Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

by The Caine Mutiny(Lit)

  "Have you read any of the novel?"

  "Hell, I have no time to read novels by good authors. Why should I bother with his tripe?" Carmody twisted his blue-and--gold Annapolis ring nervously with his thumb. He rose and poured himself coffee. "Want some Joe?"

  "Thanks- Well, look," said Willie, accepting the cup, "this kind of thing must be horribly dull to a man of his talents."

  "What talents?" Carmody dropped into a chair.

  "He's a professional author, Carmody. Didn't you know that? He's had stories in magazines. The Theatre Guild had an option on one of his plays-"

  "So what? He's on the Caine now, just like you and me."

  "If he brings a great novel off the Caine," said Willie, "it'll be a far greater contribution to America than a lot of decodes."

  "His assignment is communications, not contributions to America-"

  Keefer entered the wardroom in underwear and went to the coffee corner. "How are you doing, lads?"

  "All right, sir," said Carmody with sudden subservience, pushing away his coffee cup and taking up a coded message.

  "Except we think you ought to do some decoding for a change," said Willie. He had no fear of Keefer's higher military rank. He was sure the communicator laughed at such gradings. His respect for Keefer, already high, had risen sharply on learning that he was composing a novel.

  Keefer smiled and came to the table. "What's the matter, class of '43," he said, slouching in a chair, "want to go talk to the chaplain?"

  Carmody kept his eyes down. "The coding watch is part of an ensign's work on a small ship," he said. "I don't mind.

  Every line officer should learn the essentials of communications, and-"

  "Here," said Keefer, draining his coffee, "give me that gismo. I've been doping off. Go study Navy Regulations." He pried the device out of Carmody's hands.

  "No, I can do it, sir. Happy to-"

  "Run along."

  "Why, thank you, sir." Carmody rose, bestowed a brief arid smile on Keith, and went out.

  "There goes a happy man," said Keefer. He began whipping the coding machine through its motions. It was as Carmody had said. He was incredibly fast.

  "He tells me you're working on a novel." Keefer nodded.

  "Got much of it done?"

  "About forty thousand words out of four hundred thou-sand."

  "Gosh. Long."

  "Longer than Ulysses. Shorter than War and Peace."

  "Is it a war novel?"

  Keefer smiled ironically. "It takes place on a carrier."

  "Got a title?"

  "Well, a working title."

  "What is it?" said Willie very curiously.

  "Doesn't mean much, by itself."

  "Well, I'd like to hear it."

  Keefer hesitated, and spoke the words slowly. "Multitudes, Multitudes."

  "I like it."

  "Recognize it?"

  "Bible, I imagine."

  "Book of Joel. `Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of de-cision.' "

  "Well, I put in right now for the millionth copy, auto-graphed."

  Keefer gave him the whole-souled smile of a flattered author. "I'm a little way from that, yet."

  "You'll make it. May I read some of it?"

  "Perhaps. When it's in better shape." Keefer had never stopped decoding. He finished his third message and began a fourth.

  "You really whiz through those," marveled Willie.

  "Perhaps that's why I let 'em pile up. It's like telling a child Red Riding Hood for the thousandth time. The thing is infantile and dull to start with, and becomes maddening with repetition."

  "Most of the Navy is repetition."

  "I don't mind it, when there's only fifty per cent waste motion. Communication is ninety-eight per cent waste motion. We carry a hundred and twelve registered publications. We use about six. But all the rest have to be corrected, one set of corrections superseding another every month. Take decoding. Actually about four messages a month concern this ship in any way. Commander Queeg's orders, for instance. The mine-sweeping-exercise despatch. All the rest of this garbage we rake over because the captain, bless his intellectual curiosity, wants to snoop on the fleet's activities. For only one reason. So that at the officers' club he can say to some classmate of his, very casually, don't you know, `Well, I hope you like screening that southern attack group in the next push.' Makes him sound like a friend of the admirals. I've seen him do it a dozen times."

  He kept racing through the decoding steps as he talked. Willie was fascinated by his negligent speed. Already he had done more work than Willie could perform in an hour; and Willie was the speediest of the ensigns.

  "I can't get over the way you polish those off."

  "Willie, aren't you wise to the Navy yet? It's all child's play. The work has been fragmentized by a few excellent brains at the top, on the assumption that near-morons will be responsible for each fragment. The assumption is sound enough for peacetime. There's a handful of brilliant boys who come into the Navy with the long purpose of becoming the Nation's admirals, and they succeed invariably because there's no competition. For the rest the Navy is a third-rate career for third-rate people, offering a sort of skimpy security in return for twenty or thirty years of polite penal servitude. What self-respecting American of even average gifts, let alone superior ones, will enter such a life? Well, now, comes a war, and the gifted civilians swarm into the service. Is it any wonder that they master in a matter of weeks what the near-morons painfully acquire in years? Take code devices. Navy plodders grind out maybe five, six messages an hour with them. Any half-baked reserve communicator can learn to whip out twenty an hour. No wonder the poor peons resent us-"

  "Heresy, heresy," Willie said, rather startled and embar-rassed.

