HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947)

by Monsarrat, Nicholas

  Then, after a spell of cleaning up, which included the chaos of loose gear and ammunition round ‘A’ gun, which had been directly over the explosion, the Captain told Adams to muster what was left of the ship’s company and report the numbers. He was still in his chair on the bridge, sipping a mug of cocoa, which Bridger had cooked up in the wardroom pantry, when Adams came up with his report, and he listened to the details with an attention which he tried to rid of all personal feeling. These crude figures, which Adams, bending over the chart-table light, was reading out, were men, some of them well known and liked, some of them shipmates of two and three years’ standing, all of them sailors; but from now on they must only be numbers, only losses on a chart of activity and endurance. The dead were not to be sailors any more: just ‘missing potential’, ‘negative assets’ – some damned phrase like that.

  Adams said: ‘I’ve written it all down, sir, as well as I could.’ He had, in his voice, the same matter-of-fact impersonal tone as the Captain would have used: the words ‘as well as I could’ might have referred to some trifling clerical inconvenience instead of the difficulty of sorting out the living, the dead, and the dying in the pitch darkness. ‘There’s the ones we know about, first. There’s three officers and twelve ratings killed – that’s the Gunnery Officer, Lieutenant Haines, and Mr Merrett, and the gun’s crew and the ones on the boat-deck and the two up here. The surgeon lieutenant has one officer and sixteen men in the sick bay. We’ll have to count most of them out, I’m afraid, sir. Nine of them were out of the fo’c’sle. Then there’s’ – he paused – ‘one officer and seventy-four men missing.’ He stopped again, expecting the Captain to say something, but as no word came from the dark figure in the chair he went on: ‘Then what we’ve got left, sir. There’s yourself, and the surgeon-lieutenant, and the engineer – that’s three officers, and twenty-eight men out of the Red Watch, the one that was on duty.’

  ‘Twenty-eight. Is that all?’

  ‘That’s all, sir. They lost seven seamen at ‘X’ gun, three by the boats, and two here. Then there’s seven of them down in the sick bay. That’s forty-seven altogether.’

  ‘How are the twenty-eight made up? How many seamen have we?’

  Adams straightened up and turned round from the table. This part of it he evidently knew by heart. ‘There’s myself, sir, and Leading Seaman Tapper, and seven ABs: the quartermaster and the bosun’s mate, that were in the wheelhouse: and Bridger. That’s twelve. Then there’s the hands who were on watch in the W/T office: the leading tel. and two others, and two coders. That makes seventeen altogether. The signalman up here, eighteen. The SBA, nineteen. The leading steward, twenty.’

  ‘Any other stewards?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  It didn’t matter, thought the Captain: no officers, either.

  ‘The rest were all engine room branch, sir,’ Adams went on. ‘Eight of them altogether.’

  ‘How are they made up?’

  ‘It’s pretty good, sir, as far as experience goes. The Chief ERA and one of the younger ones, and a stoker petty officer and five stokers. If it was just one watch they’d be all right. But of course there’s no reliefs for them, and they’ll have to be split into two watches if it comes to steaming.’ Adams paused, on the verge of a question, but the Captain, seeing it coming, interrupted him. He didn’t yet feel ready to discuss their chances of getting under way again.

  ‘Just give me those figures again, Adams,’ he said, ‘as I say the headings. Let’s have the fit men first.’

  Adams bent down to the light once more. ‘Yourself and two officers and twenty-eight men, sir.’

  ‘Killed and wounded?’

  Adams added quickly: ‘Four officers and twenty-eight.’

  ‘And missing, the First Lieutenant and seventy-four.’ He had no need to be reminded of the item: that ‘seventy-four’ would stay with him always. Not counting the accident to Number One’s damage control party, there must have been sixty men killed or cut off by the first explosion. All of them still there, deep down underneath his feet. Twenty-eight left out of a hundred and thirty. Whatever he was able to do with the Marlborough now, the weight of those figures could never be lightened.

