Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  The loss of Ernest made a great gap in his life, that the new interests crowding on him failed to fill. He was unused to spending evenings with other men. He did not mind the change of circumstances that was imposed on him; indeed he felt that it was not unhealthy to be shaken from his rut. He was most bitterly resentful of the sacrifice imposed upon him in the loss of his dog. He brooded over this, until a hatred of the war and of the Germans who had made the war became the main preoccupation of his mind. A girl could have got him out of that obsession possibly, but he was too diffident a man to have much truck with girls.

  The naval duty to which he was eventually posted only made things worse. At his medical examination the surgeons very soon found out a fact that secretly he knew already: that he was colour-blind. A naval officer who cannot easily distinguish red from green is not much use in the executive, and they told him so. In view of his experience as a scientist they offered him a commission in the Special Branch, which meant that he would spend the war mostly on shore, wearing a green flash between the gold bands on his arm and working upon technical matters. Indifferent in his unhappiness, he took it.

  He spent five weeks at King Alfred, and was drafted out. And two weeks later he found that he was living in a shore job down at Dartmouth, and quite likely to stay there for the duration of the war. He was billeted in rooms just like the rooms that he had had at Bristol, but here he had a good deal more leisure time. His work was necessary and useful but not strenuous. Most of his fellow-officers kept dogs for company. If Ernest had been alive, he could have had him in Dartmouth perfectly well, with more time than ever to look after him.

  The thought of that weighed on his mind, making him sullen, bitter, and morose. He felt that he had done a cruel, beastly thing: he had taken the dog who loved him and depended utterly on him, and he had had him killed, unnecessarily and wantonly. It was the war that had tricked him into doing such a thing, a thing he would not have dreamed of a year previously. The war was made by Germany. He had joined the navy to fight the Germans and here he was, stuck in a shore job on the coast of England, never to see a German, likely as not. He had been tricked all round, and Ernest was dead, and he was desperately, desperately lonely.

  I do not want to paint him as a very tragic figure, though in those first months of his naval service he was not a very happy one. The work absorbed him and occupied a good deal of his waking thoughts, and if in leisure moments he was moody and distrait, so much was true of many temporary officers whose lives had been disrupted by the war. The long dark months of winter dragged by in anxiety and preparation for invasion. Rhodes spent his time divided between working in the office, working at gear disposed about the harbour mouth, in launches or on shore, often wet and often in some danger, and watching and waiting for the enemy in a little stone control hut on a headland.

  Loneliness and the aching void caused by a personal loss do not endure forever. Old wounds heal; new friendships and associations come as anodynes. In the spring, Rhodes got a rabbit.

  I am not joking; that is literally what happened. His landlady, a Mrs. Harding, took to breeding rabbits for the pot to eke out the meat ration. She had a very small back-yard to keep them in, and in a short time had acquired three breeding does. A buck was evidently necessary if the flow of little rabbits was to proceed according to the plan, and she got a large grey buck for ten shillings in the market. His presence in a hutch adjacent to the does did not induce the quiet contemplation proper to a maternity home, and for three days there was wild excitement in the hutches, culminating in the death of three tiny, rat-like rabbits through neglect. Mrs. Harding discussed the tragedy at length with Sub-Lieutenant Rhodes, who offered to accommodate the buck in the yard of the net defence store down the road. This yard was a naval establishment, lately a motor-bus garage, and was forbidden ground for Mrs. Harding. That did not matter much because Rhodes went there every morning and could take a bowl of apple cores and cabbage stalks and potato peelings to the rabbit in a little covered basket. An elderly torpedo rating undertook to clean the hutch out once or twice a week, and everyone was satisfied.

  This rabbit became an interest to Rhodes, and filled to some extent the gap left in his life. He did not forget Ernest, nor did he change his mood about the war. But after a day spent in a boat heaving on wet, slimy wire ropes or changing detonators with chilled wet hands, it was amusing to spend half an hour in the net store, smoking a cigarette and playing with the rabbit. He found that if you teased it with a bit of Brussels sprout stalk or some other delicacy it made little grunting noises and pranced forward, playing with mock ferocity. He found that it would eat an apple core held for it right down to his fingers. Knowing that he usually brought food, it used to come out of its hay-box when it heard his step, which pleased him very much. It grew quite tame and playful with him.

  After a week or two he came to the conclusion that it was a rabbit of character, and deserved a name. After some thought he gave it the name Geoffrey, because its face reminded him a little of a cousin of his own. By the end of the month he was letting Geoffrey out each evening for a run upon the little patch of waste ground enclosed by the fence around the store, keeping a watchful eye over him for fear of cats.

  Rhodes’s section of the defences was under the command of an old lieutenant-commander called Marshall. They were equipped with one old motor ferry-boat and two row-boats for all the business that they had to do about the port, and as that business grew their need for boats became more pressing. “What we want,” said Marshall, “is a decent twenty-five-foot motor-boat with a big open well. If you see anything like that, make a note of it. There might be something over at Torquay.”

  Rhodes said: “There are a lot of yachts up-river here, sir.”