  "Not at all. Plain fact. Whether it's the fragment of coding, the fragment of engineering, the fragment of gunnery-you'll find them all predigested and regulated to a point where you'd have to search the insane asylums to find people who could muff the jobs. Remember that one point. It explains, and rec-onciles you to, all the Navy Regulations, and all the required reports, and all the emphasis on memory and obedience, and all the standardized ways of doing things. The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence sug-gests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, `How would I do this if I were a fool?' Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you'll never go wrong-- Well, that cleans up brother Carmody's traffic, he added, pushing aside the heap of despatches. "Want me to do yours?"

  "No, thank you, sir- You're pretty bitter about the Navy-"

  "No, no, Willie," said Keefer earnestly. "I approve of the whole design. We need a navy, and there's no other way to run one in a free society. It simply takes a little time to see the true picture, and I'm passing on to you the fruits of my analysis. You have wit and background. You'd come to the same conclusion in a few months. Remember Socrates' slave who worked out the pons asinorum with a stick in the sand? A fact of nature emerges by itself after a while. It would come pretty quickly to you."

  "So that's your pons asinorum of shipboard life? `The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots.' "

  "An excellent demonstration," Keefer smiled, nodding, "of obedient memory, Willie. You'll be a naval officer yet."

  A few hours later Willie was on the bridge again with Maryk for the noon-to-four watch. Captain de Vriess dozed in his narrow chair on the starboard side of the pilothouse. The remains of his lunch in a tin tray rested on the deck under the chair: a broken corn muffin, fragments of Swiss steak, and an empty coffee mug. The weather was clear and hot, the sea choppy with whitecaps. The Caine rolled and creaked, cutting across the troughs of the waves at fifteen knots. A telephone buzzed. Willie answered it.

  "Forward fireroom requests permission t
o blow tubes," croaked the phone. Willie repeated the request to Maryk.

  "Granted," said the OOD, after a glance at the fluttering flag on the mast. There was a rumble from the stacks and inky smoke billowed out and floated away perpendicularly to leeward. "Good time to blow tubes," said Maryk. "Wind on the beam. Carries the soot well clear. Sometimes you have to change course to get the wind right. Then you ask the skipper's permission."

  The ship took a long steep roll. The rubber mats on the wheelhouse deck slid in a heap to one side. Willie clung to a window handle as the quartermaster rescued the mats. "Sure rolls with the wind on the beam," he observed.

  "These buckets roll in drydock," said Maryk. "Lot of free-board forward and too much weight aft. All that sweep gear. Pretty poor stability. Wind on the beam really pushes her over." He strolled out on the starboard wing, and Willie followed him, glad of the chance to let some fresh air blow in his face. The rolling bothered him in the narrow stuffy pilothouse. He de-cided he would do most of his watch-standing on these open wings. It would give him a nice sunburn.

  The first lieutenant peered constantly seaward, sometimes making a slow sweep of the horizon with his binoculars. Willie imitated him, but the sea was empty, and he soon became bored.

  "Mr. Maryk," he said, "what do you think of Mr. Keefer?"

  The first lieutenant gave him a brief surprised side glance. "Damn keen mind."

  "Do you think he's a good officer?" Willie knew he was trampling on etiquette, but curiosity was too strong. The first lieutenant put his binoculars to his eyes.

  "Gets by," he said, "like the rest of us."

  "He doesn't seem to think much of the Navy."

  Maryk grunted. "Tom don't think much of a lot of things. Get him started on the West Coast sometime."

  "Are you from the West Coast?"

  Maryk nodded. "Tom says it's the last primitive area left for the anthropologists to study. He says we're a lot of white tennis-playing Bushmen."

  "What did you do before the war, sir?"

  Maryk glanced uneasily at the dozing captain. "Fisherman."

  "Commercial fishing?"

  "Look, Keith, we're not supposed to shoot the breeze on watch. If you have questions about the ship or the watch that's a different matter, of course."

  "Sorry."

  "Skipper's easygoing about it. But it's a good idea to keep your mind on the watch."

  "Certainly, sir. There just wasn't much happening, so-"

  "When anything happens it generally happens fast."

  "Aye aye, sir."

  After a while Maryk said, "There they are."

  "Where, sir?"

  "One point to starboard."

  Willie trained his glasses in that direction. Behind the iri-descent edges of the empty waves there was nothing-except-t-he thought there might be two, no, three, faint black points like bristles on an unshaven chin.

  Maryk woke the captain. "Three cans hull down, sir, about three miles west of rendezvous."

  The captain mumbled, "Okay, go to twenty knots and close 'em."

  The three hairlines became masts, then the hulls appeared, and soon the ships were plain to see. Willie knew the silhouettes well: three stacks with an untidy gap between the second and third; feeble little three-inch guns; slanting flush deck; two cranes crooked queerly over the stern. They were sister bas-tards to the Caine, destroyer-minesweepers. The captain stretched, and came out to the wing. "Well, which ones are they?"

