The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  They would not send him back to sea. ‘Not repeat not too old’, he wrote in firm capitals on the signal pad in front of him, and then, as firmly, scored it out again. But the defiant scrawl represented something which could not be scored out. Three months earlier, after intensive wangling, he had very nearly brought off the sea appointment that he craved for; but fifty-nine years could not be gainsaid, and the Sea Lord who was his personal friend had had to pass him by. Instead – ‘A most responsible job,’ they reassured him: ‘a very important one, where your experience will be vital.’ So the only sphere where he really wanted to use that experience – afloat – was finally closed to him: the best answer they could give him was Ardnacraish, destined to be the training base for every new escort in the Western Approaches command. It was important – damned important – but it wasn’t what he wanted; and now he looked at Ardnacraish and, with his eyes still turned back to that seagoing appointment, he cursed it roundly.

  Ardnacraish might have returned the compliment, though with less justice: what the Admiral had done to it had had the overriding sanction of war. But certainly there had been changes . . . If you took a small Scottish fishing village of two hundred inhabitants in the remote Highlands, with one inn, three shops, a slipway, and a small landlocked harbour: if you decided that it had to be turned into a naval training base, and transported there everything necessary for its establishment – huts, storerooms, sleeping quarters, gear and equipment of every sort: if you set up a signal tower and a radio station, laid a defence boom, deepened the harbour, and put down a line of mooring buoys: if you drafted in a maintenance and training staff of seventy officers and men, and organised an additional floating population of two or three hundred sailors at a time from visiting ships – if you did all this, you got a certain result. It would probably be the result you wanted: but you could hardly expect a sweet unspoiled Highland village to be a residual part of it.

  Ardnacraish had been lovely: it would be lovely again, when the alien visitation was over; but now it was a place for a job, a utilitarian necessity, and as such it was patchwork, ugly, and unrecognisable.

  But it was his responsibility . . . The Admiral looked out of the window at the harbour, across an intervening line of corrugated-iron roofs which housed the asdic and signal departments. There was, as usual, a brisk wind blowing: he could hear it rattling the ill-fitting doors of the other offices in the building, and he could see it ruffling its way across the harbour and sending small vicious waves slapping against the mooring buoys. There were no ships in, at the moment, except the oiler and the tug attached to the base: the last one had left two days previously, and they were waiting for the next arrival, due that afternoon. She was to be a brand-new type, and the first of her class: a corvette – theatrical name, but an honoured one in naval history. He had her training programme ready for her, and she would start straight away.

  It was a stiff programme, though an experimental one still, since convoys themselves were as yet in the embryo stage, and one hardly knew what the escorts would have to contend with. But there were certain things which all ships had to do and to be, whatever job they were intended for: as a fundamental basis, they had to be clean, efficient, and alert. In this, almost everything depended on their officers, and, judging by the last war, there were going to be some pretty odd officers before the thing was over. This ship, he noted, had an R.N.R. captain, which meant, at any rate, a seaman in command . . . The others, amateurs, might be worth anything or nothing.

  The Admiral frowned. He would soon find out what they were worth, and what the ship was worth too: that was his job. He might be too old to take one to sea, but he was still a firm judge of what a ship should look like and how she should behave; and however long the war lasted, and whatever the urgency, no ship would leave his command which did not meet this lifelong standard.

  There was a knock on the door, and a signalman entered.

  The Admiral looked up. ‘Well?’

  ‘Compass Rose entering harbour now, sir. Lieutenant Haines said to tell you.’

  ‘Has he signalled her a berth?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The Admiral got up, and walked across to the window again. A ship was just entering the narrows, moving very slowly, edging sideways to offset the crosswind: as he watched her, she lowered a boat which began to make for one of the central mooring buoys. His eyes went back to the ship, and he appraised her carefully. She was small, smaller than he had expected: rather chunky, but not ungraceful if you discounted the clumsy-looking stern and the mast plumb in front of the bridge. She looked clean – and so she damned well ought to be, fresh from the builders – and the hands were properly fallen in fore and aft, in the rig-of-the-day. She was flying her pendant numbers, and a brand-new ensign. One gun on the fo’c’sle – a pom-pom aft – depth-charges – nothing much else . . . Something like an overgrown trawler. But she’d have to do more than trawler’s work.