  “There’s nothing of that sort. The Air Force cleaned up all the launches at the beginning of the war.”

  Rhodes was not convinced, and made two or three trips up the river on his off days, looking inexpertly at boats. He did not find the boat that he was looking for, but he discovered a French motor fishing vessel called Geneviève moored up by Dittisham. He saw her first from shore from some considerable distance. He did not realize her size, and to his inexperienced eye she seemed at least a possibility. It was on his next visit, when he borrowed a rowboat from a fisherman to go and board her, that he came to the conclusion that she was unsuitable.

  There was a faint flap of canvas by her while he was on board, and a faint ripple of water. He looked up and saw a sailing dinghy pass, with a red-haired naval officer alone in it. He knew the officer by sight; it was one of the chaps from the anti-submarine trawlers based on the port. Rhodes watched the dinghy tack and stem the tide back to him. They passed a few words across the intervening water; presently the red-haired officer was on board with him, and they were examining the fishing vessel together. It seemed that the newcomer was called Boden.

  They talked about her for a time. “It’s quite right what you say,” said Boden. “A boat like this would be a gift for somebody. She really should be used.”

  Rhodes said: “Surely to God she isn’t going to lie there rotting all the war.”

  They sat there smoking for a little. Presently the trawler officer remarked: “The fishing fleets still go out round about Ushant, somebody was telling me. You might be able to mix in with them by night. But if you did that, I don’t see that it would get you any further. It isn’t those we want to scrap against.”

  Rhodes nodded. “No,” he said. “But if you could mix in with those you might sail right back into harbour with them. You could put one ruddy great gun in her, in the forward fish-hold there, and camouflage it in some way.”

  “And shoot up anything that you could see when once you got inside?”

  “That’s right. In Brest, or in some place like that.”

  There was a short pause.

  Boden said: “I wonder how in hell we’d get the gun?”

  The other glanced at him. “Do you think there’s anything
in it?”

  “I don’t see why not. If there were, would you want to be in on it?”

  Rhodes said: “Yes.” He hesitated, and then said: “If I could have got in one of the fighting branches, I’d rather have done that.”

  The other nodded. “I think I know the way to set about it,” he remarked. “The first thing to do is to think up some reasonably plausible scheme, and put it up in writing to our captains.”

  Rhodes nodded. “That’s the way to handle it. You ask the captain to forward it for the consideration of Their Lordships.”

  “Is that what you say?”

  “I think it is.”

  In the days that followed they spent a good deal of time together, sometimes in the cramped ward-room of the trawler, but more often in the sitting-room of Rhodes’s lodgings on shore. In the end they evolved a scheme, sufficiently good, as they thought, to put forward in a letter.

  I saw that scheme a couple of months later, with the comments of the Plans Division on it. It was not a very good idea, but there was enough good meat in it to keep it on the secret list, and so I shall not go into it here. The attitude of the Staff was broadly that for certain reasons it was only an even chance if the raid would produce the results that were anticipated in the paper. The authors admitted in their paper that the prospects of the vessel coming home again were small. The Staff did not consider that the prospect of results justified the certain loss of the vessel and her crew. They said that the officers concerned should be commended for their zeal, and that they should be encouraged to put forward any further proposals for the employment of the vessel in question that might occur to them.

  This all took some time, and by the time this answer came to Rhodes and Boden the spring was well advanced. They set to work to recast their ideas, for to each of them the French ship represented the chance of fighting in the way they wanted to. They became friends in a limited, reserved way, but neither of them confided in the other. Boden let slip one day that he had once been married, and that his wife was dead, but said no more about it. Nothing would have induced Rhodes to tell any living man about his grief for Ernest.

  They worked and cudgelled their brains through April into May to revise their plan in order that they might submit it again. They were much hampered by a scarcity of information about the other side. Obviously, it was extremely difficult to work out an operating plan without access to intelligence reports from which to learn the objects which could reasonably be attacked, and they had no such access. The whole thing might have fizzled out and died if Simon had not come upon the scene.

  Rhodes was not present at the first meeting between Boden and this unusual, half French army officer. Boden, it seemed, had met this Captain Simon in the private bar of the “Royal Sovereign” and had taken him at once to see the French fishing vessel that they had come to regard as their own property. She had been moved from Dittisham and had been towed down to a little shipyard on the Kingswear side; Rhodes had contrived that for their mutual convenience.

  Next day they all met at the shipyard and talked for some time in the boat-shed, sitting on upturned dinghies. “I see what you mean to say, you two chaps,” said Simon presently. “You mean this war goes too bloody slow for your liking.”

  “Put it that way if you like,” said Rhodes. “There’s the boat and here we are, and the Germans over on the other side. The Admiralty will give us guns for her if we can thrash out what we want to do. They as good as said so.”

  “And what is it that you want to do?”

  There was a little silence. “That’s the devil of it,” Boden said. “We’re working blindfold. But surely to God there must be something you could do with that sort of a boat.”

  The Frenchman looked across the sunlit water of the estuary towards Mill Creek. “You want to fight a battle,” he said quietly. “I think you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. You cannot fight a battle against German ships in a French fishing-boat. Your Admiralty have told you that, and they are right. I think you have been looking at this thing all wrong.”

