The Ship

by C. S. Forester

  So similarly round the table of the Transmitting Station it was necessary that there should be discipline and courage. Trembling hands could not keep those pointers steady, nor could minds distracted by fear be alert to follow the aimless wanderings of the guiding needles so that the guns above could continue to hurl forth their broadsides every ten seconds. Down here, far below the level of the sea, the men were comparatively protected from shell fire, but not far below their feet was the outer skin of the ship, and around them were the bunkers of oil fuel. Mine or torpedo might strike there, engulfing them in flame or water. Other compartments of the ship might be holed, and the sea pour in as the ship sank slowly; in that case it would be their duty to remain at their posts to keep the guns firing to the last, while above them there were only the difficult iron ladders up which they might eventually climb to precarious life.

  The Marine bandsmen were perfectly aware of all this – they were far too intelligent not to be. It was discipline which kept them at the table; it was even discipline which kept their hands steady and their heads clear. Intangible and indefinable, discipline might perhaps be more clearly understood by consideration of one of its opposites. Panic can seize a crowd or an individual, making men run for no known reason in search of no known objective; in panic men shake with fear, act without aim or purpose, hear nothing, see nothing. Disciplined men stay calm and steady, do their duty purposefully, and are attentive to orders and instructions. The one is a state of mind just as is the other, and every state of mind grows out of the past. A myriad factors contribute to discipline – old habit, confidence in one’s fellows, belief in the importance of one’s duty. Roman discipline came to be based on fear of consequences; it was axiomatic in the Roman army that the soldier should fear his officers more than the enemy, and Frederick the Great used the same method with the Prussian Guard. An enthusiast will charge into danger, but, once stopped, he is likely to run away, and, running away, he is as hard to stop as when he is charging. Fear and enthusiasm are narrow and precarious bases for discipline. Perhaps the principal element in the Marines’ discipline was pride – pride in themselves, pride in the duty entrusted them, pride in the cause in which they fought, and pride in the Navy in which they served.

  The Torpedo Gunner’s Mate indulged in none of these highly theoretical speculations. His glance round the Transmitting Station told him that the men were doing their duty, and gratified his curiosity; and a glance at Mr Kaile told him that all the apparatus was functioning correctly, thanks to the electricity which he was supplying to them. In reply to the Torpedo Gunner’s Mate’s lifted eyebrows, Mr Kaile gave a nod, and, having no more excuse to linger, the Torpedo Gunner’s Mate withdrew to his action station.

  ‘Nosey old bastard,’ said Mr Kaile; he said it half to himself, but the other half into the telephone, and he had to add hastily to the Gunnery Lieutenant who heard it, ‘Sorry, sir, I wasn’t speaking to you.’

  The telephone gurgled back at him with the information that Artemis was turning again to the attack.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr Kaile.

  Mr Kaile’s war experience went back twenty-eight years. At the battle of the Falkland Islands as a very young Ordinary Seaman he had played an undistinguished part, being merely one of the hands in HMS Kent who had been used as living ballast, sent aft with every man who could be spared from his station to stand on the quarterdeck so as to help lift the bows a trifle and add to the speed of the ship in her desperate pursuit of Nürnberg. Mr Kaile had stood there patiently while Kent plunged through the drizzling rain of that dramatic evening, and he had cheered with the others when Nürnberg, shot to pieces, had sunk into the freezing South Atlantic.

  He had married a girl when at last Kent reached England again, Bessie – Bessie had been no oil-painting even then, as Mr Kaile politely described her looks to himself, but it was largely owing to Bessie that Mr Kaile now held his present exalted rank, with a ‘Mr’ before his name and a gold stripe on his sleeve. Oil-painting or not, Mr Kaile had loved Bessie from the first, and had never ceased to love her, with her gentleness and sympathy and her unbounded faith in her husband. Nothing was too good for Bessie. On Bessie’s account Mr Kaile had become a man of towering ambition, with dreams that he hardly dared admit even to himself; even he had never ventured so far into the realms of the wildly improbable as to imagine his holding commissioned rank, but some of his dreams had been almost equally fantastic – he had dreamed of Bessie living in a house of their own, a house bought and paid for with the money he earned, and filled with furniture, good furniture, on which all the instalments were paid. It was too lofty a dream that Bessie should have a maid in the house, wearing cap and apron, but Mr Kaile certainly had aspired in those old days to Bessie’s having a charwoman to do the rough work of the dream house – a respectable old body who would call Mrs Kaile ‘Mum’. Mr Kaile as a young Leading Seaman had thrilled to the idea of someone doing that, but when he spoke of it to his wife she had only smiled tolerantly and stroked his hair as if he were a child telling about fairies.

