The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  Lockhart swallowed. ‘If it’s not illegal,’ he began uncertainly, ‘I wanted to have a look at the plot, and see what’s going on in the Western Approaches.’

  ‘Oh.’ She did not bother to look doubtful: she was simply cool and unimpressed. Probably she got a lot of people coming in here, on any damned silly excuse . . . ‘I don’t think I can let you do that,’ she said after a moment. ‘There’s a security ban on the whole thing.’

  Her voice was low, the words musically pronounced as if each one were worth saying and not swallowing.

  ‘I know that,’ answered Lockhart. ‘But you see . . . I was in it for the last three years, and now I’ve been ashore for nearly four months, commissioning a new ship, and I wanted to catch up with what’s been happening.’

  He might have resented having to give this long explanation, if she had not been so clearly the kind of person who was entitled to an explanation for everything. Her grey eyes now rested firmly on his, without any hesitation. Somewhere behind all this there’s a woman, thought Lockhart: there must be. But she isn’t on view today. Not for me, anyway.

  After a moment she said: ‘Which ship are you?’

  ‘Saltash.’

  ‘Oh yes, the new frigate.’ She smiled momentarily: the movement gave to her mouth an opening softness which made Lockhart tremble. It’s because I haven’t seen a girl like this for so long, he thought: and then, hell! there’s got to be some explanation. After a moment he heard her continue: ‘Haven’t you got a young man called Gavin Holt on board?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Our midshipman. He practically sent his love to you.’

  ‘I practically return it . . .’ But that might be too close an approach, Lockhart realised immediately: in a minute she wasn’t going to like him at all. However, she went on amiably enough: ‘Who’s your captain? Or is it you?’

  ‘No. Commander Ericson.’

  ‘Oh yes. He’s rather a star, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her eyes went down to the rings on his sleeve. ‘Are you the First Lieutenant, then?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes.’

  She frowned, for a swift moment. ‘Isn’t that a bit unusual? Why not a command of your own?’

  ‘I wanted to stay with Ericson,’ answered Lockhart, somewhat rebelliously.

  The eyebrows moved again, a fractional and intolerable lifting. ‘Scared of it?’

  Lockhart flushed suddenly. Now we throw it all away, he thought. ‘If I were scared of having a command,’ he said, ‘I’m damned if I’d tell you about it.’

  After a moment’s silence, the smile began to break in her face again, and now it reached her eyes, which were frankly drawing his.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. The voice was soft, and a little laughing. ‘Really sorry . . . Look – if you worked in this building, with a lot of peculiar young men all scheming for a rise in rank without a rise in the amount of work they’re doing, you’d become a bit suspicious yourself.’

  ‘It isn’t like that,’ said Lockhart inadequately.

  ‘I’m sure. Because I’ve just remembered who you are.’ There was a genuine, an exquisite contrition in her face now. ‘You and he were in Compass Rose together, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lockhart. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Someone was talking about it the other night . . . You got a submarine, too. Do I apologise again?’

  ‘Never again . . . But does it increase my chance of seeing the plot and hearing the news?’

  She nodded readily. ‘I think it guarantees it. What can we tell you?’

  They talked, with some degree of technicality, for nearly ten minutes: from it, Lockhart gathered a confused impression that things in the Atlantic were slightly on the upgrade, after a bad Christmas time, that Second Officer Hallam had held her present job for four months, and that her eyes were dark rather than light grey. But he could not enjoy those eyes and that lovely face and voice for ever, and presently she said: ‘I expect you’re very busy with commissioning,’ which was clearly her method of saying that she herself was busy anyway. He took the hint without any resentment. Once again, she was that sort of person.

  And in a way, he realised, he was only living on borrowed good humour: if she had not been over-disdainful in the first place, mistaking his quality, she would not now be making these charming amends, she might never have taken as much as a single step towards him.

  Even so, their leave-taking was vaguely depressing. As Lockhart got up to go, a young R.N. lieutenant put his head round the door and said: ‘Are we lunching, Julie?’ She smiled, and answered: ‘Yes, Edward. In about five minutes.’

  ‘Julie’, thought Lockhart, on his way down the gloomy corridor. Now there’s a nice name. Farther down, he thought: I can’t say I’ve ever cared very much for ‘Edward’, though.

  Certainly Lockhart was very busy with commissioning – all of them were. The crew – the West Country crew from Devonport Barracks – had arrived: there were now 172 men living aboard Saltash, and the task of fitting them in and organising them into their watches was a complex and rather dull job that needed a lot of patience. At this stage most of it devolved upon Lockhart and on the coxswain, Chief Petty Officer Barnard. Barnard was the very antithesis of Tallow: Tallow had been rather slow-moving and solid, something like the north country accent he talked with: Barnard was small, energetic, quick-witted, and the West Country drawl in his speech seemed almost out of character, as if he were a brittle drawing room actor playing, for fun, a country farmer’s part. He had, also, a small yellow beard; and Lockhart, looking at it for the first time, had thought to himself: I wonder whether we ought to have that beard off – it’s almost too like Captain Kettle . . . But the beard was not just another bit of theatrical nonsense: it was a genuine Western Approaches beard, nourished in the cold weather, non-shaving routine of convoy escort: when one got used to it, it seemed an essential part of this brisk and capable man. Barnard was obviously a disciplinarian, with a frosty eye for defaulters; but he had an engaging humanity as well, and his contribution, during those first few weeks, in binding a new and somewhat raw crew together, was invaluable.

