by David Black
And now he was back, watching as a drunk and incapable Lucie returned from leave, with barely fifteen minutes to cast off. He had made it only because young Cantor had known where to find him, lying passed out as usual.
Watching Cantor, Harry couldn’t help but feel the young man appeared rather adept at recovering his older shipmate, and that this was a familiar routine; for the Radegondes too.
The inevitable gaggle of Brass that always gathered to wish the flotilla’s submarines bon voyage were there right now, at the forward gangplank, in last-minute conflab with Captain Syvret. Only a crane and a tarpaulin-covered heap of stuff on the quay shielded them from the terrible truth – that Leading Signalman Lucie had still not managed to rejoin. His superiors would have taken a dim view if they’d noticed. From where he was perched, Harry could see there were a couple of Radegondes on the casing aft and another gangplank; the final act in this farce was about to unfold – the getting of Lucie up the gangplank and down the aft hatch without the Brass seeing.
Harry couldn’t stand to watch any longer, so he looked away across the Tay, where the sinking sun was throwing Fife into shadow and dappling the waters. In another mood he would have found all this as hilarious as the two French matelots back there. But he wasn’t feeling very funny these days.
Later, with Bassano, the navigator, upstairs on watch, Harry sat down with Captain Syvret and all the other officers for the first meal of the patrol. Stalin was elsewhere. Harry had learned from their first patrol that Stalin had the run of the boat and was courted with what amounted to competition by all the other messes on board, from the Petty Officers’ to the seamen’s. The chef had prepared a huge turbot with pommes frites and some kind of pudding that involved lots of tinned peaches, meringue and cream. The vin rouge was flowing, and tonight’s debate was about artists who had remained behind in France to live under the Germans. It hadn’t taken long for the word ‘collaborator’ to arise, and the argument to become heated; and the greater the heat, the faster they talked, and the less Harry could follow.
Some actress called Arletty, and Maurice Chevalier, appeared to be coming in for some stick. Then Picasso was mentioned by Captain Syvret to a clamour of outrage from Faujanet and Le Breuil. But Poulenc interrupted with a lot of ‘Non, non, nons!’ The lugubrious Poulenc had a touch of the aristo about him, and managed to stay as close to manicured as Harry had ever witnessed aboard a submarine. Harry had never seen Poulenc without his navy cap – a cap that seemed impervious to all oil drips and grease smears, the hair that peeked beneath it cut so close as to appear no more than a dark five o’clock shadow. Poulenc’s French, Harry could follow.
‘I heard from Carlton Gardens, a story about M’sieur Picasso I think you should hear too, before you start hanging him in his absence,’ said Poulenc. Carlton Gardens was de Gaulle’s headquarters in London, home to all Free French forces.
‘M’sieur Picasso apparently does not hide from the Boche. He flaunts himself. And they hate it because they know they cannot touch him unless he does something obviously anti-Boche. He is too famous to just randomly disappear. But they search his places. All the time. Looking for an excuse. I was told during a recent search some senior SS officer uncovered a print of Guernica in Picasso’s studio. He asked, “Did you do this?” and Picasso replied, “No, you did.”’ Poulenc let his eyes pass round the table.
Guernica, Picasso’s painting marking the first terror bombing of the Basque town of that name by Luftwaffe pilots and planes flying for Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Harry knew all about that. The entire civilised world knew about that.
‘Picasso stays in Paris not to collaborate, I would suggest, but to remind the Germans that the world is watching what they do,’ Poulenc added. Everybody shut up. A first for Radegonde’s wardroom, thought Harry.
But before Le Breuil could whip off the wardroom table top and get at the gramophone, Harry decided he had something to say. That last subject for discussion had been controversial, so maybe he could try out his controversial topic too. Harry had been rehearsing the something he wanted to say over the past few weeks. It was a matter that had been on his mind since he had joined Radegonde and he hadn’t been able to stop nagging at it. He’d always told himself he was going to have to pick his moment, but what with everything else that had happened, now he couldn’t wait.
So much for his moment.
