The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  Barnard, lost in his not-too-happy dream, became aware of a movement by his side, and found that he had been joined at the rail by Lieutenant Allingham, the gunnery officer. The two were good friends, and they smiled at each other, and then without a word ranged themselves side by side, leaning over the taut wire rail of the fo’c’sle, staring down at the quay. Below them, a Russian sentry, bristling with weapons, came to a halt at the end of his beat, turned, and met their gaze unblinkingly, his hand on the butt of his revolver – an armed man in an ambiguous trance, a man standing stock-still at the tip of a fabulous continent, tethered to the end of his tracks in the snow . . . They both watched him for a moment: then Allingham sighed, and straightened up a little, and said: ‘Looking at Russia, coxswain?’

  Barnard nodded. ‘That’s just about it, sir. And Russia’s looking at me, as usual.’ He indicated the armed sentry, who still eyed them fixedly from under his strange steel helmet, as if daring them to come ashore, or to move Saltash one inch nearer the fatherland. Barnard, bored with that stare, waved to the man, who fingered his rifle instead of answering. ‘Cheer up, tovarich!’ called out Barnard, not to be rebuffed. The man below them looked to the right, then to the left, then jerked his head up again. ‘Churchill!’ he answered, conspiratorially. But he still did not smile.

  ‘Churchill!’ repeated Barnard, with great readiness. But then he shook his head. ‘They’re a queer lot, sir. Can’t get on with them at all. Some of the lads have had rows already, over at the canteen. They just don’t want to know . . .’

  ‘It’s nothing like what I thought it would be,’ said Allingham non-committally. He too had developed some strong views on Russia during the past few days, but the need for Allied solidarity, prominently featured in confidential directives from the Admiralty, had to be borne in mind. ‘You can’t really expect them to be the same as us, though.’

  Barnard nodded. ‘Long way from home . . . Specially from your home, sir.’

  ‘I’ll say . . . Think of coming all this way, just to get a lot of dirty looks and an air raid every morning and evening.’

  ‘And what we ran into on the way here.’ Barnard drew in his breath sharply. ‘I reckon the skipper must be just about clapped out.’

  ‘I could have slept for a week myself. In fact, if it weren’t for these bloody air raids all the time, that’s just what I’d be doing.’

  ‘I hope we don’t have to do too many of these trips.’ The sentry frowned up at them, as if he had been able to tune in to this disparaging thought. ‘Do you honestly think they’re worth it, sir?’

  ‘I reckon so. The Russians need the material, and they’re putting up the hell of a fight, you know. It’s the only country, so far, where the Germans are really taking a knock.’ Allingham waved his arm round, embracing the trodden slush of the quay, the mean icebound town, the single man watchful in the snow. ‘It’s difficult to realise it, looking at this little scrapheap. But down there’ – he pointed vaguely southwards – ‘all sorts of big things are going on. If the Russians can stage a few more Stalingrads, and if we can help them via the back door here, then the war will start to peter out. That’s worth a few trips like this one.’

  ‘As long as they realise what these convoys have to go through to get here. I wonder what it is makes them so cagey.’ He pointed once more to the snowbound sentry. ‘Look at that chap. He either hates our guts, or he’s scared stiff of being caught fraternising. And they’ve all been like that. Whichever way you look at it, it’s not much of a welcome.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because they are fighting so hard, and what we’ve done so far doesn’t show on the map. The only thing they want to hear is that we’ve started our second front, and until they read about that in the newspapers, they’re inclined to think we’re loafing.’

  ‘But still . . .’ Barnard frowned. ‘They’re a queer lot, sir,’ he repeated. ‘Remember how we wanted to shift that wire, when we first came alongside? They wouldn’t even let us land a couple of seamen, before one of their officers had been aboard to check up. Bloody cheek, considering the sort of trip we’d made to get here.’

  Allingham nodded, in spite of himself. ‘Yeah, it’s queer . . . If these chaps landed up in Sydney, we wouldn’t exactly kiss them, but at least we’d say hello, and ask them along for a drink.’

