Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  He drew on a cigarette, his face shadowed with deep lines of bitter irony. He was looking better. Rule was very strong, and a few days of rest pulled him out of most distempers. "A wee bit too clever.

  The'dotty old crank came off quite lifelike.

  It won't be taken seriously, not by anybody who counts."

  "How else could Talky have done it?"

  "I don't know. I'm amazed it got by, even so."

  "Phil, will Singapore fall?"

  Rule harshly laughed. "Darling, I fear so. But blaming the governor, or Brooke-Popham, or Duff Cooper, or even Churchill is pointless. There's just a general collapse. Nothing's, working. The system's just rotten-ripe 'to fall apart.

  Up-country there's simply no leadership. The men want to fight.

  They try to fight, even the Indian troops do. But again and again come these pusillanimous orders from Singapore-fall back, pull out, retreat.

  I've seen the men crying over their orders. These Tanglin Club overlords down here have bad consciences, Pam. They're played-out funks. They fear the Japs, and they fear our own Asiatics. When you think about it, this domination of Asia by white Europeans has always been damned silly. It was bound to be temporary.

  Why grieve at its passing?"

  "How do I get out of Singapore?"

  "Oh, you'll get out. The Japs are still far off. There are vessels waiting to evacuate the white women and children.

  That's what they did at Penang, you know. They got out the Europeans-soldiers and all-and left the Asiatics with their women and children to face the Japs. Do you know that? And then Duff Cooper went on the air and announced that all the inhabitants of Penang had been rescued! He really meant it, Pamela. To Duff Cooper, the Asiatics were part of the animal life of Penang- It's causing an uproar now-what happened, and what he said. I don't think the Asiatics care anymore who's top dog here. Maybe we're gentler than the Japanese, but at least they're colored. The Asian endures brutality better than contempt."

  "YOu don't believe in the American rescue expedition everyone's talking about?"

  "Wishful fantasy. The Americans have no fleet. It was all sunk at Pearl Harbor."

  "Nobody knows what happened at Pearl Harbor."

  "Denton Sharpe does. They lost all eight of their battleships.

  The Americans. are finished for two years in the Pacific, if not forever. A rescue expedition for Singapore is as likely to come from Switzerland, but-what the hell's the matter with you?" Pamela Tudsbury was burying her face in an arm on the back of the chair. "Pamela!

  What is it?" She did not answer. "Oh, Christ, you're thinking of your Yank! Sorry, old girl- When Denton first told me, I thought of him myself.

  Pam, I know nothing about the casualties There's every chance your man's all right. They were sunk inside in shallow water." a harbor, Still she said nothing and did not move. Outside, the rain, the bullfrogsi and a distant chorusGod rest ye merry, gentlemen, Let nothing you dismay SuddeAly a wild gibbering and giggling just outside the window, as by a frightened lunatic, made Pamela sit 'up with a shriek. "Oh! My God! What's that?"

  "Easy now. That's our apricot monkey. He comes and goes in the trees. Sounds dreadful, but he's harmless."

  "God Almighty, I hate Singapore! I would have hated it in peacetime." Pamela stumbled to her feet, wiping her moist brow. "Let the Japanese have it, and good riddance! I'm ,going back to the house.

  Are you all right? Do you want anything?"

  "I'll be lonely, but that's no reason for you to miss the fun.

  Run along."

  "Fun! I just don't want to be rude to my hosts. They'll be ,thinking I've gotten into bed with a sick man."

  "Well, why don't you, Pam?" She stared at him. "Truly, wouldn't it be charming? Christmas Eve and all that? Re.member Christmas Eve in Montmartre) When Slote and Natalie had that monumental fight at dawn, and we went.sneaking off to Les Halles for onion soup?"

  The mustache twisted in a slow beguiling well-remembered smile, shadowy in the orange radio glow. He held out his good arm. "Come, Tudsbury."

  "You're a swine, Philip, an unchanging swine"-Pam's voice trembled-"and everything else I called you in our little Bastille Day chat."

