The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  On the table before them were the tools of their trade: the convoy lists, the sailing orders, the charts, signal codes, lists of R/T call signs, screening diagrams, schemes of search, tables of fuel endurance. In this self-contained circle, these were as familiar as the alphabet or the sound of their own ship’s bell; for months and years on end, these things had been the interior decoration of their lives, the frieze that ran round the inside of the head . . . Ericson looked down at the list of his ships: it read like a banner whose staff was clasped in his own hands:

  ‘Saltash, Harmer, Streamer, Vista, Rockery, Rose Arbour, Pergola, Petal’.

  But was the staff truly and firmly in his hands? Reading the list, knowing what it meant in terms of effort and effectiveness, he was conscious, as he had been on the tactical course at Liverpool, of a certain inadequacy. There had been an undeniable break in his training, a break which the men round him had not suffered: no one else at the table had been stuck on shore for four months, no one else had had a chance to become rusty, no one else (though this was a private whisper) came fresh from losing his ship and nearly all his men . . . But that was something which was not to show. He cleared his throat.

  ‘You’ve all got the screening diagram in front of you,’ he began formally. ‘You see how the escort is to be stationed, on the outward journey at least: two frigates in front of the convoy – that’s myself and Harmer: two corvettes on either side – Vista and Pergola to starboard, Rockery and Rose Arbour to port. The third frigate, Streamer, is in position K, and the other corvette, Petal, is astern of the whole outfit.’

  ‘Tail-end Charlie, as usual,’ said the captain of Petal, a young man entirely undaunted by his lack of seniority. ‘One day I’m going to find out what the bows of a merchant ship look like.’

  ‘You’d better ask Rockery about that,’ remarked the captain of Harmer caustically, and there was a general laugh round the table. A few weeks previously, Rockery had been squarely rammed by a straggling merchantman whom she was trying to chivvy into greater activity, wrapping herself round the bows of the bigger ship and remaining there for some hours, as neatly centred and as prominent as a handlebar moustache: she had only just come out of the repair dock after the encounter.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said the captain of Rockery rebelliously. He had the air of a man who had been repeating the phrase, at very short intervals, for a very long time, and had still to make his first convert. ‘She came straight at me, and I couldn’t dodge.’

  ‘Sounds like a girl in Piccadilly,’ said the captain of Petal.

  ‘The result was the same, too,’ said Streamer’s captain, the one whom Ericson had earlier recalled as being unpleasant to his officers. ‘He had to go into dock for repairs.’

  There was another laugh round the table, a further loosening of the atmosphere of purpose which had been present at the beginning. Now just a minute, thought Ericson to himself: this is all very well, but it isn’t to be this sort of meeting and I’m not going to run it like this at all: here is where we end the chatter, here is where I take a good sharp pull . . . He rapped on the table suddenly.

  ‘That’s enough gossip for today,’ he said, as coldly as he could. ‘I want to get through this as quickly as possible, because I’m sure you all have as much to do in your own ships as I have in mine.’ Disregarding the swift chilling of the atmosphere, meeting no one’s eye, he continued: ‘We’re going all the way across this time, to St John’s, Newfoundland: there’ll be the usual procedure for oiling at sea – that is, you will make a “fuel remaining” signal each morning, and I will choose the time for refuelling, and the order in which you’re to come alongside the tanker.’ I’m laying this on a bit thick, he thought suddenly, but it’s their own fault for chattering like a lot of bloody women . . . He looked up, to find the captain of Harmer staring at him with an expression of active dislike; and after a moment the latter said: ‘So far, we’ve always made our own decisions about oiling.’