  ‘What do they drink in Sydney, then?’

  ‘Beer, and plenty of it.’

  ‘Tried the vodka yet, sir?’

  ‘Yes – anything once. Perhaps it’s no wonder these chaps are so bad-tempered.’

  The air raid sirens sounded, for the third time since daylight. Saltash’s own alarm bells followed, a moment later, and the ship sprang to life, forfeiting, as on so many other days, her afternoon siesta. The man on the quay retreated to a small sandbagged sentry box, a few yards away, but he continued to watch them warily, alert for sabotage or the display of secret weapons. Near to, some guns started firing, and from the grey lowering sky came the steady beat of aircraft engines. As usual, they would have to fight an extra round with the enemy, when they should have been in shelter and at peace.

  ‘Murmansk!’ said Allingham disgustedly. ‘No sleep on the way up, and no sleep when we get here. The sooner we start back, the better I’ll like it.’

  ‘But we can’t do it twice without a rest in the middle,’ said Barnard, grinning.

  ‘Coxswain,’ said Allingham, completing the joke, ‘that’s what all the girls say . . .’ Then, the edge of laughter still in his voice, he began to marshal his guns’ crews and bring them to readiness, while the man on the quay watched and listened to these antics from another world, and guarded closely his own.

  Lockhart had already been in collision a number of times with the Russian interpreter, a small fiery individual who seemed to regard every request for stores or facilities as yet another example of the top-hatted capitalists milking the simple proletariat. On their last morning, an hour before sailing, there developed between them a row so furious and so all-embracing that it was difficult to remember that it had started with a complaint about the quality of the fresh meat supplied to Saltash for her return journey. When it had ranged widely, from a comparison of the Russian and the British standards of living, to an analysis of their respective war efforts, and fists had been shaken on both sides – for Lockhart found this habit of emphasis infectious – the interpreter took a stormy departure. At the head of the gangway he turned, for a final blistering farewell.

  ‘You English,’ he said, in thunderous accents and with extraordinary venom, ‘think we know damn nothing – but I tell you we know damn all.’

  Scene Two: A Storm at Sea. Enter a Ship, hard-driven, labouring . . . But even that simple directive could not be obeyed, because no ship could enter, no ship could make a foot of headway on to any stage like this. The storm scene itself would have to move to meet the ship – and that, thought Ericson, when the fifth dawn in succession found his ship still fighting a fantastic battle to force her way even as far south as Iceland, that reversal of nature was not impossible; for here must be the worst weather of the war, the worst weather in the world.

  It was more than a full gale at sea, it was nearer to a great roaring battlefield with ships blowing across it like scraps of newspaper. The convoy no longer had the shape of a convoy, and indeed a ship was scarcely a ship, trapped and hounded in this howling wilderness. The tumult of that southerly gale, increasing in fury from day to day, had a staggering malice from which there was no escape: it was as if each ship were some desperate fugitive, sentenced to be lynched by a mob whose movements had progressed from clumsy ill-humour to sightless rage.

  Huge waves, a mile from crest to crest, roared down upon the pigmies that were to be their prey; sometimes the entire surface of the water would be blown bodily away, and any ship that stood in the path of the onslaught shook and staggered as tons of green sea smote her upper deck and raced in a torrent down her whole length. Boats were smashed, funnels were buckled, bridges and de
ckhouses were crushed out of shape: men disappeared overboard without trace and without a cry, sponged out of life like figures wiped from a blackboard at a single imperious stroke. Even when the green seas withheld their blows for a moment, the wind, screaming and clawing at the rigging, struck fear into every heart; for if deck gear and canvas screens could vanish, perhaps even men could be whipped away by its furious strength . . . For the crew of Saltash, there was no convoy, and no other ships save their own; and she, and they, were caught in a mesh of fearful days and nights, which might defeat them by their sheer brutal force. Normally a good sea boat, Saltash had ridden out many storms and had often had strength to spare for other ships that might be in difficulties; now, entirely on her own, she laboured to stay afloat, wearily performing, for hour after hour and day after day, the ugly antics of a ship which refused, under the most desperate compulsion, to stand on her head.