  And Leading Seaman Kaile had gone back to sea with the ambition rooted more deeply still, to earn his first medal by the way he handled a machine gun on the deck of the old Vindictive when she lay against Zeebrugge Mole with her upper works being torn to splinters by the German artillery. The ambition had stayed with him when the war ended, and sustained him through the years of the peace, while he slaved to supplement an elementary education and master the complexities (complexities which grew ever more complex) of the technical side of gunnery. Mr Kaile was not a brilliant man, but he was a man willing to go to endless effort, and under the stimulus of his ambition his mind grew more and more retentive in its memory for elaborate detail, and more and more orderly in its processes. He fell naturally into the discipline of HMS Excellent, and when the text-books that he read went beyond his comprehension he turned patiently back again to page one and started afresh analysing each sentence until he had cleared up the difficulty. He acquired the most complex assortment of rule of thumb knowledge, from the temperature at which cordite should be stored in a magazine to the breaking strain of chain cable. There was no gun in use in the British Navy which he could not repair or serve. He made orderly thinking an efficient substitute for the higher mathematics which he could never hope to learn, so that he could deal with muzzle velocities and trajectories in a workmanlike fashion. And he had risen from Leading Seaman to Petty Officer, and from Petty Officer to warrant rank, until at last he was what he had never hoped to be, a Commissioned Gunner, Mr Kaile; and Bessie lived in her own house – Mr Kaile deeded it over to her the day he paid the last instalment – full of her own furniture, and two days a week, before the war began in 1939, she had a charwoman in who called her ‘Mum’ to do the washing and the rough work. Mr Kaile did not know whether after the war there would be any servants again who would wear cap and apron, but so many unbelievable things had happened to him in his career that he had even thought this might be possible some day, and that he might have the last, ultimate pleasure of sitting in Bessie’s own sitting-room hearing Bessie give instructions to her own servant.

  Even without that prospect, merely to keep Bessie in her own house and surrounded by her own furniture, Mr Kaile would fight every Wop in the Eyety navy. He had realized so many of his ambitions, with Bessie undisputably leader of society in the circles in which she moved as wife of a Commissioned Gunner she could queen it, if she willed, over the wives of Chief Petty Officers and Sergeants of Marines. In point of fact, Bessie did not queen it very obviously, as Mr Kaile had noticed just as he noticed everything nice about Bessie. The pleasure for Mr Kaile lay in knowing that she could if she wanted to. Mr Kaile’s present position, sitting at the head of the table in the Transmitting Station, was closely enough related in Mr Kaile’s mind with the continuance of that pleasure.

