PART SEVEN
1945: The Prize
1
‘And that is why,’ said Vincent, plodding to the end of his lecture, ‘it was absolutely essential to go to war in the first place, and why it’s even more important to make sure that we do a proper job of winning it now.’
He shut his notebook with an unconvincing snap, and put on top of it the Army Bureau of Current Affairs booklet, on which his lecture had been based. Then he looked up, facing uncertainly Saltash’s lower mess deck, and the rows of stolid men who were his audience. The serried eyes looked back at him unblinkingly, with very little discernible expression: a few of them were bored, a few hostile, most of them were sunk in a warm stupor: they were the eyes of men attending a compulsory lecture on British War Aims. As on so many previous occasions, thought Vincent, the heady magic of ABCA had not worked . . . He cleared his throat, sick of the whole thing, knowing only one way to play out time.
‘Any questions?’
There was a pause, while silence settled again; many of the eyes dropped or turned aside, as if fearful of establishing contact with Vincent at this crucial moment of demand. The dynamos hummed loudly; Saltash swung a point to her anchor, and the shaft of sunlight through the porthole moved across the deck and over the feet of the men in the front row.
A man at the back cleared his throat, and spoke at last.
‘Sir?’
‘Yes, Woods?’ It was bound to be Signalman Woods: Woods always asked the first question, sometimes the only one. Woods was hoping for a recommendation for Leading-Signalman, and Vincent was the only man who could give it to him.
‘Sir, if we get rid of all the Nazis, who’ll run the country? Germany, I mean. Who’ll be the government?’
I should really encourage him, thought Vincent, I should say: Now that’s a very interesting question. But it’s not, it’s a bloody silly one, because it means he simply hasn’t been listening at all.
‘As I mentioned,’ he said, with just enough emphasis to make the point, ‘we are quite sure that there are enough non-Nazis in Germany to form a proper government. All they have to do is come forward, and—’ he finished lamely, ‘that is what will happen.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Woods politely, his effort accomplished. ‘I just wanted to be sure.’
Silence settled again. This should be a brisk and lively discussion, thought Vincent sadly, but it isn’t working; there ought to be a quick series of questions, a little argument, a fresh approach by some highly intelligent sailor, a great upsurge of speculation on this crucial question . . . Most of the failure was his own fault, he realised; the matter interested him, but he had not been able to communicate that interest to any of them; it had been just another lecture period, filling in the time between ‘Stand-Easy’ and ‘Hands to Dinner’ – preferable to gun drill or painting ship, not as interesting as playing tombola or doing nothing.
But here was someone else with a question, one of the stokers for a change. ‘Sir,’ said the man haltingly, ‘when you said about fighting for a better world . . .’ But had the phrase sounded as appalling as it did now? ‘Did you mean the League of Nations, like? No more war?’
A better world, thought Vincent – now how could he sum it up in terms which would mean something to a second-class stoker who had been a boilermaker’s apprentice before the war? He knew in his own mind what it involved – the Four Freedoms, the rule of Law, an end to tyranny, the overthrow of evil; but he had listed all these things in the course of his lecture, and explained them as best he could, and gone into detail whenever detail was worth while – and clearly it had meant absolutely nothing to his questioner, it hadn’t made a single ripple . . . I can’t go through it all again, he thought despondently; there isn’t time, and there’s no point either, if the words and phrases that mean so much to me are meaningless to this man, this roomful of men like him.
‘The League of Nations, or something of the same sort,’ he said, ‘will certainly be part of the post-war world. One of the things we’ve been fighting for is that international law should become strong again – that is, if one nation wants to start a war, the rest of the world really will combine to stop them. But when I talked about a “better world”’ – he swallowed – ‘I meant a better world for everyone – freedom from fear, no big unemployment, security, fair wages – all those sort of things.’
Silence again. Had his words meant anything to them, Vincent wondered: did they kindle any spark? – was there indeed a spark to be kindled?
Another man spoke, simply, doubtfully: ‘Is it all going to be different, then?’
What was the answer to that? I hope so. ‘I hope so,’ he said.