  Throughout it all, the ship’s relay loudspeaker system, monotonously fed by a satirical hand, boomed out a tune called Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat.

  Each of them in the wardroom had problems of a special sort to cope with, over and above the ones they shared with the rest of the crew – the problem of eating without having food flung in their faces, of sleeping without being thrown out of their bunks, of getting warm and dry again after the misery of a four-hour watch: above all, the problem of staying unhurt.

  Scott-Brown, the doctor, was kept busy with this human wreckage of the storm, treating from hour to hour the cuts, the cracked ribs, the seasickness that could exhaust a man beyond the wish to live. His worst casualty, the one which would have needed all his skill and patience even if he had been able to deal with it in a quiet, fully-equipped operating theatre ashore, was a man who, thrown bodily from one side of the mess deck to the other, had landed on his kneecap and smashed it into a dozen bloody fragments.

  Johnson, the engineer officer, had a problem calling for endless watchfulness – the drunken movements of the ship, which brought her stern high out of the water with every second wave, and could set the screws racing and tearing the shaft to bits unless the throttle were clamped down straight away.

  Raikes, in charge of navigation, was confronted by a truly hopeless job. For days on end there had been no sun to shoot, no stars to be seen, no set speed to give him even a rough D.R. position: where Saltash had got to, after five days and nights of chaos, was a matter of pure guesswork which any second-class stoker, pin in hand, could have done just as well as he. Ill-balanced on the Arctic Circle, sixty-something North by nothing West – that was the nearest he could get to it: Saltash lay somewhere inside these ragged limits, drifting slowly backwards within the wild triangle of Iceland, Jan Meyen Island, and Norway.

  The ship’s organisation was, as usual, Lockhart’s responsibility; and the ship’s organisation had become a wicked sort of joke. Between decks, Saltash was in chaos – the wardroom uninhabitable, the mess decks a shambles: there could be no hot food, no way of drying clothes, no comfort for anyone under the ceaseless battering of the storm. Deck gear worked loose, boats jumped their chocks and battered themselves to bits, water fell in solid tons on every part of the ship: after facing with hope a thousand dawns, Lockhart now dreaded what might meet his eye at the end of his watch, when daylight pierced the wild and lowering sky and showed him the ship again. An upper deck swept clean, a whole batch of thirty seamen vanished overboard – these were the outlines of a waking nightmare which might, with a single turn of fortune, come hideously true.

  As Saltash laboured, as Saltash faltered and groaned, as Saltash found each tortured dawn no better than the last, he, along with the rest, could only endure, and curse the cruel sea.

  No one cursed it with more cause and with less public demonstration than Ericson, who, self-locked into one corner of the bridge, was fulfilling once more his traditional role of holding the whole thing together. After five days and nights of storm, he was so exhausted that the feeling of exhaustion had virtually disappeared: anchored to the deck by lead-like legs and soaked seaboots, clamped to the bridge rail by weary half-frozen arms, he seemed to have become a part of the ship herself – a fixed pair of eyes, a watchful brain welded into the fabric of Saltash. All the way north to Murmansk he had had to perform the mental acrobatics necessary to the control of twenty escorts and the repelling of three or four different kinds of attack: now the physical harassing of this monstrous gale was battering at his body in turn, sapping at a lifetime’s endurance which had never had so testing a call made upon it, had never had to cope with an ordeal on this scale.

  Assaulted by noise, bruised and punished by frenzied movement, thrown about endlessly, he had to watch and feel the same things happening to his ship.