  The signalman Engstrand seized a long telescope and squinted at the bow numbers. "Frobisher-" he said. "Jones--Moulton."

  "Moulton!" exclaimed the captain. "Look again. She's in SoPac."

  "DMS 21, sir," said Engstrand.

  "What do you know. Duke Sammis with us again, hey? Send `em `Greetings to the Iron Duke from De Vriess.' "

  The signalman began blinking the shutter of the large search-light mounted on the flagbag. Willie picked up the telescope and trained it on the Moulton. The three DMS's were coming closer every minute. Willie thought he saw the long sad face of Keggs hanging over the rail on the bridge. "I know someone on the Moulton!" he said.

  "Fine," said De Vriess. "Makes the operation more cozy- -Keep the conn, Steve, and fall in a thousand yards aft of the Moulton, column open order."

  "Aye aye, sir."

  Willie had been one of Furnald Hall's champions of the blinker light. He was proud of his ability to send Morse at eight words a minute. Nothing seemed more natural than for him to take the shutter handle, when Engstrand relinquished it, and start blinking at the Moulton. He wanted to greet Keggs, and he also thought that his prowess at Morse might cause the captain to think a little more highly of him. The signalman-Engstrand and two assistants-stared at him, appalled. "Don't worry, my lads," he said. "I can send." How like sailors it was, he thought, to hug their little accomplishments, and re-sent an officer who could match them. The Moulton returned his call. He began spelling out "H-E-L-L-O K-E-G-G-S--W-H-A-T A-"

  "Mister Keith," said the captain's voice at his ear, "what are you doing?"

  Willie stopped blinking, resting his hand on the shutter lever. "Just saying hello to my friend, sir," he replied blandly.

  "I see. Get your hand off that light, please."

  "Yes, sir." He complied with a yank. The captain took a long breath, expelled it slowly, then spoke in patient tones. "I should make something clear to you, Mister Keith. The communication facilities of a ship have nothing in common with a public pay telephone. Only one person aboard this ship has the authority to originate messages, and that is myself, so hereafter-"

  "This was in no sense an official message, sir. Just hello-"

  "Confound it, Keith, you wait till I'm through talking! When-ever this ship breaks radio or visual silence for any reason whatever, with any manner of signal whatever, that is an offi-cial communication for which I and I alone am held respon-sible! Is that clear, now?"

  "I'm sorry, sir. I just didn't know, but-"

  De Vriess turned and snarled at the signalman, "Damn it to hell, Engstrand, are you asleep on watch? This light is your responsibility."

  "I know, sir." Engstrand hung his head.

  "The fact that some officer happens to be uniformed on communication procedure is no excuse for you. Even if the exec puts a hand on that light you're supposed to kick him the hell across the bridge away from it. That happens again, you're out ten liberties. Get on the ball!"

  He stalked off into the wheelhouse. Engstrand glanced re-proachfully at Willie and walked to the other side of the bridge. Willie stared out to sea, his face burning. "The boor, the big stupid egotistic boor," he thought. "Looking for any excuse to throw his weight around. Picking on the signalman to humiliate me more. The sadist, the Prussian, the moron."

  10

  The Lost Message

  At four o'clock the minesweepers formed a slanting line, a thousand yards apart, and began to launch their sweep gear. Willie went to the fantail to watch.

  He could make no sense of the activity. The equipment was a foul tangle of greasy cables, shackles, floats, lines, and chains. Half a dozen deck hands stripped to the waist swarmed about under the eye of Maryk, uttering hoarse cries and warnings larded with horrible obscenities as they wrestled the junk here and there on the heaving fantail. Waves broke over their ankles when the ship rolled, and water sloshed around the gear. To Willie's eye it was a scene of confusion, and panic. He sur-mised that the Caine crew were unfitted for their jobs, and were fulfilling the ancient adage:

  When in danger or in doubt,

  Run in circles, scream and shout.

  After twenty minutes of this bawling and brawling, the boat-swain's mate in charge of the war dance, a chunky, frog--voiced, frantic chief named Bellison, shouted, "All set to starboard, Mr. Maryk!"

  Willie, perched clear of the water on an immense steam windlass, expressed to himself a strong doubt that anything was really "set" in that heap of scrap metal.

  "Keith," yelled Maryk, "get clear of that
windlass."

  Willie jumped into an arriving wave, soaking his trousers halfway to the knees; waded to the after-deckhouse ladder, and climbed up to see what would happen. The sailors cranked an egg-shaped paravane up on a crane. At a word from Maryk, they dumped all the gear over the side. Came clanks, rattles, splashes, yells, puffing of steam, creaking turns of the windlass, and a frenzy of running around, and a great cadenza of ob-scenity. Then sudden quiet ensued. The paravane was stream-ing neatly outward to starboard in a fanning arc, sinking slowly beneath the surface with a red float above it to mark the place. The serried cutting cable payed out from the windlass evenly. All was correct and orderly as a diagram in the mine-sweeping manual.