  He watched her securing to the buoy, neatly enough, and then he turned to the signalman.

  ‘Send a signal. “Compass Rose from Flag-Officer-in-Charge. Manoeuvre well executed”. Then tell Lieutenant Haines to call away my barge. I’m going aboard now.’

  11

  For three weeks they worked very hard indeed. From the moment that the Admiral’s barge approached in a wide, treacherous sweep right under their stern and almost caught the Captain unawares, the ship’s company was in a continual state of tension. If they were not out exercising with the submarine, they were doing gun drill or running through Action Stations in harbour: if they were not fighting mock fires or raising the anchor by hand, an urgent signal would order them to lower a boat and put an armed landing party ashore on the nearest beach. In between times, relays of men attended drills and lectures ashore: sometimes, with half the crew thus absent and their normal organisation unworkable, a fearsome directive from the Admiral would set them to some manoeuvre which necessitated every available man tackling the nearest job, irrespective of his rating.

  Stokers would find themselves firing guns, seamen had to try their hand at hoisting flag signals: telegraphists and coders, gentlemanly types, would take on the crude job of connecting up filthy oil pipes from the oiler. ‘Blast the old bastard!’ said Bennett sourly, when some crisis or other found him hauling on a rope instead of watching other people do it: ‘I’ll be cleaning out the lavatories next.’ Lockhart wished it might be true . . . The three week’s ordeal was exhilarating, and profoundly good for the ship, as far as training was concerned; but there were occasions when they all felt due for a holiday, and none too sure that it would arrive in time.

  There were no holidays now: this was the time for winding up, for tuning to top pitch: they would have no other chance. Little by little the process advanced: the rough edges were smoothed off, the awkwardness of apprenticeship overcome and then forgotten. It was a progress they all acknowledged, and welcomed: their ship was coming alive, and for that reason she was a better place to live in, a surer weapon to use. There would come a time, they began to realise, when alertness and a disciplined reaction to crisis might save all their lives; if the price, now, were overwork and sometimes over-harshness, it was worth paying the score, and forgetting it as soon as it was paid. No weariness, no boredom, no grudge against authority, was worth setting against this ultimate survival.

  The measure of their progress was nowhere more apparent than during the trips they made to sea, on exercises with the submarine attached to the base. The main purpose of these trips was to try out the asdic gear – the anti-submarine detector which was their main weapon – and to perfect the teamwork between the asdic operators, the depth-charge crews, and the Captain, which would be a vital element in their future effectiveness. In those early days, the asdic set was an elementary affair, not much more than a glorified echo sounder, working horizontally all round the ship, instead of vertically down to the seabed; but it was still a weapon of precision, it could still produce results if it were p
roperly used. And certainly the hunts themselves, with a real moving, elusive quarry to outwit, instead of the synthetic target that they practised on ashore, were the most exciting part of their training.

  At first they had very little success. Bennett, Lockhart, and Ferraby all took turns at manoeuvring the ship during a hunt, and they all found the same inherent handicap – there were too many things to think about at the same time. The ship had to be handled, sometimes in bad weather which set her rolling like a metronome: the submarine had to be found, and held during the run-in: the asdic operators had to be controlled, and chivvied back on to the target if they showed signs of wandering: the engine revolutions had to be altered, the correct signals hoisted, the depth-charge crews warned, the right button pressed at the right moment. And if they forgot one of these things, the whole attack collapsed and had to be written off as a failure, a foolish waste of time attended by a deplorable publicity . . . It was no wonder that, during the preliminary exercises, each of them in turn developed stage fright, and did their best to cover it by a mixture of bluff and pretended indifference. Bennett, naturally, was by far the best at this: to listen to him, nothing moving below the surface had a chance of survival when he was Officer-of-the-Watch, and precious little on top.

