HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947)

by Monsarrat, Nicholas

  He had no idea where they were. They had seen nothing – no lights at night, no aircraft, not a single smudge of smoke anywhere on the horizon. The sextant had been smashed by the shellfire, and there was no sun anyway to take sights by. Even at two knots, even at one and a half, they should have raised Butt of Lewis light by now, if their course were correct. That was the hellish, the insane part of it. Probably it wasn’t correct: probably the torpedoing and the weight shifting had put everything out, and the magnetic compasses were completely haywire. Probably they were heading straight out into the Atlantic instead of pointing for home. And Hell! he thought, this bloody cock-eyed way of steaming … you couldn’t tell where the ship was going to. They might be anywhere. They might be going round in circles, digging their own grave.

  Bridger, the admirable unassailable Bridger, appeared at his elbow. The cup of cocoa which seemed to be part of his right arm was once more tendered. While he drank it, Bridger stood in silence, looking out at the sea. Then he said: ‘Easing off a bit, sir.’

  ‘Just a little, yes.’

  There was another pause: then Bridger added: ‘It’s a lot drier aft, sir.’

  ‘Good.’ It was impossible not to respond to this effort at raising his spirits, or to be unaffected by it; and he said suddenly: ‘What do the hands think about all this?’ It was the sort of question he had never before asked any rating except the Coxswain.

  Bridger considered. It was entirely novel to him, too; what the lower deck thought of things, and what they said about them to their officers, were two different aspects of truth. At length: ‘They’re a bit sick of the corned beef, sir.’

  The Captain laughed, for the first time for many days. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Just about, sir. But we’re having a sweepstake on when we get in.’

  For some reason the Captain felt like crying at that one. He said, after a moment:

  ‘Has your number come up yet?’

  ‘No, sir. Six more days to run.’

  There was much more that the Captain wanted to ask: did they really think Marlborough would get in: were they still confident in his judgment, after all these days and nights of blundering along: did they trust him absolutely? – questions he would never even have thought of, save in a light-headed hunger for reassurance. But suddenly Bridger said: ‘They hope you’re getting enough sleep, sir!’

  Then he sucked in his breath, as though discovered in some appalling breach of discipline, took the cup from the top of the compass and quickly left the bridge. Alone once more, the Captain smiled tautly at the most moving thing that had ever been said to him, and settled back in his chair to take up the watch again. He wasn’t getting enough sleep, but the fact that the ship’s company realized this, and wished him well over it, was as sustaining and comforting as a strong arm round his shoulders.

  On the morning of the tenth day since they were torpedoed he had a conference with the Chief on the bridge. They had seen little of each other during the preceding time: five days of having the reversing gear in continuous action had proved an unaccustomed strain, and the Chief had been kept busy below, nursing the one remaining engine through its ordeal. Now, at nine o’clock, he had come up with some fresh news.

  ‘Have you noticed the fo’c’sle, sir?’

  ‘No, Chief, I hadn’t.’ After yet another night on the bridge he felt no more and no less tired than usual: he seemed to be living in some nether hell of weariness which nothing could deepen. ‘What’s happened to it?’

  ‘The bows have started to bend upwards again.’ He pointed. ‘You can just about see it from here, sir. There’s a kink in the deck, like folding a bit of paper.’

  ‘You mean the whole thing’s being pulled off.’

  ‘Something like that, sir. It’s a slow process, but if it gets any worse we’ll lose the buoyancy of the forepeak, and that may bring the screws out of the water again.’

  ‘What’s the answer, technically?’

  ‘Either slow down to nothing, or turn round and push them on again.’

  The Captain gestured irritably. ‘My God, it’s like fooling around with a bundle of scrap iron! “Push the bows on again” – it sounds like some blasted lid off a tin!’

  ‘Yes sir.’ While Chief waited for the foolish spasm to spend itself, he wondered idly what the Captain really thought Marlborough should be like, after what she had gone through. ‘Bundle of scrap iron’ wasn’t far wide of the mark: she could float, she could lollop along backwards, and that was about all. ‘Well, that’s the choice, sir,’ he said presently. ‘I don’t think we can carry on like this much longer.’