  ",Darling, I was born in a rotting system, and so perhaps I'm a Totter, if the word has any meaning. Let's not have that old quarrel again, but aren't you the inconsistent one? When ever'anything's breaking up, there's nothing but pleasure. You believe that yourself.

  I take my pleasures lightly, youinsist on drama. That won't change, I grant you. I do love you."

  "And your wife? I'm just curious. In Paris you had no wife, ,at least."

  "Sweetie, I don't know if she's alive. If she is, I hope she's screwing the brains out of some nice deserving Russian fighting man on leave. Though I doubt it, she's a worse prig than most Englishwomen are nowadays."

  Pamela plunged out the door.

  "You'll need the umbrella," he called after her.

  She returned, snatched the umbrella, and darted outside.

  She had not gone ten steps in the blackness, when, almost at her ear, the monkey set up its blood-freezing cry. With a little scream Pamela sprinted forward and ran into a tree. The bark scratched her face. The branches swept the umbrella from her hand and showered her.

  She caught it up and stood paralyzed, soaking wet. Almost straight ahead she could hear the singingThere'll always be an England, While there's a country lanebut the night was pitch-black. She had come by starlight, in an interval between showers. She had no clear idea of how to procede The path twisted steeply through the banks of oleanders and bougainvillea' It was a bad moment for Pamela. Her father's broadcast had sunk her spirits. The famiiar voice, Coming from so far away, had intensified her nervous sense of being alone and unprotected.

  In recent days, threatening Japanese broadcasts in broen English had scared her. The guttural alien voices had sounded so close, so horrible! She had almost felt callused hands with enough need ripping at her underwear and forcing her thighs apart. More than most threatened females she knew how weak Singapore was.

  And now Rule had Sharpe's word that Victor Henry's ship had been sunk! Even if Henry had survived, he would be reassigned. Even if she got out of Singapore, she would probably never see him again. And if she should, by some bizarre chance, then what? Did he not have a wife?

  She had set out on a wild goose chase around the world, and here she was, wet and lost in the hot black night, under an umbrella in the garden of strangers in a downpour, on Christmas Eve, perhaps her last.

  There'll always be an England, And England shall be free She did not want to join these drunken Singapore British in their songs. This cheap ditty unbearably brought back the first days of the war, the brilliant summer of the Battle of Britain"and the best moment of her life, when Commander Henry had come back from the flight over Berlin and she had flung herself into his arms. All that glory was crumbled now.

  "She liked the McMahons, but their friends were dullards from, the club crowd and the army. Two young staff lieutenants had been paying court to her, from the pahit drinking onward; both crashing bores but handsome animals, especially a long-faced blond lieutenant with a languid Leslie Howard air.

  They would be after her again, as soon as she returned to the house-if she could find her way without falling on her face in muck.

  Obviously they both were intent on sleeping *with her; -if not tonight, another night.

  How wrong were they? What did it matter? What was her spell of continence, vaguely for Victor Henry's sake, but a stupid out-of-character joke, after all the damned screwing she had done in her- life?.

  Behind her, the open window of the guest cottage was a faint orange oblong in the dark To someone - who did not know it was really there, it would have seemed an optical illusion. In the all-encompassing blackness and rain, it was the only hint of light, the only way to go. BYRON HADR NEVER heard a depth charge detonate under water; nor had anybody else on the Devilfish.

&nb
sp; A hideous ear-splitting BONG shuddered through the whole vessel, like the blow of a sledgehammer on a giant bell.

  The control room tumbled in nauseating earthquake motions; glass smashed, loose objects flew, and the lights blinked scarily, all in the roaring reverberation of a thunderclap.

  While the planesmen managed to cling to their control wheels, the plotting party went staggering, Chief Derringer falling to his hands and knees, the others toppling against bulkheads. Byron felt such sharp stabbing pains in his ankles that he feared they were broken.

  An instrument box sprang off the overhead and dangled on an electric cable, emitting blue sparks and the stinking smoke of burning rubber.