‘Never mind about what Picasso or Arletty did. What about the Royal Navy?’ he asked, assertively loud, speaking French; always French around the wardroom table.
Everybody affected to look puzzled, but Harry knew they weren’t.
‘Mers el-Kebir,’ he said, so as to leave no one in any doubt. Nobody looked pleased that he’d raised the subject.
‘What about it?’ said Captain Syvret.
‘The Royal Navy sank—’ but Harry did not get to finish.
‘We all know what happened.’ Syvret’s interruption was just sharp enough to brook no argument.
Third July, 1940, Mers el-Kebir, the French naval base near the Algerian port of Oran. There had been four French battleships, a seaplane tender and a flotilla of destroyers in port. The British feared they would be surrendered to the Germans under the armistice that Vichy France had signed with Hitler two weeks before. The French Navy had said no to the Germans. But neither would they surrender the warships to the British.
The British, not trusting this new, pro-German government to resist German pressure forever, had then issued an ultimatum: join us and fight on against the German invader or face destruction. The French ignored it. The result: a Royal Navy squadron had bombarded Mers el-Kebir, sinking one battleship and damaging two others as well as four of the five destroyers. Almost 1,300 French sailors had died. The British Admiral in charge had objected strenuously to his orders and had only opened fire under a direct command to do so from the new Prime Minister, Mr Churchill. In the aftermath of this action, word got round about what the Admiral thought about the whole sorry story. He said he felt ‘ashamed’. And that pretty well summed up the feeling throughout the Royal Navy.
At the same time, other French ships in British ports had been boarded by Royal Navy crews; in Alexandria, and Portsmouth and Plymouth too. Several sailors had died, on both sides. That was why, serving aboard Radegonde, Harry had decided he had to know what the French Navy felt about it. Same old Harry; on his first posting, in the wardroom of that ancient, bloody battleship HMS Redoubtable, the Harry who wouldn’t sit and take all the bull and ragging; and on his first submarine, Pelorus, the Harry who wouldn’t collude with her drunken Skipper to help him cover up her needless loss. Harry; he just couldn’t let it lie.
‘How do you feel about it? About what happened?’ he persisted.
All the officers, even Poulenc, looked at Syvret, who blew out his cheeks.
‘Feel? Feel?’ said Syvret, sounding almost tired. ‘Are you being serious? Don’t answer that. You’ll probably say something unforgiveable.’
There was a long pause, and the thump of Radegonde’s diesels – a sound you got so used to, you normally didn’t notice – was loud now in the wardroom. From where Harry sat, he caught a glimpse of the chef’s face poking round the bulkhead door, curious at the lack of noise from the officers, before he thought better of it and withdrew.
‘How do you see this conversation ending, M’sieur Harry?’ resumed Syvret. But his question was rhetorical. ‘You say you’re sorry, and we say we forgive you?’
There was another pause as if Syvret was gathering his thoughts.
‘My parents have a town house in Lyon,’ he continued. ‘I grew up there. A German is in it now.’
And yet another pause.
‘Poulenc,’ he added, nodding at him. ‘There is a German sitting in Poulenc’s house in Chartres.’ Then Syvret pointed at the other two officers. ‘And a German in his house, and his house. And the crew, in their houses and on their streets.’ And one pause more, and then a grin. ‘I don’t know about Bassa
no’s house; I don’t know if any German is brave enough.’
There was a laugh at that, a laugh that Syvret’s changed expression quieted.
‘We’re fighting the Germans,’ he said. ‘You’re fighting the Germans. And we’ll both do what we have to do to win. We understand that. But what do we feel? That’s none of your business.’
Chapter Eight
Harry was lying on Captain Syvret’s bunk, in his tiny cabin, out of the way while Radegonde began her first lay. Three days had passed since the conversation in the wardroom. For Captain Syvret and his officers it had been as if nothing had happened. They carried on as normal; a different debate every night over the evening meal. Only Faujanet or Le Breuil paid any kind of attention to Harry, religiously intoning their ‘of courses’ every time Harry spoke, followed by the usual adolescent giggles, and always an indulgent smirk from Syvret. No one mentioned Mers el-Kebir, and, indeed, Harry got the impression that Bassano didn’t even know any such conversation had taken place; that no one had bothered to tell him.
