‘It is,’ said Mr Churchill at one point, ‘a war of groping and drowning, of ambuscade and stratagem, of science and seamanship.’
It was all that. And sometimes the thing was in terms still cruder: sometimes the blood was thicker than the water.
2
For Compass Rose, there were special times which stuck in the memory, like insects of some unusually disgusting shape or colour, transfixed for ever in a dirty web which no cleansing element could reach.
There was the time of the Dead Helmsman (all these occasions had distinctive labels, given them either when they happened, or on later recollection. It simplified the pleasure of reminiscence). This particular incident had a touch of operatic fantasy about it which prompted Morell to say, at the end: ‘I think we must have strayed into the Flying Dutchman country’: it was a cold-blooded dismissal, but that was the way that all their thoughts and feelings were moving now.
The ship’s lifeboat was first seen by Baker, during the forenoon watch: it was sailing boldly through the convoy, giving way to no man, and pursued by a formidable chorus of sirens as, one after another, the ships had to alter course to avoid collision. The Captain, summoned to the bridge, stared at it through his glasses: he could see that it must have been adrift for many days – the hull was blistered, and the sail, tattered and discoloured, had been strained out of shape and spilled half the wind. But in the stern the single figure of the helmsman, hunched over the tiller, held his course confidently: according to the strict rule of the road he had, as a sailing ship, the right of way, though it took a brave man to put the matter to the test without, at least, paying some attention to the result.
It seemed that he was steering for Compass Rose, which was a sensible thing to do, even if it did give several ships’ captains heart failure in the process: the escorts were better equipped for dealing with survivors, and he probably realised it. Ericson stopped his ship, and waited for the small boat to approach: it held its course steadily, and then, at the last moment, veered with a gust of wind and passed close under Compass Rose’s stern. A seaman standing on the depth-charge rails threw a heaving line, and they all shouted: the man, so far from making any effort to reach them, did not even look up, and the boat sailed past and began to draw away.
‘He must be deaf,’ said Baker, in a puzzled voice. ‘But he can’t be blind as well . . .’
‘He’s the deafest man you’ll ever meet,’ said Ericson, suddenly grim. He put Compass Rose to ‘slow ahead’ again, and brought her round on the same course as the boat was taking. Slowly they overhauled it, stealing the wind so that presently it came to a stop: someone in the waist of the ship threw a grappling hook across, and the boat was drawn alongside.
The man still sat there patiently, seeming unaware of them.
The boat rocked gently as Leading-Seaman Phillips jumped down into it. He smiled at the helmsman: ‘Now then, chum!’ he called out encouragingly – and then, puzzled by some curious air of vacancy in the face opposite, he bent closer, and put out his hand. When he straightened up again, he was grey with shock and disgust.
He looked up at Lockhart, waiting above him in the waist of the ship.
‘Sir,’ he began. Then he flung himself across and vomited over the side of the boat.
It was as Ericson had guessed. The man must have been dead for many days: the bare feet splayed on the floorboards were paper-thin, the hand gripping the tiller was not much more than a claw. The eyes that had seemed to stare so boldly ahead were empty sockets – some seabird’s plunder: the face was burnt black by a hundred suns, pinched and shrivelled by a hundred bitter nights.
The boat had no compass, and no chart; the water barrel was empty, and yawning at the seams. It was impossible to guess how long he had been sailing on that senseless voyage – alone, hopeful in death as in life, but steering directly away from the land, which was already a thousand miles astern.
There was the time of the Bombed Ship, which was the finest exercise in patience they ever had.