  But gradually they improved: they learned various tricks and idiosyncrasies of the ship and the asdic set, they learned to anticipate what a hunted submarine would do next, they learned when it was safe to guess and when it was essential to make sure before moving in any direction. Their wits sharpened, and their applied skill too. And finally there came a day when in the course of six successive ‘runs’ Compass Rose picked up the submarine each time and held it right down to the mock ‘kill’: when indeed, the submarine, surfacing at the end of its last encounter after trying every device and every evasion, signalled to them: ‘You’re too good. Go away and try it on the Germans.’ At that moment of small triumph, it seemed a very good idea – and anything else a waste of energy. The time was very near when they would outgrow the schoolroom altogether, and insist on trying their armour on the adult world. They were confident that that armour would take a lot of denting. Even Chief E.R.A. Watts, when straight tackled, would admit that Compass Rose was running sweetly enough, and that his engines, at least, were proving themselves robust, tireless, and dependable. From Petty Officer Tallow there was now less talk of the glories of the Repulse: on a smaller scale, Compass Rose had won his affection.

  There was one thing which did not improve, though they were busy enough to be able to ignore it most of the time: the situation in the wardroom. Ericson, watching his officers at work, was satisfied enough with their progress, from the professional angle: it was off duty, when they were isolated on board (there was nothing for them to do ashore, even when they braved the winter cold in search of distraction), that the bickering and the ill-humour started up again, taking the place of their working cooperation. It came to a head on one occasion, and he was forced to recognise it and to take action: he did so unwillingly, since discipline necessitated his admonishing the wrong man, but with the best will in the world he could not ignore a direct clash between Bennett and the other two.

  It started with Ferraby: most things did: he was now established as the vulnerable element, the weak link that betrayed the rest of the chain. He tried hard enough, he was still eager to make a success of it: but that eagerness was blunted and poisoned all the time by the knowledge that, whatever he did, Bennett would find fault with it. Given any sort of encouragement, and an occasional word of approval, he might have measured up to the new standard of effectiveness which Compass Rose as a whole had reached – he was not stupid, by any means, he was adaptable and enthusiastic, he wanted above all to give of his best. But since this giving always met with the same reception, since whatever he did was wrong, and the fact was pointed out to him in the crudest terms, it was no wonder that he slipped deeper and deeper into a miserable hesitation. He grew to loathe and to fear that rough voice, which might at any moment call out ‘Ferrabee!’ and then pick to pieces whatever he was trying to do; and hesitation, loathing, and fear were not a compound which was of any use either to himself or to the ship.

  Lockhart saw what was happening, and did his best to stand in the way of Bennett’s rougher attacks: it was this effort to shield Ferraby that led to an open rupture. It took place in the wardroom, one night when Ferraby, as Officer-of-the-Day, had come below again after Evening Rounds. Though he had been up to the bridge, he had forgotten to check their anchor bearings – a pure formality in this case, since there was no wind and in their sheltered harbour it would take a tidal wave to make Compass Rose drag her anchor; but Bennett, seizing the occasion as usual, had made it the subject of a prolonged and brutal tirade which Ferraby accepted without protest. When he was finally and contemptuously dismissed, and had left the wardroom, Lockhart, who had been a spectator, muttered something not quite under his breath. Bennett, who was standing by the sideboard pouring himself a drink, swung round.

  ‘What did you say?’ he snapped.

  Lockhart came to a decision. ‘I said,’ he repeated more distinctly, ‘why don’t you leave him alone? He’s only a kid, and he’s doing his best.’

  ‘It’s not good enough.’

  ‘It would be if you gave him a chance.’

  Bennett slammed down his glass. ‘That’s enough,’ he said roughly. ‘You keep out of it. I don’t have to argue with you.’

  ‘You don’t have to argue with anyone,’ said Lockhart moderately. ‘But can’t you see that it’s no good going on at Ferraby like that? It only makes him worse instead of better. He’s that sort of person.’

