The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  ‘That is quite all right,’ Ericson signalled back. ‘We will sleep by ourselves.’ He put that in, in case Viperous were feeling sad about the arrangement. It was perfectly true that two escorts could not be spared from the convoy during the night; there could be no argument about the rightness of that decision.

  There was another pause. Viperous began to shape up towards the northward horizon again. When she was stern-on to them: ‘I must leave you to it,’ she signalled finally. ‘Best of luck.’ She began to draw away. Just before she got out of touch she signalled again: ‘Goodnight, Cinderella.’

  ‘”Goodnight, dear elder sister”,’ Ericson dictated to Rose. But then he cancelled the message, before Rose started sending. The captain of Viperous was just a little bit too elder – in rank – for him to run the risk.

  The repairs did not take all the night, but they took many trying hours of it. Watts had to cut the oil pipe eight times before he found the exact point of obstruction: this was at the joint of the elbow, and consisted of a lump of cotton waste hardened and compressed into a solid plug. The question of how it got there gave Watts half an hour of abusive and infuriated speculation, and left Leading-Stoker Gracey, along with the rest of the engine room complement, in sullen contemplation of the whole system of naval discipline. But time was not there to be wasted: even as he raged and questioned, Watts was working swiftly on the pieces of piping, brazing them together again into something like the same length and curve as they had had before. The result did not look very reassuring, and once they were delayed and very nearly defeated by a section which succumbed to the heat of the blowlamp and collapsed into solid metal: but finally the whole pipe was cleared and smoothed off, and they set to work to coax it back into position again.

  Outside, dusk had come down, and then the night. With its coming they took extraordinary precautions against discovery: Lockhart went round the upper deck three or four times to ensure that the ship was properly darkened and that no chink of light would betray them: the radios in the wardroom and the mess decks were closed down, and stringent orders given against unnecessary noise: the boats were swung out, ready for lowering, and the lashings of the rafts cast off – in case, as Tallow put it morbidly, they had to make a rush job of swimming. ‘And if any of you,’ he added to the hands working on the upper deck, ‘makes a noise tonight, I’ll have his guts for a necktie . . .’ The situation now involved a worse risk than any stopping or loitering had done before, because this time they were quite helpless: if a torpedo passed right underneath them, they could only wave goodbye to it, and wait for the next one. As the hours passed, the tension became unbearable: this was the sea, the very stretch of water which on their outward voyage had seen so many men go to their death, and here they were, sitting on it like a paralysed duck and waiting for the bang.

  But there was nothing to do but wait. Watch succeeded watch: the hands tiptoed delicately to their stations, instead of clumping along the deck or stamping their seaboots on the iron ladder, as they usually did: Compass Rose floated motionless, with the black water occasionally slapping against her side: a brilliant quarter-moon hung in the mid-Atlantic sky, showing them all the outlines of their hazard. Throughout the ship there was the same tension, the same disbelief in the future, the same rage against the bloody stokers down below who had let the engine get gummed up, and were now loafing and fiddling about . . . Lockhart had it in mind to give the watch on deck, and the other spare hands, something definite to do, to take their attention away from the present danger; but everything he thought of – such as fire drill or lowering a boat to the waterline – involved noise and probably the flashing of torches on the upper deck, and in the end he abandoned the idea and left them alone. Waiting in idleness was bad for the nerves; but the risk attending anything else might be worse still.

  Ericson spent all these hours up on the bridge: there was no other station for him at such a moment, and no other choice in his mind. The lookouts changed half-hourly: cocoa came up in relays from the wardroom: the asdic and the radar kept up their incessant watch: curbing his immense impatience, Ericson sat on, enthroned like some wretched ragamuffin chief on the bridge of his useless ship. Mostly he stared at the water and the horizon, sometimes at the bright moon which no cloud would obscure: occasionally he watched the shadowy figures on the upper deck, the men who waited there in silent groups, collected round the guns or the boats, instead of going below and turning in. This was a new thing aboard Compass Rose. But he could not find fault with their prudence, he could not blame them for their fear.

