No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  Bill Reed, more than old enough to be Perrin-Trichard’s father, beamed paternally on him as they shook hands. Perrin-Trichard gazed respectfully into Reed’s bronzed face; the French have apparently far more reverence for their elders than we. I felt the two of them would get along fine; as a matter of fact, they always did.

  The discussion on the Grand Dock started. I had one general blueprint of the dock already; Perrin-Trichard had brought more with him, showing it in all its details. We fell to studying the blueprints, with Perrin-Trichard translating the French notes on them for us, when necessary.

  The plan for raising the dry dock was worked out—it would be done with compressed air, as we had raised the Massawa docks. But this was a vast dock, with over fifty separate compartments to be made airtight for blowing. Aside from the holes to be patched and the innumerable other openings to be sealed off, miles of air hose would be required, whole skyfuls of air, and more portable air compressors to provide it than North Africa had ever contained, even before the Nazis had looted it. As for hose, we were fortunate; Captain Harding volunteered the information he had considerable amongst the salvage stores in his hold. But where we were to get enough air compressors, I couldn’t imagine—those Reitzel had procured for the Spahi would be only a drop in the bucket on the Grand Dock. But I felt the Lord would provide when the time came—He always had in Massawa.

  Perrin-Trichard broke timidly in. He had moved all his men from la Bretagne at Mers-el-Kebir to the Grand Dock. He had them now working from open boats with hand pumps surveying the Grand Dock; they would do their best for M’sieu Reed, but, please, could I get them only a few decent diving dresses? Theirs were so worn he felt like an assassin when he asked one of his men to go down in the mass of patches that with them passed for a diving dress.

  I had to agree with him. I had seen the dilapidated French dresses; I wouldn’t want to dive in one of them myself. So I told Reed he would have to give Perrin-Trichard two of the dresses he had brought from Massawa; I would get him a replacement for one from Ankers—after that, his crew and Ankers’ crew would each have to go short a diving dress apiece, but we would share with our new French shipmates, and not ask them to work under conditions more dangerous than we faced ourselves. Reed ungrudgingly agreed.

  There wasn’t much more. Reed needed a power boat and something to dive from. Reitzel undertook to provide them. As for a diving air compressor, Reed felt surely that by tomorrow, his would arrive from Yum Dum, but I cherished no such illusion. I told Reitzel to see that the scow he hired was big enough to float one of the larger compressors we wouldn’t be needing on the Spahi for a couple of weeks yet. Reed could use that oversized unit for the present, and every time he broke his back cranking it up to start it, probably curse himself for his overtrustfulness in air force colonels.

  So with that the second conference broke up. Reed and Williams left to go to their new quarters with Perrin-Trichard and give him the promised diving dresses; Reitzel started out to find a suitable boat and scow for Reed; and Harding and I went out to see how Ankers was getting along with his new problem.

  On the float, Ankers explained to us he had temporarily suspended work on the patch to use his two best men on the first hogshead; after they had worked out the method, he trusted his second string divers could do the underwater stevedoring while the best men went back on the patch again. That way he hoped the overall task wouldn’t be stretched out any. Gatchell and Lynch were at the moment both overboard, dangling in their cumbersome diving rigs alongside the vertical deck in front of the fore hold hatch, trying with crowbars to work a hogshead sideways out the hatch. Ankers had the earphones on Gatchell’s line over his own head; Ensign Leo Brown, near by, was listening in similarly on Lynch.

  I reflected. In the nearly twenty years since I had started salvage work, I had had divers doing almost everything conceivable under water from acting as plumbers to acting as undertakers. But I could not remember that I had ever before had any acting as the brewer’s big horses in hauling about hogsheads of hootch. Then another thought struck me.

  “Say, Ankers, when Red and George between them get that cask of wine clear of the cargo hatch and out into the open, what’s it going to do? Will it sink on them, or will it float up?”

  Ankers, swift to see the implications, paused before he answered. If it floated, all well and good; but if it sank, it meant that the divers would have to sling each cask below before it came free, and we would have to rig some sort of a derrick off something to hoist the cask to the surface. We couldn’t leave a thousand hogsheads cluttering up the ocean floor alongside the Spahi; they’d interfere with our work. And if we had to sling and hoist them, a job, bad already, would immediately get far worse. Ankers’ brow wrinkled up as he thought it over.