A third man spoke, scornfully, out of some personal political copybook he carried for ever in his head. ‘There’ll always be the bosses. Stands to reason.’
That’s outside this discussion, thought Vincent – and yet, should anything be outside this discussion? If this man has been fighting for a world without ‘bosses’, why shouldn’t he say so? If he thinks that his particular fight has been a failure, why shouldn’t he say that as well? But it isn’t really a fight about bosses – not in the sense he means; and I very much doubt whether he gave that aspect of it a single thought when he enlisted, or was conscripted. Yet ‘bosses’ or ‘no bosses’ was a post-war problem: it could even be true that the war, obscurely, was being fought to end the whole range of boss-tyranny – big bosses like Hitler, little bosses like the foreman with the rough tongue. If that were true, then it was a dangerous subject: the pamphlet hadn’t said anything about the master-and-man relationship, it had treated with oppression at the international level only . . . And that was what he had failed to interest them in – the large-scale pattern, the moral issue: those things had rung no bell at all.
He was about to answer non-committally when Signalman Woods came through again, this time in prim reproof.
‘It’s got nothing to do with the bosses. That’s a lot of talk. It’s war aims – what to do when we’ve won.’
At that there was a final blanketing silence: the moment of spontaneity was lost for ever. Last week’s lecture had been so much better, thought Vincent; but then, that had been on venereal disease . . . He cast about him for some phrase which might stimulate further questions, and found none; the subject had been dealt with, the potent leaven distributed, and the result now confronted him, unalterable, totally defeating. Then, far away, came the sound of a pipe: the audience brightened and shuffled: the pipe came nearer, and with it the quartermaster’s voice: ‘Hands to dinner!’ There was movement at the back of the mess deck, a stirring, a heightened receptivity towards the first attractive idea of the morning. Vincent picked up his papers.
‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘You can carry on.’
Back in the wardroom, Allingham looked up when he came in.
‘What’s the matter, Vin? Brassed off?’
‘Yes,’ said Vincent. He went to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. ‘I don’t think these lectures of mine are much use.’
‘What was it this time?’
‘War aims – post-war prospects . . .’ He swung round. ‘It ought to be interesting. It is interesting to me. But it doesn’t seem to raise a single spark, for anyone else.’
‘For some of them, surely,’ said Allingham helpfully.
Vincent shook his head. ‘No . . . It’s so difficult to make it sound convincing, or even to explain it properly. And morally speaking, people shouldn’t really be called upon to fight, if they don’t understand the real issues and wouldn’t believe in them if they did.’ He looked at Allingham with curiosity. ‘Do you think it matters?’
‘That we should explain – dress the war up a bit, make it a matter of conviction?’
‘Yes.’
Allingham considered, frowning. ‘I used to. I started the war like that, anyway. Now I’m not so sure. We’ve got to win the bloody thing, whatever material we use – willing or not . . . Perhaps it
doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference, either way, when it comes to action – fighting, danger. Able-Seaman Snooks doesn’t shout: “Another blow for democracy!” when he looses off a couple of rounds at an aircraft: he says “Got the bastard!” if he hits, and “— it!” if he misses. He just doesn’t want to get killed, and he doesn’t need any special inspiration or moral uplift for that.’
‘But you feel the need for it yourself?’
‘I don’t even know that. I came a long way to fight this war, and I thought it was some sort of crusade then – but maybe I’d have come anyway . . .’ He smiled, and rose, and came towards the sideboard and the gin bottle. ‘No good being left out, you know, even if you’re an Australian.’
‘But if it’s just a war,’ said Vincent despondently, ‘it’s not worth winning, it’s not worth all the trouble.’
‘It’s even less worth losing,’ said Allingham, with conviction. ‘That’s one thing sure . . .’ He raised his glass, and drank deep, as if toasting the prospect of victory and survival. Then he smiled again. ‘Cheer up, kid! It’s too late to worry about it now, anyway.’
