But this was to be no swift kill: perhaps, indeed, it was to be no kill at all. During the next hour, Saltash dropped a total of sixty-eight depth-charges without, apparently, the slightest effect: the echo remained constant, the U-boat still twisted and turned and doubled back, with limitless cunning. It seemed as if no attack, however carefully calculated, was sufficiently accurate to bring her up short; they might have been launching snowballs into the fire, they might have been dropping cotton wool bombs on the nursery floor, for all the difference their efforts made. Time and again Saltash swept in for the assault: the depth-charges went down, the surface of the sea leapt and boiled astern of her; but when she came round again, in a tight circle, she found that her searchlight still shone on a blank sea, and presently she would pick up the contact again – always there, always solid, but never to be grasped, and seemingly unaffected by the fury of the attack. Sixty-eight depth-charges, thought Ericson wearily: most of them had been pretty close: the men down there in the U-boat must be going through hell: why doesn’t something happen, why doesn’t it work . . . ? He shaped up for yet another attack, on a contact which was as firm as ever; and then he suddenly lifted his head, and sniffed.
‘Number One!’ he called out.
‘Sir?’ said Lockhart.
‘Smell anything?’
After a pause: ‘Yes – oil,’ said Lockhart.
Oil. The hateful smell, which to them had always meant a sinking ship, could now mean a sinking U-boat instead . . .
Ericson, walking to the wing of the bridge, sniffed violently again, and the smell of oil came thick and strong to his nostrils: taken at its face value, it meant damage, it meant, at least, a crushed and leaking bulkhead inside the U-boat, and it could mean total success. He ordered the searchlight to be trained right ahead, and there, where they had dropped their last charges, they presently saw the patch of oil itself – glistening, sluggish, reflecting the light most prettily, and spreading outwards in a heartening circle. They dropped another pattern of depth-charges as they rode over the area; and then, as they turned in again, the asdic faded, and Lockhart reported: ‘Lost contact’.
The silence that fell on the bridge seemed to be a self-congratulatory one, but it was not so for Ericson. He would have liked to believe in that patch of oil, and that fading contact which everyone else took to be the U-boat slowly sinking beneath the beam of the asdic; but he suddenly found that he could not believe it. Oil, for his private satisfaction, was not nearly enough: he wanted wreckage, woodwork, an underwater explosion, bits of men weaving gently to the surface. Oil could come from a minor leak, oil could even be a subterfuge; the U-boat might have released some on purpose, and then crept away, leaving the feeble English sailors to celebrate their kill in feeble English beer. Oil, like wine, could be a mocker . . . She has gone deep again, he thought, with sudden, illogical conviction: maybe she is damaged, but she is not yet done to death: she will wait, and then come up again. We will wait too, he told himself grimly, with a new access of determination which must have come from the very core of his brain; and then aloud to Lockhart, he called out: ‘Carry out lost-contact procedure. I’m going to go on with the attack.’
To his tautened nerves, it seemed as if the bridge personnel and indeed the whole tired ship had sighed as he said the words. I do not care how sick of it you are, he said, almost aloud, instantly angry: if I am the last man to keep awake in this ship, if I am the last man left alive, I will drive her, and you, and myself, for just as long as I want to . . . But no one had sighed, and no one had spoken, save Lockhart who repeated: ‘Lost-contact procedure’ to his asdic operator; and Saltash, settling down to her steady half-speed progress, began again her interminable search, as if the past six hours now counted for nothing, and they were starting again from the beginning.
The trouble was that, ludicrously, there was nothing to start on. For the second time the U-boat, with her leak or her oil decoy, with her shaken or exultant crew, with her dubious amount of damage, had vanished.