  The Captain got hold of himself again: at this late hour, he wasn’t going to start dramatizing the situation. It was all this damned tiredness … ‘We could just about turn round now,’ he said slowly, looking at the sea with its long rolling swell and occasional breaking wavetops. ‘It was a lot worse than this before we turned last time.’

  ‘About how far have we got to go, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know, Chief.’ He did not make the mistake of admitting his ignorance in a totally normal voice, but he managed to imply that there was nothing to be gained either by a full discussion of it or by surrendering to its hopeless implication. ‘If we were on our proper course we should have raised Butt of Lewis a long time ago. Probably the compasses are faulty. I’m just going to keep on like this till we hit something.’

  Stopping, and turning the bows into the wind again, was an even slower process than it had been five days earlier: at times it seemed that Marlborough, lying lumpishly off the wind and butting those fragile bows against the run of the waves, would not come up to her course. The Captain dared not increase speed, in order to give the rudder more leverage; and so for a full half-hour they tumbled athwart the wave troughs, gaining a point on the compass-card, sagging back again, wavering on and off the wind like a creaking weathercock no one trusts any longer. Down in the wheelhouse, Leading Seaman Tapper leant against the wheel which he had put hard a-starboard, and waited, his eyes on the compass-card. If she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t: no good worrying, no good fiddling about … All over the ship, during the past few days, that sort of thing had been growing: things either went right, or they didn’t, and that was all there was to it. Between a deep weariness and a deeper fatalism, the whole crew accepted the situation, and were carried sluggishly along with it.

  At the end of half an hour a lull allowed Marlborough to come round on her course. She settled down again slowly, as if she did not really believe in it, but knew she had no choice. South-east, it was, and one and a half knots. It must bring them home. It had to.

  It did not bring them home: it did not seem to bring them anywhere. They steamed all that day, and all the next, and all the next, and all the next: four more days and nights, to add to the fantastic total of that south-easterly passage. But was it a south-easterly passage? – for if so, they should by now have been right through Scotland, and out the other side: eleven days steaming, it added up to, and thirteen days since they had been torpedoed. It just didn’t make sense.

  The weather did not help. It did not deteriorate, it did not improve: the stiff breeze held all the time, the sloppy uneven sea came running at them for hour after hour and day after day. The ship took it all with a tough determination which could not disguise a steady, progressive breaking down. The bulkhead wavered and creaked, the water ran down the splitting seam, slopping about the deck, increased in weight till it began to drag the bows down to a fatal level. The noise mounted gradually to an appalling racket: clanging, groaning, knocking, protesting – the whole hull in pain, ill-treated as an old galled horse sweating against the collar, fit only for the knacker’s yard but hardly strong enough to drag itself there. Gallant, ramshackle, on her last legs, Marlborough bumped and rolled southwards, at a pace which was itself a wretched trial of patience.

  Above all, there was now a smell – a sweetish, sickish smell seeping up the ventilators from the fo’c’sle. It
penetrated to every part of the ship, it hung in the wind, it followed them till there seemed to be nothing around them in the sea or the sky but the gross stink of the dead, those seventy-odd corpses which they carried with them as their obscene ballast. It could not be escaped anywhere in the ship. Every man on board lived with it, tried to shut it out with sleep, woke with it sweet and beastly in his nostrils. It became the unmentionable horror that attended them wherever they went.

  They all hated it, but there was so much more to hate. The tiredness of overstrained men working four hours on and four hours off, for day after day and night after night, lay all over the ship, a tangible weight of weariness that affected every yard of their progress. The ship’s company, whether watching on the upper deck or tending the boilers and the engine room, moved in a tired dream barely distinguishable from sleep. A grotesque fatigue assailed them all: they stayed on watch till their eyes ran raw and their bodies seemed ready to crumple: they ate like men who could scarcely move their jaws against some dry and tasteless substance: they fell asleep where they dropped, wedged against ventilators, curled up like bundles of rags in odd corners of the deck. All of them were filthy, bearded, grimed with spray and smoke: there was no water to wash with, no change of clothes, nothing to hearten them but tea and hard biscuit and corned beef, for every meal of every day of the voyage. All over the ship one met them, or stumbled over them: wild-eyed, dirty, slightly mad. And all round them, and above and below, hung that smell of death, a thick enveloping curtain, the price of sea power translated into squalid and disgusting currency.

