It was a party of RAF officers from some hospital – a hospital which supposedly dealt with plastic surgery cases. The six young men in Air Force uniform were all the same: Lockhart, looking sideways along the row, received so frightful an impression of disfigurement that for a moment he thought it must be a trick of lighting and shadow. But it was no trick: the faces were all shattered in the same formless way, mutilated alike by wounds and by slapdash surgical repair: puckered by scars or by burning, twisted into living caricature, lacking eyebrows, lacking ears, lacking lips and chins; greyish-yellow where fire had scorched them, livid red where they were scarred, a line of violence and pain which shocked Lockhart nearly to sickness. Between each terrible face was a fresh young one – a girl’s; and the girls were all smiling and talking animatedly and looking closely into the other faces, without flinching, and the other faces, which were not equipped to smile, and hardly even to talk, looked back at them searchingly, with dreadful alertness . . . ‘They oughtn’t to allow them in,’ whispered a woman sitting just behind him. ‘What about decent people’s feelings?’ Shut up, you flaming bitch, thought Lockhart, nearly saying it aloud, and then, looking down the row again towards the wounded men, as many other people were looking, drawn by the magnet of this insane ugliness: you poor bastards, he thought again, I hope you’re going to be all right – in time, in a year or two . . . This, and nothing else, was the war; this was the part you couldn’t glamorise, or belittle, or pretend about in any way. He was glad when the lights went down again, but glad only for their sakes, for the cover of darkness which they must welcome: for himself, after the initial shock, he had felt more at home with this cruel evidence of the fight than with anything else in London. Indeed, the wounded men were a good token of the best of this city, scarred and fired in the same way: maimed for life, maybe, but talking and working and playing with what was left, and never to be daunted now or in the future.
It was the right kind of memory to take back from leave: the unsoftening kind, the dream-of-home which ran no risk of tenderising the spirit. Lockhart took it with him thankfully.
They hardly knew Compass Rose, by the end of her refit: she seemed to have moved right out of the corvette class altogether, and to have graduated with unexpected honours. The new bridge was a replica of a destroyer’s, with a covered chart table and plenty of room to walk about: the sickbay, presided over by a sick berth attendant who had actually been a country vet at one period, was properly fitted up and stocked for most of the emergencies they had met so far. There were more depth-charges and anti-aircraft guns: there was the new asdic set: above all, there was now a brand-new weapon altogether – radar.
Radar – the most formidable invention in sea warfare – had been slow in coming to them. By now, all the escort destroyers had it, and a lucky corvette or two; but Ericson, who had applied many times during the past year for it to be fitted, had always come away discouraged. ‘You haven’t a hope,’ the man in charge of such things at headquarters had told him, whenever he raised the question. ‘There are all sorts of ships ahead of you. In fact,’ said the man, who was not a smooth-spoken character, ‘as far as radar is concerned, corvettes are sucking on the hind tit. You’ll just have to wait until everyone else has had a go.’
‘What a pity Bennett is not still with us,’ remarked Morell, who had overheard the conversation. ‘The phrase would have delighted him . . .’
But now at last they had it, mounted on the bridge in all its glory and promise. Radar was the one thing they needed, the one weapon which the Atlantic war had long demanded: a means of making contact at night or in thick weather with whatever lay in waiting nearby. It could detect a U-boat on the surface at a considerable distance, and show its course and speed: on its fluorescent screen, radar gave a ‘picture’ of the convoy or of nearby ships, a picture which simplified station keeping at night to such a degree that it was difficult to see how they had ever done without it. There need be no more hanging on and punishing the eyes at night, since radar did it all: no more searching for lost ships or for the incoming convoy – there they were, clearly picked out on the screen, scores of miles away. It was going to be a help and a comfort – that they all realised; and beyond this, perhaps it would, as a weapon, even start to equalise the Atlantic score, meeting the cunning and secret attack with a delicate revealing finger, the best that science could do for man.