  The scene from the bridge of Saltash never lost an outline of senseless violence. By day it showed a square mile of tormented water, with huge waves flooding in like mountains sliding down the surface of the earth: with a haze of spray and spume scudding across it continually: with gulfs opening before the ship as if the whole ocean was avid to swallow her. Outlined against a livid sky, the mast plunged and rocked through a wild arc of space, flinging the aerials and the signal halyards about as if to whip the sea for its wickedness. Night added the terrible unknown; night was pitch-black, unpierceable to the eye, inhabited by fearful noises and sudden treacherous surprises: by waves that crashed down from nowhere, by stinging spray that tore into a man’s face and eyes before he could duck for shelter. Isolated in the blackness, Saltash suffered every assault: she pitched, she rolled, she laboured: she met the shock of a breaking wave with a jar that shook her from end to end, she dived shuddering into a deep trough, shipping tons of water with a noise like a collapsing house, and then rose with infinite slowness infinite pain, to shoulder the mass of water aside, and shake herself free, and prepare herself for the next blow.

  Ericson watched and suffered with her, and felt it all in his own body: felt especially the agony of that slow rise under the crushing weight of the sea, felt often the enormous doubt as to whether she would rise at all. Ships had foundered without trace in this sort of weather: ships could give up, and lie down under punishment, just as could human beings: here, in this high corner of the world where the weather had started to scream insanely and the sea to boil, here could be murder: here, where some of Compass Rose’s corpses might still be wandering, here he might join them, with yet another ship’s company in his train.

  He stayed where he was on the bridge, and waited for it to happen, or not to happen. He was a pair of red eyes, inflamed by wind and salt water: he was a brain, tired, fluttering, but forced into a channel of watchfulness: he was sometimes a voice, shouting to the helmsman below to prepare for another threatening blow from the sea. He was a core of fear and of control, clipped small and tight into a body he had first ill-treated, and then begun, perforce, to disregard.

  No gale of this force could last for ever, or the very fabric of the globe would long ago have been torn to bits; and presently, as a grudging act of grace, the weather took a turn for the better. The sea was still jumbled and violent, but it was no longer on the attack: the wind still sang on a high note, but it had lost its venom: the ship still rolled and staggered, but she could, at least, now steer a single fixed course. There came a day when the upper deck began to dry off, and a start could be made with cleaning up the shambles below: when a hot meal could be cooked and eaten in comfort: when a man could climb from the fo’c’sle to the bridge without running a gauntlet of green seas that might toss him into the scuppers, or straight overboard: when the Captain could leave the bridge for more than half a watch, and sleep for more than an hour at a stretch . . . The sun pierced the clouds, for the first time for many days, and set the grey water gleaming: it warmed the shoulders of their duffle coats, and sent up a small haze of steam from the drying decks. It also showed them exactly three ships in sight, over a space of a hundred square miles of ocean which should have held fifty-four vessels in orderly convoy format
ion.

  But perhaps that was too much to expect . . . The process of rounding up the convoy took Saltash nearly forty-eight hours, steaming all the time at an average of twenty knots on a dozen different schemes of search: it was not eased by the fact that each individual escort was doing this same thing simultaneously, trying to marshal whatever merchantmen were in their immediate area, and that there were at one time six of these small convoys of half a dozen ships each, all trying to attract fresh customers to the only true fold, and all steering different courses. On one occasion, Saltash, coming across the frigate Streamer with five ships in company, signalled to her: ‘The convoy is 200 degrees, fourteen miles from you,’ only to receive the answer: ‘The convoy is here.’ It was, for a tired Senior Officer on the edge of irritation, a pregnant moment which Ericson longed to exploit.

  But for him there could be no such delaying luxury: the crisp orders which went to Streamer were neither brutal, nor sarcastic, simply explicit and not to be argued. They formed a pattern with all the other crisp orders of the last two days, and presently, as a result, things were under control again; presently, Saltash could station herself at the van of what really looked something like a convoy – straggling, woefully battered, but still a body of ships which could be honestly reported to Their Lordships as Convoy R.C. 17. Ericson made this report, and disposed of his escorts in their night positions, and handed over to Allingham, who was officer-of-the-watch; and then, with a drugged thankfulness, he took his aching body down the ladder, in search of the shelter of his cabin, and of longed-for rest.

  The weather was still wild; but with the convoy intact and the main chaos retrieved, the hours ahead seemed bearable and hopeful, and above all suitable for oblivion.

  Then, not a mile astern of Saltash, a ship was torpedoed.