2
Now there was a lull – but it seemed a friendly, not a foreboding lull: this was the pause before going on holiday, not the halt on the edge of the grave. The transatlantic convoys went on, unceasingly, but convoys were different now – once again, they were like the convoys at the very beginning of the war: ships and men occasionally ran into trouble, but they were always other ships, other men – strangers who had had bad luck, amateurs who had probably made some silly mistake . . . For the most part, the U-boats held off, for a variety of reasons which could only be guessed at: it might be fear, it might be insufficient numbers, reorganisation, the saving of strength for some huge final effort. Whatever it was, the spring of that year gave them what all springs should give – ease, hope, and promise, in abundant measure.
For Ericson, it was a lull that he needed – he and Saltash together. One could perhaps divine more of the past history of strain from looking at Saltash than from looking at Ericson; but that did not mean that Ericson was not feeling it just as strongly . . . His men had become used to his grey hair, his gruff manner, his stern face which looked with an equal indifference upon a sinking ship, a dead man, a defaulter with a foolish excuse, a pretty visitor to the wardroom. This mask hid his tiredness; Saltash had no such camouflage. She had now been running for over two years, hard-driven years with little respite from the weather or the enemy: she was battered, salt-streaked, dented here and there – a typical Western Approaches escort, telling her whole story at a single glance. Ericson, surveying his ship as he put off in the motorboat, sometimes found himself wondering what Compass Rose would have looked like, if she had still been alive and afloat. Not as pretty as he remembered her, certainly; for some of the original corvettes, which had seen it through in the Atlantic since 1939 – Trefoil, Campanula, their own Petal – looked like tough and battered old women who had been streetwalking too long. So do I, by God! thought Ericson grimly. It was his fiftieth year, and he looked and felt every hour of it.
‘I’m thirty-two,’ Lockhart told him on one occasion, in answer to his question. ‘The best years of my life have vanished . . .’ But that was not really true, Lockhart knew well enough: for him, they were not lost years, in spite of the futility and wastefulness of war. He had grown up fast in the meantime, he was a different person from the twenty-seven-year-old, goalless, motiveless, not very good journalist who had joined up in 1939. War had given him something, and the personal cost was not a whit too high: he had missed five years of writing and travel, but he had gained in every other way – in self-discipline, in responsibility, in simple confidence and the rout of fear . . . I should be all right after the war, he told himself sometimes: because they can’t muck me about any more, and I can’t muck myself about, either.
For him as well as for Ericson, the lull in action was welcome, the more so since he saw it as an appropriate part of the pattern; it was the way things ought to be going, at that stage, to ensure that they should have the hoped-for outcome. If I were writing the story of this contest, he thought, this is where the book would tail off, because we’ve reached the moment when nothing happens – we’re just winning the war, and that’s all there is to say. That would be the whole point of the story, really – that in the end nothing happened, and it petered out into silence. The petering out was their victory.
‘”And enterprises of great pith and moment”,’ he quoted to himself vaguely, ‘de dah, de dah, de dah, “and lose the name of action”.’ But thank God the enterprises had done so: thank God for being alive on a fine spring morning in 1945, when he had never really expected to be, and when lots of people, who for five years had been trying to kill him, were dead themselves. Now in truth nothing was happening, and nothing was just what they had been aiming at, all alone.
If only Julie had been alive as well, to share the moment with him, to give it warmth and happiness as well as its cold satisfaction.
3
April . . . April, in the Atlantic, brought the last few strokes of their war; and one of them, involving a homeward-bound convoy which Saltash was taking in to Liverpool, gave them the most unpleasant surprise they had had for many months. After the lull, the recent weeks had been startlingly and dangerously active: The enemy still had about seventy U-boats able to keep at sea, and though the brief and violent flare-up cost thirty-three of them sunk, it cost many merchant ships as well. On one of these occasions, Saltash lost a ship on the very front doorstep – inside the Irish Sea, within sight of home. The ship was hit close to the bows, and she sank slowly, with little likelihood that any lives would be lost; but even so, the sudden mischance, at that late hour of the convoy and the war, had an evil element of shock.
