting her lonely end in the outer ring of darkness beyond the convoy.

Poor
Sorrel,
poor sister corvette . . . Up on the bridge of
Compass Rose,
the men who had known her best of all were now the mourners, standing separated from each other by the blackness of night but bound by the same shock, the same incredulous sorrow. How could it have happened to
Sorrel,
to an escort like themselves . . . ? Immediately he saw the explosion, Ericson had rung down to the wireless office. ‘”
Viperous
from
Compass
Rose”,’ he dictated. ‘”
Sorrel
torpedoed in her diversion position. May I leave and search for survivors?”’ Then: ‘Code that up,’ he snapped to the telegraphist who was taking down the message. ‘Quick as you can. Send it by R/T.’ Then, the message sent, they waited, silent in the darkness of the bridge, eyeing the dim bulk of the nearest ship, occasionally turning back to where
Sorrel
had been struck. No one said a word: there were no words for this. There were only thoughts, and not many of those.

The bell of the wireless office rang sharply, breaking the silence, and Leading-Signalman Wells, who was standing by the voice-pipe, bent down to it.

‘Bridge!’ he said, and listened for a moment. Then he straightened up, and called to the Captain across the grey width of the bridge. ‘Answer from
Viperous,
sir . . . “Do not leave convoy until daylight”.’

There was silence again, a sickened, appalled silence. Ericson set his teeth. He might have guessed . . . It was the right answer, of course, from the cold technical angle:
Viperous
simply could not afford to take another escort from the screen, and send her off on a non-essential job. It was the right answer, but by Christ it was a hard one! . . . Back there in the lonely darkness, ten miles and more away by now, men were dying, men of a special sort: people they knew well, sailors like themselves: and they were to be left to die, or, at best, their rescue was to be delayed for a period which must cost many lives.
Sorrel’s
sinking had come as an extraordinary shock to them all: she was the first escort that had ever been lost out of their group, and she was, of all the ones that could have gone, their own chummy ship, the ship they had tied up alongside after countless convoys, for two years on end: manned by their friends, men they played tombola with or met in pubs ashore: men they could always beat at football . . . For
Sorrel
to be torpedoed was bad enough; but to leave her crew to sink or swim in the darkness was the most cruel stroke of all.

‘Daylight,’ said Morell suddenly, breaking the oppressive silence on the bridge. ‘Two more hours to wait.’

Ericson found himself answering: ‘Yes’ – not to Morell’s words, but to what he had meant. It was a cold night. With two hours to wait, and then the time it would take them to run back to where
Sorrel
had gone down, there would be very few men left to pick up.

There were in fact fifteen – fifteen out of a ship’s company of ninety.

They found them without much difficulty, towards the end of the morning watch, sighting the two specks which were Carley rafts across three miles or more of flat unruffled sea. However familiar this crude seascape had become to them, it was especially moving to come upon it again now: to approach the loaded rafts and the cluster of oily bodies washing about among
Sorrel’s
wreckage: to see, here and there in this filthy aftermath, their own uniforms, their own badges and caps, almost their own mirrored faces . . . The men on the rafts were stiff and cold and soaked with oil, but as
Compass Rose
approached, one of them waved with wild energy, foolishly greeting a rescuer not more than twenty yards away from him. Some of the men were clearly dead, from cold or exhaustion, even though they had gained the safety of the rafts: they lay with their heads on other men’s knees, cherished and warmed until death and perhaps for hours beyond it. Ericson, looking through his binoculars at the ragged handful that remained, caught sight of the grey face of
Sorrel’s
captain, Ramsay, his friend for many years. Ramsay was holding a body in his arms, a young sailor ugly and pitiful in death, the head thrown back, the mouth hanging open. But the living face above the dead one was hardly less pitiful. The whole story – the lost ship, the lost crew, the pain and exhaustion of the last six hours – all these were in Ramsay’s face as he sat, holding the dead body, waiting for rescue.

It was a true captain’s face, a captain in defeat who mourned his ship, and bore alone the monstrous burden of its loss.

Lockhart, waiting in the waist of the ship while the survivors were helped aboard, greeted him with impulsive warmth as he climbed stiffly over the side.

‘Very glad to see you, sir!’ he exclaimed eagerly. Everything about Ramsay – his expression, his weary movements, his reeking oil-soaked uniform – was suddenly and deeply moving, so that to have saved his life, even in these tragic circumstances, seemed a triumph and a blessing. ‘We were all hoping—’ he stopped awkwardly, watching Ramsay’s face. He knew immediately that it would be wrong, terribly wrong, to say: ‘We were all hoping that we’d pick
you
up, anyway.’ That was not what Ramsay himself was feeling, at that moment. Rather the reverse.

‘Thanks, Number One.’ Ramsay, straightening up, turned round and gestured vaguely towards the men still on the rafts. ‘Look after them, won’t you? One or two of them are pretty far gone.’

Lockhart nodded. ‘I’ll see to all that, sir.’

‘I’ll go up to the bridge, then.’ But he lingered by the rails, watching with hurt eyes as the remnants of his crew were helped or hauled or lifted tenderly inboard. In the middle of the crowd of men working, he was unassailably withdrawn and private in his grief. When the living were seen to, and they were starting on the dead, he turned away and walked slowly towards the bridge ladder, his oily bare feet slurring and slopping along the deck. Lockhart was glad to be kept busy and preoccupied at that moment. It was not one to be intruded on, upon any pretext.

To Ericson, up on the bridge, Ramsay presently held out his hand and said: ‘Thanks, George. I’ll not forget that.’ The West Country accent was very prominent.

