The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  Ericson thought he was going to stop, as he had stopped many times before, but the whisky had done its work – or perhaps it was the story itself, which could not be delayed at so crucial a point.

  ‘I asked her what she was doing there, instead of being at home,’ Gregg went on immediately, ‘and she said there was no harm in having a drink. Then I said: “Where’ve you been the last week?” and she said: “Staying with Else” – that’s this woman. I said I wasn’t going to stand for it, and the man said: “What you need is a drink”. I said: “I don’t want a drink from you – if this goes on I’m going to see about a divorce”. I didn’t really mean it, I just wanted to give him a scare. He said: “You’ve got no evidence”. So I said: “How about you coming down the stairs that night?” and he said: “I was just saying goodnight to Mrs Gregg – it was quite innocent”. I said: “How about that stuff on her dressing gown, then?” and he said: “Reckon we must have spilt the milk”, and then he winked at her and she laughed like a – like a rotten tart.’

  What an accurate description, thought Ericson: how can he want her now, how can he feel anything but hatred and disgust? But in Gregg’s voice there was neither of these: when he said ‘rotten tart’ he was not condemning, he was mourning what he and she had lost. There was no trace of rationality in it, no balancing of right and wrong: there was simply the incalculable instinct of love, of what people feel – or feel that they should feel – when they undertake to bind themselves to other people. Even now, it seemed, Gregg did not question the validity of that binding: the bargain might be bad, but it was a bargain still – and all this sprang from ‘love’, a word in a book, a scene in a film, a foolish core of determination in a man’s brain.

  Gregg was continuing, with quiet assurance. ‘I was going to say something to him about that, sir, but then he said: “You needn’t worry, anyway, I’m off to the States next week, big buying job”. And the wife said: “First I’ve heard of it, Walter, when are you going?” and he said: “Thursday – I’ll come round to say goodbye”, and I said: “Like hell you will – you don’t come near the house again”. It was funny, sir, he didn’t try to argue the toss about that, he just said, “Have it your own way, then”; I think what I said about the divorce must have rattled him a bit, but perhaps he’d had enough of it anyway. Then he stood up and said to the wife: “Thanks a lot, see you again one of these days”, and she said, very surprised: “Do you mean goodbye, Walter?” and he walked off, and by and by she started crying and I took her home.’

  At that, Gregg paused and looked at Ericson, as if judging how he would receive what he was going to say next: he was near the end now, and he must, in spite of his earlier indifference, have felt it necessary to justify himself while he had the chance. Ericson was careful to keep his expression as non-committal as possible: even now, there was no verdict to be given, no comforting words to forestall the threat of discipline. This was still a private hearing, out of the main stream, with the normal course of events held in suspense.

  Gregg seemed to gather himself together. ‘That was the Friday, sir,’ he said. ‘I’d been adrift ten days already, and this chap didn’t leave till the next Thursday, six more days.’ He swallowed again. ‘I still couldn’t go, sir, I still couldn’t leave her, even now it wasn’t safe: he might change his mind and come round to the house, and if he didn’t, I knew she’d be off to meet him if she got half a chance . . . So I thought I’d stay on, and keep her there with me: I was in the rattle anyway, whatever happened, and there was only one way to make sure she didn’t see him. Even then it was touch and go. We went to the pictures once, and she got up to go to the Ladies, and after a bit I went out myself, and I just caught her as she was going out through the front entrance. After that, we stayed at home all the time . . . She used to cry a lot: she was always on at me, wanting to go out – I was afraid to go to sleep, towards the end, and then I locked up all her clothes and hid the key where she couldn’t find it.’ He passed his hand over his forehead. ‘But one night – it was the Wednesday, the night before this chap left – she waited till I was asleep and broke the cupboard open and got dressed, and then something woke me up, and she tried to run for it, and I got to the door first and she was screaming and pulling at me, I thought she’d go mad . . . I stayed awake all that night, to make sure, and then in the morning she saw it was too late, and she kind of gave up and I knew it was all right to leave . . . I wasn’t going to talk to her at all about it, I wanted to forget it and start afresh; but when I was saying goodbye she said: “Will you be in trouble?” and I said yes I would and she said: “I’m in trouble too, Tom”, and then she said she was going to have a baby.’