  All the wardroom was busy: some of its activity was inescapable, to be met and heard all over the ship, some of it patient and unobtrusive. The largest quota of noise and movement was undoubtedly made by Allingham, who had set to work to instil into his guns’ crews something of the fiery discipline he had just picked up at Whale Island. The broad Australian voice might be heard at any hour of the day, anywhere on the upper deck, going through the loading or the firing drill: there would be a harsh series of commands, then the click and clang of machinery, then another spate of words, usually either discontented or threatening. But there was something about Allingham’s manner, a sort of fierce gusto, which made him popular with the crew in spite of his badgering tactics: the words and phrases he used might, in Bennett’s mouth, have been actively unpleasant, but here there could be no resentment – Allingham was so obviously efficient, and so obviously ready to jump in and do the job himself, any time of the day, that he carried his men along with him without a hitch.

  His manner was a direct contrast with that of Vincent, the sub-lieutenant who was working up the depth-charge crews. Vincent knew his job well enough, after two or three years in corvettes, but he was extremely diffident about giving the necessary orders, and his way of supervising a practice run recalled a rather young governess whose only effective weapon was an appeal to nursery goodwill. ‘I’m afraid that wasn’t very successful,’ Vincent would say mildly: ‘try to hurry it up a little, next time’; while within earshot – there were few places on board where he was not within earshot – Allingham was bawling: ‘If you jokers are trying to break my heart by waddling round the deck like a flock of old whores on a picnic, you’ll have to try a long, long time. Now get cracking!’

  Only the future could show which of these methods of instruction was the more efficient . . . Between the two extremes, like
a man keeping his head in a foreign country, Johnson was often to be seen striding round the upper deck, silent, purposeful, followed by gangs of filthy and forbidding-looking stokers, intent on rounding up the spare engine room stores and getting them below. Sometimes he would pause to listen to Allingham, sometimes he would watch Vincent; then he would frown, and turn away, and say something brief and incomprehensible to one of his strange followers; and they would gather round whatever it was they had discovered – a drum of oil, or a set of spares – and lumber into action, claiming their own with the heavy gestures of men for whom one idea at a time was saturation point.

  In the wardroom itself, a holy calm reigned during most of the working day. Three people were permanently installed there: Scott-Brown, who was checking over his medical equipment item by item; Raikes the navigator, bringing the charts up to date; and Midshipman Holt, who was listing the confidential books and codes. Lockhart, putting his head round the door one morning, was struck by their industrious air: the only movement was the scratch of a pen, the rustle of a sheet of paper. Then Holt looked up, and caught his glance.

  ‘The backroom boys, sir,’ he said. There was a thunderous clatter overhead, where Allingham was doing something very noisy at high speed, time and time again. Holt raised his eyes theatrically. ‘All the brains of the ship are here, and yet we don’t make a sound.’

  ‘Quiet!’ said Scott-Brown vaguely, without looking up from his lists.

  ‘Me?’ asked the midshipman, astonished.

  ‘Yes, you,’ said Raikes. ‘If you’ve got time to talk, you’ve got time to help me with these charts.’

  ‘I couldn’t be busier,’ said the midshipman promptly. ‘I’m working my trousers to the bone . . .’ He sighed a deep sigh, and bent over his task again. There was another roar from overhead as Allingham started to reason with his men. The bearded coxswain appeared at the doorway, and said briskly to Lockhart: ‘Request men ready, sir.’ An encouraging odour of coffee came from the wardroom pantry.

  Saltash was getting into her stride.

  The Captain himself was away: he had, in fact, gone back to school.

  For a fortnight he had been at Liverpool, caught deep in the toils of something which, innocently labelled ‘Commanding Officers’ Tactical Course’, had proved an ordeal of the most daunting kind. The course was intended to illustrate the latest developments of the war in the Atlantic, and to provide a practice ground for close study of them: there was a series of lectures, and then, each afternoon, the officers under instruction were installed in a large empty room, on the floor of which was a ‘plot’, with models to illustrate the convoy, the escort, and the threatening enemy. The ‘convoy game’ began: ‘sighting reports’ came in, bad weather was laid on, ships were sunk: U-boats crowded round, and the escorts had to work out their counter-tactics, and put them into effect, as they would do at sea. A formidable R.N. captain was in charge: and large numbers of patient Wrens stood by, moving the ship models, bringing the latest ‘signals’, and sometimes discreetly advising the next course of action. Rather unfairly, they seemed to know all about everything.