  ‘Will I make some more cocoa, sir?’ said Bridger suddenly. He had been waiting in silence all this time, standing behind the Captain’s chair. The numbers and details which Adams had produced, even though they concerned Bridger’s own messmates, were real to him only so far as they affected the Captain: this moment, he judged instinctively, was the worst so far, and he tried to dissipate it in the only way open to him.

  The Captain’s figure, which had been hunched deep in the chair, straightened suddenly. He shook himself. The cold air was stiffening his legs, and he stood up. ‘No, thanks, Bridger,’ he answered. ‘I’m going to turn in, in a minute. Bring up my sleeping bag and a pillow, and I’ll sleep in the asdic hut.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Bridger clumped off at a solid workmanlike pace, his heavy sea boots ringing their way down the ladder. The Captain turned to Adams again. ‘We’d better work out a routine for the time between now and daylight,’ he said briskly. ‘We can leave the engine room out of it for the moment: they’re busy enough. You’d better arrange the seamen in two watches: the telegraphists and coders can work with them, except for the leading tel. – he can stay on the set. Send half the hands off watch now: they can sleep in the wardroom alleyway or on the upper deck, whichever they prefer. The rest can carry on with cleaning up.’

  ‘The doctor may want some help down there, sir.’

  ‘Yes – see about that too … Keep two look-outs on the upper deck for the rest of tonight: tell them they’re listening for aircraft as well. We’ll show an Aldis lamp if we hear anything, and chance it being hostile. You’d better put the signalman up here, with those instructions; and pick out the most intelligent coder, and have him work watch-and-watch with the signalman. That’s about all, I think. See that I’m called if anything happens.’

  ‘Do you want a hand to watch that bulkhead, sir?’

  ‘No. The engine room will cover that: they’re nearest. About meals ... ’ The Captain scratched his chin. ‘We’ll just have to do our best with the wardroom pantry. There were some dry provisions in the after store, weren’t there?’

  ‘Corned beef and biscuits, sir, and some tinned milk, I think. And there’s plenty of tea. We’ll not go short.’

  ‘Right … That’ll do for tonight, then. I’ll see what things are like in the morning: there’ll be plenty of squaring up to do. You’ll have to get those bodies sewn up, too. If we do get under way again,’ the Captain tried and failed, to say this in a normal voice, ‘you’ll have to work out a scheme of guns’ crews and look-outs and quartermasters.’

  ‘Better take the wheel myself, sir.’

  The Captain smiled. ‘It won’t exactly be fleet manoeuvres, Adams.’

  The expected question came at last. ‘How much chance have we got, sir?’

  ‘Hard to say.’ He answered it as unemotionally as he could. ‘You saw the state that bulkhead was in. It might go any time, or it might hold indefinitely. But even very slow headway would make a big difference to the strain on it, unless the bows stay rigid where they are, and take most of the weight. Almost everything depends on the weather.’

  As he said this, the arrangements he had been making with Adams receded into the background, and he became aware of the ship again, and of her sluggish motion under his feet. She was quieter now, certainly: no shock or grinding from below, no advertisement of distress. But he could feel, as if it were going on inside his own body, the strain on the whole ship, the anguish of that slow cumbersome roll downwind. Earlier she had seemed to be dying: this now was the rallying process, infinitely painful both to endure and to watch. Long after Adams had left the bridge, the Captain still stood there, suffering all that the ship suffered, aware that the only effective anaesthetic was death.

  It was an idea which at any other time he would h
ave dismissed as fanciful and ridiculous, unseamanlike as a poet talking of his soul. Now it was natural, deeply felt and deeply resented. His professional responsibility for Marlborough was transformed: he felt for her nothing save anger and pity.

  Just before he turned in, Chief came up from below to report progress. He stood at the top of the ladder, a tired but not dispirited figure, and his voice had the old downright confidence on which the Captain had come to rely. He had been in Marlborough for nearly three years; as an engineering lieutenant he, too, could probably have got a better job, but he had never shown any signs of wanting one.