  Ericson looked at the floor. There was only one question to be asked, and not for a million pounds could he have asked it. But then suddenly Gregg asked and answered it for him, in one swift brave stroke.

  ‘The kid’ll be mine, sir, and that’s all there is to it.’

  Love again, thought Ericson, with wonder in his heart: love the unfailing cure, no matter how hideous the deception, how vile the betrayal . . . Now that the story was done, he wanted to dispose of it as quickly as possible: it was clear that Gregg could not be punished for something which had tried him too high, which he was simply not equipped to deal with, and there was a wise provision for mercy available in such cases. But in spite of his willingness to spare Gregg any further ordeal, there was one point to be made; and it must be driven home at once, if only in fairness to other men who, caught in the same circumstances, did not take the law into their own hands but stayed within the framework of discipline. He turned in his chair.

  ‘Thank you for telling me this, Gregg – I shall think it over before your case comes up again tomorrow. At the moment there’s only one thing I want to say, but it’s something you ought to remember.’ He summoned an incisiveness he did not wholly feel. ‘Your officers aren’t there just to run the ship and give orders – they’re there to help you as well. In a case like this, if you’d come to me as soon as you got that letter I could have given you special leave, and then you wouldn’t have had to break ship. And we could have arranged for someone to visit your wife, while you were away.’ He smiled – very briefly, for it was not a smiling moment: the miserable face opposite him was the only proper measure of its quality. ‘Just remember that the Royal Navy has a routine for everything, whether it’s for going into battle, or for taking a shell out of a gun when it’s jammed and may explode, or for helping in domestic trouble like yours. It’s usually the only workable routine there is, the best available, because the Navy looks after its own.’ He saw that for some reason Gregg was near to tears again, and he broke off: the point had been made, and he could not bring himself to hammer it further home. ‘That’s all for now. Ask the First Lieutenant to see me.’

  When Gregg had gone, Ericson sat for a long time in thought. On one point, thought was straightforward. Gregg’s story would have to be checked – that could be done on the spot, in London, as a matter of routine – and if it were true, he could legitimately let him off altogether: even though Gregg had done wrong, even though women and marriage and emotion should not play a part in war . . . But he knew that the story was true – and it was here that thought strayed uncontrollably: there had been no acting in that anguish, no lies behind the pitiful story. Some women were worthless, and some were getting bored with the war: when the two things coincided, no result, however mean or sordid, should ever come as a surprise.

  2

  Presently the turn of the year was left behind, and the lengthening days that marked the spring brought them one respite at least – easier nights at sea. Morell’s middle watch, indeed, was now the only one which passed in complete darkness; and soon, as spring gave way to early summer, even he was allowed a partial relief from the strain of hanging on to the convoy and guessing at black shadows for four hours on end. During the last half-hour of his watch, towards four o’clock in the morning, there would be a faint lifting of
the darkness in the east: through his binoculars the horizon would lose its vagueness and take on a harder outline, and the ships that lay in his line of sight began to abandon their gloomy neutrality and grow into three-dimensional figures again. By the time Lockhart came up to relieve him, at the change of the watch, it was possible to distinguish in detail the upper works of Compass Rose and the faces of the men up on the bridge: when they said good morning to each other, it was a matter of recognition and not guesswork. And then, within half an hour, it was the dawn, and the start of another day – a day farther out into the Atlantic, or a day nearer home. Lockhart would survey the calm collection of ships, and perhaps drop back a mile or so to encourage the stragglers: the Captain would come up, grey and bristly from an uncomfortable night in his berth in the wheelhouse, and look about him and sniff the air, and then wander from side to side of the bridge, sextant in hand, ready to catch the last stars before they died with the sun; and finally, to mark the end of the night, Tomlinson the young steward sidled up and collected the sandwich plates and the derelict cocoa cups, the debris of the night’s picnic.