  Mr Kaile was fully aware that the Eyeties had good machinery of their own. He had read with the utmost care the confidential notes whic
h had been circulated to gunnery officers in the Royal Navy regarding the discoveries made in captured Italian ships. Captured submarines had contributed a little – the submersible six-inch gun mounting was a most ingenious adaptation of an idea which the Navy had been (in Mr Kaile’s mind) a little premature in discarding – and the destroyer captured in the Red Sea had told much more. Reconstructing in theory the Italian system of gunnery control in big ships from what could be seen in a destroyer was a sort of Sherlock Holmes job, like guessing a man’s height from the length of his stride between footprints, and it was just the sort of thing Mr Kaile was good at. In his pocket at that moment there was a nice letter from the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty thanking Mr Kaile for some suggestions he had made on the subject. One of these days the English would lay their hands on an intact Italian cruiser, or even a battleship – Mr Kaile hoped when that happened he would be there to see. It would be pretty good material, Mr Kaile was sure, but Mr Kaile was not so wrapped up in materials as to be unaware that the best of material is still dependent on men to be handled properly. He looked down the double row of serious faces along the Transmitting Station table and was satisfied. These kids were sometimes inclined to a frivolity which needed restraint. They were well enough behaved; when the big explosion had come, and the ship had jerked as if she had struck a rock, the lights had gone out instantly. But when they had come on again (Mr Kaile gave grudging credit to the Torpedo Gunner’s Mate for the promptitude with which the circuits had been restored) they were still all sitting in their places, and each had reported quietly that the pointer each was observing was still functioning. They were quite steady, and Mr Kaile was human enough to realize that they might not be so in that atmosphere, for some freak of the ship’s ventilation was dragging into the Transmitting Station a horrible stench – of burning paint, perhaps, but with other elements added; possibly burning meat. Mr Kaile could be single-minded and ignore that stench, and he could control his thoughts so as not to speculate about what might be happening elsewhere in the ship to cause that stench, but he knew that might not be the case with these lads. He was glad to see that it was.

  ‘Enemy in sight. Green four-o,’ said the telephones to Mr Kaile.

  All guns load,’ said Mr Kaile to the turrets. That was an automatic reaction. The Transmitting Station was as quiet as a church, save for the curt sentences passing back and forth. Band Corporal Jones at his telephone was receiving, and repeating aloud, the enemy’s course and deflection, as the Rate Officer announced it. The marvellous machines were making their calculations. Mr Kaile swept his eye over the table.

  ‘Table tuned for deflection, sir,’ he reported.

  ‘Broadsides,’ said the telephone back to him.

  ‘Broadsides,’ repeated Mr Kaile to the turrets.

  A gong pealed sharply, and then Artemis heaved beneath their feet to her own broadside, and the rigid steel of her structure transported the din and the shock of the explosion into the Transmitting Station, astoundingly. And the new data began to pour into the Transmitting Station, and the pointers moved, tracked steadily by the Marine band, while every ten seconds came the crash of the broadside, and the stench from the burning wardroom flat seeped down into the Transmitting Station, polluting their nostrils.

  19

  From the Captain’s Report

  … so that the ship was ready to attack again…

  The battle was approaching a climax. The wind had steadily rolled the smoke screen down upon the Italian battle line, and the British ships had advanced with it, nearer and nearer to the Italian ships. The Captain on the bridge of Artemis was considering the possibilities and potentialities of an attack by the destroyers with torpedoes. A destroyer is even more fragile than a light cruiser, and her attack must be launched only after careful preparation of it to be successful. At more than five thousand yards her torpedoes are running too slowly to have much chance of hitting a well-handled target, and the longer the range the more difficult it is to send the torpedo near the target. Fired at a line of ships, a salvo of torpedoes nominally stands a chance of hitting with one torpedo in three, because between each pair of ships there is an empty space twice as long as any ship, but slow torpedoes and alert handling makes this chance far slighter.

  A forty-knot torpedo fired at a range of three miles at a ship advancing at twenty knots reaches its target in three minutes having only travelled two miles; but if the ship is retreating instead of advancing the torpedo must run for nine minutes, travelling six miles, before it overtakes its target. So a torpedo attack must always be delivered from ahead of the enemy’s line, and it must be pressed home to the farthest limit in the teeth of the enemy’s fire. That Italian battle line mounted over a hundred guns, which each fired a shell big enough to cripple a destroyer, over ranges at least three times as long as the maximum efficient torpedo range; if the destroyers were to launch a simple attack they would have a long and perilous gauntlet to run before they could fire their torpedoes with any hope of success. In fact, if even one of the six available destroyers got within torpedo range it would be surprising. And if, more surprisingly, that one destroyer had the opportunity to send off six torpedoes the chances would be against scoring two hits, and even two hits would probably not sink one of those big fellows over there. So the net result would be the loss of six destroyers in exchange for a temporary crippling of one or two major Italian units – a very bad bargain in the beggar-your-neighbour game of war.

