The Man who Missed the War

by Dennis Wheatley

  After the fall of France there came an ominous pause in the war. It had now assumed its own individuality and was not, after all, to be merely a repetition of 1914–1918. Yet the present situation had more than a superficial similarity to 1802 when Napoleon’s Armies were massing at Boulogne for the invasion of England. Then, as now, in her great extremity Britain had been given a great Englishman to lead her. William Pitt, aided by her brilliant band of Admirals, had humbled the pride of France and brought the schemes of the ambitious Corsican to naught; and now, Winston Churchill, equally well served by his Air Marshals, was to use Britain’s new Navy—the Fleet of the air—to render the might of Germany impotent and turn all Hitler’s past victories to ashes in his mouth.

  For those outside the picture the Battle of Britain began almost imperceptibly in ever-increasing attacks by the Luftwaffe on British shipping and the Southern ports. But by mid-August it was obvious even to Philip—thousands of miles away in the middle of the South Atlantic—that one of the most titanic battles in the history of the world was now in full swing.

  Hour after hour, he waited impatiently for each fresh bulletin and listened to their staggering figures of German aircraft—three, four, even five to one—shot down compared with the Royal Air Force losses. Gloria, too, was enthralled and once asked him, with awe in her voice:

  ‘But how do they do it, Boy? The Germans are swell fighters—you must give them that. They’re brave and they’ve got good machines. Yet the R.A.F. puts it over them every time.’

  ‘I suppose we owe it more than anything to Lord Trenchard,’ Philip replied. ‘He is a Marshal of the Royal Air Force, and for years during the peace he fought a most desperate battle. He battled to keep our Air Force as a separate Service and to prevent it being brought under the Army, as the Generals and many of our statesmen wished it to be. How he managed to win his fight with such a tremendous weight and influence and interest against him God only knows; but he did, and the policy, arming and training of the R.A.F. continued to be governed by airmen instead of by soldiers. I think the fact that the R.A.F. is a young Service has saved it from a lot of the deadening taboos which often stifle initiative in the others, and as flying is much more exciting than footslogging I don’t doubt that a pretty high percentage of our more adventurous young men have gone into the Air Force; but I’m quite certain that wouldn’t cut any ice if the basis of the thing had been wrong.

  ‘The pride of place which in all German minds is given to the Army caused them to slip up in laying down the policy of the Luftwaffe. They went in very strongly for dive-bombers and that sort of thing, owing to their conception that the main rôle of an Air Force is to assist the Army. Our people did not make that mistake. The British doctrine is that the first function of the Air Force is to drive the enemy Air Force from the skies, and its second function is to destroy the enemy’s capacity to make war. If it can do the first, the Army obviously won’t be bothered by the enemy’s dive-bombers, and, if it can do the second—smash up all the enemy’s munition factories—all the Army will have left to do will be to hunt the stragglers out of the rubble. Anyhow, the Royal Air Force was organised and trained to fight an air war, and they have been given the finest machines that British mechanical genius could conceive. That’s why they’re shooting the Germans to hell.’

  It was some ten days later—on September the 4th, to be exact—that a major tragedy occurred in the small world of the raft. Philip switched on the radio as usual that morning for the eight o’clock news, but nothing happened. Examination disclosed that the batteries had run out and they had no more. To their consternation they found themselves still thousands of miles from any land and now completely cut off from all news of the outside world.

  Throughout September and early October they continued to drift a little erratically, but mainly on the same course. Once they heard distant gunfire, which told them that the war at sea had even reached these southern latitudes, and once another raft, a poor makeshift affair with three dead bodies on it, remained floating for two days in their vicinity. They now rarely saw a vessel, even hull-down on the horizon.

  These autumn days were spring in the Southern Hemisphere, and, as they moved ever further southwards, they were extremely grateful for this fact. Although they had now left the airless and torrid heats of the equatorial region, fine, calm weather and the pleasantly hot days of a normal summer were travelling south with them and they were able to continue their swimming and lazing in the sun.

  By mid-October they had reached the latitude of Cape Town, and it was soon after this that Philip noticed on the chart he kept that their main direction had now altered to south-east, and it looked as if they were about to pass south of Africa and enter the great watery wastes that lie below the Indian Ocean.

  It was early in November that they saw the first trails of weed. It grew in long bright green streamers, rather like smilax, and at first they noticed only comparatively small patches of it several miles apart. After another three or four days, however, the patches had become great banks, and the sea, now as calm as a mill-pond, was split up into a number of channels intersecting the innumerable verdantly deceptive islands of this strange archipelago.

  At first, the change of scene, after the wearisome monotony of the empty ocean, was pleasant, but on the fifth day after they had first seen the weed they realised that they had now entered an area devoid of currents and that their drift had become so slow as to be almost indiscernible. Their latitude was a little south of the 50th parallel, and the temperature very similar to that in the English Channel in June, but it irked them badly to be hung up. The weed provided them with two changes in their diet—small, soft-shelled crabs and baby octopuses, both of which lived among it in great numbers—but it also very nearly proved the death of Gloria.