  There was a silence, while the others waited for his answer: it was clear that none of them had liked his exercise of discipline, the first essay in the strict control of his group, and were ready, if not to defy him, at least to nibble at his authority in any way they could. It was not a sulky or a disgruntled reaction, it was just that they were all conscious of knowing their jobs just as well as Ericson did – otherwise they would not have achieved their commands – and they resented any hint to the contrary. All right, thought Ericson instantly: if that’s the way you want it, I’ll be tough with you – the group is mine, and if it makes any mistakes, the blame is mine as well . . . He suddenly put up one hand, and touched lightly the three broad rings on his other sleeve: he saw the eyes of everyone at the table follow the gesture, which could not have been clearer, or, indeed, more offensively pointed. Then he looked directly at Harmer, and said, in a voice he hardly recognised and with an entirely novel feeling of challenge: ‘Then that is one of the things I want to change.’

  The sentence, undisputed, set the tone for the rest of the session, and, though he had really had no intention of making so crude a declaration of authority, Ericson did not try to improve on it. Instead, he dealt brusquely with all he had to deal with: the signal routine, the procedure in case of attack, the half-dozen different points which had to be settled at the start of every convoy. No one at the table said anything, except to agree with him; it was as if they had decided to leave things where they were, to suspend judgement and see how the new scheme of close control worked out. But they gave no ground in the way of good humour, either; when, at the end, Ericson relaxed his formal manner and said: ‘I’ll see you all later, then – probably in some frightful hotel at St John’s,’ no one smiled or tried to meet him in any way. They too were clearly saying to themselves: if you want to be a bastard, go ahead and see how it works . . .

  When they had gone, and he surveyed the empty wardroom, he had a moment of doubt as to how he had handled the meeting. He began to wonder why he had behaved like that – and then, consciously, he stopped himself wondering, and stood up, and gathered his papers together. All that he wanted, all that the situation at sea demanded, was an efficient, tightly organised escort group: if he became unpopular in the process of getting it, it did not matter in the least.

  They sailed on the last day of April, under a ragged sky which soon clouded over to form a lowering barrier to the westward; and that first convoy – free of attack, but rough and slow and tiring – was the start of a four-months’ routine, all spent on the run to and from St John’s, Newfoundland. Neither Ericson nor Lockhart had ever been there before, though most of the other ships had: it was an area continually menaced by fog, and occasionally – if they were routed far northwards – by the threat of ice, and the Newfoundland coastline, with its black crags endlessly battered by the shock and surge of the Western Atlantic, was forbidding in the extreme. The entrance to St John’s was a difficult one, not much more than a hole in the rocks, a narrow passage between tall cliffs with a strong tide sluicing past on the seaward side: the approach had to be at speed, and speed, with a few yards to spare on either side of the ship as she threaded her way through the gap, added a hair-raising risk to normal navigation. Ericson had never heard of a ship piling up in the narrows, in spite of the scores that went in and out every week, and certainly Saltash never came to any harm; but the ordeal of the entrance waited for him at the end of each trip westwards, and again when they left St John’s homeward bound – a recurrent hazard, a sting in the tail of every convoy which might one day find its mark.

  Once inside the landlocked harbour they were snug enough, though St John’s had little to give in the way of material comfort. It had the air of being the last outpost of civilization in a wild continent: the quays were crowded with tough, salty fishing schooners, the streets were steep and narrow, and, though it was late spring, only just free of snow: the townsfolk still trudged round in snow boots and jerkins, fur caps and lumberjack’s shirts. In nearly every
shop window was a placard advertising that the wares were ‘just landed’ or ‘just unpacked’ – frontier phrases which were still appropriate here: many of the buildings and houses had a makeshift, impermanent air, as if it were even now uncertain whether the inhabitants could cling to the small haven which they had wrested from nature. Moving against this crude backcloth, the men in naval uniform from the British and Canadian escorts which thronged the harbour had a curious overdressed look about them, an insistence on formality which the natives were surely entitled to laugh at . . . There was really nothing to do in St John’s except to go ship visiting and wait for the return journey: it was no more than a pause, in rough and simple terms, before making the outward passage of the narrows and rounding up the convoy again for its three-thousand-mile gauntlet, with the enemy ahead preparing new snares, brewing new poisons for their ruin.