  Even with the intensive lecturing, Ericson found a lot of it extraordinarily difficult to grasp. Things had moved on in the Atlantic during the four months he had been ashore: there were new weapons, new dangers, new schemes of counter-attack about which he knew very little. He found that he was out of practice, too, and out of tune with the feel of command: there was so much to think about, and to guard against, as soon as a crisis blew up; often he could hardly remember the correct helm orders, or how to draft an intelligible signal . . . By reason of his rank, he was usually chosen to be Senior Officer of the escort when they played the convoy game; and whenever he made mistakes, he could not help remembering that in a few weeks he was going to be leading his own escort group to sea, and that if he made these mistakes in a real battle they would carry a heavy price: more ships sunk, more men drowned: perhaps another burning tanker, perhaps another Compass Rose – and all now to be laid directly at his door and on his conscience.

  Sometimes these errors were so elementary that they appalled him. There was one occasion which remained in his memory for a long time afterwards. He had been detailed, as usual, to act as the Senior Officer of the escort: it was an action at night, and to initiate it he was given two ‘sighting reports’, coming in the form of two urgent signals within a minute of each other.

  ‘Radar bearing 300 degrees, three miles.’

  ‘Asdic contact bearing 360 degrees, one mile.’

  That meant, presumably, two submarines, some distance apart and both on the same side of the convoy. He thought for a moment: then he sent signals to two of his wing escorts, telling them to investigate the contacts. When he had done so, he tried to think of what should follow, he tried to translate the picture on the floor into the reality of a convoy at sea, with danger threatening and a hundred ships to guard. Nothing happened in his brain, nothing occurred to him. The minutes went by. Presently the Wren by his side shook her head, solemn and reproachful.

  ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘you must remember to bring up another escort, to close the gap on the starboard side.’

  The gap, thought Ericson, with a feeling of extreme guilt: yes, we’ve had that gap before . . . He looked at the girl, who was not more than twenty years old, and the sight of her young, thoughtful, and intelligent face suddenly staggered him with a sense of his inadequacy. I must be slipping, he thought, and then: perhaps I have slipped . . . Here was a kid of twenty, who had remembered the correct move: he himself was forty-eight, and he had not. Possibly that was the whole fatal point: he was forty-eight, and there had been nearly four years of this: it might be that he was now permanently stale, permanently beyond the flexibility of mind that the job demanded. Perhaps he had had his war, as far as a front-rank contribution was concerned.

  He had shaken his head at the ugly thought, but it had stayed with him, even when, towards the end of the course, he started to get the hang of things and had improved his record. He had not been able to rid himself of this depression, he had remained puzzled and daunted by the prospect of the future. It would have been bad enough anyway, after Compass Rose, to make the fresh start and get geared up again; but now the new tactics, the larger responsibility, and the complex problems had multiplied beyond belief the range of effort needed. Clearly there was an immense amount to learn; clearly he might be past the learning stage. And what sort of a Senior Officer was he going to be, when he made mistakes which, a year ago, he would not have made in his sleep?

  He allowed none of this doubt to show, when he returned to Saltash; and indeed, as soon as he stepped aboard the ship and felt the solid deck under his feet, he began to feel that some of his misgivings had been foolish and exaggerated. At forty-eight, he could not really be past the effort of command . . . Lockhart had met him at the gangway, and Ericson had been further heartened, as they walked round the ship together, by the progress she had made while he was away. It was half-past four, and the first liberty men were just falling in on the quarterdeck: the inspection of them, before they went ashore, was efficiently and properly handled by Raikes, and the men themselves looked trim and alert. Saltash herself seemed almost ready to go to work: the upper deck was clear, the paintwork clean: one need no longer pick one’s way through strange and encumbered territory – she had emerged as an organised ship, easy to recognise, familiar in every part. After Lockhart had given him a detailed progress report, the two of them went down below to have tea in the wardroom, where the rest of the officers were gathered; and Ericson found it good to relax in this young company, and to join in talk which, where he was concerned, had just enough formality in it to mark him out as the Captain, and just enough freedom to show that here the others were off duty, and on their own ground. It was a delicate and entirely natural balance which both sides understood perfectly.

  ‘How was the course, sir?’ asked Allingham, as soon as he had settled in an armchair. ‘Tough?
’

  Ericson nodded. ‘They didn’t exactly make us run about, but there was everything else. I haven’t worked so hard for a long time.’

  ‘Are there any new horrors in the way of weapons?’ asked Raikes.

  ‘Well . . .’ Ericson considered. ‘They’ve perfected those acoustic torpedoes that chase you up the tail, but that’s rather old stuff by now. Then there’s a rumour of some sort of underwater breathing apparatus for U-boats—’ he broke off, and looked round the wardroom – ‘this is not to be talked about, by the way – a long tube or pipe which allows them to stay submerged indefinitely.’

  ‘Bastards,’ said Raikes, without rancour.

  ‘We’ll just have to try a little harder, that’s all . . .’ He turned to Johnson. ‘We shall be starting trials in about ten days’ time, Chief. Downriver to the Tail-of-the-Bank, and we’ll stay there till we go to Ardnacraish.’