The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  That first night with the convoy was a restless affair which gave them very little sleep. They were still organised on a two-watch basis – that is, the Captain and Ferraby alternated with Bennett and Lockhart, four hours on and four hours off. It was a trying arrangement at the best of times, hard on the endurance and the temper: even if they could fall asleep as soon as they came off watch, they had to wake and dress and climb up to the bridge again, almost before they had turned over. But this was not the best of times, and Compass Rose far from a restful place when they were off duty. The wind was rising, and the Irish Sea with it: the ship responded to the movement with a deplorable readiness, rolling and thumping as if she were being paid for her travail by the hour. In the noisy turmoil between decks, sleep was barely possible, even to men already dog-tired.

  There were other things. An aircraft, flying low over the convoy, brought them needlessly to Action Stations at two o’clock in the morning: one of their ships, straggling in the rear (where Compass Rose was stern escort), needed constant chivvying to keep her in touch with the main body. Their progress was dishearteningly slow: Chicken Rock Light, at the south end of the Isle of Man, was their mark for so long that at times it was difficult to believe that they would ever leave it behind, and reach the open sea. Altogether, the first night at their appointed job was not reassuring: if it could be as trying as this, with no enemy to fight and only a few odd incidents to contend with, what would it be like when they met the real ordeal?

  There was no answer to this question, not that night, nor at any time during the next seventeen days, which was the duration of the trip. But soon, in any case, they forgot to wonder about it: they had enough to deal with, in the simple course of nature. The second day saw them make more tangible progress, north-west between Scotland and Northern Ireland; and nightfall gave them, as their last sight of land, the lovely rain-washed hills of the Mull of Kintyre, and Islay away to the north. Then they turned due westwards, to the open sea and the teeth of the wind, and the deep-sea voyage had begun. As a final introduction to it, U-boats were reported in the area immediately ahead.

  They never met those U-boats, which were doubtless thankful enough to stay submerged and escape the fury of the weather; for it was the weather which was the most violent enemy of all. For eight days they steamed straight into a westerly gale: five hundred miles at a grindingly slow pace, buffeting through a weight of wind which seemed to have a personal spite in every blow it dealt. The convoy was dispersed over more than fifty square miles: the escorts were out of touch most of the time; it was impossible to establish any sort of ‘convoy speed’ because they were no longer a composite body, just a lot of ships making the best they could of the vile Atlantic weather. The big ships in the van slowed down, till they had almost lost steerage way, and tried to preserve some sort of order; but the smaller ones still straggled away behind, virtually heaving-to at the height of the gale and often having to steer many degrees off their true course, simply in order not to batter themselves to pieces. On the eighth day Viperous, which had had a very bad time and had lost two men overboard, signalled ‘Convoy disperse – proceed independently’: in the circumstances, the signal had an irony which they were scarcely in the mood to enjoy.

  The escorts collected: Viperous with damage to her bridge superstructure, the old corvette minus one of her boats, Compass Rose intact but rolling villainously, the trawler riding well, the tug tossing about with a ludicrous, almost hysterical violence as she tried to keep pace with the rest. They had a rendezvous with the incoming convoy, and they found it – somehow: in the wilderness of wind and rain, with visibility hardly more than five hundred yards at any time, they found the single pinpoint in mid-Atlantic which brought them up with the ships they were waiting for. It was navigation of a very high order: it had been Viperous’ responsibility, and Ericson, with years of experience behind him, found himself watching Viperous’ bridge rolling through a sixty-degree arc, and wondering, somewhere between amazement and deep admiration, how on earth her Captain had managed it. Taking sights and fixing their position, under these conditions, was very nearly impossible: somehow it had been done, and done with the absolute accuracy of fleet manoeuvres in calm weather.