  ‘Then he’d better change, pretty quickly,’ sneered Bennett.

  ‘He’s doing his best,’ Lockhart repeated.

  ‘He’s not. He’s been no bloody use ever since I stopped him dipping his wick at Glasgow, and that’s been the trouble all along.’

  Lockhart looked at him for a moment, and then said, with all the dispassion he could muster: ‘What a horrible man you are.’

  Bennett suddenly stiffened, his whole body rigid with fury. ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ he shouted. ‘By God, you’d better watch out, or I’ll land you in hell’s own trouble! I’ll see you stay a sub-lieutenant for the rest of the war, for a start.’

  Lockhart, who had had the one extra drink which took him over the borderline of discretion, looked pointedly at the two rings on Bennett’s sleeve, and said: ‘I’m not sure I want to be a lieutenant after all.’

  Bennett, now nearly beside himself, walked across the wardroom and stood over his chair. ‘One more crack like that, and I’ll report you to the Captain.’

  ‘Try it,’ said Lockhart. He was beginning to feel fatalistic about the outcome of the scene: it might be suicidal to keep on, but if he knuckled under now it would cancel out the whole stand he had made. ‘Try it,’ he repeated. ‘The Captain’s not such a bloody fool. I bet he knows how you treat Ferraby, at all events.’

  ‘He knows I treat Ferraby like that because Ferraby’s a lazy bastard who’s no bloody use to anyone.’ Bennett focused a venomous look on Lockhart’s face, daring him to counter-attack. ‘And that’s about true of you, too.’

  ‘It’s not,’ said Lockhart, stung out of his control at last. He abandoned caution. ‘We both do a damned sight more work than you, anyway.’

  After which, there was really nothing to do but put on his cap and follow Bennett up to the Captain’s cabin. The respectful gaze of Leading-Steward Carslake, who had been an enthralled audience and who now came out of the pantry to watch the tense procession go by, was sufficient commentary on the seriousness of the clash. It seemed that only some vital exercise of authority could resolve it.

  But the subsequent encounter in the Captain’s cabin was an odd one, and less conclusive than either Bennett or Lockhart had expected. Ericson listened while Bennett put his case – fairly enough, since he was on impregnable ground; but e
ven on the admitted facts he could not really decide how to deal with it. He had been expecting something of the sort for quite a long time, and now here it was: Lockhart had been a fool not to keep his temper, Bennett had been his natural unpleasant self – and he, as Captain, had to find the right answer, with a strong bias towards the maintenance of discipline. But what sort of discipline did he want to maintain?

  The ideal solution was to tell Lockhart to behave himself, and Bennett not to be so tough; but that did not quite square with King’s Regulations, and it was the letter of the law that had to be appeased. The next best thing was to find some negative ground on which to settle the matter, and he had an opening when Lockhart, in answer to a question about the origin of the row, said: ‘I think Ferraby gets a rough deal, sir.’

  ‘It’s not your concern whether someone else gets a rough deal or not,’ Ericson cut in briskly. ‘You’ve got your own job to do without worrying how the First Lieutenant treats his officers.’

  ‘I realise that, sir.’ Lockhart, standing formally to attention, was still sensitive to atmosphere, and he guessed the Captain’s dilemma; but having come so far he did not want the whole situation to melt away in vague generalisations about minding one’s own business. ‘But if you think a friend of yours is being unfairly treated, the natural thing to do is to try and help him.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Ericson ironically. ‘I should say that much the best plan was to keep clear of it, and let him work out his own salvation. Then we don’t get this sort of argument, and—’ he looked grimly at Lockhart, ‘argument between you and the First Lieutenant is something I’m not going to stand for.’

  ‘I know that, sir. I got a bit worked up, and—’ he was about to say he was sorry, but somehow he could not bring himself to form the words. Instead he finished: ‘I’m not trying to get out of the consequences. But I do think that this sort of treatment’ – he gestured towards Bennett – ‘is having an appalling effect on Ferraby. He just hasn’t an ounce of self-confidence left.’