  For Ericson, not only the harbour entrance was difficult and trying. Falling into the old routine, getting geared up again to the heavy rhythm of seagoing in war, would have been hard enough in any case, after so long ashore and with the imprint of Compass Rose so fresh and cruel upon the memory: but for him it was complicated by a dozen new tasks, a dozen additional items which went with the job of Senior Officer Escort. He had to handle his group at sea, he had to supervise them when they were docked: he had to keep an eye on the commodore, on the moon, on stragglers and ships out of station, on U-boat signals, on the fuel position, on the routing of the different components of the convoy: he had also to continue nagging at his ships in harbour, where the emptying of the dustbins by the guard corvette seemed just as important to higher authority as the posting of Streamer to the danger side of the convoy, whenever they were on passage.

  It meant there was something to think about all the time, it meant that he could never relax his grip; and the tactical side of it, when they were in convoy, put the whole concept of escort into a higher category altogether. One ship – a big, new ship, still at the exploratory stage – would have been sufficient responsibility already: but now he had eight of them, to be handled as a single weapon, a single shield for what he had to guard: it meant that he must carry in his brain, not the manageable plan of his own command, but another bigger picture altogether – a picture with eight arms, eight different possibilities, eight assorted points of strength or weakness. All of them must be considered and remembered, none must be wasted or ignored.

  Each day and night of each trip could bring its own problems, and no problem could ever be left to solve itself. If there were a suspicious radar contact to be investigated, for example, he might detach Streamer, the third frigate, which was usually given these roving commissions. Detaching Streamer meant putting one of the corvettes in her place – Pergola for choice, the best of the five. That made a gap on the port side, and the port side was the moonless side, the point of danger. It must be filled immediately: Petal must come up from astern. But that left the straggling merchantman, which Petal had been shepherding, without any protection. Was that to be accepted? Or should he reduce the convoy speed, to let the straggler catch up? And supposing there was a threat of attack, should he bring Streamer back again to the close screen – or was she doing more useful work, possibly intercepting another U-boat before it was in touch with the convoy? But suppose Streamer’s contact were an independent merchant ship in difficulties: the job might delay her for two or three days: should he then tell her to proceed independently, knowing that she might run short of fuel and would need to rendezvous with the tanker which travelled with them? Could he spare her from the screen, in any case? Was it worth leaving his own station, now at this moment, to investigate a woolly asdic contact which had just been reported ahead? If it were a U-boat, and if it attacked, and if it scored a hit, there might be survivors: could a corvette be spared to pick them up? If so, which wing of the convoy was it safer to weaken? And was that a star shell, low on the horizon to starboard? And if so, was it from Streamer? And if so, did she need help? And if so, who was to give it?

  Sometimes the questions seemed to come like a storm of insects, pricking and stinging him from a dozen different directions at once. But they had to be handled on this personal plane: there had to be one coordinating brain, no matter how overloaded it became, and one authoritative voice, even though it might have to speak swiftly and continuously for hours on end. Now, in retrospect, Ericson forgave Viperous every complaint or query, every testy signal, every bit of interference that Compass Rose had ever suffered from her: he forgave, and he copied the pattern thankfully. For if complete control had to be exercised, it could only be done on this basis of the all-seeing eye, the voice of Jove from the clouds, the thunderclap that allowed no back answer. There was no room for hurt feelings: in fact, there was little room for feelings of any sort.

  It was a regime he found himself applying within his own group; nothing else would serve, whether the rest of them liked it or not. He was aware that he was still unpopular with the other captains, or, at least, regarded warily as a man likely to stick a surprise oar in, any time of the day or night. It did not matter: it was a small price to pay for efficiency and confidence. If the relationship, within the group, was businesslike and nothing more, at least it was effective, and it was showing results.

