The Cruel Sea (1951) (35 page)

But for a few moments longer he tried to gain support and confidence for what he had to do.

‘What’s it look like now, Number One?’

‘The same, sir – solid echo – exactly the right size –
must
be a U-boat.’

‘Is it moving?’

‘Very slowly.’

‘There are some men in the water, just about there.’

There was no answer. The range decreased as
Compass Rose
ran in: they were now within six hundred yards of the swimmers and the U-boat, the fatal coincidence which had to be ignored.

‘What’s it look like now?’ Ericson repeated.

‘Just the same – seems to be stationary – it’s the strongest contact we’ve ever had.’

‘There are some chaps in the water.’

‘Well, there’s a U-boat just underneath them.’

All right, then, thought Ericson, with a new unlooked-for access of brutality to help him: all right, we’ll go for the U-boat. With no more hesitation he gave the order: ‘Attacking – stand by!’ to the depth-charge positions aft: and having made this sickening choice he swept in to the attack with a deadened mind, intent only on one kind of kill, pretending there was no other.

Many of the men in the water waved wildly as they saw what was happening: some of them screamed, some threw themselves out of the ship’s path and thrashed furiously in the hope of reaching safety: others, slower-witted or nearer to exhaustion, still thought that
Compass Rose
was speeding to their rescue, and continued to wave and smile almost to their last moment . . . The ship came in like an avenging angel, cleaving the very centre of the knots of swimmers: the amazement and horror on their faces was reflected aboard
Compass Rose,
where many of the crew, particularly among the depth-charge parties aft, could not believe what they were being called upon to do. Only two men did not share this horror: Ericson, who had shut and battened down his mind except to a single thought – the U-boat they must kill: and Ferraby, whose privilege it was to drop the depth-charges. ‘Serve you bloody well right!’ thought Ferraby as
Compass Rose
swept in among the swimmers, catching some of them in her screw, while the firing bell sounded and the charges rolled over the stern or were rocketed outwards from the throwers: ‘Serve you right – you nearly killed us last night, making us stop next door to that fire – now it’s our turn.’

There was a deadly pause, while for a few moments the men aboard
Compass Rose
and the men left behind in her wake stared at each other, in pity and fear and a kind of basic disbelief; and then with a huge hammer crack the depth-charges exploded.

Mercifully the details were hidden in the flurry and roar of the explosion; and the men must all have died instantly, shocked out of life by the tremendous pressure of the sea thrown up upon their bodies. But one freak item of the horror impressed itself on the memory. As the tormented water leapt upwards in a solid grey cloud, the single figure of a man was tossed high on the very plume of the fountain, a puppet figure of whirling arms and legs seeming to make, in death, wild gestures of anger and reproach. It appeared to hang a long time in the air, cursing them all, before falling back into the boiling sea.

When they ran back to the explosion area, with the asdic silent and the contact not regained, it was as if to some aquarium where poisoned water had killed every living thing. Men floated high on the surface like dead goldfish in a film of blood. Most of them were disintegrated, or pulped out of human shape. But half a dozen of them, who must have been on the edge of the explosion, had come to a tidier end: split open from chin to crutch, they had been as neatly gutted as any herring. Some seagulls were already busy on the scene, screaming with excitement and delight. Nothing else stirred.

No one looked at Ericson as they left that place: if they had done so, they might have been shocked by his expression and his extraordinary pallor. Now deep in self-torture, and appalled by what he had done, he had already decided that there had been no U-boat there in the first place: the contact was probably the torpedoed ship, sliding slowly to the bottom, or the disturbed water of her sinking. Either way, the slaughter which he had inflicted was something extra, a large entirely British-made contribution to the success of the voyage.

By the time they were past the Straits, and had smelt the burnt smell of Africa blowing across from Ceuta, and had shaped a course for Gibraltar harbour, they were all far off balance.

It had gone on too long, it had failed too horribly, it had cost too much. They had been at Action Stations for virtually eight days on end, missing hours of sleep, making do with scratch meals of cocoa and corned beef sandwiches, living all the time under recurrent anxieties which often reached a desperate tension. There had hardly been a moment of the voyage when they could forget the danger that lay in wait for them and the days of strain that stretched ahead, and relax and find peace. They had been hungry and dirty and tired from one sunrise to the next: they had lived in a ship crammed and disorganised by nearly three times her normal complement. Through it all, they had had to preserve an alertness and a keyed-up efficiency, hard enough to maintain even in normal circumstances.

The deadly part was that it had all been in vain, it had all been wasted: there could have been no more futile expense of endurance and nervous energy. Besides
Sorrel
, which was in a special category of disaster, they had lost fourteen ships out of the original twenty-one – two-thirds of the entire convoy, wiped out by a series of pack attacks so adroit and so ferocious that countermeasures had been quite futile. That was the most wretched element of the voyage – the inescapable sense of futility, the conviction that there were always more U-boats than escorts and that the U-boats could strike, and strike home, practically as they willed.

The escorts, and
Compass Rose
among them, seemed to have been beating the air all the time: they could do nothing save count the convoy’s losses at each dawn, and make, sometimes, a vain display of force which vanished like a trickle of water swallowed by an enormous sea. In the end, they had all sickened of the slaughter, and of the battle too.

To offset the mortal bleeding of the convoy, by far the worst of this or any other war,
Viperous
had sunk one U-boat: a second had probably been destroyed; and
Compass Rose
herself had collected 175 survivors – nearly twice the number of her own crew. But this seemed nothing much, when set alongside the total loss of lives: it seemed nothing much, when measured against the men they had depth-charged and killed, instead of saving: it seemed nothing much, when shadowed by the stricken figure of
Sorrel’s
captain, wordless and brooding at the back of their bridge as
Compass Rose
slid into the shelter of Gibraltar Harbour, under the huge Rock that dwarfed and mocked the tiny defeated ships below.