The rest of the time Harry had sat with Lucie or Cantor – watch on, watch off – on the surface through the night up in the conning tower by their radio set, as they monitored the radio frequencies; or when Radegonde was submerged, down in the wardroom decoding their trawl of signals. Sometimes, like now, he hid in Captain Syvret’s cabin, when Syvret was on the bridge or in the control room.
At last, after a tortuous approach, dodging some overly zealous Jerry anti-submarine activity, Radegonde was off Stavanger, in the process of laying her minefield. Harry could hear the mines go; the reverberating trundle and then the short ting! as each dropped off the end of the rack and fell to the sea bed.
But he wasn’t really paying attention. Harry, with nothing to do, was back in a minefield of his own.
Harry is walking up the Camel’s Hump behind his parents’ house – the little hill you got to by cutting through Dunloskin Farm – his wellington boots well-caked in the yard’s mud; a bright, hazy day, with high cloud, and cold. He’s in civvies, in his duffel coat, with a herringbone cap pulled down to his ears so you can’t see his face as he trudges, dull of step, on up the hillside parallel to the tree line, a man with a burden he does not want.
You don’t want to look inside Harry’s head right now. It’s not a place to be. No one’s a hero all the time. Out there, there are plenty of people who’ve had harder wars than him, but Harry’s not telling himself that right now. It’s not just the depth charging he’s endured aboard the old Bucket, or the fight in that Russian fjord, or the whole injustice of the Royal Navy and all its bull and nonsense, and the ship’s company it scattered and buried on a dozen other boats just to hide what they’d done, when they should’ve all been made heroes; the Buckets – his ship’s company – who he should be with now. And it’s not the friends he’s lost or the wounds he’s suffered. Or his father sitting behind his paper, and Harry’s realisation after his conversation with him that night in the study that it’s not anger the old man feels for him, but despair and fear. Despair that his son is fighting in a war. And fear as to what might happen to him. His pacifist dad: huge, utterly remote, viciously intelligent, cold to everyone but his mother, and dispensing the judgements of Jove to everyone else.
His father; what is he to do about his father?
It isn’t as if his father never fought in a war. He had; the last world war, and even won a medal. So he knows why he is afraid for his son, and why he despairs. But Harry knows nothing about what happened to his father on the Western Front, and no one, not even his mother, will tell him. She is still trying to be serene in the middle of this rift that has opened up in her family.
So there he is, our Harry, full of resentment for the people he should be turning to for succour.
It’s not even the fact that the first submarine he had served aboard, HMS Pelorus, had been sunk with him still trapped inside, or that it had been mere happenstance that he had survived while so many of her crew had not.
No, it’s not just one thing for Harry. He’s twenty years old and it’s all of them. The whole bloody war, and everyone in it.
And when he gets to the summit of the Camel’s Hump with all this churning within him, and he looks out over the firth, the town, the ships, the whole seething little diorama; the whole, pointless, stupid, mad, inconsequential, irrelevant . . . that’s when he sinks to his knees, rolls over, clutching himself and begins to sob; deep, wracking, wallowing, unfettered sobs. Like a thwarted child.
He’s still doing it when Shirley Lamont comes up the hill behind him, and sees.
There is an enormous clang! and he’s back aboard Radegonde, off Norway. Then the sound of grinding metal; he can feel it through the hull. It goes on too long before it stops. Harry is lying in Syvret’s cabin, no longer on that little hill above his home, and he is wondering what the hell has just happened.
He sits up, but knows better than to go crashing into the control room when the crew will likely have more pressing things to do than to give a running commentary to a useless bystander. He can hear the shouting already. The Radegondes, he has learned, are an efficient crew, but they aren’t half bloody noisy. Running feet go to and fro in the passageway. Then Cantor sticks his head into the cabin.
‘Something’s gone wrong with the lay, Sir!’
Harry gestures him into the tiny cabin. There’s barely enough room for them to sit side by side on the bunk.