  The Captain had no need to recapitulate all this in his mind; his reasoning processes started at this point, up to which the facts were as much part of his mental equipment as a musician’s knowledge of the number of flats in a scale. For the destroyers to stand any chance of success in the attack which the leader’s flag signals were proposing to him the Italians must be distracted, their attention diverted and their aim divided. That meant launching another attack with the cruisers through the smoke screen so that they could attract the Italian fire to themselves, and then the destroyers could slip round the end of the screen ahead of the Italians and charge in. The Italian reply to this would be to keep their big guns firing at the cruisers and turn their secondary armament against the destroyers; but the Captain doubted whether in the stress of action the Italian fire control would be effective enough to master this added complication. And when the Italians attempted it they would be under the rapid fire of the British cruisers, shaken by hits and blinded by splashes. Some of their secondary armament, behind thin armour, might be put out of action – by some good fortune perhaps even the secondary gunnery control in some of the ships might be knocked out by lucky shells. That would make all the difference in the world. Another attack of the cruisers would increase the stake thrown on the board – exposing them again to the Italian fire at ever-lessening range – but it increased the chances of success to a far greater proportion. It made a good gamble of it.

  The Captain pulled himself up sharply; his thoughts were running away with themselves. He was allowing himself to be carried away by his emotions. The realization was thrust upon him by the discovery that he was pleased with the prospect of plunging once more through the smoke screen, of being deafened again by the guns of Artemis, of seeing the shells he fired striking the Italian line. There was pleasure in the thought, and that meant danger. The Captain was a man of violent passions, although no mere acquaintance would ever have guessed it. People said that ‘Methy’ – Captain the Hon. Miles Ernest Troughton-Harrington-Yorke – had ice water in his veins instead of the blue blood one would expect of the son of the tenth Viscount Severne, but the people who said so did not know him, however close their acquaintance with him. The fact that he had a nickname should have warned them of the contrary, for even when their initials run together so conveniently, nicknames are not given to men who are as cold and hard and unemotional as they thought the Captain to be. As a boy and a youth Methy had indulged and indulged again in the rich dark pleasure of insane evil temper. He had revelled in the jo
y of having no bounds to his passion, of every restraint cast aside – the sort of joy whose intensity not even the drunkard or the drug-addict can know. One of Methy’s brothers carried to his grave the scar across his scalp which resulted from a blow Methy dealt him – a blow not dealt to kill, for in his rage Methy never stopped to think of the possibility of killing, but a blow that might have killed. Methy’s brother carried that scar to his grave, the unmarked grave amidst the shattered ruins of Boulogne where he fought to the last with the Guards.

  Methy’s wife knew about the frightful passions that could shake the man, for she had seen something of them. She could remember the young Lieutenant about to sail for the East Indian Station, frantic with jealousy that duty was taking him to the other side of the world while his rival stayed in England. He had been brutal, violent, demanding that she swear to be faithful to him, and she had been cold, aloof – concealing her fright – reminding him that they were not married or betrothed and that she had no intention of being either as long as he behaved like a madman.

  That had been a very late manifestation of passion, called forth by his love for a woman; long before that he had come to realize the insidious danger of a lack of self-control, and the insidious habit that could be formed by self-indulgence, more binding even than a drunkard’s. He had mastered his passions, slowly and determinedly. Luckily he had matured early; luckily the discipline of the life of a naval cadet had been reinforced by the discipline of the life of a poor man’s son – the tenth Viscount Severne had no money to speak of, and his three elder sons were in the army. When Gieves’s agent came on board at Gibraltar and displayed shocked disapproval of jacket or cap, Methy had to smile and refuse to take the easy step of ordering new ones; when his rivals thought nothing of dinner at the Savoy or the Berkeley he had to suggest Soho. And he had come through without becoming either embittered or inhuman. Only a very few people knew that the Captain, good humoured, easy going in everything unconnected with the Service, witty and reliable and even tempered, had been compelled to learn to be each of these things; and most people who were in that secret thought the change was absolutely permanent. They looked upon Methy as an extinct volcano; but he himself knew, only too well, that he was only a dormant volcano, that mad rage could still master him – like some half-tamed animal it would still rise against him the moment he took his eye off it.