The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  An hour later they were in the thick of the Mersey traffic, leading the slow and stately progress upriver to the convoy anchorage. The long line of ships stretched behind them, deep-laden, travel-stained, proud and yet matter-of-fact: ships they had guarded for many days, ships they knew well by sight from this and earlier convoys, ships they had cursed for straggling or admired for skilful handling. It was another convoy – Lockhart had lost count by now, but perhaps it was their sixteenth, perhaps their twentieth; another great company of ships, safe home with hundreds of men and thousands of tons of supplies, after running the gauntlet of the weather and the worst that the enemy could do. Perhaps pride was the keynote, pride and a sober thankfulness: the supplies were needed, the men were precious, and their own Compass Rose was a well-loved hostage to fortune . . . Wells said suddenly: ‘Commodore calling up, sir!’ and there was silence on the bridge as he took and acknowledged the message from the big freighter that led the convoy. Then Wells turned from the signal lamp.

  ‘From the Commodore, sir. “Nice to see those Liver birds again. Thanks and goodbye”.’

  Lockhart looked upriver, towards the great gilded birds that topped the Liver Building in the heart of Liverpool. He shared the Commodore’s sentiment, down to the last tip of their wings . . .

  ‘Make: “They look bigger and better every time. Goodbye to you”,’ he dictated to Wells. He waited while the message was despatched and then, with a curious sense of disappointment, he gave the helm order which took Compass Rose in a wide sheer away from the convoy and towards their own berth at the oiler. The job was done, the release was official, but to part company now was like surrendering a foster child one had learned to love . . . Earlier he had been worried about manoeuvring Compass Rose up to the oiler, but now he took her alongside with a careless skill, as if he had done it every day for the past year. After the weight of the last few days, after the ordeal of the fog, there seemed nothing that he could not do. When finally he gave the order: ‘Finished with main engines’, and went down to report to Ericson, he felt at least ten years older, and triumphant in his maturity.

  4

  There was the life at sea, crude, self-contained, sometimes startling: there was the tender life of home, when leave came round: and there was the medium world of life in harbour, when they rested from one convoy and prepared for the next one. Of the three, harbour routine gave them perhaps the most vivid sense of being one unit of a complex weapon engaged in a huge and mortal battle.

  Gladstone Dock, where nearly all the Western Approaches escorts roosted, had developed in two years into a vast, concentrated hive of naval activity. Strategically, the Battle of the Atlantic was controlled from the underground headquarters in Liver Buildings: down in Gladstone Dock, and in other smaller docks grouped along the waterfront, the ships that fought the battle, the crude pawns that did the work, lay in tiers, three and four abreast along the quayside, salty, shabby, overworked, overdriven; fresh and wet from the encounter, resting thankfully, or waiting for the next tide to take them out again . . . They looked workmanlike, without much elegance, but tough and dependable: they were close packed, stern to stern, their masts reaching for the sky, their level fo’c’sles towering over the jetty – the jetty which was itself crowded with sheds and training huts and an untidy jumble of gear and spare parts and oil drums and newly delivered stores. But it was the ships which drew and focused the eye: the lean grey destroyers, the stocky sloops and corvettes, the trawlers that swept the fairway – this was the whole interlocking team that had the battle in its hands. Here in Gladstone Dock was the hard shell for the convoys, the armour of the Atlantic: it did not shine, it was dented here and there, it was unquestionably spread thin and strained to the limit of endurance; but it had stood the test of two brutal years, and it would hold as long as the war held, and for five minutes longer.

  The men who manned these ships were cast in the same mould. For sailors, the Battle of the Atlantic was becoming a private war: if you were in it, you knew all about it – you knew how to watchkeep on filthy nights, how to surmount an aching tiredness, how to pick up survivors, how to sink submarines, how to bury the dead, and how to die without wasting anyone’s time. You knew, though not in such detail as your own particular part of the job, the overall plan of the battle, and the way it was shaping. You knew, for example, that at this moment the score was steadily running against the convoys; you knew by heart the monthly totals of sinkings, the record and the quality of other ships in other escort groups, the names of U-boat commanders who had especially distinguished themselves by their skill or ruthlessness. The whole battle was now a very personal matter, and for sailors involved in it there was a pride and a comradeship which nothing could supplant. For they were the experts, they were fighting it together, they had learnt what it took from a man, and the mortal fury which, increasing from month to month, tested whomever was sucked in, from the highest to the lowest, down to the fine limits of his endurance.

  This was especially true of the men who sailed in corvettes, the smallest ships loose in the wild Atlantic at this desperate stage: when they foregathered in harbour after the tough convoy, the triumphant attack, the miserable loss and slaughter, they were very conscious of their calling . . . They read about themselves in the newspapers, they quoted the ludicrous headlines which lagged so far behind the truth: but deep within himself each man knew that the public reputation, the corvette label, was a reflection of something which, when isolated at sea, always confronted him with a mixture of triumph and horror, which was a stark and continuous challenge, which really did take a man to survive . . . When a sailor said: ‘I’m in corvettes,’ he might be alert for the answering: ‘That must be tough – I believe they roll their guts out’: but whatever the answer, whatever the scale of sympathy or incomprehension, the truth kept him company, and in his private mind he could be proud of it.

