The Cruel Sea (1951) (43 page)

‘Ask them who it was,’ said Ericson. His voice was quiet, but there was such acute tension in it that everyone on the bridge stared at him.

Wells began to flash the question, signalling very slowly, with frequent pauses and repetitions. There was a long wait; then the Polish ship began to answer. Wells read it out as it came across: ‘”The man is fourth officer”,’ he began. Then he started to spell, letter by letter: ‘”E-R-I-C-S-O-N”.’ Wells looked up from the signal lamp. ‘Ericson . . . Same name as yours, sir.’

‘Yes,’ said Ericson. ‘Thank you, Wells.’

There was a time, a personal time for Lockhart, which he knew as the time of the Burnt Man.

Ordinarily, he did not concern himself a great deal with looking after survivors: Crowther, the sick berth attendant, had proved himself sensible and competent, and unless there were more cases than one man could cope with, Lockhart left him to get on with his work alone. But now and again, as the bad year progressed, there was an overflow of injured or exhausted men who needed immediate attention; and it was on one of these occasions, when the night had yielded nearly forty survivors from two ships, that Lockhart found himself back again at his old job of ship’s doctor.

The small, two-berth sickbay was already filled: the work to be done was, as in the old days, waiting for him in the fo’c’sle. As he stepped into the crowded, badly-lit space, he no longer felt the primitive revulsion of two years ago, when all this was new and harassing; but there was nothing changed in the dismal picture, nothing was any the less crude or moving or repellent. There were the same rows of survivors – wet through, dirt-streaked, shivering: the same reek of oil and seawater: the same relief on one face, the same remembered terror on another. There were the same people drinking tea or retching their stomachs up or telling their story to anyone who would listen. Crowther had marshalled the men needing attention in one corner, and here again the picture was the same: wounded men, exhausted men, men in pain afraid to die, men in a worse agony hoping not to live.

Crowther was bending over one of these last, a seaman whose filthy overalls had been cut away to reveal a splintered kneecap: as soon as he looked the rest of the casualties over, Lockhart knew at once which one of them had the first priority.

He picked his way across the fo’c’sle and stood over the man, who was being gently held by two of his shipmates. It seemed incredible that he was still conscious, still able to advertise his agony: by rights he should have been dead – not moaning, not trying to pluck something from his breast . . . He had sustained deep and cruel first-degree burns, from his throat to his waist: the whole raw surface had been flayed and roasted, as if he had been caught too long on a spit that had stopped turning: he now gave out, appropriately, a kitchen smell indescribably horrible. What the first touch of salt water on his body must have felt like, passed imagination.

‘He got copped by a flashback from the boiler,’ said one of the men holding him. ‘Burning oil. Can you fix him?’

Fix him, thought Lockhart: I wish I could fix him in his coffin right now . . . He forced himself to bend down and draw close to this sickening object: above the scored and shrivelled flesh the man’s face, bereft of eyelashes, eyebrows, and the front portion of his scalp, looked expressionless and foolish. But there was no lack of expression in the eyes, which were liquid with pain and surprise. If the man could have bent his head and looked at his own chest, thought Lockhart, he would give up worrying and ask for a revolver straight away . . . He turned and called across to Crowther: ‘What have you got for burns?’

Crowther rummaged in his first aid satchel. ‘This, sir,’ he said, and passed something across. A dozen willing hands relayed it to Lockhart, as if it were the elixir of life itself. It was in fact a small tube of ointment, about the size of a toothpaste tube. On the label was the picture of a smiling child and the inscription: ‘For the Relief of Burns. Use Sparingly.’

Use sparingly, thought Lockhart: if I used it as if it were platinum dust, I’d still need about two tons of it. He held the small tube in his hand and looked down again at the survivor. One of the men holding him said: ‘Here’s the doctor. He’ll fix you up right away,’ and the fringeless eyes came slowly round and settled on Lockhart’s face as if he were the ministering Christ himself.

Lockhart took a swab of cotton wool, put some of the ointment on it, swallowed a deep revulsion, and started to stroke, very gently, the area of the burnt chest. Just before he began he said: ‘It’s a soothing ointment.’