  Confused yells echoed through the vessel.

  BONG! this second metallic thunderbolt blacked out the lights and flung the deck bow-upward. In the darkness the blue sparks kept flaring, terrified groans and shouts arose over the thunderous roaring outside the hull, and a heavy body with flailing arms fetched up agains Byron, crushing his back agonizingly against the ladder to the conning tower.

  This time it truly felt like the end, with the submarine on a horrible ipslant, sounds of breakage all around, Derringer weighing him down like a warm corpse -he could smell the tobacco breath-and the Japanese sonar baying loud, fast, and triumphant on short scale: peeng-peeng-peeng-peengl Another explosion made the tortured hull scream and ring. A squirt Of cold water struck Byron's face.

  Except for the lancing death in its torpedoes, the Devilfish was very weak and very slow. Even on the surface it could go only half as fast as the destroyer overhead. Underwater its sprint was eleven knots, its usual crawl three knots. The destroyer could run circles around it, probing for it with sonar; and the tumbling depth charges did not even have to hit. Water transmits an explosion in a shock wave. A miss thirty feet off could finish the Devilfish. It was just a tube of nine long narrow cylinders joined together, a habitable section of sewer pipe. Its pressure hull was less than an inch thick.

  It had only one military advantage to balance its feeble sluggishness-surprise; and it had blown its surprise. Now it was a creeping scorpion in a-flashlight beam. Its only resort was to dive; the deeper it dove, the less the chance of being found and pinned by sound echoes. But in Lingayen that refuge was denied.

  The test depth of a fleet submarine, a guarded secret,. was four hundred twenty feet, and the safety margin was close to a hundred percent. In extremis the submarine captain could as a rule burrow down as far as six hundred feet, with some hope that his poor tube might survive the leaks springing at the fittings. Deeper, the heavy black fist of the sea would crumple the steel hull like Hoban would gladly have risked the Devilfish beyond test depth now; but the end of the line for ,in most of Lingayen was shallow muck at about a hundred feet.

  There were other hazards. A surface ship had. a natural balance, but a submerged submarine was a waterlogged object. Trapped air bubbles in its tanks held it suspended, a wobbly thing hard to control.

  Water and fuel oil, pumped here and there through pipe'mazes, made the long tube tilt one way or another, and the submarine unfolded planes much like an aircrait's to steady it. But the vessel had to. keel) moving or the planes would not work.

  Stopped for long, a submarine like the Devilfish was done, for.

  It would slowly sink below its test depth-or in this case, into the muck-or it would pop to the surface to face the destroyer's five-inch guns. And it could not keep moving underwater for more than a few hours, at any speed.

  For underwater there is no air for a combustion engine to consume.

  As it had only so much bottled air for its crew to breathe in a dive, so it had only so much stored power to use.

  Then it had to stop, lie on the bottom, or come up for air to burn fuel and get itself going again.

  On the surface, the submarine wound itself up for moving underwater. The diesels not only drove the boat but also charged two huge banks of batteries with energy to their chemical brim. Submerged the Devilfish would draw on these batteries. The faster it moved underwater, the quicker the batteries would go flat. At three or four knots it could stay down for about twenty-four hours. Doing radical escape maneuvers at ten knots, it would be finished in an hour or so.

  In extreme hazard, the captain could try to outwait his pursuer, lying on the bottom while the crew used up its air.

  That was the final wait: forty-eight to seventy-two hours of lying doggo, and a submarine had to choose between asphyxiation below and destroyer guns above.

  The lights flickered yellowly on. Byron wiped the salt water off his face-from some fitting strained by the explosion but holding, thank God, The chief pushed himself off Byron, his mouth forming apologetic words the Ensign was too deafened to hear. However, as through cotton wool he did hear Aster directly overhead bawling, "Captain, he's got our depth cranked in. We're getting creamed. Why don't we go to fifty feet and give him a knuckle?"