  And the Captain … he summed up, in his person, all that tiredness, all that stress and dirt, all that wild fatigue. He had had the least sleep of anyone on board, throughout the thirteen days: at the end of it he still held the whole thing in his grip, but it was a grip that had another quality besides strength – it had something cracked and desperate about it. His was the worry, and the responsibility, his the appalling doubts as to whether they were really going anywhere at all: he held on because there was no choice, because they could not give up, above all because this was Marlborough, his own ship, and he would not surrender her to God or man or the sea. Like a lover, light-headed and despairing, he hoped and strove and would not be foresworn.

  The bridge was now his prison … Wedged in his chair, chin on hand, a small thing was beginning to obsess him. On one of the instruments in front of him there was a splash of dried blood, overlooked when they cleaned up after the shell burst. It had an odd shape, like a boot, like Italy: but the silly thing was that when he looked to one side that shape seemed to change, spinning round and round like a windmill, expanding and contracting as if the blood still lived and still moved to a pulse. He tried to catch it moving, but when he stared at it directly it became Italy again, a dirty, brownish smear that no one wanted. He roared out suddenly: ‘Signalman!’ and then: ‘For the Lord’s sake clean that off – it’s filthy!’ and when the man, staring, set to work on the job, he watched him as if his sanity depended on it. Then he looked ahead again, scanning the horizon, the damned crystal clear horizon. No change there: no shadow, no smudge of smoke, nothing. Where were they going to? Was there anything ahead but deep water? Was he leading Marlborough, and the wretched remnant of her ship’s company, on a fantastic chase into the blue? And God Almighty! That smell from forrard … It was like a curse, clamped down hard on their necks. Perhaps they were all going to perish of it in the end: perhaps the whole ship and her dead and dying crew, welded together in a solid mass of corruption, would one night dip soundlessly beneath the sea and touch the bottom a thousand fathoms below.

  At 4 a.m. on the morning of January 14, Petty Officer Adams came up on to the bridge, to see the Captain before taking over the wheel. He had a pair of binoculars slung beneath the hood of his duffle coat, and from force of habit he raised them and swept slowly round the horizon, a barely distinguishable line of shadow on that black moonless night. He did this twice: then, on the verge of lowering his glasses, he checked suddenly and stared for a long minute ahead, blinking at the rawness, the watery eyestrain, which even this slight effort induced. Then he said, in a compressed, almost croaking voice: ‘There’s a light dead ahead, sir.’

  The words fell into the silence of the bridge like a rock in a pool. They all whipped up their glasses and stared in turn – the Captain, the signalman, Bridger, with his cocoa cup forgotten: all of them intent, tremendously alert, checking their breathing as if afraid of losing an instant’s concentration. Then Adams said again: ‘There it is, sir – only the loom of it, but you can see it sweeping across.’

  And the Captain, answering him, said very softly: ‘Yes.’ It was a light – the faintest lifting of the gloom in the sky, like a spectral fan opening and closing, like a whisper – but it was a light. For a moment, the Captain was childishly annoyed that he had not seen it first: and then a terrific and overpowering relief seemed to rise in his throat, choking him, pricking his eyes, flooding all over his body in a shaking spasm. The soreness which he had felt round his heart all through the last few days rose to an agonizing twinge and then fell again; and then he dropped his binoculars and leant against his chair. The wish to cry, at the end of the fourteen days’ tension, was almost insupportable.