  Alongside each other, in harbour, one wardroom visited another: a taste of someone else’s gin and a new angle to flotilla gossip enlivened the set routine and the waiting for action. But there was little to distinguish between the men themselves: whatever the ship, they were the same kind of people – amateurs who had graduated to a professional skill and toughness. When Ericson looked round his own wardroom, he saw in theory a journalist, a barrister, a bank clerk, and a junior accountant; but these labels now were meaningless – they were simply his officers, the young men who ran his ship and who had adapted themselves to this new life so completely that they had shed everything of their past save the accent it had given them. It was the same in other ships: all the corvettes were officered on these lines: the new experimental craft had taken their men to school with them, and had developed swiftly and evenly into units remarkable for their dependability and essential to the struggle. It was no wonder that, when they met and relaxed between convoys, these young men all exhibited, like a brand name, the disdainful confidence of the elect. To sail in corvettes was a special kind of test and a special distinction, and none could know it better than themselves.

  It coloured – it was bound to colour – their feelings for other men who were not in the battle. During her time in harbour, Compass Rose had many contacts with the shore staff, who supervised the continuous programme of gunnery and asdic training which filled most of the working days between convoys; and there were many visitors on board – experts of all kinds to check their equipment, signalling and engineering staff, liaison characters, religious performers: men with excellent reasons for coming aboard, and men with none at all save a militant thirst and the chance of slaking it at any one of a dozen floating bars . . . There was indeed a very wide range of callers, and it was fair to say that most of them were welcome, since most of them were hardworking, helpful, genuine, and wistfully honest when they proclaimed their longing to go to sea instead of sitting out the war in an office job ashore. But there were others, nibbling and sipping at the outside of the real core; professional callers, who could be counted on to come a
board at eleven in the morning with some transparent excuse, anchor themselves in the wardroom with a glass in one hand and the bottle convenient to the other, and stay there with so established an air that the final choice lay between closing the bar or asking them to lunch . . . Some of them acted a part, and the talk would run on their eagerness to go to sea, if only they could shake off this infernal catarrh; others did not even bother to do this, and exhibited only the complacency which went naturally with a soft job, plenty of spare time, and a prescriptive right to scrounge free drinks for several hours a day. When one was recovering from two or three weeks of vile weather at sea, with perhaps a rough convoy thrown in, and the memory of men gasping out their lives in the very wardroom where one sat, it was particularly hard to be civil to a man who seemed to regard the whole thing as an agreeable frolic, and his own soft role in it as the reward of a natural talent.

  For the most part their reaction, even among themselves, was silence, a tacit contempt which could hardly find expression without acknowledging what they thought of their own job. But sometimes this contempt overflowed. There was one occasion aboard Compass Rose when, lunch having been delayed for a full hour by a determined stayer who would not take even the broadest hint that the morning gin session was over, they sat down at the lunch table in a state of frustrated impatience. Ericson was ashore, and Lockhart, sitting at the head of the table and helping himself to nearly-congealed steak-and-kidney pie, voiced the general feeling when he said: ‘That man really is the limit. He comes aboard every single day we’re in harbour, and I don’t suppose he does a stroke of work while he’s here.’ He looked at Morell. ‘What did he do for us this morning?’

  ‘He had eight gins,’ answered Morell evenly. ‘Apart from that, he said our gun was very nice and clean.’

  ‘Flotilla Gunnery Officer!’ exclaimed Lockhart savagely. ‘I’d like to take that gun and—’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Morell. ‘But I claim the right to pull the trigger.’

  Ferraby, picking at his food at the bottom of the table, broke in. ‘Don’t you remember him at King Alfred?’ he asked Lockhart. ‘He was there the same time as us. He said he was going into Coastal Forces.’

  Lockhart nodded. ‘I remember his face vaguely.’

  ‘You’ve had plenty of time to refresh your memory,’ said Morell.

  ‘What makes me specially angry,’ went on Lockhart, ‘is his general attitude – the way he looks at the war. He comes aboard here, drinks our gin, doesn’t pretend to be the slightest use to us, and then talks about the war and the Navy as if they were both some kind of racket, specially invented to give him a soft job.’

  ‘That’s probably exactly what the war has meant for him,’ said Morell. ‘There are hundreds of people like that, you know: they don’t see the point of it, they don’t want to see the point of it – they get themselves a nice easy job, with a bit of extra pay attached, and the longer the war goes on the happier they are. They’re not fighting, or helping to fight, because they don’t see the thing as a fight at all. It’s simply a little cosmic accident which has given them a smart uniform and the chance to scrounge cigarettes at duty-free prices.’