  That was the simple outline of dawn, as it came to Compass Rose on dozens and scores of mornings; but many dawns had more to them than this. Often, tragically, daybreak was the time for counting heads, for closing gaps in the ranks, for signalling to Viperous the tally of survivors and the total of the dead. For now, with 1941 advancing, they were a year older, and so was the war; and the further it progressed the deeper they seemed to be involved in failure and setback.

  The tide was now set and running strongly against all Allied shipping: over a full two-thirds of the Atlantic the attackers had the initiative, and they held on to it and gave it ruthless force and effectiveness. It was like a dark stain spreading all over this huge sea: the area of safety diminished, the poisoned water, in which no ship could count on safety from hour to hour, seemed swiftly to infect a wider and wider circle. In the background the big ships skirmished and occasionally came to blows: the Hipper, the Scharnhorst, and the Gneisenau emerged on raiding forays, the Hood was sunk by one prodigious shot at eleven miles’ range, and then, in a swift counterstroke, the destruction of the Bismarck squared the account. But these were dramatic surprises, highlights of a ponderous and intermittent warfare: plying to and fro ceaselessly, the convoys fought their longer and bloodier battle against a multiplying enemy.

  The enemy was planning as well as multiplying. At last, the U-boats were coordinating their attack: they now hunted in packs, six or seven in a group, quartering a huge area of the convoy route and summoning their full strength as soon as a contact was obtained. They had the use of French, Norwegian, and Baltic ports, fully equipped for shelter and maintenance: they had long-range aircraft to spot and identify for them, they had numbers, they had training, they had better weapons, they had the spur of success . . . The first concerted pack attack sank ten out of twenty-two ships in one convoy: the monthly record of sinkings mounted – fifty-three in one month, fifty-seven in another. The U-boats gradually extended their operations further westward, until there was no longer, in mid-Atlantic, a safe dispersal area for the convoys; neither from Britain, Canada, nor Iceland (which had now been drawn fully into the strategic pattern) could complete air cover be provided, and the escorts themselves were limited in their endurance. So the stain spread, and the ships went down. There were countermeasures: patrolling aircraft extended their range, a number of merchant ships were provided with fighters launched by catapult, and the quality of the weapons in the escorts improved slowly: to mark this improvement, one month in the middle of 1941 saw seven U-boats sent to the bottom – the highest total of the war. But seven U-boats was not enough: there were still too many of them hunting and striking, and not enough escorts to screen the convoys: there was still a vast margin which could only be covered by luck and human endeavour, and neither of these could match the standard and the pace of the enemy, or stop the slaughter.

  Of this slaughter, Compass Rose saw her full share. It was no longer a surprise when the alarm bell sounded, no longer a shock to see the derelict humanity that was hoisted over the side after a ship went down: it was no longer moving to watch the dying and bury the dead. They developed – they had to develop – a professional inhumanity towards their job, a lack of feeling which was the best guarantee of efficiency: time spent in contemplating this evil warfare was time wasted, and rage or pity was something which could only come between them and their work. Hardened to pain and destruction, taking it all for granted, they concentrated as best they could on fighting back and on saving men for one purpose only – so that they could be returned to the battle as soon as possible.

  Ferraby and Baker, the two juvenile leads, shared the first watch, from eight until midnight. Following the contemporary corvette fashion, they had both grown beards: in some curious way it made them look younger instead of older, and also rather unconvincing, like the naval personnel in a provincial revival of HMS Pinafore. (‘Nice drop of horticulture you’ve got there,’ a visitor to the wardroom had said, surveying the effect: the remark had earned, from Morell, the highest raised eyebrows of the war so far.) Baker, who had arrived on board a year previously, as a shy young man with a vague background in accountancy, had shed none of his diffidence in the intervening period: he and Ferraby were alike in many ways – in their automatic acceptance of authority, no matter how flimsy its basis, in their lack of confidence, in their fear that sooner or later the test of war would reveal their shortcomings . . . When they talked together, it was on a level plane of protective humility, as men talk when, in an outer office, they are waiting to be interviewed for a job they do not think they will get: it is no good showing off to each other, because neither is worth impressing, and raised voices or a cocksure attitude may be overheard, and lead to their disqualification before they have even faced the boss . . . But latterly, Ferraby had secured an appreciable lead: he was now a father, and when the two of them were together he exhibited the first stirrings of paternal consequence.