‘Sorry we couldn’t be here earlier,’ said Ericson shortly. ‘But I couldn’t leave the screen before daylight.’

‘It wouldn’t have made much difference,’ answered Ramsay. He had turned away, and was once more watching the bodies coming inboard, and the other bodies that disfigured the even surface of the sea round
Compass Rose.
‘Most of them were caught below, anyway. We broke in half. Went down in a couple of minutes.’

Ericson said nothing. Presently Ramsay turned back to him and said, half to himself: ‘You never think that
you’ll
be the one to catch it. It’s something you can’t be ready for, no matter how much you think about it. When it does happen—’ he broke off, as if at some self-reproach which he did not know how to voice, and then the moment itself was interrupted by Signalman Rose, alert at one of the voice-pipes.

‘Signal from
Viperous,
sir,’ he called out. ‘Addressed to us. “Rejoin the convoy forthwith”.’

‘Something must be happening,’ said Ericson. He walked to the head of the bridge ladder, and looked down at the waist of the ship. The two rafts were cleared now, but there were still twenty or more bodies floating within a circle of half a mile round them. ‘I’d like to—’ he began uncertainly.

Ramsay shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter, George,’ he said quietly. ‘What’s the odds, anyway? Leave them where they are.’

He did not look at anyone or anything as
Compass Rose
drew away.

What had happened, as they discovered when they caught up the convoy, towards midday, was that another ship had been torpedoed, in broad daylight, and
Viperous
was rightly anxious to close up all the escorts as soon as possible. There could be no pause, no respite in this long chasing battle: certainly the dead had no claim – not even when, as now, they were beginning to outnumber the living. By noon of that seventh day, the tally of ships remaining was eleven – eleven out of the original twenty-one; behind them were ten good merchant ships sunk, and countless men drowned, and one of the escorts lost as well. It was horrible to think of the hundreds of miles of sea that lay in their wake, strewn with the oil and the wreckage and the corpses they were leaving behind them: it was like some revolting paperchase, with the convoy laying a trail from an enormous suppurating satchel of blood and treasure. But some of it – the Wrens, and
Sorrel,
and the screams of the men caught in the first ship lost, the burning tanker – some of it did not bear thinking about at all.

It was not a one-sided battle, with repeated hammer strokes on the one hand and a futile dodging on the other, but it was not much better than that, in the way it was working out; there were too many U-boats in contact with them, not enough escorts, not enough speed or manoeuvrability in the convoy to give it a level chance. They had fought back all that they could.
Compass Rose
had dropped more than forty depth-charges on her various counter-attacks, some of which should have done some damage: the other escorts had put up a lively display of energy:
Viperous
herself, after one accurate attack, had sufficient evidence in the way of oil and wreckage to claim a U-boat destroyed. But as far as the overall picture was concerned, all this was simply a feeble beating of the air: with so many U-boats in their area, miracles were necessary to escape the appalling trap the convoy had run into, and no miracles came their way. There was no chance of winning, and no way of retreat; all they could do was to close their ranks, make the best speed they could, and sweat it out to the end.

Compass Rose
had never been so crowded, so crammed with survivors. It was lucky, indeed, that they had the new sickbay and the Sick Berth Attendant to deal with their wounded and exhausted passengers: Lockhart could never have coped with the continual flow single-handed. But apart from the number of people requiring attention, they had collected a huge additional complement of rescued men – far outnumbering, indeed, their own crew. There were fourteen Merchant Navy officers in the wardroom, including three ship’s captains: there were a hundred and twenty-one others – seamen, firemen, cooks, Lascars, Chinese – thronging the upper deck by day and at night crowding into the mess decks to eat and sleep and wait for the next dawn. During the dark hours, indeed, the scene in the darkened fo’c’sle was barely describable. Under the shaded yellow lamp was a scene from the Inferno, a nightmare of tension and confusion and discomfort and pain.

The place was crammed to the deckhead: men stood or sat or knelt or lay, in every available space: they crouched under the tables, they wedged themselves in corners, they stretched out on top of the broad ventilating shafts. There were men being seasick, men crying out in their sleep, men wolfing food, men hugging their bits of possessions and staring at nothing: wounded men groaning, apparently fit men laughing uneasily at nothing, brave men who could still summon a smile and a straight answer. It was impossible to pick one’s way from one end of the fo’c’sle to the other, as Lockhart did each night when he made the Rounds, without being shocked and appalled and saddened by this slum corner of the war: and yet somehow one could be heartened also, and cheered by an impression of patience and endurance, and made to feel proud . . . Individuals, here and there, might have been pushed close to defeat or panic; but the gross crowding, the rags, the oil, the bandages, the smell of men in adversity, were
still
not enough to defeat the whole company. They were all sailors there, not to be overwhelmed even by this sudden and sustained nightmare: they were being mucked about, it was true, but it would have to be a lot worse than this before they changed their minds about the sea.

There was another sort of nightmare, which kept recurring to Lockhart as he looked at the throng of survivors, and at
Compass Rose’s
seamen making their cheerful best of the invasion, and met a puzzled or frightened face here and there in the crowd. Suppose, like
Sorrel,
they were hit: suppose they went down in a minute or so, in two broken halves, as
Sorrel
had done: what would happen in there, what sort of trapped and clawing shambles would develop as they slid to the bottom? The details could not really be faced, though it was possible that other people in the fo’c’sle were occupying their spare time in facing them. Once, when Lockhart was adjusting a survivor’s bandaged arm, the man said: ‘Be all right for swimming, eh?’