  ‘We’ve made a good start on the switchboard, sir,’ he began. ‘We ought to get the fans going some time tomorrow.’ There was nothing in his tone to suggest the danger, which he must have felt all the time, of working deep down below decks at a time like this. ‘The boiler room’s in a bit of a mess – there’s a lot or water about – but we’ll clear that up as soon as we can get pressure on the pumps.’

  ‘What about the bulkhead, Chief?’

  ‘It’s about the same, sir, I’ve been in once myself, and I’ve a hand listening all the time outside the next watertight door. There’s nothing to report there.’ He turned, and looked behind him down the length of the ship, and then up at the sky. ‘She seems a lot easier, sir.’

  ‘Yes, the wind’s going down.’ The phrase was like a blessing.

  ‘By God, we’ll do it yet!’ Chief, preparing to go down again, slurred his feet along the deck and found it sticky. ‘Bit of a mess here,’ he commented.

  ‘Blood,’ said the Captain shortly. ‘They haven’t cleaned up yet.’

  ‘We’re going to be pretty short-handed,’ said Chief, following a natural train of thought. ‘But that’s tomorrow’s worry. Good night, sir.’

  ‘Good night, Chief. Get some sleep if you can.’

  But later he himself found sleep almost impossible to achieve, weary as he was after nearly nine hours on the bridge. He lay in his sleeping bag on the hard floor of the asdic hut, feeling underneath him the trials and tremors of the ship’s painful labouring. It was very cold. Poor Marlborough, he thought, losing between waking and sleeping the full control of his thoughts. Poor old Marlborough. We shouldn’t do this to you. None of us should: not us, or the Germans, or those poor chaps washing about in the fo’c’sle. No ship deserved an ordeal as evil as this. Only human beings, immeasurably base, deserved such punishment.

  Bridger woke him at first light, with a mug of tea and an insinuating ‘Seven o’clock, sir!’ so normal as to make him smile. But the smile was not much more than a momentary flicker. Under him he felt the ship very slowly rolling to and fro, without will and without protest: she seemed more a part of the sea itself than a separate burden on it. The weather must have moderated a lot, but Marlborough might be deeper in the water as well.

  Cold and stiff, he lay for a few minutes before getting up, collecting his thoughts and remembering what was waiting for him outside the asdic hut. It would be bitterly cold, possibly wet as well: the ship would seem deformed and ugly, the damage meeting his eyes at every turn: the blood on the bridge would be dried black. All over the upper deck there would be men, grey-faced and shivering, waking to face the day: not cheerful and noisy as they usually were, but dully astonished that the ship was still afloat and that they had survived so far; unwilling, even, to meet each other’s eye, in the embarrassment of fear and disbelief of the future. And there were those other men down in the fo’c’sle, who would not wake. There were the burials to see to. There was the bulkhead.

  He got up.

  The bulkhead first, with the Chief and Adams. The rating outside the watertight door said: ‘Haven’t heard anything, sir,’ in a non-committal way, as if he did not really believe that they were not all wasting their time. He was a young stoker: sixteen men in his mess had been caught forward: no hope of any sort had yet been communicated to him. Noting this, the Captain thought: I’ll have to talk to them, some time this morning … Inside, things were as before: there was a little more water, and the atmosphere was now thick and sour: but nothing had shifted, and with the decrease in the ship’s rolling the bulkhead itself was rigid, without sound or movement.

  ‘I think it’s even improved a bit, sir,’ said the Chief. He ran his hand down the central seam, which before had been leaking: his fingers now came away dry. ‘This seems to have worked itself watertight again. If we could alter the trim a bit, so that even part of this space is above the waterline, we might be able to save it.’

  ‘That’s going to be today’s job,’ said the Captain, ‘moving everything we can aft, so as to bring her head up a bit. I’ll go into details when we get outside.’

  On his way back he visited the boiler and engine rooms. The boiler room was deserted, and already cooling fast: here again the forward bulkhead was a tangle of shores and joists, braced against the angle-pieces that joined the frames.