  Before setting out on his original voyage, Philip had realised that he and the crew of five that he had intended to take with him would have to live entirely on tinned foods for from eight to fourteen weeks, so, as a precaution against scurvy, he had shipped a large consignment of tinned spinach. It was partly to the fact that he and Gloria made a meal from one of the tins about every ten days that Philip attributed their excellent health. They still had a large part of the consignment left, but the seaweed’s delicate green looked so fresh and its shoots were so tender that they thought it possible that it was one of the edible kinds and decided to try it as a vegetable.

  The result was surprising. Philip felt no ill effects whatever, but within an hour poor Gloria was rolling on the floor in agony and choking for breath, while great beads of sweat bedewed her freckled forehead. There could be no doubt at all that she had been seriously poisoned, so Philip gave her an emetic and forced her to keep awake, even when her pains temporarily lessened; which, with his very limited knowledge of medicine, was the only method he knew of dealing with such a situation.

  There were times during the night when from the violence of her vomiting and subsequent spells of complete exhaustion he felt certain she was going to die; and it was during those anxious hours, while he was doing all he could to alleviate her suffering, that he realised how much her loss would mean to him.

  After their one most unfortunate experience he had been too frightened to attempt to make love to her again, although he had frequently been tempted to do so, particularly during the more sultry nights when they had often bathed by moonlight together. Yet their perpetual closeness and dependence on each other had formed a strong bond between them. Occasionally the little habits of each would get on the other’s nerves, but they were both too well balanced to allow such small irritations to affect them seriously. During their long companionship they had come to respect each other and to admire many of the qualities each possessed. They were rarely silent for very long, never dull and always in good spirits; and, as Philip tightly held Gloria’s hands during her terrifying convulsive spasms, he was very conscious of all he owed to her.

  It was three days before he felt reasonably
sure that she would recover, but, in the meantime, she had broken out in an ugly rash and was so emaciated by fever that she could hardly sit upright without assistance. Philip formed a theory that she was what doctors call an ‘iodine hound’ and thus allergic to the drug, which is found in considerable strength in certain seaweeds. However, they never knew for certain if it was this or possibly some bad crab-meat in her portion of the weed that had caused the trouble. The rash gradually subsided, but for a long time she took things very quietly, and it was mid-December before she was her old self again.

  The long, pleasant, sunny days ran on until the 18th of the month, when the sky became overcast, and that night they took all precuations to meet another gale. It was by no means so severe as the last they had experienced, and it blew itself out in thirty-six hours. To their surprise and delight, when they next ventured out they found that the storm had carried them out of the area of the weed. The raft was once more floating in open water, and a pleasant breeze was pushing it along.

  They soon found they were travelling south and east again, and as they moved through the Fifties to the Sixties they enjoyed the long twilights and short nights that would have been their portion had they been in Scotland during the latter part of the summer. But, from the end of January, the nights began to shorten, as the autumn of the Southern Hemisphere was now setting in.

  The two months that followed were by far the most unpleasant they had so far experienced. There was no severe storm, but the sea was almost continuously choppy. There was rain, mist and, at times, hail, while the temperature fell steadily, until even during sunny spells they could never sit out on deck unless well wrapped up. Swimming and sunbathing were only happy memories, and, apart from fishing to maintain their food supply, their only diversion was watching—with a certain trepidation for their own safety, the gambolling of the huge whales that frequented these far southern waters.

  Their only consolation for the increasing cold and hardship—and a very dubious consolation at that—was the thought that soon they would again strike land. Philip’s workings showed beyond dispute that they were heading for the Antarctic Continent, and, unless the raft were caught up in a contrary current, it could hardly fail to beach itself before the end of March.

  Anxious as they were for any turn in their fortunes which offered a prospect of their eventual return to civilisation, there was little cause for rejoicing over the likelihood of being able to land in the Antarctic. The atlas showed that the great Sub-Continent had been neatly divided into segments, the largest of which were dependencies of Australia, Britain and Norway. Most of the coastline was marked, while many bays and promontories had been given names, but there were no towns and, so far as Philip knew, no permanent settlements of any kind—nothing but a few scattered whaling stations which were occupied only during the southern summer—and the Antarctic winter was rapidly approaching.

  At the beginning of March the raft entered the area of ice-floes which for ever fringes the mysterious Southern Continent. Sometimes they were wide, flat stretches and at others large ice islands that towered from the water, their cliffs shimmering in the pale sunshine and often pierced with deep blue caves. The castaways soon came to know when they were approaching one of these great ice masses well before they actually sighted it, as the snow on them threw a whitish reflection into the sky, and the temperature always fell by several degrees.

  Whenever they were in the vicinity of the floes and bergs they kept themselves shut up to preserve as far as possible the warmth of their quarters, but at such times they found plenty to do, as they were now preparing clothes and equipment to enable them to face the rigours of the Antarctic. Fortunately, they had a considerable variety of materials, and Philip had always heard that the best protection against extreme cold lay not in very thick garments but in many layers of thin ones, so they planned their outfits accordingly; and, in addition, made themselves warm hoods and big padded fingerless gloves such as boxers wear.