  They turned for home, with the new convoy of thirty-odd ships which, in the better weather to the westward, had managed to preserve a reasonable formation. But now, with the fierce wind behind them, it was more uncomfortable still; and another U-boat alarm involved ‘evasive routine’ which took them many miles off their proper course and kept them nearly two days extra at sea. Aboard Compass Rose, conditions were indescribable. She rolled furiously, with a tireless malice allowing of no rest for anyone. Cooking was impossible, even had they not exhausted their fresh meat and vegetables many days previously: the staple diet was tea and corned beef, at breakfast, lunch and dinner, for nearly a fortnight on end. Everything was wet through: some water had come down a ventilator and flooded the wardroom: forward, the mess decks were a crowded hell of saturated clothes, spare gear washing about round their feet, food overturned – and all the time the noise, the groaning slamming violence of a small ship fighting a monstrous sea. There seemed no end to it. Compass Rose, caught in a storm which could take hold of her bodily and shake her till the very rivets loosened: a storm which raged and screamed at her and never blew itself out until they were in the shelter of the land again: Compass Rose, adrift on this malignant ocean, seemed doomed to ride it for ever.

  Bennett, disliking the experience they were all sharing, said so with honest persistence. He was now the most vocal of the wardroom, complaining with an ill-temper coloured by a real uneasiness: the rotten ship, the lousy convoy, the bloody awful weather – there were the sinews of an unending dirge which was really grounded in fear. Like the others, he had never seen weather like this, nor imagined it possible: he knew enough about ships to see that Compass Rose was going through a desperate ordeal, but not enough to realise that she was built to survive it, and would do so. He doubted their safety, and doubt was translated by a natural process into anger. He had, too, made a fool of himself over working out their position – so much so that the Captain, taking the sextant from him, had said: ‘Leave it, Number One – I’d rather do it myself’: it had not helped matters.

  He should have done something about getting the mess cleared up in the fo’c’sle, but he couldn’t be bothered. He should somehow have organised at least one hot meal a day, even if it were only warmed-up tinned beans: the galley fire was unusable, but with a little ingenuity it could have been done in the engine room. This, again, was more trouble than he was prepared to take. Instead, he sulked, and shirked, and secretly longed to be out of it.

  Not much more of this for him, he decided: there were other ways of winning the war . . . It was all so tiring, too: if he hadn’t been able to hand the watch over to Lockhart, and get forty winks now and again, he’d have been out on his feet.

  Lockhart was desperately tired, and rather numbed, for nearly all that voyage. His thin wiry body was not built to withstand the cold: he was not yet accustomed to staying awake and alert, when every nerve under his skin was crying out for sleep; and bitter cold and wakefulness were all that the present offered. Bennett might shirk his watch, spending most of it inside the asdic shelter: he himself could not do so. Four hours on, and four off, for seventeen days at a stretch – that was his share: and the hours ‘on’ were an unending strain, trying his eyes and his tired body to the limit. And when he stumbled down the ladder at the end of his watch, there was little relief to be had: tea and corned beef in the shambles of the wardroom, with water washing about all over the place and the furniture lashed together in one corner, and then the effort to sleep, wedged in his bunk against the endless rolling of the ship, with the light left burning in case of an alarm, and the thought, nagging all the time, that he must get up and face the wind and the sea again, within a few hours. When he did face it again, and felt the gale whipping and tearing at his face and
clothes, and Compass Rose lurching under his feet as if the world itself were drunk, it was with a body from which every instinct save a dumb endurance had been drained.

  There was one night he remembered especially, towards the end of the trip, when the wind had veered to the north and the gale was at its height. A gigantic sea was running at them from the beam: Compass Rose would rise to it as if she were going up in a lift, balance herself uneasily at its peak, and then fall away into the trough of the wave with a wicked sideways roll. Sometimes the next wave, towering up in its turn, would catch them as they lay there sluggishly and beat down on them before they could rise. That was the moment when the heart quailed: when solid tons of water fell with a thunderous drumming on the bridge and the upper deck, and the spray flew over in clouds, wind-driven and cutting. The storm was indeed incredibly noisy: the water crashed and thudded against their side, the wind howled at them out of the blackness as if it had a conscious intention of terror. Round them was nothing but a waste of sea, a livid grey whipped up here and there to white foam; and then beyond it, like a threatening wall, the surrounding dark, the chaos and flurry of the night.