It started, in mid-ocean, with a corrupt wireless message, of which the only readable parts were the prefix ‘SOS’ and a position, in latitude and longitude, about four hundred miles to the north of their convoy. The rest was a jumble of code groups which, even when ‘reconstructed’, did not yield much beyond the words ‘bomb’, ‘fire’, and ‘abandon’. It must have been difficult for Viperous to decide whether it was worth detaching an escort for this forlorn effort of detection: there was no reason to suppose that the position given was accurate, and they could ill spare a ship for a long search; and this quite apart from the fact that the message might be false – the result of a light-hearted wireless operator amusing himself, or an attempted decoy by a U-boat, both of which had happened before. But evidently Viperous decided that it was worth a chance: her next signal was addressed to Compass Rose, and read: ‘Search in accordance with SOS timed 1300 today.’ A little later she reopened R/T communication to add: ‘Goodbye.’
The first part of the assignment was easy: it boiled down to turning ninety degrees to port, increasing to fifteen knots, and holding that course and speed for twenty-six hours on end. It was the sort of run they all enjoyed, like a dog let off a leash normally in the grasp of the slowest old lady in the world: now there was no restraint on them, no convoy to worry about, no Senior Officer to wake from his siesta and ask them what on earth they were doing. Compass Rose raced on, with a rising wind and sea on her quarter sometimes making her sheer widely, till the quartermaster could haul her back on her course again: she was alone, like a ship in a picture, crossing cold grey waves towards an untenanted horizon.
She ran all through the night, and all next morning: not a stick, not a sail, not a smudge of smoke did she see: it was a continuous reminder of how vast this ocean was, how formidable a hiding place. There were hundreds of ships at sea in the Atlantic all the time, and yet Compass Rose seemed to have it to herself, with nothing to show that she was not, suddenly, the last ship left afloat in the world.
But when they had run the distance and reached the likely search area, the phrase ‘hiding place’ returned again, this time to mock them. It was mid-afternoon of a brisk lowering February day, with darkness due to fall within three hours: they were looking for a ship which might have been bombed, might have been sunk, might have been playing the fool, might be in a different longitude altogether, and halfway round the world from this one. On a sheet of squared tracing paper Ericson plotted out a ‘box search’ – a course for Compass Rose consisting of a series of squares, gradually extending down wind in the direction the ship should have drifted. Its sides were each seven miles long: every two hours, the area shifted another seven miles to the north-eastward. Then he laid it off on the chart, so as to keep a check on their final position, and they settled down to quarter the ocean according to this pattern.
It was very cold. Darkness came down, and with it the first drift of snow: as hour succeeded hour, with nothing sighted and no hint of a contact on the radar screen, they began to lose the immediate sense of quest and to be preoccupied only with the weather. The wind was keen, the snow was penetratingly cold, the water racing past was wild and noisy: these were the realities, and the early feeling of urgency in their search was progressively blunted, progressively forgotten. Hours before, it seemed, there had been something about a carefully worked out, meticulous investigation of this area; but that was a very long time ago, and the bombed ship (if she existed) and her crew (if they still lived) were probably somewhere quite different, and in the meantime it was excruciatingly cold and unpleasant . . . At midnight the snow was a whirling blizzard: at 4 a.m., when Lockhart came on watch, it was to a bitter, pitch-black darkness that stung his face to the marrow when he had scarcely mounted the bridge.
‘Any sign of them?’ he shouted to Morell.
‘Nothing . . . If they’re adrift in this, God help them.’
It was ‘nothing’ all that watch, and ‘nothing’ when daylight came, and
‘nothing’ all the morning: at midday the wind fell light and the snow diminished to an occasional drift, wafting gently past them as if hoping to be included in a Christmas card. Individually, without sharing their doubts, they began to wonder if the thing had not gone on long enough: the search had taken two days already, and during the last twenty-four hours they had ‘swept’ nearly six hundred square miles of water. The contract could not call for very much more . . . ‘I’ve just remembered it’s St Valentine’s Day,’ said Ferraby suddenly to Baker, during the idle hours of the afternoon watch. ‘Put it down in the log,’ growled Ericson, overhearing. ‘There won’t be any other entries . . .’ It was unusual for him to admit openly to any sort of doubt or hesitation: they felt free now to question the situation themselves, even to give up and turn back and forget about it.
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.