  Round him the others reacted in their own way, contributing to a moment of release so extraordinary that no extravagance of movement or word could have been out of place. The cup which Bridger had placed on a ledge fell and shattered. The signalman was whistling an imitation of a bosun’s pipe, a triumphant skirl of sound. Adams, unknowing, muttered: ‘Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,’ over and over again, in a voice from which everything save a sober humility had disappeared. They were men in a moment of triumph and of weakness, as vulnerable as young children, as unstable, as near to ecstasy or to weeping in the same single breath. They were men in entrancement.

  It was a light – and soon there were others: three altogether, winking and beckoning them towards the vast promise of the horizon. The Captain took a grip of himself, the tightest grip yet, and went into the charthouse to work them out: while all over the ship men, awakened by some extraordinary urgency which ran everywhere like a licking flame, leant over the rails, and stared and whispered and laughed at what they saw. Lights ahead – land – home – they’d made it after all. Some of them stared up at the bridge, seeing nothing but feeling that they were looking at the heart of the ship, the thing that had brought them home, the man who more than anyone had worked the miracle. And then they would go back to the lights again, and count the flashes, and start singing or cursing in ragged chorus. There was no one anywhere in the ship who did not share in this moment: the hands on the upper deck shouted the news down to the engine room, the signalman on the bridge gave a breathless running commentary to the wheelhouse. The release from ordeal moved them all to the same wild exultation.

  Only the Captain, faced by the array of charts on the table, no longer shared the dull measure of their relief. For he was now concentrating on something else, something he could not make out at all. They were lights all right – but what lights? The one that Adams had first seen was not Butt of Lewis: the other two did not seem to fit any part of the chart, either Lewis or the mainland round Cape Wrath, or the scattered islands centred on Scapa Flow and the Orkneys. He checked them again, he laid off the bearings on a piece of tracing paper and then moved it here and there on the chart, hesitatingly, like a child with its first jigsaw puzzle. He even moved it up to Iceland, but the answer would not come – and it was an answer they must have before very long: they were running into something, closing an unknown coastline which might have any number of hazards – outlying rocks, dangerous overfalls, minefields barring any approach except by a single swept channel. Sucking his pencil, frowning at the harsh lamplight, he strove to find the answer: even at this last moment, delay might rob them of their triumph. But the answer would not come.

  Presently he opened the charthouse door and ca
me out again, ready to take fresh bearings and to make doubly certain of what the lights showed. Both the doctor and the Chief were now on the bridge, talking in low voices through which ran a strong note of satisfaction and assurance. The Chief turned as he heard the step, and then jerked his head at the lights.

  ‘Finest sight I’ve seen in my life, sir.’

  The Captain smiled. ‘Same here, Chief.’

  ‘Is that Butt of Lewis, sir?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘No.’ He raised his glasses, checked the number of the flashes, and bent to the compass to take a fresh bearing. ‘No, Doc, I haven’t worked out what it is yet.’

  ‘It’s something solid, anyway.’

  ‘Enough for me,’ said the Chief. ‘All I want is the good old putty, anywhere between Cape Wrath and the Longships.’

  To himself the Captain thought: I wish I could guarantee that.

  ‘Another light, sir!’ exclaimed the signalman suddenly. ‘Port bow – about four-oh.’

  The Captain raised his glasses once more.

  ‘There it is, sir,’ said the signalman again, before the Captain had found it. ‘It’s a red one this time.’

  ‘Red?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I got it clearly then.’

  Red … that rang a bell, by God! There was a red light at the end of Rathlin Island, off the north coast of Ireland: it was the only one he could remember, in fact. But Rathlin Island. He walked quickly into the charthouse, and moved the tracing paper southwards. The jigsaw suddenly resolved itself. It was Rathlin: the light they had first seen was Inistrahull, the others were Inishown and something else he could not check – probably an aircraft beacon. Rathlin Island – that meant that they had come all down the coast of Scotland, over two hundred miles farther than he had thought: it meant that they must have been steering at least fifteen degrees off their proper course. Those bloody compasses! But what did it matter now? Rathlin Island. They could put in at Londonderry and get patched up, and then go home. Northern Ireland instead of Butt of Lewis – that would look good in the Report. But what the hell did it matter? They had made their landfall.