Surveying the fact dispassionately, Ericson found it hard to believe: continuing to survey it, his dispassion gave way to the beginnings of a blind rage. When Lockhart had reported ‘Lost contact’, he imagined that it was because of the disturbed state of the water, and that they would pick the U-boat up again in a matter of minutes, as had happened before; but when those minutes went by, and added up to five, and then ten, and then twenty, without a single trace of an echo on the asdic, he found himself face to face with the fact that they might have lost her. After seven hours of trying, after nearly eighty depth-charges, after this enormous and sustained effort which was eating into the last reserves of his endurance . . . He stood over the two operators at the asdic set, and looked down at the backs of their stupid doltish heads, and wanted above all else to take a revolver from the rack and put a bullet through the pair of them. This could not happen to him – the U-boat was there – they had had her almost in their hands, and now Lockhart and his two bloody fools of operators and his rotten set had let her slip away again . . . When Lockhart reported, for the tenth time: ‘No contact,’ and added: ‘She could have been sunk, don’t you think, sir?’ Ericson, with a spurt of anger, answered: ‘I wish to Christ you’d mind your own business and get on with your job!’ and strode out of the asdic compartment as if he could bear the infected air no longer.
But: I should not have said that, he thought immediately, leaning against the front of the bridge: it comes of being tired, it comes of losing the U-boat when we were so close . . . He turned round.
‘Number One!’
Lockhart came out of the asdic hut, and walked towards him in the darkness. ‘Sir?’ he said, with extreme formality.
‘Sorry I said that,’ grunted Ericson. ‘Forget it.’
‘That’s all right, sir,’ said Lockhart, who could rarely resist an apology, and certainly not one so promptly offered.
‘I don’t think she was sunk,’ went on Ericson. ‘Not enough evidence for it.’
‘No sir,’ answered Lockhart. He did not agree, but this was not the moment to say so.
‘I’m going back to that square search again. We’ll keep at Action Stations.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Not Action Stations, but sleep, thought Lockhart, returning to the set: that’s what I want, that’s what he wants, that’s what we all want: and we’re none of us going to get it, because the obstinate old bastard won’t listen to reason . . . He was quite sure, as was his leading asdic rating, that the U-boat had been destroyed, crushed, or battered to bits by the cumulative effect of seventy or eighty near-misses: she had probably collapsed, and was going down slowly, leaving that trail of oil which had so cheered him when he caught sight of it. But since it seemed that the slightest hint to this effect was enough to start a riot, it was better to carry on, without comment . . . He shut the door of the asdic compartment, and said, in a non-committal voice: ‘Normal sweep. We’re doing a box search again.’
The senior rating on the set repeated: ‘Normal sweep, sir,’ and then sucked his teeth in unmistakable reproach.
‘Don’t make that filthy noise!’ snapped Lockhart. ‘Without comment’ covered that sort of thing as well.
‘Hollow tooth, sir,’ said the man rebelliously.
‘Get on with your work.’
The rating, now breathing heavily, bent over the set and made an adjustment to it, as noisily as he could. They were all of them a bit short-tempered, thought Lockhart: it’s catching, it’s an inevitable product of tiredness. He smiled to himself as he looked at the asdic rating, who was normally one of his favourites: he could have quoted with reasonable accuracy most of the thoughts and phrases that were going through the man’s head. (All you get is threats and abuse . . . The skipper gives him a rocket and he passes it on to me . . . Bloody officers . . . Roll on my twelve . . .) With just enough friendliness in his voice to bring things back to normal without surrendering his point, Lockhart said: ‘We’d better have ano
ther brew of cocoa. This is going to take a long time.’
It took a very long time indeed; and as the hours went by, without change, without significance, it began to seem as if the futile hunt might well continue to the end of time itself – or until, for some reason unrelated to their private effort, the war came to a finish, one side was declared the winner and the other not, and Saltash, receiving a postcard about the result, would be able to set course for home, in reasonable time to claim her old age pension . . . Pergola joined them at three o’clock, coming up from the south-east at a speed which seemed to spurn the wasted hours of her diversion: her arrival enabled Ericson to extend the scope of the search, to guard the back door as well as the front, but she was no more successful than Saltash in picking up the scent again. The watch changed at four, the sky began to lighten from the eastwards, illuminating a sea as grey and flat and worthless as a washed-out watercolour: it showed also the two ships, five miles apart, seemingly intent but scarcely convincing – in fact, plodding to and fro like a couple of myopic old women making the rounds of the dustbins, not knowing that these had been emptied hours before.