I suppose it’s natural that he should scream, thought Lockhart presently, shutting his ears: all the old-fashioned pictures showed a man screaming as soon as the barber-surgeon started to operate, while his friends plied the patient with rum or knocked him out with a mallet . . . The trouble was that the man was still so horrifyingly alive: he pulled and wrenched at the two men holding him, while Lockhart, stroking and swabbing with a mother’s tenderness, removed layer after layer of his flesh. For the
other
trouble was that, however gently he was touched, the raw tissue went on and on coming away with the cotton wool.

Lockhart was aware that the ring of men who were watching had fallen silent: he felt rather than saw their faces contract with pity and disgust as he swabbed the ointment deeper and deeper, and the flesh still flaked off like blistered paintwork. I wonder how long this can go on, he thought, as he saw, without surprise, that at one point he had laid bare a rib which gleamed with an astonishing cleanness and astringency. I don’t think this is any good, he thought again, as the man fainted at last, and the two sailors holding him turned their eyes towards Lockhart in question and disbelief. The ointment was almost finished: the raw chest now gaped at him like the foundation of some rotten building. Die! he thought, almost aloud, as he sponged once more, near the throat, and a new layer of sinew came into view, laid bare like a lecturer’s diagram. Please give up, and die. I can’t go on doing this, and I can’t stop while you’re still alive.

He heard a dozen men behind him draw in their breath sharply as a fresh area of skin suddenly crumbled under his most gentle hand and adhered to the cotton wool. Crowther, attracted by the focus of interest and now kneeling by his side, said: ‘Any good, sir?’ and he shook his head. I’m doing wonders, he thought: they’ll give me a job in a canning factory . . . Some blood flowed over the rib he had laid bare, and he swabbed it off almost apologetically. Sorry, he thought: that was probably my fault – and then again: Die! Please die! I’m making a fool of myself, and certainly of you. You’ll never be any use now. And we’ll give you a lovely funeral, well out of sight . . .

Suddenly and momentarily, the man opened his eyes, and looked up at Lockhart with a deeper, more fundamental surprise, as if he had intercepted the thought and was now aware that a traitor and not a friend was touching him. He twisted his body, and a rippling spasm ran across the scorched flesh. ‘Steady, Jock!’ said one of his friends, and: Die! thought Lockhart yet again, squeezing the last smear of ointment from the tube and touching with it a shoulder muscle which immediately gave way and parted from its ligament. Die. Do us all a favour. Die!

Aloud, he repeated, with the utmost foolishness: ‘It’s a soothing ointment.’ But: Die now! His lips formed the words. Don’t be obstinate. No one wants you. You wouldn’t want yourself if you could take a look. Please die!

Presently, obediently, but far too late, the man died.

There was the time of the Skeletons.

It happened when
Compass Rose
was in a hurry, late one summer afternoon when she had been delayed for nearly half a day by a search for an aircraft which was reported down in the sea, a long way south of the convoy. She had not found the aircraft, nor any trace of it:
Viperous
had wirelessed: ‘Rejoin forthwith,’ and she was now hurrying to catch up before nightfall. The sea was glassy smooth, the sky a pale and perfect blue: the hands lounging on the upper deck were mostly stripped to the waist, enjoying the last hour of hot sunshine. It was a day for doing nothing elegantly, for going nowhere at half speed: it seemed a pity that they had to force the pace, and even more of a pity when the radar operator got a ‘suspicious contact’ several miles off their course, and they had to turn aside to investigate.

‘It’s a very small echo,’ said the operator apologetically. ‘Sort of muzzy, too.’

‘Better take a look,’ said Ericson to Morell, who had called him to the bridge. ‘You never know . . .’ He grinned. ‘What does small and muzzy suggest to you?’

To Morell it suggested an undersized man tacking up Regent Street after a thick night, but he glossed over the thought, and said instead: ‘It might be wreckage, sir. Or a submarine, just awash.’

‘Or porpoises,’ said Ericson, who seemed in a better humour than he usually was after being woken up. ‘Or seaweed with very big sand fleas hopping about on top . . . It’s a damned nuisance, anyway: I didn’t want to waste time.’

In the event, it wasted very little of their time, for
Compass Rose
ran the distance swiftly, and what they found did not delay them. It was Wells – the best pair of eyes in the ship – who first sighted the specks on the surface, specks which gradually grew until, a mile or so away, they had become heads and shoulders – a cluster of men floating in the water.

