by Nevil Shute
Boden said thoughtfully: “A flame-thrower...” He stood staring out of the scuttle at the tide flowing past, bright in the evening sun. He was silent for so long that Rhodes looked curiously at him, noting the staring auburn of his hair, the white strained face, the rather sunken cheeks. Boden wasn’t looking quite so good to-night, he thought. Sometimes he looked about sixty.
Boden turned to him. “Is it a big flame?” he enquired. “Big in diameter, I mean — not just in length.”
Rhodes told him.
“I mean, if you turned it on anyone — a German — he wouldn’t be able to jump back and get out of it?”
“Lord, no,” said Rhodes. “You ought to see the thing.”
“And is it all blazing oil inside the flame, in all that width?” He paused. “I mean, what would happen to anyone caught by it?”
“It wouldn’t do him a great deal of good,” said Rhodes decidedly. “It’s flame temperature, of course, the whole of it. But there is solid oil all through it, I think, in a sort of spray form, burning as it goes. Your German would get blazing oil all over him, and when he gasped he’d get it blazing down into his lungs. He wouldn’t come up for a second dose.”
Boden said: “Were you thinking we could have one in Geneviève?”
“That’s what I had in mind. I sounded out the chaps up there about the possibility of getting an equipment. They said they thought there’d be a chance.”
They spent some time together, talking it out in detail. To Boden the suggestion came like the opening of a door. It gave a form and substance to the whole proposal to use Geneviève; he ached to use a weapon of that sort against the Germans. Anti-submarine work was all very well, but it needed so much imagination. You could not actually see them smothering and perishing deep down in the black sea, trapped in a bubble of chlorine-polluted air in the split hull. Sometimes, if you were lucky as he had been, you could hear them tapping as you listened on the hydrophones, but then you had to build up all the rest with your imagination. With this new thing, if you could bring it to the enemy, you would be able to see them curl up and burn and die before you as you watched.
“The difficulty will be to bring it to the enemy,” said Rhodes.
Boden said: “Well, that’s our same old tactical problem. But this put a new angle on it altogether. I think we ought to have another talk with Simon soon as possible, and see what he thinks of it. I must say I’d be in it right up to the neck myself if there were any chance of using anything like this.”
“Simon’s in London,” said the Special officer. “He isn’t coming back until to-morrow night.”
There was nothing much more to be done that night. Rhodes stayed and had supper in the trawler, then went on shore again. He walked up to the net defence store to give his evening meal to Geoffrey; rather to his surprise he found a few stalks of the cow parsley already in the hutch. He wondered if it were the Wren who had been there to feed his rabbit.
He did not object to that. He had a little sixpenny book on rabbits which informed him that a rabbit liked a full stomach, and Geoffrey had given him no cause to disbelieve that statement. He stayed there for a quarter of an hour in the dusk, teasing the rabbit with the cow parsley, playing with it, and stroking the furry little coat. It was a playful, friendly little beast and he had grown very much attached to it, but it would never be to him what Ernest had been; it would never have the faithful devotion of a dog. He still missed Ernest terribly. If only this flame-thrower business could come off!
Two days later he met Captain Simon, alone, because Boden was at sea on a routine patrol. They met in the Boom Defence office; Rhodes showed the army officer the finished report of his visit to Honiton, and told him of their plan to put a flame-thrower in Geneviève.
In the hour that followed Rhodes and Simon got to know each other better than before. Hitherto Rhodes had regarded Simon as an odd, dilettante Frenchman, romantic, like most foreigners. Simon had regarded Rhodes as a dreamy, ineffective young officer. He now became aware that this young officer was very much alive to the technicalities of flame-throwers, that he was an industrial chemist with a good background of experience, and that he had considerable knowledge about what could and could not be done with oil. Once launched upon his own subject he showed an energetic and a penetrating mind. Simon very quickly revised his views about Rhodes. This was a young man who could be used in war.