  ‘What about this one?’ he asked.

  ‘Doesn’t seem to be any strain on it, sir,’ Chief answered. ‘I think the space next to it – that’s the drying room and the small bosun’s store – must still be watertight.’

  The Captain nodded without saying anything. He was beginning to feel immensely and unreasonably cheerful, but to communicate that feeling to anyone else seemed frivolous in the extreme. There was so little to go on: it might all be a product of what he felt about the ship herself, and unfit to be shared with anyone.

  The engine room was very much alive. Two men – the Chief ERA and a young telegraphist – were working on the main switchboard: the telegraphist, lying flat on his back behind it, was pulling through a length of thick insulated cable and connecting it up. Two more hands were busy on one of the main steam valves. There was an air of purpose here, of men who knew clearly what the next job was to be, and how to set about it.

  The Chief ERA, an old pensioner with a smooth bald head in odd contrast with the craggy wrinkles of his face, smiled when he saw the Captain. They came from the same Kentish village, and the Chief ERA’s appointment to Marlborough had been the biggest wangle the Captain had ever undertaken. But it had been justified a score of times in the last two years, and obviously it was in the process of being justified again now.

  ‘Well, Chief?’

  ‘Going on all right, sir. It won’t be much to look at, but I reckon it’ll serve.’

  ‘That’s all we want.’ The Captain turned to the engineer officer. ‘Any other troubles down here?’

  ‘I’m a bit worried about the port engine, sir. That torpedo was a big shock. It may have knocked the shaft out.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if we only have one screw. We couldn’t go more than a few knots anyway, with that bulkhead.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, sir.’

  The Chief ERA, presuming on their peacetime friendship in a way which the Captain had anticipated, and did not mind, said: ‘Do you think we’ll be able to steam, sir?’

  Everyone in the engine room stopped work to listen to the answer. The Captain hesitated a moment, and then said: ‘If the weather stays like it is now, and we can correct the trim a bit, I think we ought to make a start.’

  ‘How far to go, sir?’

  ‘About five hundred miles.’ That was as much as he wanted to talk about it and he nodded and turned to go. With his foot on the ladder he said: ‘I expect we’ll be able to count every one of them.’

  The laughter as he began to climb was a tonic for himself as well. It hadn’t been a very good joke, but it was the first one for a long time.

  The sick bay next. The doctor was asleep in an armchair when he came in, his young sensitive face turned away from the light, his hands splayed out on the arms of the chair as if each individual finger were resting after an exhaustive effort. The sick-berth attendant was bending over one of the lower cots, where a bandaged figure lay with closed, deeply circled eyes. There were eight men altogether: after the night’s turmoil the room was surprisingly tidy,
save for a pile of bloodstained swabs and dressings which had overflowed from the wastebasket. The tidiness and the sharp aseptic smell were reassuring.

  He put his hand out, and touched the sleeping figure.

  ‘Good morning, Doctor.’

  Soundlessly the doctor woke, opened his eyes, and sat up. Even this movement seemed part of some controlled competent routine.

  ‘Hallo, sir.’

  ‘Busy night?’

  ‘Very, sir. All right, though.’

  ‘Just what you were waiting for?’ The Captain smiled.

  The doctor looked at the Captain, and smiled back, and said: ‘I haven’t felt so well for years.’

  It must be odd to feel like that, about what must have been the goriest night of his life. But it was natural, if you were proud and confident of your professional skill, and for three years you felt you had been utterly wasted. This young man, who had barely been qualified when war broke out, must now feel, with justice, that the initials after his name had at last come to life.

  The Captain looked round the sick bay. ‘Where are the rest of them? Adams said you had sixteen.’

  ‘Four died.’ It was extraordinary how the simplicity of phrase and tone still conveyed an assurance that the lives had been fought for, and only surrendered in the last extremity. ‘I’ve spread the rest over the officers’ cabins, where they’ll be more comfortable. There’s one in yours, sir.’

  ‘That’s all right … How’s the midshipman?’