  ‘Did you mind it being a girl?’ asked Baker one night, when, as usually happened at sea, the conversation turned to the gentler background of home. ‘Or did you really want a boy?’

  ‘It didn’t seem to matter what it was, as long as she was all right,’ said Ferraby frankly. ‘You get so worried towards the end . . . Of course she had her mother there, to look after her, but all the same I was glad when it was over.’ Even now, he could not think of that night, just before the end of his last leave, without acute discomfort: Mavis’ cry as she woke suddenly, about midnight, the frantic telephoning, the ambulance that would not come, the agonised waiting past dawn, past midday, past half another night . . . To see Mavis and the baby together, next morning, two heads on the pillow instead of one, had made up for most of it; but it could not wholly kill the force of memory. ‘It was a bit of luck I was on leave when it started,’ Ferraby went on. ‘Otherwise I don’t know what I’d have done, thinking about it happening while we were at sea.’

  ‘My turn for leave next,’ said Baker, reacting to the cherished word. ‘Two more convoys, I should say – about six weeks.’

  Six weeks . . . That started, in Ferraby, a fresh train of thought which he was not ready to share with Baker, or with anyone else. Six weeks was a long time in the Atlantic, at this stage, when the next six hours – or six minutes, for that matter – might bring them disaster. There were so many U-boats on the hunt; sooner or later, he was sure, one of them was going to get Compass Rose in its sights. Ferraby was never free of that fear nowadays: it was as if, when Bennett left, he had to exchange one tyranny for another, as if the fear of Bennett would only give way to the fear of being torpedoed. Of all of them on board, Ferraby was the least hardened to what was going on: he could not forget the nodding head of the dead man, that first time they had picked up survivors, he could not forget the recurrent alarm, the inevitable attack, the slim chance of survival. Even now, as he talked to Baker or looked at the
ship they were stationed on, he was uncomfortable and nervous, preoccupied with what the next few moments might bring: it was getting towards midnight, the end of their watch, and this was the time when things so often happened – the bang, the flare from a torpedoed ship, the explosion in the heart of the convoy. And if they did not happen in the first watch, they could happen in the next one, the middle – and that was worst of all.

  At midnight, every night at sea, Ferraby was free to go below, and turn in, and sleep undisturbed till breakfast time: he had never found this possible save at the very beginning and the very end of a voyage, when they were in safety and shelter. There was something in the very act of lying down below the waterline which tortured his imagination: it seemed quite impossible that Compass Rose would not be torpedoed during these dark hours, and that the torpedo, when it struck, would not rip its way into the very cabin where he lay . . . Night after night, when they were out in the deep of the Atlantic, these thoughts returned to him: he would lie there, while the ship rolled and groaned and the water sluiced past a few inches from his bunk, sweating and staring at the bulkhead and the rivets that bound the thin plating together. That plating was all that stood between him and the black water: he waited in terror for the iron clang, the explosion, the inrush of water, the certainty of being trapped and choked before he could make a move. One terrible night he had managed to get to sleep, even though there had been warnings of a submarine pack in their vicinity: after an hour of sweating nervousness he had dozed off, and then, between waking and sleeping, he had heard a monstrous explosion that seemed to come from within the ship itself, and as he leapt from his bunk the alarm bell clanged, followed by a rush of feet, and he had felt a surge of blinding panic as he raced for the ladder and the open sky.