‘Survivors, by God!’ exclaimed Ericson. ‘I wonder how long they’ve been there.’

They were soon to know.
Compass Rose
ran on, the hands crowding to the rail to look at the men ahead of them. Momentarily Ericson recalled that other occasion when they had sped towards men in the water, only to destroy them out of hand. Not this time, he thought, as he reduced speed: now he could make amends.

He need not have bothered to slow down: he might well have ploughed through, the same as last time. He had thought it odd that the men did not wave or shout to
Compass Rose,
as they usually did: he had thought it odd that they did not swim even a little way towards the ship, to close the gap between death and life. Now he saw, through his glasses, that there was no gap to be closed: for the men, riding high out of the water, held upright by their life jackets, were featureless, bony images – skeletons now for many a long day and night.

There was something infinitely obscene in the collection of lolling corpses, with bleached faces and white hairless heads, clustered together like men waiting for a bus which had gone by twenty years before. There were nine of them in that close corporation; they rode the water not more than four or five yards from each other: here and there a couple had come together as if embracing.
Compass Rose
circled, starting a wash which set the dead men bobbing and bowing to each other, like performers in some infernal dance. Nine of them, thought Morell in horror: what is the correct noun of association? A school of skeletons? A corps?

Then he saw – they all saw – that the men were roped together. A frayed and slimy strand of rope linked each one of them, tied round the waist and trailing languidly in the water: when the ripples of the ship’s wash drove two of them apart, the rope between them tightened with a jerk and a splash. The other men swayed and bowed, as if approving this evidence of comradeship . . . But this is crazy, thought Ericson: this is the sort of thing you hope not to dream about.
Compass Rose
still circled, as he looked down at the company of dead men. They must have been there for months. There was not an ounce of flesh under the yellow skins, not a single reminder of warmth or manhood. They had perished, and they had gone on perishing, beyond the grave, beyond the moment when the last man alive found rest.

He was hesitating about picking them up, but he knew that he would not.
Compass Rose
was in a hurry. There was nothing to be gained by fishing them out, sewing them up, and putting them back again. And anyway . . .

‘But why roped together?’ asked Morell, puzzled, as the ship completed her last circle, and drew away, and left the men behind. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

Ericson had been thinking. ‘It might,’ he said, in a voice infinitely subdued. ‘If they were in a lifeboat, and the boat was being swamped, they might tie themselves together so as not to lose touch during the night. It would give them a better chance of being picked up.’

‘And they weren’t,’ said Morell after a pause.

‘And they weren’t. I wonder how long—’ But he did not finish that sentence, except in his thoughts.

He was wondering how long it had taken the nine men to die: and what it was like for the others when the first man died: and what it was like when half of them had gone: and what it was like for the last man left alive, roped to his tail of eight dead shipmates, still hopeful, but surely feeling himself doomed by their company.

Perhaps, thought Ericson, he went mad in the end, and started to swim away, and towed them all after him, shouting, until he lost his strength as well as his wits, and gave up, and turned back to join the majority.

Quite a story.

There was the time that was the worst time of all, the time that seemed to synthesise the whole corpse-ridden ocean; the time of the Burning Tanker.

Aboard
Compass Rose,
as in every escort that crossed the Atlantic, there had developed an unstinting admiration of the men who sailed in oil tankers. They lived, for an entire voyage of three or four weeks, as a man living on top of a keg of gunpowder: the stuff they carried – the lifeblood of the whole war – was the most treacherous cargo of all; a single torpedo, a single small bomb, even a stray shot from a machine gun, could transform their ship into a torch. Many times this had happened, in
Compass Rose’s
convoys: many times they had had to watch these men die, or pick up the tiny remnants of a tanker’s crew – men who seemed to display not the slightest hesitation at the prospect of signing on again, for the same job, as soon as they reached harbour. It was these expendable seamen who were the real ‘petrol-coupons’ – the things one could wangle from the garage on the corner: and whenever sailors saw or read of petrol being wasted or stolen, they saw the cost in lives as well, peeping from behind the headline or the music hall joke, feeding their anger and disgust.