HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) (5 page)

Adams, straightening up as the sick-berth attendant took over, once again tried, respectfully, to recall the critical moment to him:

‘Carry on with that pipe, sir?’

‘No.’ The Captain, divining the uncertainty in the man’s mind, smiled in the darkness. ‘No, Adams, I hadn’t forgotten. But we’ll wait till daylight.’

There were fourteen hours till daylight: fourteen hours to review that decision, to ascribe it correctly either to emotion or to a reasonable assessment of chance, and to foresee the outcome. What struck the Captain most strongly about it was the unprofessional aspect of what he had done. Down there in the shored up fo’c’sle, he had made a precise, technical examination of the damage and the repairs to it, and come to a clear decision: if the U-boat’s shell had not hit them, and interrupted the order, they would now he sitting in the boats, lying off in the darkness and waiting for
Marlborough
to go down. But something had intervened: not simply the absolute necessity of fighting the U-boat as long as possible, not even second thoughts on their chances of keeping the ship afloat, but something stronger still. It was so long since the Captain had changed his mind about any personal or professional decision that he hardly knew how to analyse it. But certainly the change of mind was there.

He could find excuses for it now, though not very adequate ones. Daylight would give them more chance to survey the damage properly. (But he had done that already.) With the motorboat wrecked by the first shell-burst, there were not enough boats for the crew to take to. (But some of them would always have to use rafts anyway, and if
Marlborough
sank they would have no choice in the matter.) They had a number of badly wounded men on board who must be sheltered for as long as possible, if they were not to die of neglect or exposure. (But they certainly stood more chance of surviving an orderly abandonment of the ship, rather than a last minute emergency retreat.) No, none of these ideas had really any part in it. It boiled down to nothing more precise than a surge of feeling which had attacked him as soon as the U-boat was sunk: a foolish emotional idea, product of the past years and of this last tremendous stroke, that after
Marlborough
had done so much for them they could not leave her to die. It wasn’t an explanation which would look well in the Report of Proceedings; but it was as near the truth as he could phrase it.

The answer would come with daylight, anyway: till then he must wait. If the bulkhead held, and the weather moderated, and Chief was able to get things going again (that main switchboard would have to be rewired, for a start), then they might be able to do something: creep southwards, perhaps, till they were athwart the main convoy route and could get help. It was the longest chance he had ever taken: sitting there in his chair up on the bridge, brooding in the darkness, he tried to visualize its successive stages. Funnier things had happened at sea … But the final picture, the one that remained with him all that night, was of a ship – his ship – drawing thirty-two feet forward and nothing aft, drifting helplessly downwind with little prospect of surviving till daylight.

No one ashore knew anything about them, and no one would start worrying for at least three days.

With the ship, ignoring and somehow isolating itself against this preposterous weight of odds, there was much to do; and with no officers to call on except the doctor, who was busy with casualties, and the Chief, whom he left to make a start in the engine room, the Captain set to work to organize it himself. He kept Bridger by him, to relay orders, and a signalman, in case something unexpected happened (there was a faint chance of an aircraft on passage being in their area, and within signalling distance): Adams was installed a virtual First Lieutenant; and from his nucleus the control and routine of the ship was set in motion again.

The bulkhead he could do nothing about: Chief set to work on the main switchboard, the first step towards raising steam again, and the leading telegraphist was working on the wireless transmitter; the boats and rafts were left in instant readiness, and the more severe casualties taken back under cover again. (A hard decision, this; but to keep them on the upper deck in this bitter weather was a degree nearer killing them than running the risk of trapping them below.) Among the casualties was the midshipman, still alive after a cruel lacerated wound in the chest and now in the sick bay waiting for a blood transfusion. The bodies of the other three who had been killed on the bridge – Haines, the look-out, and the bridge messenger – had been taken aft to the quarter-deck, to join the rest, from ‘X’ gun’s crew and the party on the boat-deck, awaiting burial.