They were fitted with it in time to return to sea when the battle was climbing to crucial heights; in time for the worst convoy of all so far.
7
The smiling weather of that late summer helped them to settle down to seagoing again, after the relaxation of their refit. It was a curious business, this tuning-up of men and machinery, and in some cases it caught both of them unawares. Compass Rose hit the knuckle of the jetty – fortunately not very hard – on her way out of dock, owing to a small defect in her reversing gear; and one seaman, to his lasting shame, was actually seasick on the five-minute trip across the river to top up at the oiler . . . But these were odd items in a quick process of re-establishment: when they picked up their convoy off the Bar Light Vessel they were already halfway back to the old routine, and by the time they were two days out, clear of land and heading in a wide south-westerly circle for Gibraltar, the ship was fighting fit again. The weather gave them a wonderful succession of sunlit days and calm nights; and conscious of their luck in sailing for hour after hour over a deep blue, mirror-calm sea, the sort of warm and lazy trip that cost a guinea a day in peacetime, they quickly made the transfer from land to seafaring. It was, from many angles, good to be back on the job again: clear of the dubious and emotional tie of land, they were once more part of an increased escort – two destroyers and five corvettes – charged with the care of twenty-one deep-laden ships bound for Gibraltar. This was their real task, and they turned to it again with the readiness of men who, knowing that the task was crucial, were never wholly convinced that the Navy could afford to let them take a holiday.
The treachery of that perfect weather, the lure of the easy transition, were not long in the declaring.
It started with a single aircraft, possibly an old friend, a four-engined Focke-Wulf reconnaissance plane which closed the convoy from the eastwards and then began to go round them in slow circles, well out of range of any gunfire they could put up. It had happened to them before, and there was little doubt of what the plane was doing – pinpointing the convoy, shadowing it, noting exactly its course and speed, and then reporting back to some central authority, as well as tipping off any U-boats that might be nearby. The change this time lay in the fact that it was occurring so early in their voyage, and that, as they watched the plane circling and realised its mission, the sun was pouring down from a matchless sky on to a sea as smooth and as lovely as old glass, hardly disturbed at all by the company of ships that crossed it on their way southwards. Unfair to peace-loving convoys, they thought as they closed their ranks and trained their glasses on the slowly-circling messenger of prey: leave us alone on this painted ocean, let us slip by, no one will know . . .
At dusk the plane withdrew, droning away eastwards at the same level pace: up on the bridge, preparing to darken ship and close down for the night, they watched it go with gloomy foreboding.
‘It’s too easy,’ said Ericson broodingly, voicing their thoughts. ‘All it’s got to do is to fly round and round us, sending out some kind of homing signal, and every U-boat within a hundred miles just steers straight for us.’ He eyed the sky, innocent and cloudless. ‘I wish it would blow up a bit. This sort of weather doesn’t give us a chance.’
There was nothing out of the ordinary that night, except a signal at eleven o’clock addressed by the Admiralty to their convoy. ‘There are indications of five U-boats in your area, with others joining,’ it warned them with generous scope, and left them to make the best they could of it. As soon as darkness fell the convoy changed its course from the one the aircraft had observed, going off at a sharp tangent in
the hope of escaping the pursuit: perhaps it was successful, perhaps the U-boats were still out of range, for the five hours of darkness passed without incident, while on the radar screen the compact square of ships and the outlying fringe of escorts moved steadily forwards, undisturbed, escaping notice. Viperous, making her routine dash round the convoy at first light, signalled: ‘I think we fooled them,’ as she swept past Compass Rose. The steep wave of her wash had just started them rolling when they heard the drone of an aircraft, and the spy was with them again.
The first ship was torpedoed and set on fire at midday. She was a big tanker – all the twenty-one ships in the convoy were of substantial size, many of them bound for Malta and the eastern Mediterranean: it was a hand-picked lot, a valuable prize well worth the pursuit and the harrying. And pursued and harried they were, without quarter: the swift destruction of that first ship marked the beginning of an eight-day battle which took steady toll of the convoy, thinning out the ships each night with horrible regularity, making of each dawn a disgusting nursery rhyme, a roll-call of the diminishing band of nigger-boys.