  ‘But how many people do see it as a fight?’ Baker did not often join in wardroom discussions, but this time he seemed to have nerved himself to take part. He looked round the table, rather hesitantly. ‘We all feel pretty close to it here, I suppose, but even so—’ he floundered for a moment, ‘even when we’re at sea, it’s difficult to feel that we’re there because we’ve got to win the war and beat the Germans. Most of the time it’s not like being in a war at all – it’s just doing a job because everyone else is doing it, and if it were the French instead of the Germans we’d do it just the same, without asking any questions.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Lockhart after a pause. ‘Sometimes it is like being caught in a machine, a machine which someone else is working and controlling.’ He hesitated. The true answer was of course that one should have taken sufficient interest in politics before the war to understand what the war was about, and to feel a personal and overwhelming desire to win it; but for someone like Baker, barely out of his teens and with the narrowest of interests, the criticism would have been harsh. His trouble was not lack of interest, but immaturity. ‘But all the same,’ he went on, ‘we are in it, and we are fighting; and even if we don’t consciously give it a melodramatic label like “fighting for democracy” or “putting an end to fascist tyranny”, that’s precisely what we’re doing and that’s the whole meaning of it.’

  Morell looked at him curiously. ‘You really feel that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Then, conscious that the others were looking at him with an equal curiosity, Lockhart relaxed, and smiled. ‘Yes, I’m a very patriotic character. It’s the only thing that keeps me going.’

  There was a knock at the wardroom door, and the quartermaster came in.

  ‘Gunnery Officer, sir,’ he said formally.

  ‘Yes?’ said Morell.

  ‘The officer who went ashore awhile ago just came back, sir.’

  ‘Oh God!’ said Lockhart involuntarily.

  ‘He asked me to give you this, sir.’ The quartermaster held out an envelope. ‘Said he forgot about it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Morell. He took the envelope, and slit it open with a knife. An imposing-looking sheet of foolscap fell out. Morell glanced at it, and his face assumed a ludicrously startled air. ‘Good heavens!’ he muttered. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Lockhart.

  ‘An amendment to the new Flotilla Gunnery Orders that came out yesterday,’ answered Morell. ‘Our friend has justified his existence at last.’

  ‘Anything important?’

  ‘Oh yes. In fact it’s fundamental . . .’ Some element of control in his voice made them all look up. ‘I will read it to you. “Flotilla Gunnery Orders”,’ he read out, his inflection infinitely smooth. ‘”Amendment Number One. Page two, line six. For ‘shit’ read ‘shot’”.’

  Among the many ships which they encountered regularly at Liverpool were some manned by men of the Allied navies, men who had either escaped in the ships themselves and made their way to Britain, or had been recruited on their arrival and drafted to a British ship which had been turned over to them. There were, among others, several Dutch minesweepers, a Norwegian corvette, and a French submarine chaser of so dramatic a design that it was difficult to tell, at a first glance, whether she was sinking or not. Such ships, and such men, set a curious problem: the problem of whether to take them seriously, and count on them as honest and effective allies, or to discount them altogether and treat them as an unexpected piece of decoration, acceptable as long as they did not get in the way of more serious preoccupations but hardly to be rated as ships of war and men of action.

  The trouble was that they varied: sometimes they were convincing, sometimes not. The ‘foreign’ ships were of course essentially self-contained: isolated in a strange country and cut off from their own defeated peoples, their officers and men had a wary reserve in dealing with strangers which was difficult to break down. One wanted to understand them, to make allowances, to sympathise with their position; but there were so many other things to think about that the curious, the almost tender complication of appreciating an exile’s feelings was too much trouble altogether, unless one were in an exceptionally sympathetic mood . . . Sometimes it did seem worth while, when they could be persuaded to talk freely; for many of them had exciting stories to tell of how they came to be fighting for the Allies, stories so very much more significant than simply signing on the dotted line and stepping into an R.N.V.R. uniform: stories of drama and intrigue when their countries were on the verge of defeat, of escape seen as the only salve for honour, of taking desperate decisions under cover of a passive acceptance, of fighting and eluding, of breathing suddenly the free air of England . . . They all shared this basic excitement, in many and varied forms, and they shared also a sadness, a l
ooking backwards towards what they had left behind; but even in sadness they varied, even here there were degrees of plausibility.

  The Dutch and the Norwegians seemed essentially serious and dependable: they too had this backward glance – many of them had heard nothing of their friends and families since their countries had been cruelly overrun in 1940 – but they matched it by a forward look as well, a positive effort to regain and re-establish what they had lost, a fighting-back towards home and peace with honour. Their ships always made a remarkable impression, because the men themselves seemed to have remarkable qualities; by cutting themselves off from their homes they had cleared the ground for a single-minded effort, and this effort, involving the seamanlike virtues of cleanliness, patience, and courage, was reflected in all they did and most of what they said. By chance, it was Ericson who summed up this feeling, after spending an evening in one of the Dutch minesweepers in Gladstone Dock.