  On the 25th of March they made landfall, after having covered an erratic course of not less than 10,000 miles since leaving North-West Africa, at an average drift of about twenty-five miles a day. The coast that rose before them was grim in the extreme. It consisted mainly of the permanent ice foot formed by great glaciers pushing outward, from which huge chunks broke off each year to float away and melt in the warmer waters to the north; but here and there it was intersected by bays of stark, black basalt rocks. At intervals along the coast there rose extinct volcanoes, the sides of which glistened with snow and ice, except where sheer cliffs exposed the dark rock of which they were composed. On the 27th, in a flurry of light snow, the raft grated on the pebbly beach of one of the small bays.

  Philip at once threw out their home-made anchor, and, as it was still before midday, they went ashore to climb a five hundred foot hill that lay only about a mile from the beach, to see what was to be seen from it.

  The walk and climb took longer than they had expected, so when they got to the top of the hill they had little leisure to remain there if they were to get home before dark, yet time enough to take in the uninspiring scene. To the south there was a range of mountains, rearing snowy heights to the leaden sky; while to the east and west stretched the rugged inhospitable coast, behind which lay a rolling tundra, whose hollows were already filled with snow. Despondently and, for them, in an unusually long silence, they made their way back to the raft.

  From fear of depressing Gloria, Philip had said little about the Antarctic while they were drifting towards it, so she had pictured it as very similar to Alaska, of which she had read accounts at home; cold and desolate perhaps, but at least sparsely peopled with fur trappers and Eskimoes who had sledges and dogs. She had also expected great pine forests inhabited by reindeer, wolves, foxes, bears and many other animals. Instead, the stark emptiness came as a shock, and she found something appalling in its dreadful silence.

  That night Philip explained why it was that such a great difference existed between the territories in the neighbourhood of the two Poles. Although the central Arctic is a great empty ocean, the bulk of the ice cap never melts and each winter stretches down unbroken to the northern lands of America and Russia so men and animals from both continents have always had easy access to its outer fringe, and on the lands within the Arctic Circle there has never been any bar to such hardy types of vegetation spreading as will withstand the rigours of the climate. On the other hand, the Antarctic, although a vast land mass far bigger than Europe and also coated in ice and snow for the greater part of the year, is entirely cut off by sea from all the other continents and has no aboriginal tribes such as the Eskimoes living in it. Owing to the sea barrier, no land animals have ever migrated there, and even the indigenous vegetable life is of the lowest forms.

  Yet, in some way that Philip could not explain it seemed even worse than he had anticipated, and, although he tried to talk cheerfully about the whaling stations that must lie somewhere along the coast, they both recognised without discussing the matter that it would be absolute madness to attempt to reach one of them until the coming of spring.

  They went ashore again several times during the next few days, explored the bays adjacent to the one in which the raft was anchored, and struggled up to the summits of four more hills, but nowhere could they discern any trace of men ever having set foot in that part of the world. By the end of a week a fringe of ice had begun to form along the coast, and by late April the raft was firmly frozen in, with several miles of ice stretching out into the open sea beyond it.

  Philip took the elementary precautions, which were all that one with so little knowledge of Antarctic conditions could do, such as keeping two holes in the ice open for fishing, and they settled down to face the hardships of the winter. The days were already becoming absurdly short, and soon the sun, if it appeared at all, was only a pale ball low on the horizon for an hour or two a day.

  Two problems which had already caused them some concern now began to assume reall
y troublesome proportions; the one was snow-glare and the other condensation. To protect their eyes they made canvas masks with narrow cross slits and never came out of their living quarters without wearing them The iron cargo containers in which they lived proved a more difficult proposition as, owing to the intense cold, the iron had now become not only redhot to the naked touch but sweated from the heat of the stoves, so that the floors gradually became covered with pools of water. To get over this Philip knocked a number of cases to pieces and remade them into low wide benches upon which bedding and other items could be kept permanently out of the wet. The water was then allowed to accumulate and mopped up into buckets each morning.

  The cold outside was bitter if there was the least wind blowing, but otherwise the lowness of the temperature did not unduly worry them, although they had to be careful about frostbite. This was quite harmless if taken in time but caused very severe pain if even temporarily neglected. It always took effect without the slightest warning, the blood draining away from the afflicted part and leaving a white patch on the skin. If the circulation were at once restored all was well otherwise when the bite thawed out the place swelled up alarmingly and later became a most painful blister. After learning this from bitter experience they made it a routine to examine each other’s faces for these dangerous white patches every ten minutes or so, when they ventured out from the shelter of their quarters.

  The raft had long since been snowed up, and to get in and out of it they now had to traverse a long, sloping tunnel which they had made through twenty feet of snow. Down at the bottom of this they were as warm as Eskimoes in an igloo, and they soon discovered the wisdom of the Eskimo practice of passing the greater part of the long night of the Arctic winter by eating infrequently but very heavily, then sleeping until they felt really hungry again.