  Boden said: “What do you mean?”

  Simon looked at them and smiled. “Look, you chaps,” he said. “I have been over on the other side. I must not talk about it, but I know what I am saying. You do not want to fight a battle in that fishing-boat. It is not suitable for that. But it is suitable for...secret things. In that you can approach the other side without suspicion. You can take photographs, land agents, even lay a mine or two, perhaps, before you slip away. You may work secretly for months and never fire a shot. That is the proper way to use a fishing vessel like that one.”

  Boden said: “You may be right in that. But that’s a bit out of my depth. That turns it into a — a sort of an intelligence job.”

  “Yes. That is what it would be.”

  Boden said moodily: “I don’t know that I’d be much interested in that.”

  The army officer said quietly: “It is interesting work.”

  “Not to me.”

  “What would you rather do?”

  “I’d rather stay on in my A/S trawler. It’s a bit slow at times, but it’s definitely killing Germans.”

  Simon glanced curiously at the strained white face. “So?”

  Boden said: “Look. Take a contact that we made last month. We put down fifteen charges set for various depths, and Louise put down thirteen. We got a lot of oil up to the surface, and the hell of a lot of air came up. And we could hear the muggers tapping — hammering at something. We heard them on the hydrophones. The noise went on for nearly half an hour, and then it got fainter and stopped.”

  He turned to them, eyes glowing. “They were trying to get out, or something, right down there on the bottom in seventy fathoms, in the darkness and the mud and slime. I reckon we split the pressure hull right open, and there were just a few of them trapped in one end, up to their necks in water, smothered in oil, trying to get out. I expect the lights were out and they were trying to get out in the darkness. They’d probably got just a little pocket of air above the water-level, and as they breathed up that they died off one by one. Or else the pressure killed them, or the chlorine fumes. But I swear we got the lot of them. I swear we did.”

  There was a little pause.

  “So?” said Simon again.

  Rhodes spoke up. “Can you think of how this vessel could be used if she were turned over to intelligence, as you say?”

  The other said: “I could find out about that from — from my friends.”

  They settled that he should do so, and presently broke up their meeting. It was not satisfactory to any of them, but it seemed the only thing to do. Boden was definitely not interested; in the job that he was in he knew that he had killed some Germans, distant and unseen as they might be. He had no intention of giving up that mode of life for a less active one. To Rhodes it seemed that if the vessel were employed as Simon had suggested, there could be no place for him in the scheme. If she were to do no fighting there would be no place in her for a colour-blind Special officer; it would have been difficult enough for him to go with her, anyway.

  Simon went up to London some days later, Boden went to sea, and Rhodes went on at his routine jobs at the harbour mouth. He was depressed about the vessel he had been the first to find, and a little morose. It had seemed at first that he had found an opportunity for active combat with the Germans; now that was slipping from him. Other men with better eyes would take Geneviève upon whatever secret mission she was destined to perform, and he would only be an onlooker. It seemed that it was not his lot to fight the Germans in this war; he could have served the country just as well or better by staying on with British Toilet Products, now switched entirely to war work. He could have still had Ernest with him.

  He did not regret altogether his decision to become a naval officer, but the remembrance of his dog affected all he did or thought about. He became morose and rather bitter in regard to the trivial defect in his eyes.

  Marshall, his elde
rly commanding officer, made short trips now and then with other area officers of the defences to see demonstrations of new methods of attack for which the coast defences must prepare. Sometimes these took the form of confidential lectures in some hall in Plymouth; at other times there were actual demonstrations of real weapons in the field. He went down in the middle of May with acute lumbago; after a day of pain and bad temper in the office he gave up and went to bed. He sent for Rhodes in the stuffy little bedroom of the hotel where he lived.

  “Look, Rhodes,” he said. “This show at Honiton the day after to-morrow. I fixed up with N.O.I.C. I’d take the little Austin van because the place is five miles from a railway station. But I shan’t be fit. You’d better go instead of me, and come back and write a report that I can send in all about it. It’s eighty miles there and eighty miles back, and I can’t stand that with this damn thing I’ve got.”

  Rhodes said: “I’m very sorry, sir. What is it you were going to see?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, it’s flame-throwers. I don’t know what the ruddy things are like, but the Germans have them in the invasion barges, so we’ve got to know what we’ll be up against. They’re going to show a lot of different sorts of them, I believe.”

  “I see, sir. Then we’ve got to see if we can cope with them?”

  “That’s right. You make a full report of what you’ve seen, when you get back, and then we’ll see just what it means to us.”

  “Are these our own flame-throwers that they’re going to show; or German ones?”

  “Oh, these things are our own. The Army do a good bit with them, I believe.”

  Marshall gave him instructions how to find the place and a numbered pass for entry to the show. Rhodes asked: “Shall I take the van myself, sir?”

  “No, you’d better not do that. The Naval Stores are sending a Wren driver. It’ll take you all of three hours to get there in that thing; you’d better make your plans to get away from here by eight o’clock at the latest. The show’s at eleven.”