They fought back, they did their best: but the odds against them were too high, the chinks in their armour impossible to safeguard against so many circling enemies.
‘There are nine U-boats in your area,’ said the Admiralty at dusk that night, as generous as ever; and the nine U-boats between them sank three ships, one of them in circumstances of special horror. She was known to be carrying about twenty Wrens, the first draft to be sent to Gibraltar: aboard Compass Rose they had watched the girls strolling about the deck, had waved to them as they passed, had been glad of their company even at long range. The ship that carried them was the last to be struck that night: she went down so swiftly that the flames which engulfed the whole of her after part hardly had time to take hold before they were quenched. The noise of that quenching was borne over the water towards Compass Rose, a savage hissing roar, indescribably cruel. ‘By God, it’s those poor kids!’ exclaimed Ericson, jolted out of a calm he could not preserve at so horrible a moment. But there was nothing that they could do: they were busy on a wide search ordered by Viperous, and they could not leave it. If there were anything left to rescue, someone else would have to do it.
Four of the girls were in fact picked up by another merchant ship which had bravely stopped and lowered a boat for the job. They were to be seen next morning, sitting close together on the upper deck, staring out at the water: there was no gay waving now, from either side . . . But the ship that rescued them was one of the two that were sunk that same night: she too went down swiftly, and Compass Rose, detailed this time to pick up survivors could only add four to her own total of living passengers, and six to the dead. Among these dead was one of the Wrens, the only one that any ship found out of the draft of twenty: included in the neat row of corpses which Tallow laid out on the quarterdeck, the girl’s body struck a note of infinite pity. She was young: the drenched fair hair, the first that had ever touched the deck of Compass Rose, lay like a spread fan, outlining a pinched and frightened face which would, in living repose, have been lovely. Lockhart, who had come aft at dawn to see to the sewing up of those that were to be buried, felt a constriction in his throat as he looked down at her. Surely there could be no sadder, no filthier aspect of war . . . But there were many other things to do besides mourn or pity. They buried her with the rest, and added her name to the list in the log, and continued the prodigal southward journey.
Six ships were gone already: six ships in two days, and they still had a week to go before they were near the shelter of land. But now they had a stroke of luck: a succession of two dark nights which, combined with a violent evasive alteration of course, threw the pursuit off the scent. Though they were still on the alert, and the tension, particularly at night, was still there, yet for forty-eight hours they enjoyed a wonderful sense of respite: the convoy, now reduced to fifteen ships, cracked on speed, romping along towards the southern horizon and the promise of safety. Aboard Compass Rose, a cheerful optimism succeeded the sense of ordained misfortune which had begun to take a hold; and the many survivors whom they had picked up, wandering about the upper deck in their blankets and scraps of clothing or lining the rails to stare out at the convoy, lost gradually the strained refugee look which was so hard on the naval conscience. Hope grew: they might see harbour after all . . .
So it was for two days and two nights; and then the aircraft, casting wide circles in the clear dawn sky, found them again.
Rose, the young signalman, heard it first: a stirring in the upper air, a faint purring whisper which meant discovery. He looked round him swiftly, his head cocked on one side: he called out: ‘Aircraft, sir – somewhere . . .’ and Ferraby and Baker, who had the forenoon watch, came to the alert in the same swift nervous movement. The throbbing grew, and achieved a definite direction – somewhere on their port beam, away from the convoy and towards the distant Spanish coast. ‘Captain, sir!’ called Baker down the voice-pipe. ‘Sound of aircraft—’ but Ericson was already mounting the bridge ladder, brought up from his sea cabin by the hated noise. He looked round him, narrowing his eyes against the bright day, and then: ‘There it is!’ he exclaimed suddenly, and pointed. On their beam, emerging from the pearly morning mist that lay low on the horizon all round them, was the plane, the spying eye of the enemy.