Then, after a spell of cleaning up, which included the chaos of loose gear and ammunition round ‘A’ gun, which had been directly over the explosion, the Captain told Adams to muster what was left of the ship’s company and report the numbers. He was still in his chair on the bridge, sipping a mug of cocoa, which Bridger had cooked up in the wardroom pantry, when Adams came up with his report, and he listened to the details with an attention which he tried to rid of all personal feeling. These crude figures, which Adams, bending over the chart-table light, was reading out, were men, some of them well known and liked, some of them shipmates of two and three years’ standing, all of them sailors; but from now on they must only be numbers, only losses on a chart of activity and endurance. The dead were not to be sailors any more: just ‘missing potential’, ‘negative assets’ – some damned phrase like that.

Adams said: ‘I’ve written it all down, sir, as well as I could.’ He had, in his voice, the same matter-of-fact impersonal tone as the Captain would have used: the words ‘as well as I could’ might have referred to some trifling clerical inconvenience instead of the difficulty of sorting out the living, the dead, and the dying in the pitch darkness. ‘There’s the ones we know about, first. There’s three officers and twelve ratings killed – that’s the Gunnery Officer, Lieutenant Haines, and Mr Merrett, and the gun’s crew and the ones on the boat-deck and the two up here. The surgeon lieutenant has one officer and sixteen men in the sick bay. We’ll have to count most of them out, I’m afraid, sir. Nine of them were out of the fo’c’sle. Then there’s’ – he paused – ‘one officer and seventy-four men missing.’ He stopped again, expecting the Captain to say something, but as no word came from the dark figure in the chair he went on: ‘Then what we’ve got left, sir. There’s yourself, and the surgeon-lieutenant, and the engineer – that’s three officers, and twenty-eight men out of the Red Watch, the one that was on duty.’

‘Twenty-eight. Is that all?’

‘That’s all, sir. They lost seven seamen at ‘X’ gun, three by the boats, and two here. Then there’s seven of them down in the sick bay. That’s forty-seven altogether.’

‘How are the twenty-eight made up? How many seamen have we?’

Adams straightened up and turned round from the table. This part of it he evidently knew by heart. ‘There’s myself, sir, and Leading Seaman Tapper, and seven ABs: the quartermaster and the bosun’s mate, that were in the wheelhouse: and Bridger. That’s twelve. Then there’s the hands who were on watch in the W/T office: the leading tel. and two others, and two coders. That makes seventeen altogether. The signalman up here, eighteen. The SBA, nineteen. The leading steward, twenty.’

‘Any other stewards?’

‘No, sir.’

It didn’t matter, thought the Captain: no officers, either.

‘The rest were all engine room branch, sir,’ Adams went on. ‘Eight of them altogether.’

‘How are they made up?’

‘It’s pretty good, sir, as far as experience goes. The Chief ERA and one of the younger ones, and a stoker petty officer and five stokers. If it was just one watch they’d be all right. But of course there’s no reliefs for them, and they’ll have to be split into two watches if it comes to steaming.’ Adams paused, on the verge of a question, but the Captain, seeing it coming, interrupted him. He didn’t yet feel ready to discuss their chances of getting under way again.

‘Just give me those figures again, Adams,’ he said, ‘as I say the headings. Let’s have the fit men first.’

Adams bent down to the light once more. ‘Yourself and two officers and twenty-eight men, sir.’

‘Killed and wounded?’

Adams added quickly: ‘Four officers and twenty-eight.’

‘And missing, the First Lieutenant and seventy-four.’ He had no need to be reminded of the item: that ‘seventy-four’ would stay with him always. Not counting the accident to Number One’s damage control party, there must have been sixty men killed or cut off by the first explosion. All of them still there, deep down underneath his feet. Twenty-eight left out of a hundred and thirty. Whatever he was able to do with the
Marlborough
now, the weight of those figures could never be lightened.

‘Will I make some more cocoa, sir?’ said Bridger suddenly. He had been waiting in silence all this time, standing behind the Captain’s chair. The numbers and details which Adams had produced, even though they concerned Bridger’s own messmates, were real to him only so far as they affected the Captain: this moment, he judged instinctively, was the worst so far, and he tried to dissipate it in the only way open to him.

