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 ou
t 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?’
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.