To Ericson, the dawn, and the outlines of his ship, and the grey faces of the men on the bridge, brought a sudden bleak doubt. He could be wrong, he could be wasting his time, for two reasons which now began to appeal irresistibly: the U-boat might be many miles away, or she might have been sunk by their original attack. At this, the lowest hour dividing night and day, when Saltash had been hunting for eleven hours on end, and he himself had been on the bridge the entire time, he was assailed by the most wretched sense of futility he had ever known; the temptation to call the thing off, to take the oil patch at its face value and claim a victory which no one would seriously deny them – this nagged at him like a cat mewing endlessly outside a door, his own door which sooner or later he would have to open. It would stop the noise; it would please the neighbours. And it would bring, for his own relief, the prospect of sleep . . .
He was aware that all round him were men who had long ago made up their minds on these very lines: that Lockhart thought the U-boat had been sunk, that the hard-driven asdic operators were sulky and sullen for the same reason; that Pergola, reading the report he had given her, to bring her up to date when she arrived, must have wondered why on earth they had not packed up and joined the convoy hours before, signalling a definite kill to the Admiralty as they did so.
The doubt and uncertainty increased his weariness: slumping in his chair, with nothing to break the monotony and no glimmer of success to sustain him, he found himself in mortal fear of falling asleep. He felt his whole brain and body being lulled into a delicious weary doze by the sounds round him – the noise of the asdic, the slice-slice of Saltash’s bow wave, the men washing down the upper deck: even the movement each half-hour, as the lookouts changed and the helmsman was relieved, could be strung together as part of the same sleep-inducing chain. To resist it was agony, not to resist it gave him a feeling of sick foreboding: if he stayed awake he would begin to weep, if he slept he would fall off his chair, and then they would all think he was cracking up, and it would be true . . .
Lockhart, who now had the watch, came out of the asdic hut, for the twentieth time, and said: ‘Nothing on the recorder, sir.’
Involuntarily, Ericson’s nerves began to jump. ‘What about it?’
Lockhart stared. ‘Nothing, sir. Routine report. It’s the end of another sweep.’
‘What do you mean, another sweep?’
Lockhart swallowed, as he had had to do many times during the past twelve hours. ‘I thought you said, sir—’
‘Jesus Christ, Number One—’ began Ericson, and then stopped. His heart was thudding, his brain felt like a box with a little bird fluttering about inside it. He thought: this won’t do at all – I really will crack up, I’ll be shooting somebody in a minute . . . He stood up, and flexed his shoulders, sharpening and then easing the pain that lay across them. His head swam with the effort. But he knew now what he had to do next. Two minutes later, down in his cabin, he confronted Scott-Brown, the doctor. The latter, routed out of his sleep as a matter of urgency by a startled bridge messenger, was dressed in a pair of pyjama trousers and an inflated lifebelt; he still maintained, unimpaired, his Harley Street air of complete dependability. He took one look at the Captain, and said, in a tone of reproof which Ericson did not mind: ‘Time you turned in, sir.’
‘I know, doc. But I can’t.’
‘How long have you been up on the bridge?’
‘Since that ship went down.’
‘It’s too long.’
‘I know,’ repeated Ericson. ‘But I’ve got to stay there. Can you fix me up with something?’
Scott-Brown frowned at him. ‘Is it necessary? What’s this all about?’
Ericson flared: ‘Christ, don’t you start—’ and then, his heart thudding again, he sat down suddenly. ‘There’s a U-boat here,’ he said quietly, trying to conserve every effort, every urge of feeling. ‘I know damned well there is, and I’m going to get her. I want something to keep me awake while I’m doing it.’
‘How long for?’
‘Another night, maybe . . . Can you do it?’
‘Oh, I can do it all right. It’s just a question of—’
Ericson’s nerves were starting to jump again. ‘Well, do it then,’ he interrupted roughly. ‘What does it involve? An injection?’