  There was an example of this nervous strain much closer at hand. Ferraby had not been below decks since the ship came to a stop, and now he was curled up in a blanket at the side of the bridge: he lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, his inflated life jacket ballooning out like some opulent bosom; he had been there since he came off watch, at midnight, and he had never stirred or changed his position. Ericson had thought that he was dozing; but once, taking a turn round the bridge, he had noticed that the other man’s eyes were wide open, and that he was darkly staring at the sky overhead. There was a sheen of perspiration at his temples. He was very far from sleep . . . Ericson paused in his pacing, and looked down at the pale face.

  ‘All right, sub?’ he asked conversationally.

  There was no answer, and no sign that he had been heard. But Ericson did not persist with his question: this was a time to disregard people’s reactions, to look past them without comment. The ship had been stopped, a still and defenceless target, for over twelve hours: Sorrel was fresh in all their minds: this was where it had all happened before. It was no wonder that, here and there, nerves stretched to breaking point were jumping and quivering in the effort to hold on.

  He walked to the front of the bridge again, and sat down without another word. Ferraby could not help what was happening to him: no blame attached to him for his raw nerves, any more than a newborn child could be blamed for weighing six pounds instead of eight. The womb of war had produced him thus. But somewhere at the back of his mind Ericson was conscious of a strange sort of envy, an irritated consciousness of what a huge relief it would be to relax his grip, to surrender the unmoving mask of competence, to show to the world, if need be, his fatigue or fear . . . Gibraltar, he thought suddenly; I gave up there, Lockhart saw it – but that had been alcohol, alcohol and guilt, nothing else. And it was not to happen again, it was not to happen now . . . Waiting in the darkness, watching the silver ripples crossing the track of the moon, he slowly tightened up again.

  Only once during that night was there an interruption of their vigil, but it was an interruption which startled them all. In the stillness that followed the change of the watch, just after midnight, breaking harshly in upon the sound of lapping water, there was a sudden burst of hammering from below, a solid succession of thuds which resounded throughout the ship. Everyone came to attention, and looked at his neighbour in quest of reassurance: secretly they cursed the men working in the engine room, for reawakening their fear and their hatred. The noise could be heard for miles around . . . On the bridge, Ericson turned to Morell, who had just taken over the watch.

  ‘Go down and see Watts,’ he said crisply. ‘Tell him to stop the hammering or to muffle it somehow. Tell him we can’t afford to make this amount of noise.’ As Morell turned to go, Ericson added, less formally: ‘Tell him the torpedo will hit him first.’

  That was perfectly true, thought Morell, as he climbed down successive ladders deep into the heart of the ship: to go below the waterline at a moment such as this was like stepping knowingly into the tomb. He could not help feeling a comradely admiration for the men who had been working patiently, ten feet below the surface of the water, for so many hours on end: it was part of their job, of course, just as it had sometimes been part of his own to be up on the exposed bridge when an aircraft was spraying them with machine gun fire; but the cold-blooded hazard involved in working below decks in the present circumsta
nces seemed to demand a special category of nervous endurance. If a torpedo came, the engine room crew must be an instant casualty: they would have perhaps ten seconds to get out, as the water flooded in, and those ten seconds, for a dozen men fighting to use one ladder in the pitch darkness, would mean the worst end to life that a man could devise . . . But hazard or not, they oughtn’t to make so much noise about what they were doing: that was stretching their necks out too far altogether.

  The hammering stopped as he slid down the last oily ladder to the engine room itself, and Watts, hearing his step on the iron plating, turned to greet him.

  ‘Come to see the fun, sir? It won’t be long now.’

  ‘That’s my idea of good news, Chief,’ answered Morell. No settled naval hierarchy could ever make him address Watts, who was nearly old enough to be his grandfather, with anything save an informal friendliness. ‘But the Captain’s a bit worried about the noise. Can you do anything to tone it down?’

  ‘Pretty well finished now, sir,’ said Watts. ‘We were just putting one of those brackets back . . . Could you hear the hammering up top?’

  ‘Hear it? There were submarines popping up for miles around, complaining about the racket.’