  That, at least, was obvious to them all. Saltash was now becoming the nucleus of a strong team which, welded together gradually and exercised to the point of exhaustion, was achieving a solid sort of partnership, an improving standard. Fewer mistakes were made, fewer foolish signals sent, less time wasted. It had tangible successes to its credit, too. In May, Harmer shot down a reconnaissance aircraft over the Clyde Estuary: a month later, two of the corvettes, Vista and Rose Arbour, shared a U-boat between them, a quick mid-ocean kill that may have surprised both sides. It was good to chalk up this official evidence of something they all knew – that the group was an effective force, and that all the effort and the patience did not go to waste.

  Other groups were doing as well, some of them better: for that was the sort of place the Atlantic was becoming, towards the turn of that crucial year. The new ships were proving themselves, the new weapons were flattering their designers; the small aircraft carriers which were now available for many convoys were playing a steady part in spotting U-boats before they became actively dangerous. And in August of that year came a piece of news which stirred a thousand hearts, afloat and ashore; for during that month, more U-boats were destroyed than merchant ships were sunk. For the first time in the war, the astonishing balance was struck.

  It was heartening, it was wonderful – but perhaps, on reflection, it was no more than was to be expected. If it didn’t happen at some point, if the two lines on the graph didn’t cross, that was the time to start worrying . . . For now they were beginning to be cool in killing, now nothing surprised them: winning as well as losing, they were ready to take it in their stride. In Ericson’s group, as with the rest of the Clyde Escort Force, and the Liverpool contingent, and the strange fellows who sometimes came round from Rosyth on the east coast, the Atlantic had become a profession; if the Royal Navy were rising to the top of it, that was hardly a matter for comment – it would really have been extremely odd if anything else had happened.

  Aboard Saltash, when they weighed anchor at the start of a fresh convoy, and set off downriver, with the rest of the group tailing along behind them at the regulation five cables’ distance – aboard Saltash, the gramophone which was connected to the loudspeakers on the upper deck always played the same tune. The tune was that jaunty trifle: We’re Off to See the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Lockhart had initiated its playing, as something between a joke and a tonic – but somehow the tune was serious, and the words were true. It was as if they were really going off to search a strange sea lair, to seek once more a passage of arms with a cunning enemy who sometimes used magic . . . But it was their own lair as well, and their own familiar wizard, no longer veiled, no longer fearful: now they knew him, and all about him, from
the tip of his watery whiskers to the cold green gleam in his eye.

  ‘Starboard ten.’

  ‘Starboard ten, sir.’

  ‘Steer one-three-five.’

  ‘Steer one-three-five, sir.’

  Saltash came round slowly in the gloom, preparing for the long leg across the front of the convoy. Lockhart, watching the dim compass card edging away to the left, tried to work out the diameter of their turning circle, and then gave up the calculation. Must be about a thousand yards . . . A mile astern of them, he could just see the leading ship of the port column – or rather, he could see a vague smudge, darker than the grey night, and a thin white bow wave that occasionally caught the moon: in between them,Saltash’s phosphorescent wake boiled and spread and faded to nothing in the calm darkness.

  Within a minute or so the leader of the next column came into view on their quarter, and then the next, and the next, a whole rank of shadows, admirably disciplined and stationed; as it ploughed towards the homeward horizon, escaping notice for the fifteenth night in succession, the whole convoy was on its best behaviour. The lookout called: ‘Ship fine on the starboard bow, sir!’ but he called softly, for the ship was Harmer, keeping her distance on a parallel zigzag, and the lookout knew it, and Lockhart knew it as well. Then the helmsman said: ‘Course – one-three-five, sir.’ Then there was silence again, and the crisp threshing of their bow wave, and the ghostly shadows of a score of ships slipping past under their lee, as they made their starboard leg across the van, their precise act of guardianship. Smoothly, steadily, like these shadows, the summer night with the convoy slid by.