  With Bennett dozing inside, Lockhart was clinging to the rail in one corner of the bridge, staring through misted binoculars at the single merchant ship on which he was keeping station. He was wet through, and cold to the bone: his feet inside the sodden seaboots squelched icily whenever he moved: from the pinched skin of his face the water ran down, riming his eyes and lips with salt. He felt little resentment against Bennett, who should really be doing this job: he had a general disgust that someone nominally his senior should be content to evade responsibility at a moment like this, but he was really feeling too remote from personalities to care. For him, the world had resolved itself into a storm, and a small blur to leeward of Compass Rose: the blur was a ship which he must not lose, and so, for hour after hour, he nursed Compass Rose in her station, altering the engine revolutions, edging over when the blur faded, and away again when it loomed too large.

  He was roused at one point from this tremendous concentration by someone nudging him, and he turned round to see a figure in the darkness beside him.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked. It could hardly be Bennett.

  ‘Coxswain, sir,’ said a voice.

  ‘Hallo, coxswain! Come to see the fun?’

  ‘Just for a bit of air, sir.’

  They both had to shout: the wind caught the words on their very lips and whipped them away into the night.

  ‘I brought a mug of tea up, sir,’ Tallow went on. And as Lockhart took it gratefully, he added: ‘It’s got a tot in it.’

  Tea and rum . . . When Lockhart bent down to shelter behind the rail, and took a sip, it ran through him like fire: it was the finest drink he had ever tasted. He was oddly moved that Tallow should have taken the trouble to make tea at two o’clock in the morning, add a tot of his own rum, and negotiate the difficult climb up to the bridge with it. He could not see Tallow’s face, but he divined a sympathy in his manner which was nearly as warming as the drink.

  ‘Thanks, coxswain,’ he said when he had finished it. ‘I needed that.’ He raised his binoculars again, confirmed that Compass Rose was still in station, and relaxed slightly. ‘What’s it like below?’

  ‘Terrible, sir. Couldn’t be worse. It’ll take us a week to get straight after this lot.’

  ‘Not much longer,’ said Lockhart, though he did not feel that very acutely. ‘Two or three days, and we’ll be in shelter.’

  ‘Can’t be soon enough for me, sir. Proper uproar, this is. A lot of the lads wish they’d joined the Army instead.’

  They talked till the end of the watch, shouting at each other against the storm. Lockhart was glad of the company: it was a tiny spark of warmth and feeling in a furious and inhuman onslaught. They would need a lot of that, if the Atlantic were going to serve them like this in the future.

  Physically, Ferraby was in a worse way than any of them. He had been acutely seasick during most of the voyage, but he never gave in to it: always, when it was time for him to go on watch, he would drag himself up the ladder, his face the colour of a dirty handkerchief, and somehow last out the four hours on the bridge. Then he would stumble below again, and force himself to eat, and be sick once more, and lie down on his bunk, waiting for sleep to blot out the clamour of the storm, and his misery with it. Often sleep would not come, and he lay awake throughout his time off watch. Those were the worst moments of all, when doubt as to whether he could go on with this job pressed on his consciousness like a living weight of guilt.

  Towards the end, the strain nearly proved too much for him. This was particularly so when he had to go on watch at night, after an hour or so of sleep snatched in the stuffy heaving cabin. He would get into his seaboots and duffle coat, listening to the sounds of the storm outside, and the thud of water hitting the side of the ship and the deck overhead. Then he climbed slowly up the ladder, tired beyond belief, fearing the wind and the misery waiting for him up on the bridge: watching the square of dark sky at the entrance above him, to see if the gale were passing. He was very weak, and without any will except to last out this watch, and the next one, and a few more until they made harbour. Once, he stopped halfway up the ladder, and found himself crying. ‘Mavis,’ he said – and went on, as if his wife had answered him from somewhere up above.