  “Well Captain, it ought to float. Those hogsheads are full of wine, and wine’s partly alcohol, and alcohol’s lighter than water. So it ought to float up; and it damned well better had, too, or we’re in for a hell of a lot more work.”

  “Your logic’s all right, Ankers; but that’s not the whole story. Maybe it won’t float. You’ve covered the wine, but how about the hogsheads themselves? They’re probably made of oak staves, and oak is heavier than water, and besides those casks must have steel hoops round ’em, and those hoops are plenty heavier than water. The hogshead by itself’ll probably sink. Now whether there’s enough extra buoyancy in that wine to compensate for the excess weight of the hogshead or not is a question. There’s no certainty about it. This damned salvage business is getting just too complicated for comfort any more. But I guess we’ll know the answer before long. Let’s all pray she floats!”

  So while Gatchell and Lynch cursed and pried and tugged in the submerged wreck below us, trying to work free a hogshead from a ship in such a position that any self-respecting stevedore would have thrown up the job in disgust and gone home immediately unless he got higher wages, shorter hours, and double-time for dirty work, plus a few other fringe concessions, their shipmates on the float above started to scratch their heads trying to figure out what that hogshead was actually going to do when it was finally shoved clear of the hatch coamings.

  At last came word from below. Over Red’s diving phone came the message to Ankers,

  “Stand by on the topside for that barrel! One more shove down here and she’s all clear!”

  I laughed. Red’s faith that it would float was refreshing. Apparently he’d been too busy below to concern himself over the relative buoyancies in sea water of wine, oak, and steel, and their various possible combinations in that actual hogshead. But in a moment now, we’d know.

  It floated. I almost cheered.

  But it didn’t float by much. With barely a ripple to mark its rising, that hogshead came to rest on the surface with nothing more of it rising above water than might easily be mistaken for an oversized flapjack which somebody had heaved overboard. In a huge hogshead weighing all told around half a ton, there wasn’t over five pounds positive buoyancy keeping it afloat. Had the water in Oran harbor been a little less brackish and more like fresh water, it would certainly have sunk.

  “O.K., Red!” sang out the exuberant Ankers to his diver below. “She’s up! Can you get out any more this dive?”

  “A couple more, maybe,” phoned up Gatchell. “The next one oughta come easier!”

  So it proved. The hogsheads in that hold were like a bottle of olives; once the first one was out, the others did come easier. When Ankers finally called time on his divers, they had sent up five casks all told. Ankers sent out his workboat, towed the five hogsheads to the quay, and there the King Salvor took hold of them with her boom and landed them, each on end, on the stone coping opposite her forecastle.

  Once out of water, those hogsheads proved huge. They must each have held over three ordinary barrels; 140 gallons of wine apiece at least.

  Shortly Ankers and his men all knocked off for the day and came ashore for supper. Ankers told me that next day, Gatchell and
Lynch would go back on the patch. From what they had learned about manhandling those casks out, any ordinary diver should have no great trouble thereafter in carrying through the cargo unloading.

  But when I came back in the morning to watch the progress on the patch before going out on the Grand Dock, I found a very disgruntled salvage officer waiting for me on the quay. There were no divers out on the float, there weren’t any on the quay waiting to go out to the Spahi.

  “Sorry, Captain,” apologized Ankers, “but there’ll be no diving today. I was just a plain damned fool to have left those hogsheads on the quay last night. Somebody broached one of ’em in the dark, and this morning everybody’s so dead drunk in his bunk I don’t dare trust a man of ’em overboard. Harding’s crew on the King Salvor’s in about the same shape, only they don’t have to dive. Those casks hold too damned much for safety. But it’s mighty fine wine, even if it has been submerged over a month. Try some, Captain,” and he offered me a flask he’d himself filled with it.