In turn, Simon displayed himself as a keen manager, accustomed to quick decisions upon the basis of hard technical facts. He asked the right questions, he asked all of them, and he asked them in short time; when he had got his data he made the right decision without further ado. He was obviously a man who was accustomed to control an engineering business; the sort of man, Rhodes felt, that he would like to work under.
They talked over the report for an hour. In the end Charles Simon leaned back in his chair in the bare, whitewashed little office. He lit a cigarette, blew a long cloud of smoke, and stared out of the window at the sunlit street of the small Devon town.
“So...” he said, half to himself. “Here is the temporal weapon that crops up again, the sacred weapon of the Holy Church.”
Rhodes said: “What’s that?”
Simon turned to him, deadly serious. “Listen, my friend,” he said quietly. “This thing that you have now suggested — it is frightfully important. How much, you do not know. But now I shall tell you secret things which you must keep under your hat, that happened to me on the other side, not many months ago.”
He leaned forward to an ash-tray, and brushed the ash from the cigarette. “Listen to me,” he said. “You know, I was employed and worked all of my life in France. I used to be chief engineer of a cement works, in a town called Corbeil....”
Three days later Simon was back in London sitting in Brigadier McNeil’s office in Pall Mall, at the conclusion of a long discussion.
“There is the matter, sir,” he said at last. “This is the way to help the people of Douarnenez.” He paused for a moment. “Their minds are running upon fire,” he said. “Let me bring fire to them.”
The brigadier sat for a minute deep in thought. “We’ll have to get the Navy interested,” he said.
5
TWO DAYS LATER I went down to Newhaven with Brigadier McNeil to see my admiral about the proposal. Admiral Thomson was a young man for a vice-admiral, not much over fifty; on the morning of our visit he was much engaged on a forthcoming operation, and had little time to spare for fishing-boats with flame-throwers. Yet he had found time to read the memorandum I had sent him; he discussed it with us for about ten minutes, and asked one or two questions.
In the end he said: “All right — I have no objection.” He turned to McNeil. “I wish you all good luck with it,” he said, “and on our side we shall do all we can to help. There are one or two restrictions that I have to make. It must not conflict with any major naval operation, and I must be the judge of that. And then, it must stand on its own feet. I can’t promise you any naval support. I can’t send destroyers up to the front door of Brest to help you out if you get into trouble. But you don’t want that.”
McNeil shook his head. “That isn’t the idea at all. The expedition is a minor one, and I don’t want to see it grow into a major operation. But it will serve a useful purpose, I assure you, sir.”
Vice-Admiral for Channel Operations was silent for a moment. “I think it will,” he said at last. “I hope it does. I think there is some danger that you’ll lose your vessel and her crew.”
McNeil shrugged his shoulders. “We have to take that risk each time we send a party over to the other side.”
“Of course.” Admiral Thomson turned to me. “I shall leave all the details in your hands, Martin. I shall inspect the ship before she sails on operations. See Captain Harrison about her routing when the time gets near. Keep me informed from time to time how it is getting on.”
I said: “She will require a navigator, sir. An R.N.R. lieutenant would be suitable.
Can I get her one?”
“See the Second Sea Lord’s office. That will make three of our officers in her — there are two R.N.V.R. already?”
“Yes, sir. A lieutenant in an A/S trawler, and a sub. in Boom Defence. Both in Dartmouth.”
“And the ship is at Dartmouth, too?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is her name?”
“Geneviève.”
He turned away. “Very good, Martin. Do everything that you consider necessary, and keep me informed.”
McNeil said: “It’s very good of you to give us so much help, sir.”
“Not at all. I wish your venture every success.”
We left him dealing with far more important matters, and we took the next train back to London. I parted from McNeil at Victoria; when I got back to my office I found a note upon my desk asking me to ring the Second Sea Lord’s office.
I rang up Lovell at once. He said: “That navigator you were asking for, who wanted to do fire. Do you still want him?”
I said: “I do indeed. I’ve just got permission from V.A.C.O. to take him on.”