Scott-Brown smiled, recognising the point where medical prudence succumbed to the lash of discipline. ‘Just a pill or two. Benzedrine. You’ll feel like a spring lamb.’
‘How long will it last?’
‘We’ll start with twenty-four hours.’ The doctor smiled again, turning for the door. ‘After that you’ll go out like a light, and wake up with the hell of a hangover.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Probably. How old are you, sir?’
‘Forty-eight.’
Scott-Brown wrinkled his nose. ‘Benzedrine isn’t a thing to play with, you know.’
‘I wasn’t intending to make a habit of it,’ said Ericson sourly. ‘This is a special occasion.’
Another two minutes, and Scott-Brown was back again, with two grey pills and a glass of water. Ericson had disposed of the first one, and had the second poised upon his tongue, when the bell at the head of his bunk began to ring.
He bent to the voice-pipe, swallowing as he did so, and called out: ‘Captain.’
‘Bridge, sir!’ came Lockhart’s voice off-key with excitement. ‘Pergola’s got a contact.’
He felt like saying: ‘I told you so,’ he felt like shouting: ‘Nuts to all of you . . .’ He caught Scott-Brown’s eye, expectant, slightly amused: he said: ‘Thanks, doc,’ and started for the door. Behind him, the doctor said: ‘In theory, you ought to lie down for ten minutes, and then—’, and then the measured voice was lost as he turned the corner of the passageway and began to race up the bridge ladder.
Whether it was the benzedrine, or the feeling of eleventh-hour reprieve, or Pergola’s activity, or the heartening effect of full daylight, he felt like a king when he stood on the bridge again, and looked round him. Now it was a different sort of scene . . . Five miles away across the flat sea, Pergola was turning under full helm and at full speed: the water creamed at her bow as, coming obliquely towards Saltash, she roared in for her attack. She flew the two flags which meant: ‘I have an underwater contact,’ and ‘I am attacking’: she looked everything a corvette, viewed at dawn after a long and exhausting night, should look . . . Ericson called to Lockhart in the asdic hut: ‘Have you got anything?’ and then there was a pause, and Lockhart answered suddenly: ‘In contact – starboard bow – bearing one-nine-oh!’ and the asdic repeater began to produce a loud clear singing echo, on a cross bearing which could only be the U-boat which Pergola was attacking.
Pergola’s charges exploded half a mile ahead of them: Saltash, weaving in at right angles to complete a lethal tapestry, dropped her own not more than twent
y yards from the discoloured, still frothing, patch of water. Then the two ships turned together, heading back towards the fatal area, ready to do it all again, but this time, this time there was no need. There came a sudden dull underwater explosion, clearly audible all over the ship: a great gout of oily water burst upwards from the heart of the sea, and it was followed by other things – bits of wood, bits of clothing, bits of things which might later need a very close analysis . . . Ericson called for ‘Stop engines’, and Saltash came to a standstill, surrounded now by a bloody chaplet of wreckage; the crew crowded to the rails, the curious debris thickened and spread, a working party aft got busy with buckets and grappling hooks. This was a victory which called for trophies . . . It took us twelve hours, thought Ericson, leaning against the front of the bridge, hugely exultant; but we did it, she was there all the time, I was right . . . He turned and caught Lockhart’s eye – Lockhart, whose last attack must have been accurate to within five yards – and Lockhart smiled ruefully and said: ‘Sorry sir!’ to cover the past night of disbelief, and the bad judgement which had prompted it. But it did not matter now, and Ericson sat down in his chair, himself sorry for only one thing – the benzedrine which he need not have taken, which he should have saved for a really exhausting occasion . . .
The bell rang from the quarterdeck aft, and Vincent said, in the voice of a man facing grisly reality rather too early in the morning: ‘We’ve got lots of woodwork, sir, and some clothes, and some other things as well. Two buckets full.’
‘What other things, Sub?’
After a pause: ‘The doctor says, sir, they’re clearly in his department.’
The ring of men standing round the two slopping buckets, sipping cocoa and staring, were talkative in victory.
The Cruel Sea Page 49