  I tipped up the flask. It was good wine; excellent, I thought. The Algerian vineyards were certainly turning out a good product. Somehow I couldn’t blame the men, with five unguarded casks of it right under their noses. After all, even the Bible says something about not muzzling the ox that treadeth out the corn; still, I wished that they had gone a little more lightly on their guzzling of the grapes that they had trodden out from beneath the sea.

  “O.K., Ankers, you’re right about it,” I agreed, giving him back the flask. “It’s good.”

  “That’s what the boys must’ve thought,” continued Ankers, “for one of those casks is about empty. How my gang ever managed that, I can’t figure, for even taking in the King Salvor’s whole crew, that’s over two gallons a man. I just can’t make out how they held it all.”

  “They probably didn’t,” I muttered. “After all, they may have friends around here, or they’ve laid some away for a rainy day, or maybe both things happened. You’d better search that salvage shack, or you’ll never get any more work done. That Spahi is going to be the ruination of us; I certainly wished she’d been loaded with olive oil! This can’t go on or we’ll all be shot yet for sabotaging our own job. You have Reitzel make arrangements with General Larkin” (Larkin had succeeded Fredendall in the Army command in Oran) “to send down an army quartermaster and a squad of G.I.s with rifles and bayonets to tally in and take charge of what’s left here in those five casks, and of all the rest of that lot from now on as we bring it ashore. After that, if we get the whole United States Army drunk on the Spahi’s cargo, it’ll be Larkin’s funeral, not ours. But I’m going to be damned sure my salvage outfit stays sober enough hereafter, so we can work.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  SEEING THERE WOULD BE NOTHING on the Spahi that day, I went out at once with Reed’s gang to get them going on the Grand Dock. Reed’s men, being all quartered up on the heights in Oran itself, far from the quay and the salvage shack, had been no parties to the orgy of the night before. They were all quite fit for work; a fact they deeply regretted as they enviously inhaled the rich breath of the snoring sleepers in the salvage shack just before we all shoved off.

  Reitzel had procured a small but broad-beamed and decked-over French scow which made a good working platform, and a power boat to tend it. Harding had lowered on to its after deck one of the rented compressors, an Ingersoll-Rand of 110 cubic foot capacity, bearing a French nameplate. The compressor seemed to be in fair shape, so whether it was actually French-built or merely an American machine with a French label, we didn’t care. I had sufficient faith in Ingersoll-Rand to believe that whatever they turned out, even in France, would be reliable enough to risk men’s lives on in diving. Its only drawback was that it was too big for the job, and even on that barge took up too much of the available working space.

  Once over the port side of the Grand Dock with the scow, we picked out a spot a little beyond the submerged deckhouse with its flagstaff, and Bill Reed, who was a very practical seaman, managed to drop a weighted line with a running bowline in its end, down over a submerged stanchion on the dock below so we could anchor ourselves to it while we worked.

  I elected to make the first dive on the dock myself. I felt some first hand information on diving conditions in Oran, as well as on the Grand Dock, would be helpful to me in sizing up what to expect. So I peeled off my army O.D.s, dragged on another suit of heavy wool underwear over the one I was already wearing, pulled on another pair of wool socks, and I was ready to be dressed.

  Buck and Al served as valets. They dropped me expertly into a stiff canvas-covered rubber-lined diving dress, and after soaping my wrists, worked them one by one through the tightly fitting rubber cuffs and snapped on the sealing wristlets. Then they slid the heavy bronze breastplate over my head onto my shoulders and turned to, both of them, on bolting the top of the dress watertight to it. That done, they went to work harnessing me into a lead belt while Ervin Johnson slid my feet, one after the other, into the heavy lead-soled diving boots and proceeded to lace them and my trouser-legs up with sections of signal halyard for lacings.

  The rest went quickly. Jim Buzbee, a wizard with such things, managed to crank up and start the French air compressor without too many curses at it. The air hose was coupled to my helmet, the earphones put over my head and jacked into the helmet receptacle, the helmet tested out and dropped down over my head. Then with Buck gripping my shoulders to brace the breastplate, Al gave the helmet a sharp twist to lock it into place, and I was all ready. Completely cased in, I turned on the air valve a trifle to get something to breathe, and immediately my suit swelled out like a balloon.