They all stared at it, every man on the bridge, bound together by the same feeling of anger and hatred. It was so unfair . . . U-boats they could deal with – or at least the odds were more level: with a bit of luck in the weather, and the normal skill of sailors, the convoy could feint and twist and turn and hope to escape their pursuit. But this predatory messenger from another sphere, destroying the tactical pattern, eating into any distance they contrived to put between themselves and the enemy – this betrayer could never be baulked. They felt, as they watched the aircraft, a helpless sense of nakedness, an ineffectual rage: clearly, it was all going to happen again, in spite of their care and watchfulness, in spite of their best endeavours, and all because a handful of young men in an aircraft could span half an ocean in a few hours, and come plummeting down upon their slower prey.
Swiftly the aircraft must have done its work, and the U-boats could not have been far away; within twelve hours, back they came, and that night cost the convoy two more ships out of the dwindling fleet. The hunt was up once more, the pack exultant, the savage rhythm returning and quickening . . . They did their best: the escorts counter-attacked, the convoy altered course and increased its speed: all to no purpose. The sixth day dawned, the sixth night came: punctually at midnight the alarm bells sounded and the first distress rocket soared up into the night sky, telling of a ship mortally hit and calling for help. She burned for a long time, that ship, reddening the water, lifting sluggishly with the swell, becoming at last a flickering oily pyre which the convoy slowly left astern. Then there was a pause of more than two hours, while they remained alert at Action Stations and the convoy slid southwards under a black moonless sky; and then, far out on the seaward horizon, five miles away from them, there was a sudden return of violence. A brilliant orange flash split the darkness, died down, flared up again, and then guttered away to nothing. Clearly it was another ship hit – but this time, for them, it was much more than a ship; for this time, this time it was Sorrel.
They all knew it must be Sorrel, because at that distance it could not be any other ship, and also because of an earlier signal which they had relayed to her from Viperous. ‘In case of an attack tonight,’ said the signal, ‘Sorrel will proceed five miles astern and to seaward of the convoy, and create a diversion by dropping depth-charges, firing rockets, etc. This may draw the main attack away from the convoy.’ They had seen the rockets earlier that night, and disregarded them: they only meant that Sorrel, busy in a corner, was doing her stuff according to plan . . . Probably that plan had been effective, if the last two hours’ lull were anything to go by: certainly it had, from one point of view, been an i
deal exercise, diverting at least one attack from its proper mark. But in the process, someone had to suffer: it had not cancelled the stalking approach, it did not stop the torpedo being fired: Sorrel became the mark, in default of a richer prize, meeting her lonely end in the outer ring of darkness beyond the convoy.
Poor Sorrel, poor sister corvette . . . Up on the bridge of Compass Rose, the men who had known her best of all were now the mourners, standing separated from each other by the blackness of night but bound by the same shock, the same incredulous sorrow. How could it have happened to Sorrel, to an escort like themselves . . . ? Immediately he saw the explosion, Ericson had rung down to the wireless office. ‘” Viperous from Compass Rose”,’ he dictated. ‘”Sorrel torpedoed in her diversion position. May I leave and search for survivors?”’ Then: ‘Code that up,’ he snapped to the telegraphist who was taking down the message. ‘Quick as you can. Send it by R/T.’ Then, the message sent, they waited, silent in the darkness of the bridge, eyeing the dim bulk of the nearest ship, occasionally turning back to where Sorrel had been struck. No one said a word: there were no words for this. There were only thoughts, and not many of those.
The bell of the wireless office rang sharply, breaking the silence, and Leading-Signalman Wells, who was standing by the voice-pipe, bent down to it.
‘Bridge!’ he said, and listened for a moment. Then he straightened up, and called to the Captain across the grey width of the bridge. ‘Answer from Viperous, sir . . . “Do not leave convoy until daylight”.’
The Cruel Sea Page 24