  He bore his ordeal alone, bravely: his set white face invited nothing save the kindness of ignoring it. He did not give in, because to fail to go on watch, to confess his defeat, would have been worse than any seasickness, any fatigue, any wind or rain or fury. There was no way out that was not shameful; and that was no way out.

  The Captain carried them all.

  For him, there was no fixed watch, no time set aside when he was free to relax and, if he could, to sleep. He had to control everything, to drive the whole ship himself: he had to act on signals, to fix their position, to keep his section of the convoy together, to use his seamanship so as to ease Compass Rose’s ordeal as much as possible. He was a tower of strength, holding everything together by sheer unrelenting guts. The sight of the tall tough figure hunched in one corner of the bridge now seemed essential to them all: they needed the tremendous reassurance of his presence, and so he gave it unstintingly, even though the hours without sleep mounted to a fantastic total.

  He was tired – he could not remember ever having been so tired – but he knew that he was not too tired: there were always reserves . . . It was part of the job of being Captain, the reverse side of the prestige and the respect and the saluting: the tiny ship, the inexperienced officers, the unbelievable weather – he had taken these on as well, and they would not defeat him. So he dealt with everything that came, assuming all cares out of an overflowing strength: he was a professional – the only one among amateurs who might in the future become considerable assets to him but at the moment were not very much help – and the professional job, at sea, was not without its rewarding pride. It had to be done, anyway: he was the man to do it, and there was no choice and no two answers.

  They grew, almost, to love him, towards the end of the voyage: he was strong, calm, uncomplaining, and wonderfully dependable. This was the sort of Captain to have: Compass Rose could have done with nothing less, and Compass Rose, butting her patient way homewards under the blows of the cruel sea, was lucky to have him.

  No voyage can last for ever, save for ships that are sunk: this voyage ran its course, and presently released them. There came an afternoon – the afternoon of the sixteenth day – when the horizon ahead was not level, but uneven; not the pale grey of the sky, but the darker shadow that was the land. The foothills of Scotland came up suddenly, beckoning them onwards: their rolling lessened as they came under the lee of the northern coastline: presently, towards dusk, they were in shelter, and running down towards the home port that promised them rest and peace at last. It was difficult to realise that the worst was over, and that Compass Rose, on a steady keel, could beco
me warm and dry again: it was difficult to believe in the relaxation that had been so relentlessly denied them. It must be an illusion, or a swindle: probably the Irish Sea would open up at the other end, and they would find themselves in deep water once more, fighting another round of the same exhausting battle. They had been on trial for so long that the acquittal did not seem to ring true.

  So the first convoy ended. It had been a shock – the more so because of the doubt, in the background, as to how they would fare in action with U-boats, if action were added to so startling an ordeal. But they did not think of this straight away: that night, tied up alongside the oiler after seventeen days of strain, they were all so utterly exhausted that a dead and dreamless sleep was all they were fit for.

  3

  It seemed that they were to be stationed permanently at Liverpool, and there they settled down, as part of the Liverpool Escort Force which was gradually being built up. The centre of naval activity was Gladstone Dock, downriver and away from the town: it was already crowded with destroyers and sloops, and the corvettes which were now beginning to leave the shipyards in substantial numbers. The forest of masts, the naval parties moving on the dockside, and the huts and storerooms put up for their use, were all heartening symptoms of a growing escort strength; but they were matched by a steady increase in the number and size of convoys, which made demands on the naval potential almost impossible to meet. It was clear that many chances would have to be taken with the safety of merchant ships, for a long time to come.

  Among the corvettes to arrive at Liverpool was Sorrel, who, delayed at Ardnacraish by some clash with the Admiral which she was not particularly ready to discuss, joined her sister ship soon after their second convoy.