He said: “Is it for a major war vessel?”
“No,” I said. “It’s for a very minor one. One of these harum-scarum shows.”
“I see,” he said. “I’ve got a very good navigator, but he’s not everybody’s kettle of fish, if you understand. He might be suitable for you. He’s ringing me again this afternoon; would you like to see him?”
“Certainly. Send him along. Is he R.N.R. or R.N.V.R.?”
“Oh, R.N.R. He holds a master’s ticket.”
“What’s his name?”
“Colvin. A lieutenant.”
Lieutenant John Colvin came to see me in my office next morning. He was a man of about forty-five, a fine-looking chap. He was over six feet tall, a lean, hard-looking man. He was deeply bronzed. He wore the ribbons of the last war on his shoulder. He had a fine head with short, curly, iron-grey hair, and he carried himself well. He had a firm chin, a humorous twist to his mouth, and grey eyes. When he spoke it was with a marked American accent.
I made him sit down. “Well,” I said. “What have you been doing so far in this war?”
He said: “I was in an ocean boarding vessel, sir.” He told me the name. “We paid off last week, on account of the repairs that had to be done,” and I knew about that, too.
I asked: “Were you Number One in her?”
“No, sir. Lieutenant Johnson, he was Number One.” I glanced at the papers before me, wondering a little. On paper, Colvin’s record should have made him first lieutenant. It might, of course, be whisky — but a glance at him convinced me that it wasn’t.
“Did you join her at the beginning of the war?”
“No, sir. I joined her in February, 1940.” There was a momentary silence and then, as if feeling that some more explanation was required, he said: “I had quite a way to come.”
“Where were you when it started?”
“I was in San Francisco, sir. I was Marine Superintendent with the Manning Stevens Line.”
I did not know the name. “Where do they run?”
“Down to Chile, and around. Nitrate tramps, under the Chilean flag. Five of them, there were.”
I nodded. “Did you come back across the States?”
He shook his head. “I hadn’t that much jack,” he said softly, smiling a little. “I worked a passage home as deck-hand on a tug.”
He told me that the Salvage Department had been in the market for tugs all over the world, and they had bought a thing called Champion in San Francisco at the beginning of the war. She was not very big, she was twenty-three years old, and when loaded with a deck cargo of coal for the Atlantic crossing she had fourteen inches freeboard. They left San Francisco in November, 1939, bound for Liverpool.
Her auxiliary machinery gave continuous and increasing trouble. They came by Rosario and Acapulco to the Panama Canal, and from there by way of Kingston in Jamaica to Bermuda. Here they waited for a fortnight to join a convoy. Sailing with the convoy, they blew a gasket out of the condenser pump when they were three days out, and had to stop engines while they made repairs, rolling their fourteen inches freeboard under twice every twelve seconds. Six hours later they were going again and chasing on to catch the convoy up, and nine hours after that they blew the gasket out again. They turned and steamed back slowly to Bermuda to face up warped castings in the dockyard shops.
When they were ready to start off again they were routed up to Halifax to join a convoy there. It was January by that time, and a tug with fourteen inches freeboard in the North Atlantic in mid-winter is no joke, especially for the deck-hands. They elected to try it, however, and sailed with a convoy for Liverpool as soon as they arrived. Nine days later in longitude twenty-eight west the condenser pump passed out again, this time with a broken piston. They were about six hundred miles from Ireland.
The convoy went ahead and left them, and they followed after it thirty-six hours later. They sailed unescorted into Londonderry in the end, rested for three days, and completed the trip to Liverpool to hand the vessel over to the Salvage Department.
“A very good show,” I remarked.
He smiled gently. “It was quite a trip,” he said. “I’m glad we made it all right.” I was coming to the conclusion that this was rather an attractive man.
I turned again to his papers. “I see you put down here that you wanted to be employed in fighting with fire,” I said casually. “That’s rather unusual. What put that into your head?”