  The captain's voice blared in the tube, "Briny, come up to fifty feet! Fifty feet! Acknowledge!"

  "Fifty feet! Aye aye, sir!"

  The planesmen steadied the vessel to climb. Their response was calm and expert, though neither of them looked over their shoulders at Byron with round eyes in livid faces. As it climbed through the depth charge turbulence, the Devilfish made a sharp Turn to create the "knuckle," more turbulence to baffle the echo-ranging. The sailors clung to anything handy. Locking an elbow on the ladder, Byron noted on the depth gauges that the power plant must still be working, for at this angle and rate of climb they were making ten knots. Four more explosions shook the deck; hideous sounds, but farther off. This time nothing broke in the control room, though the sailors swayed and staggered, and particles of loose debris rattled in Byron's face.

  ",Levelling off at fifty feet, Captain!"

  "Very well. Everything okay down there?"

  "Seems to be, sir." Derringer was yanking at the broken sparking cable. The other sailors, shakily cursing, were picking instruments and rubbish off the deck.

  Several more charges rumbled and grumbled below, each one duller and farther away. Then Byron's heart jumped, as the pings of the Jap destroyer shifted to long scale: p-i-i-i-ng! pi-i-i-i-ng! In the Pearl Harbor drills that had been the moment of triumph, the huntees mournful wailing confession that he had lost the scent, and was forced back to routine search; and the down Doppler-the lowered pitch of the sound-betrayed that the destroyer had turned away from the Devilfish.

  A joy as intense as his previous fear, a wave of warm physical delight, swept over Byron. They had shaken loose, and he rode in a blooded submarine! The Devilfish had survived a depth charging! It had taken hard punishment, and it had eluded its pursuer. All the submarine action narratives he had ever read paled once for all into gray words. All the peacetime drills seemed child's play. Nobody could describe a depth charging, you had to live through it. By comparison, the bombings he had experienced in Warsaw and Cavite had been mild scares. This was the real thing, the cold skull-grin of the Angel of Death, frightful enough to test any man at war. Such thoughts shot through Byron Henry's mind with the joyous relief, when he heard the destroyer pinging again on long scale with down Doppler.

  Things became quieter. The plotting team gathered again around the dead reckoning tracer. Aster and Captain Hoban descended from the conning tower to watch the picture form.

  The plot soon coalesced into two course lines; the destroyer AM heading toward the beachhead at Lingayen, the Devilfish moving the opposite way.

  Aster said, grinning with relief, "I guess he figures we'd still try for the landing area."

  "I don't know what he's figuring, but this is just great!"

  Hoban turned to Byron. "All right. Tour the compartments, Briny, and let me have a survey of the damage."

  "Aye aye, sir."

  "And talk to the crew. See how they're doing. We got some crazy screaming about water in the after torpedo room.

  Maybe a valve came unseated for a minute, or something.
"

  The captain spoke in collected tones, and seemed in every way himself, yet something about him was changed. Was it the vanished mustache? No, not that. It was the look of his eyes, Byron thought; they seemed bigger and brighter, yet dark-ringed as though with fatigue. Hoban's brown eyes now dominated his face, alert, concerned, and shiny. The boss man had tasted his full -responsibility. That would sober anybody. As BYron left the control room, Lady Aster, moistening the end of a Havana, gave him a contorted wink.

  Every compartment had some minor breakage or malfunction to report-dangling bunks, shattered lamp bulbs, overturned tables, jammed water lines-but under the pounding the Devilfish had proved remarkably resilient; that was the sum of what Byron saw. Nothing essential to operations was down. The crew was another matter. Their condition ranged from pallid shock to profane defiance, but the note all through the submarine was dispirited; not so much because of the depth charging, though there was much cibscene comment on its terrors-and in one compartment a strong smell of befouled trousers-but because the torpedoes had missed. They had taken the beating for nothing. It was a sour outcome after all the E's in drills. This crew was used to success. Some sailors ventured mutters to Byron about the captain's hasty shot on slow setting.