  There was a short laugh from the handful of men working round the oil pipe: down there, even the funniest jokes about submarines were only just funny . . . Morell looked round the circle of faces, harshly lit by the naked hand lamp clipped to a nearby stanchion: they all shared the same look, the same factors of expression – tiredness, concentration, fear in the background. He knew them all by sight – Watts, Leading-Stoker Gracey, a couple of young second-class stokers named Binns and Spurway who were always getting drunk ashore, an apprentice E.R.A. called Broughton who was a Roman Catholic – but he had never known them quite like this: the labels and the characters he usually attached to them seemed to have been stripped and melted away, leaving only the basic men whose brains and fingers either could or could not patch up the oil pipe before a submarine caught them, and whose faces reflected this uncertain future. There was no pettiness about them now, no individual foible, no trace of indiscipline: as they worked, Care sat on their shoulders, Time’s winged chariot was at their backs (Morell smiled as the odd phrases, incongruous in the glare and smell of the engine room, returned to him), and they knew this all the time and it had purged them of everything save a driving anxiety to finish what they had to do.

  ‘Any signs of submarines, sir?’ asked Gracey after a pause. He was a Lancashire man: he pronounced the hated word as ‘soob-marines’, giving it a humorous air which robbed it of its sting. Said like that, it was hardly a submarine at all, just something out of a music hall, no more lethal than a mother-in-law or a dish of tripe. How nice, thought Morell, if that were true.

  ‘Nothing so far,’ he answered. ‘The convoy seems to be quite happy, too. But I don’t think we want to hang about here too long.’

  Watts nodded. ‘Seems like we’re sitting up and asking for it,’ he said grimly. ‘If they don’t get us now, they never will.’

  ‘How much longer, Chief?’

  ‘Couple of hours, maybe.’

  ‘Longest job we’ve ever had,’ said Gracey. ‘You’d think it was a bloody battlewagon.’

  ‘Me for barracks, when we get in,’ said Broughton. ‘I’d rather run the boiler house at Chatham than this lot.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’ said Spurway, the smallest and usually the drunkest stoker. ‘I’d rather clean out the dockside heads, any day of the week.’

  Morell suddenly realised how intensely nervous they had all become, how far they had been driven beyond the normal margins of behaviour. He said: ‘Good luck with it,’ and started up the ladder again. At the top, the stars greeted him, and then the black water. A small chill wind was stirring, sending quick ripples slapping against their side. Alone in the dark night, Compass Rose lay still, waiting.

  10

  In the cold hour that stretched between two and three a.m., with the moon clouded and the water black and fathomless as sable, a step on the bridge ladder. But now it was a different sort of step: cheerful, quick-mounting, no longer stealthy. It was Chief E.R.A. Watts.

  ‘Captain, sir!’ he called to the vague figure hunched over the front of the bridge.

  Ericson, stiff and cold with his long vigil, turned awkwardly towards him. ‘Yes, Chief?’

  ‘Ready to move, sir.’

  So that was that, thought Ericson, standing up and stretching gratefully: they could get going, they could leave at last this hated corner, they could make their escape. The relief was enormous, flooding in till it seemed to reach every part of his body: he felt like shouting his congratulation, seizing Watts’ hand and shaking it, giving way to his light-headed happiness. But all he said was: ‘Thank you, Chief. Very well done.’ And then, to the voice-pipe: ‘Wheelhouse!’

  ‘Wheelhouse, bridge, sir!’ came the quartermaster’s voice, startled from some dream of home.

  ‘Ring “Stand by, main engines”.’

  Very soon they were off: steaming swiftly northward, chasing the convoy: the revolutions mounted, the whole ship grew warm and alive and full of hope again. There was no need to look back: they had, by all the luck in the world, left nothing of themselves behind and given nothing to the enemy.