They watched Streamer counter-attacking, on the other side of the convoy, but they could still scarcely believe that it had happened: it was the end of the war, the U-boats were virtually defeated – and no U-boats operated in home waters anyway. They had been aware that April was proving a bad month at sea, and that the enemy seemed to be making a last vicious effort to avert defeat; but it had never been brought so close to them, they had never seen it proved in so violent a fashion. It induced a sense of discomfort, a nervous foreboding, which lasted long after the situation had been set to rights. If this sort of thing could still happen, it not only restored the wicked past – it threatened, in an extreme degree, the promised future as well.
‘You silly bastards!’ said Raikes, aloud, when the flurry was over – the U-boat neatly dispatched by Streamer, the merchant seamen rescued from the water: ‘You silly bastards – you might have killed some of us.’ He echoed all their thoughts at that moment: their hopes of staying alive, their prickling haste to get the thing over before they ran into any more danger or took any more chances. In the whole of the rest of the war, there might only be two or three more convoys for them to escort: in the whole of the rest of the war, it was possible that only one more escort ship was going to be sunk. Make it not us, they thought – not at this stage, not so late in the day when we have very nearly finished, very nearly survived . . .
Raikes, up on the bridge, had spoken for all of them; and later, in the wardroom, they returned to the subject, with a readiness which showed how deep an impression the torpedoing had made on everyone in the ship.
‘It gave me the shock of my life!’ said Allingham, downing one drink very quickly and reaching out for the next one. ‘U-boats in the Irish Sea – at this stage? They must be stark staring crazy!’
‘Crazy or not,’ said Scott-Brown, ‘it happened, and it can happen again. Particularly if it’s their last chance, and they know that it is. They’ll go all out, and they won’t care what happens as long as they do some kind of damage. That was a suicidal attack, this afternoon – but they made it, all the same. We’ve probably got to expect that sort of thing, and worse, in the future.’
‘All I hope is that
we don’t get in the way of the next one,’ said Raikes. ‘I haven’t lived as long as this, just to stop a torpedo when we’re nearly home and dried.’
‘It would certainly spoil my war aim,’ said the midshipman, with decision.
‘But it’s the end of the fighting!’ said Allingham, violent emphasis in his voice. ‘We’re over the Rhine, we’ve nearly joined up with the Russians, Hitler himself may be dead by now. What do they hope to gain by it?’
‘Perhaps nothing.’ Vincent, who had been sitting quietly by the stove, spoke suddenly. ‘They’re just going on fighting, that’s all . . . If it were we who were near defeat, wouldn’t we do the same thing, however hopeless it looked?’
He glanced round the wardroom, waiting for an answer.
‘I should do exactly what I was told,’ said the midshipman, modestly. ‘But I don’t think I’d volunteer for anything special . . .’
‘But if it were really hopeless—’ Allingham began, and then stopped. After a moment he smiled at Vincent. ‘You’re right, Vin – it is the only thing for them to do, and I hope we would do the same. They’ve got bags of guts, you know – you’ve got to hand it to them.’
‘They can have any sort of testimonial they like,’ said Scott-Brown, ‘as long as they don’t try to earn it by sinking Saltash.’
Raikes nodded. ‘That’s just what I thought this afternoon. It may sound a bit selfish – but this is such a bloody silly time to be killed.’
4
May – and now, surely, now at last nothing could go wrong, nothing could steal their victory, nor take their lives.
Saltash, divorced from the rest of her group, had been on independent passage from Iceland when she received the unusual signal: ‘Remain on patrol in vicinity of Rockall’; and there she now was, steaming in a five-mile square round the isolated, inexplicable pinpoint of rock which was really the tip of a mountain in mid-ocean – Rockall, rising from the depths of the Atlantic to break surface, by a few feet only, 300 miles from land: Rockall, the unlighted, shunned graveyard of countless ships, countless U-boats. But, Ericson wondered, why Rockall? – unless Their Lordships wished to place a finger on Saltash in case of need; and why ‘on patrol’? – unless she were waiting for something which did not require an escort group, something which one single ship could do.
The Cruel Sea Page 54