At half-past eight on the evening of their arrival, there was a knock on the door of the Captain’s cabin. Ericson, sitting in his armchair with a glass in his hand and a half-empty bottle of gin on the side table, called out: ‘Come in!’ in a voice from which all expression save an apathetic listlessness had vanished. He had been drinking steadily since four o’clock, in an attempt to forget or to blur the edges of certain scenes from their recent voyage. It had not been successful, as a glance at his face showed all too plainly.

In answer to his invitation three extraordinary figures entered the cabin: three tall, very fair men, all dressed alike in sky-blue suits of an excruciating cut, vivid shirts with thick brown stripes, and yellow pointed shoes. They stood before him, like a trio from some monstrous vaudeville act, looking down at the figure slumped in the chair with expressions half-doubtful, half-smiling: they had the air of men who expect to be recognised and welcomed, and yet are uncertain of their exact status in novel circumstances. They were like three public school boys who had strayed, by accident, into the headmaster’s side of the house.

The Captain stood up, rocking slightly on his feet, and focused his eyes with an effort. ‘Who—?’ he began, and then he suddenly recognised them. They were three of his late passengers, the captains of Norwegian ships, who had been living in the wardroom for the past three or four days after being picked up as survivors. The last time Ericson had seen them, they had been wearing what was left of their uniforms; now, it was clear, they had been ashore, and some Gibraltar outfitter had done his worst for them in the way of civilian clothes. It was a highly efficient disguise for men who, when properly dressed as ships’ captains, could exhibit a formidable air of competence and toughness.

The tallest and fairest of them, possibly the elected spokesman, took a pace forward, and said, in a voice just over the borderline of sobriety: ‘Good evening, Captain. We came back to thank you for our lives.’

Ericson blinked. ‘Didn’t recognise you,’ he said, his voice equally blurred. ‘Come in. Sit down. Have a drink.’

‘Thank you, no,’ said the first speaker.

‘Thank you, yes,’ said the man just behind him, with perverse readiness. ‘I wish to drink with this brave man who stopped his ship in the middle of a fire, and gave me my life.’

‘And me,’ said the third man, who had the worst suit and the vilest shirt of all, ‘me, I have the same wish, much stronger. And for my wife too, and my three children.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Ericson, a trifle embarrassed. ‘Let’s sit down. What’ll you have?’

But when they were all three provided with glasses, and had settled down on the hard cabin chairs, the conversation lagged. There had been a formal toast to their rescuer, and much repetition of the word ‘Skoal!’ each time they drank; apart from that, there did not seem much to say. Ericson was too near to his brooding thoughts to switch over to conviviality at such short notice; and the three visitors, who had clearly included any number of bars in their shopping tour ashore, were further handicapped by their halting English. Ericson, with an effort, complimented them on their new and appalling clothes: there were more drinks, and more cries of ‘Skoal!’: and then a stonewall silence fell, one of those silences which demonstrate instantly that all the conversation which has gone before, no matter how lively, has been an arid social artifice. Finally it was broken by the first of the three captains, who leant forward in his chair and said solemnly: ‘We know that you have much to think about.’

‘Yes,’ said Ericson, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘You are sad?’

‘Yes,’ said Ericson again. ‘I’m pretty sad.’

The second captain leant forward in his turn. ‘The men in the water?’

Ericson nodded.

‘The men you had to kill?’ asked the third captain, completing the chorus.

‘The men I had to kill,’ repeated Ericson after a pause. He remembered having once seen a Russian play with dialogue like this. Perhaps Norwegian plays were the same.

‘It was necessary to do it,’ said the first captain decisively, and the other two nodded. ‘Yes,’ said the second. The third one said ‘Skoal!’ and drank deeply.

‘Maybe,’ answered Ericson. ‘But that didn’t make them look any prettier, did it?’

‘It is war,’ said the second captain.

‘Skoal!’ said the first.

‘I wash my hands, please,’ said the third.

When he came back, Ericson roused himself momentarily. ‘I really thought there was a submarine there,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.’ He realised how foolish that must sound, and he added: ‘I had to make up my mind. I’ve put it all in the report.’

‘There is no blame,’ said one of the captains.

‘But there may be thoughts,’ said another.

‘Naturally there will be thoughts.’

‘For thoughts there is gin,’ said the first captain, with an air of logic.

‘Skoal!’ said Ericson.

It went on like that for a very long time. It was neither better, nor worse, than being alone. But when his three visitors had gone, Ericson did not relax; he simply reached out his hand for the bottle again. It was quite true that for thoughts there was gin.

It was Lockhart who finally found him, some time after midnight, leaning over the rail just outside his cabin, staring down at the water, muttering vaguely. Lockhart himself, though he had had less to drink, was in no better case as far as his private thoughts were concerned. Earlier that evening he had gone ashore with Lieut.-Commander Ramsay,
Sorrel’s
captain, to see the latter to his billet in the nearby Naval Barracks: it had been a sad, silent walk through streets and crowds whose cheerfulness was not infectious, and they had parted almost as strangers. Now Lockhart was back on board, but he felt quite unable to turn in: he had the jitters, like nearly everyone else in the ship, he was exhausted beyond the point of relaxation, his brain had too much company for sleep.

But when he came to the end of his pacing of the iron deck, there was the Captain, leaning over the rail in helpless defeat. Someone on board was even worse off than himself . . . The big tough figure stirred as Lockhart approached, and turned towards him.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ asked Lockhart.

‘No,’ answered Ericson readily. ‘I don’t mind telling
you
that I’m not.’ His tone was thick and slurring: it was the first time Lockhart had ever heard it so, and after these two years of close association it was hard to identify the surrendered voice with the competent one he knew so well.