  Buck and Al took me by both shoulders to hold me up, for I was now draped with over 200 pounds of lead and copper, and dragged me to the gunwale, to which a short ladder had been secured leading a few feet down into the water. Laboriously they hoisted me and all my weights over the gunwale and onto the ladder. Clumsily I started down it till, on the last step, I was wholly immersed beneath the surface and stopped a moment to test out everything before dropping down the descending line dangling in the water from the barge.

  No longer was my canvas suit ballooning out. Now the sea about me was pressing it hard against my body, lovingly embracing every last square inch of me in the kind of over all hug one may dream of but which no woman, however affectionate, is quite capable of matching. That embrace was a little too complete; I could hardly breathe from the pressure on my chest. I opened my air valve a trifle more, screwed down a bit on the exhaust valve on the back of my helmet from which my air was gurgling out and upward through the water. In a moment the slightly added air pressure started to swell my suit out over my lungs so breathing became freer. With that adjustment I could work, though from my waist down, my suit was still as tightly pressed in on me as before. I wound my legs about the descending line, gripped it with one hand, and with the other signaled to Bill Reed, who was tending me, to lower away.

  My lifeline slacked off above. With the surface undulating over my head like a silvery sheet, I started to drop through the water. The light, never very good in winter in northern waters, started to fade perceptibly, the water pressure began to increase as I went deeper. A few fathoms down, and I signaled for a stop. There in the water before me loomed up vertically the massive steel wall of the port side of the Grand Dock, stretching away several fathoms in both directions from me and there seeming to dissolve imperceptibly into the sea. What I could see of it was only a blank precipice, topped a little above my helmet by a steel railing, and broken a little below my feet by a narrow platform protruding horizontally from the sheer side, a working platform, no doubt, for sailors while docking ships. Since everything seemed to match the blueprints and there was no damage visible in that vicinity, I signaled to be lowered again.

  This time, I made no further stop till I hit bottom. Down the line I slid, watching through my faceplates the steel wall in front of me continuously dissolving in the water over my hea
d and continuously materializing seemingly out of nothing below my feet as I dropped. All the while, the light from above grew steadily dimmer and dimmer. My lead-soled boots touched something, I stopped dropping. Barely visible under my feet, I could see the steel floor of the Grand Dock.

  “On the bottom!” I sang out to Reed above. “Give me some more slack!” Immediately my lines eased off, leaving me free for movement. At my feet was the heavy lead weight holding the lower end of the descending line. I looked carefully round to mark its location, then upward to see my lifeline and air hose weren’t fouled round it. Up that line I must finally rise again. It was about one fathom inboard of the vertical port inside wall of the dock, but there was nothing else within sight to identify the spot more particularly. I would have to count my steps in every direction as I went from it, so I could retrace my path later.

  I looked around. I was on the deck of the dock in about ten fathoms of water, not bad for diving work, except that the illumination for seeing what one was about was poor. The visibility, I judged, was perhaps three or four fathoms. Of course I couldn’t see the far starboard side of the dock, over a hundred feet away through the water, nor even the line of center keel blocks, only half that far from me. Carefully I turned myself till my back was squarely set to the port wall of the dock behind me, to give me my direction, then started cautiously to breast my way through the water toward the line of invisible keel blocks halfway across the dock.

  The water, I thanked my stars, was cold. Diving around Oran was not going to be the torture to the men that it had been in the Red Sea, the hottest and saltiest body of water on earth. In the Red Sea, between the hot water he was immersed in and the hot and humid air pumped down to him, a diver might preferably have been in a Turkish bath. If he went down stripped naked to try to keep a little cool, the coarse inside layer of the diving dress sandpapered his perspiring skin off in large patches, which promptly became terribly infected. Paradoxical as it may seem, we always dived on the wrecks in the Red Sea clad in full suits of heavy woolen underwear and woolen socks, to avoid being flayed alive by our own diving dresses; and as a consequence, we nearly drowned instead in our own sweat inside them. But here in Oran, at least a man could dive in comfort, with only the normal diving dangers, plentiful enough, to battle.