  At about six o’clock, with the first dawn lightening the sky to the eastwards, they ‘got’ the convoy on the very edge of the radar screen. Lockhart, who was Officer-of-the-Watch, looked at the blurred echo appreciatively: it was still many miles ahead, and they would not be in direct touch till mid-morning, but it put them on the map again – they were no longer alone on the waste of water that might have been their grave. He woke the Captain to tell him the news, as he had been ordered to: it seemed a shame to break into his sleep with so straightforward an item, which might well have been kept till later in the morning, but the orders had been explicit – and probably Ericson would sleep the easier for hearing that they were in touch again. Indeed, the sleepy grunt which came up the voice-pipe in answer to Lockhart’s information seemed to indicate that Ericson had only just risen to the surface, like a trout to a fly, to take in the news, before diving down fathoms deep to the luxury of sleep once more. Lockhart smiled as he snapped the voice-pipe cover shut again. After such a night, the Captain deserved his zizz.

  The morning watch progressed; towards its ending at eight o’clock the light grew to the eastward, blanching the dark water: Tomlinson, the junior steward, foraging for the cups and sandwich plates of the night’s session, went soft-footed on the wet and dewy decks, like a new character in a suddenly cheerful third act. The engine revolutions were now set near their maximum: Compass Rose’s course was steady, aiming for the centre of the convoy ahead: Lockhart had nothing to do but stamp warmth into his feet and keep an appraising eye on the radar screen as the range closed and the pattern of ships hardened and took shape. It was good to see that compact blur of light, as welcome and as familiar as the deck under his seaboots, gaining strength and edging nearer to them: they had been away from it too long, they wanted, above all, an end to their loneliness, and here it was at last, tangible and expectant, like a family waiting to greet them at the finish of a journey . . . His thoughts wandered: he responded automatically as the quartermaster and the lookouts changed for the final half-hour of the watch: Compass Rose, breasting the long Atlantic swell and shifting gently under his feet, might have been a train rocking over the last set of points as it ran into Euston station. At the end of the platform there would be— he jerked to attention suddenly as the bell rang from the radar compartment.

  ‘Radar – bridge!’

  Lockhart bent to the voice-pipe. ‘Bridge.’

  The voice of the radar operator, level, rather tired, not excited, came up to him. ‘I’m getting a small echo astern of the convoy, sir. Can you see it on the repeater?’

  Lockhart looked at the radar screen beside the voice-pipe, a replica of the one in the operator’s compartment, an
d nodded to himself. It was true. Between the convoy and themselves there was now a single small echo, flickering and fading on the screen like a candle guttering in a gentle draught. He watched it for half a minute before speaking. It was never more than a luminous pinpoint of light, but it always came up, it was persistently there all the time: it was a contact, and it had to be accounted for. He bent to the voice-pipe again.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it . . . What do you make of it?’ Then, before the man could answer, he asked: ‘Who’s that on the set?’

  ‘Sellars, sir.’

  Sellars, thought Lockhart: their Leading-Radar Mechanic, a reliable operator, a man worth asking questions . . . He said again: ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Hard to tell, sir,’ answered Sellars. ‘It’s small, but it’s there all the time, keeping pace with the convoy.’

  ‘Could it be a back echo off the ships?’

  ‘I don’t think so, sir.’ Sellars’ voice was dubious. ‘The angle’s wrong, for a start.’

  ‘Well, a straggler, then?’

  ‘It’s a bit small for a ship, sir . . . Do you see the ship right out to starboard – probably one of the escorts? That one’s a lot bigger.’

  Lockhart stared at the radar screen. That, again, was quite true. On the edge of the convoy pattern, away to starboard, was a single detached echo which was probably a corvette; and it was appreciably bigger than the speck of light which they were querying. He found himself hesitating, on the verge of reporting the strange echo to the Captain, and yet not wanting to wake him up from his deserved sleep without good reason. It could be one of many things, all of them harmless: it could be a fault in the set, which was not yet clear of its teething troubles; it could be a straggler from the convoy (though its size was against it): it could conceivably be a rainstorm. Or it could – it could – be something that they really wanted to see . . . After watching for a full two minutes, while the echo strengthened slightly, maintaining level pace with the convoy as before, he said to Sellars: ‘Keep your eye on it,’ and then, unwillingly, he crossed to the Captain’s voice-pipe and pressed the bell.