The Captain’s figure, which had been hunched deep in the chair, straightened suddenly. He shook himself. The cold air was stiffening his legs, and he stood up. ‘No, thanks, Bridger,’ he answered. ‘I’m going to turn in, in a minute. Bring up my sleeping bag and a pillow, and I’ll sleep in the asdic hut.’

‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Bridger clumped off at a solid workmanlike pace, his heavy sea boots ringing their way down the ladder. The Captain turned to Adams again. ‘We’d better work out a routine for the time between now and daylight,’ he said briskly. ‘We can leave the engine room out of it for the moment: they’re busy enough. You’d better arrange the seamen in two watches: the telegraphists and coders can work with them, except for the leading tel. – he can stay on the set. Send half the hands off watch now: they can sleep in the wardroom alleyway or on the upper deck, whichever they prefer. The rest can carry on with cleaning up.’

‘The doctor may want some help down there, sir.’

‘Yes – see about that too … Keep two look-outs on the upper deck for the rest of tonight: tell them they’re listening for aircraft as well. We’ll show an Aldis lamp if we hear anything, and chance it being hostile. You’d better put the signalman up here, with those instructions; and pick out the most intelligent coder, and have him work watch-and-watch with the signalman. That’s about all, I think. See that I’m called if anything happens.’

‘Do you want a hand to watch that bulkhead, sir?’

‘No. The engine room will cover that: they’re nearest. About meals ... ’ The Captain scratched his chin. ‘We’ll just have to do our best with the wardroom pantry. There were some dry provisions in the after store, weren’t there?’

‘Corned beef and biscuits, sir, and some tinned milk, I think. And there’s plenty of tea. We’ll not go short.’

‘Right … That’ll do for tonight, then. I’ll see what things are like in the morning: there’ll be plenty of squaring up to do. You’ll have to get those bodies sewn up, too. If we do get under way again,’ the Captain tried and failed, to say this in a normal voice, ‘you’ll have to work out a scheme of guns’ crews and look-outs and quartermasters.’

‘Better take the wheel myself, sir.’

The Captain smiled. ‘It won’t exactly be fleet manoeuvres, Adams.’

The expected question came at last. ‘How much chance have we got, sir?’

‘Hard to say.’ He answered it as unemotionally as he could. ‘You saw the state that bulkhead was in. It might go any time, or it might hold indefinitely. But even very slow headway would make a big difference to the strain on it, unless the bows stay rigid where they are, and take most of the weight. Almost everything depends on the weather.’

As he said this, the arrangements he had been making with Adams receded into the background, and he became aware of the ship again, and of her sluggish motion under his feet. She was quieter now, certainly: no shock or grinding from below, no advertisement of distress. But he could feel, as if it were going on inside his own body, the strain on the whole ship, the anguish of that slow cumbersome roll downwind. Earlier she had seemed to be dying: this now was the rallying process, infinitely painful both to endure and to watch. Long after Adams had left the bridge, the Captain still stood there, suffering all that the ship suffered, aware that the only effective anaesthetic was death.

It was an idea which at any other time he would have dismissed as fanciful and ridiculous, unseamanlike as a poet talking of his soul. Now it was natural, deeply felt and deeply resented. His professional responsibility for
Marlborough
was transformed: he felt for her nothing save anger and pity.

Just before he turned in, Chief came up from below to report progress. He stood at the top of the ladder, a tired but not dispirited figure, and his voice had the old downright confidence on which the Captain had come to rely. He had been in
Marlborough
for nearly three years; as an engineering lieutenant he, too, could probably have got a better job, but he had never shown any signs of wanting one.

‘We’ve made a good start on the switchboard, sir,’ he began. ‘We ought to get the fans going some time tomorrow.’ There was nothing in his tone to suggest the danger, which he must have felt all the time, of working deep down below decks at a time like this. ‘The boiler room’s in a bit of a mess – there’s a lot or water about – but we’ll clear that up as soon as we can get pressure on the pumps.’