‘I admire your confidence in me, Cantor,’ says Harry, with his lopsided smile, ‘but I’m not sure there’s anything I can do about it.’
‘I think there might be, Sir.’
The cabin curtain is unceremoniously whisked back a second time by a matelot in his bobble cap and striped vest – a uniform that is still too comically inappropriate for Harry to take seriously, despite the time he has spent aboard Radegonde. He smirks. But the rating isn’t smirking. Captain Syvret wants him immediately.
‘It’s the minelaying mechanism, Sir,’ says Cantor as Harry rises to follow. ‘The instruction manual is in English.’
Harry hadn’t far to go to meet Captain Syvret. The matelot had told him to wait at the wardroom table, which was just the other side of the passageway. The senior Petty Officer in charge of Radegonde’s engines came hurrying from aft; and Syvret and Le Breuil appeared, running from the other direction, clutching a large binder, paper and pencils. They slipped into the banquette either side of Harry and Syvret slapped the binder on the table. All three of them looked grim.
‘A mine has come off the track,’ said Le Breuil, all suggestion of his usual frivolity gone. Speaking in French slowly, to make sure Harry understands. ‘That’s what I think, but we can’t know until we surface. Whatever has happened, it has jammed the mechanism and there are eight mines backed up—’
Le Breuil had more to say, but Syvret interrupted, his voice flat and scrupulously polite: ‘It is your shit British mechanism. And your shit British mines. That you British insisted fitting to a French boat and then giving the French crew a shit set of drawings and your even shittier book of how it works – all in inconvenient English!’
After a pause, Le Breuil continued, ‘And all the measurements, tensions, everything; they’re all in imperial and not metric. We’re not sure how we’re going to be able to deal with this without your help.’
‘I’m not an engineer,’ said Harry.
‘That’s all right. Beyfus here is,’ said Syvret nodding to the rather bovine, lumpen-looking Petty Officer, who was wearing greasy dark blue overalls, and had more grey hair sprouting over his collar than was on his head. Beyfus smiled obediently. ‘He is not, however, a linguist.’
Syvret spread a set of drawings that showed a plan view of Radegonde’s hull, with the two mine racks running down either side. Below it was a side view that gave more detail of the mechanism. Beyfus pointed with a dirty-nailed finger at what looked like some extended loop system that connected to a large, toothed gear wheel.
; ‘It’s a basic rack-and-pinion system,’ he said in heavily accented French that Harry struggled to follow even though the middle-aged engineer was going slow. A rack and pinion system. That meant nothing to Harry. His heart sank. He looked round the grim faces that were looking back at him, swallowed, pulled over the binder and opened it. The language was in English all right, but it was densely technical.
‘Isn’t there some manoeuvre you could do to shake it loose?’ Harry said brightly.
Syvret, sitting next to Harry, crooked his neck round to appraise him, then, sitting back, in rapid French that Harry didn’t quite catch, he dismissed Beyfus. Le Breuil rose from the table too, but continued to hover while Syvret gave him instructions; it sounded like a course change; then in a loud voice he called for two coffees, before turning back to Harry.
‘Harry,’ he said, very calm now and speaking to him in English. ‘Let me explain.’
Much of the initial stuff Syvret told Harry was about the boat and how it worked; most of it Harry had already learned from de Maligou, the boat’s sea-weathered Maître principal, on his initial tour. But what followed made Harry’s stomach sink even further. Radegonde’s mine racks held a total of thirty-two contact mines and were open to the sea, so that the racks that held them did not form any part of the boat’s buoyancy. There was one inspection panel on each side that you could enter, at the forward end of each rack, and holes at the aft end where the mines dropped out. Those were the only ways into the racks.
The mines they were carrying this time were standard British Mark XVs, each almost three and half feet in diameter, with eleven contact triggers on their casing – ‘horns’, Syvret called them – and 320 pounds of explosives in their guts. The mines sat on boxes holding a coiled tether; when the box hit the sea bed, the clips holding the mine released and the mine floated up on the tether to wait, unseen, at a set depth beneath the surface for some unsuspecting ship to come along, hit one of the horns and set the whole bloody thing off.