He said: “Oh, that was just a fool idea I had at the beginning of the war. That doesn’t mean a thing.”
“What sort of fool idea? I’d like to know.”
He glanced at me curiously. “The Germans used Flammenwerfer, in the last war, an’ I think we should have done. It’s what you want to give these Nazis.”
I said: “Have you ever seen a Flammenwerfer?”
“I did see one once,” he said. “It seemed to be rather an unwelcome subject.”
“Where was that?”
“In the United States.”
“When?” He was telling me no more than he had to.
“About 1927, it must have been.”
I wrinkled my forehead, trying to think of an easy way of extracting what I wanted to know. “Was that a demonstration?”
“That’s right,” he said. “A kind of demonstration.”
I had no time to waste in going on like that. “I want to know about that flame-thrower you saw,” I said. “How did you come to see it?”
He seemed very reluctant. “I was in the import business,” he said at last.
“Import business? What were you importing?” And suddenly I saw the answer to my question, and smiled. “Rum?”
He looked confused. “Hard liquor,” he admitted. “It was mostly rye. I’d been going through a bad patch, sir,” he said.
I grinned at him. “I don’t suppose that you’re the only ex-rum-runner in the Navy,” I said cheerfully.
“I know damn sure I’m not,” he said.
“About this flame-thrower,” I reminded him. “Was that in a ship?”
He said: “It was in a ship it happened. Off the coast of Massachusetts, way back in twenty-seven.”
I nodded; he was easing up. “What ship was that?”
He hesitated. “Heartsease,” he said. “Or...it might have been Judy. They changed her name,” he explained. “She was called Oklahoma City in the end.”
“I see,” I said. “How did she get mixed up with flame-throwers?”
He told me the whole incident, and it took a quarter of an hour. I didn’t cut him short, partly because I was curious, but also because I wanted to know all I could about John Colvin. And what he said was this:
Rum-running in those days was an affair of queer, tortuous politics. In the beginning ships used to arrive in Rum Row and used to sell cases of liquor indiscriminately to the fast motor-boats that came out from the shore to t
hem; there was never much difficulty in disposing of the cargo in this way. Presently the shore end of the trade became more organized as the small individual operators were amalgamated into powerful groups, were squeezed out and murdered, or were taken by the law officers. The repercussions of this development upon land were felt upon the sea. Sleek, Italianate gentlemen began coming out in fast armed boats and bought options on large parcels of the cargo. The old customers would come along next day and would be told that no Scotch was for sale, or else no rye: that it was all reserved. Then there would be trouble. Sometimes the two parties would meet on board and there would be a showdown, usually with a settlement to the profit of the Italians.
Occasionally the settlement was not so amicable. Shots were exchanged in Heartsease, once in the saloon and once in a desperate running battle round about the bridge that lasted for a quarter of an hour and left the ship with a good deal of washing down to do before returning to Nassau. John Colvin disapproved of this, as did his captain, but there was nothing much that they could do to stop it.
It was at this juncture that they had their trouble with Bugs Lehmann.
Colvin had known Bugs Lehmann for some months. He was a German American, they thought; at any rate he spoke with a thick German accent. They were lying anchored some miles off Cape Cod at that time, and had come back to the same place for a number of successive trips. Bugs came out with half a dozen other men in a big launch; he paid cash on the nail with never any trouble. He did not buy large quantities, but he was a good, steady customer. They thought he came from one of the little harbours on the north side of the Cape; his trade was almost certainly in Boston.
It was only when it was all over that they came to know the origin of his name, Bugs. It was, they found out later, short for Firebug.
Bugs Lehmann came on board one day just after an Italian that they knew as Mario had left. Mario had bought an option for a week on the remainder of their cargo of hard liquor, and had paid good dollars for his option. About five hundred cases were involved. When Bugs arrived in an empty launch, there were five hundred cases staring at him from the open hatches, but all they had to sell him were three barrels of Algerian red wine, an unwanted sample that they had carried with them for some months and proposed shortly to dump overboard.