The Cruel Sea (1951) (48 page)

‘The L.T., sir, I’m just chucking away the primers.’

He went on with the job, without waiting for a comment. Ferraby was staring about him as if he were lost in some terrible dream, but presently he crossed to the other depth-charge rail and began, awkwardly, to deal with the depth-charges on that side. They worked steadily, back to back, braced against the slope of the deck. At first they were silent: then Wainwright started to whistle again, and Ferraby, as he dropped one of the primers, to sob. The ship gave a violent lurch under their feet, and the stern rose higher still, enthroning them above the sea.

D plus seven . . . Ericson realised that she was going, and that nothing could stop her. The bridge now hung over the sea at an acute forward angle, the stern was lifting, the bows deep in the water, the stern itself just awash. The ship they had spent so much time and care on, their own
Compass Rose,
was pointed for her dive, and she would not be poised much longer.

He was tormented by what he had not been able to do: the signal to
Viperous,
the clearing of the boats, the shoring up of the wardroom bulkhead, which might conceivably have been caught in time. He thought: the Admiral at Ardnacraish was right – we ought to have practised this more . . . But it had all happened too quickly for them: perhaps
nothing
could have saved her, perhaps she was too vulnerable, perhaps the odds were too great, and he could clear his conscience.

Wells, alert at his elbow, said: ‘Shall I ditch the books, sir?’

Ericson jerked his head up. Throwing overboard the confidential signal books and ciphers, in their weighted bag, was the last thing of all for them to do, before they went down: it was the final signal for their dissolution. He remembered having watched the man in the U-boat do it – losing his life doing it, in fact. For a moment he held back from the order, in fear and foreboding.

He looked once more down the length of his ship. She was quieter already, fatally past the turmoil and the furious endeavour of the first few minutes: they had all done their best, and it didn’t seem to have been any use: now they were simply sweating out the last brief pause, before they started swimming. He thought momentarily of their position, thirty miles astern of the convoy, and wondered whether any of the stern escorts would have seen
Compass Rose
catching up on their radar, and then noticed that she had faded out, and guessed what had happened. That was their only chance, on this deadly cold night.

He said: ‘Yes, Wells, throw them over.’ Then he turned to another figure waiting at the back of the bridge, and called out: ‘Coxswain.’

‘Sir,’ said Tallow.

‘Pipe “Abandon ship”.’

He followed Tallow down the ladder and along the steep iron deck, hearing his voice bawling ‘Abandon ship! Abandon ship!’ ahead of him. There was a crowd of men collected, milling around in silence, edging towards the high stern: below them, on the black water, the two Carley floats had been launched and lay in wretched attendance on their peril. A handful of Tonbridge’s party, having disposed of the Carleys, had turned back to wrestle afresh with the boat, but it had become locked more securely still as their list increased. When Ericson was among his men, he was recognised; the words ‘The skipper – the skipper’ exploded in a small hissing murmur all round him, and one of the men asked: ‘What’s the chances, sir?’

Compass Rose
trembled under their feet, and slid further forward.

A man by the rails shouted: ‘I’m off, lads,’ and jumped headlong into the sea.

Ericson said: ‘It’s time to go. Good luck to you all.’

Now fear took hold. Some men jumped straight away, and struck out from the ship, panting with the cold and calling to their comrades to follow them: others held back, and crowded farther towards the stern, on the high side away from the water; when at last they jumped, many of them slid and scraped their way down the barnacled hull, and their clothes and then the softer projections of their bodies – sometimes their faces, sometimes their genitals – were torn to ribbons by the rough plating. The sea began to sprout bobbing red lights as the safety-lamps were switched on: the men struck out and away, and then crowded together, shouting and calling encouragement to each other, and turned to watch
Compass Rose.
High out of the water, she seemed to be considering the plunge before she took it: the propeller, bared against the night sky, looked foolish and indecent, the canted mast was like an admonishing finger, bidding them all behave in her absence.

She did not long delay thus: she could not. As they watched, the stern rose higher still: the last man left on board, standing on the tip of the after-rail, now plunged down with a yell of fear. The noise seemed to unloose another: there was a rending crash as the whole load of depth-charges broke loose from their lashings and ploughed wildly down the length of the upper deck, and splashed into the water.

From a dozen constricted throats came the same words: ‘She’s going.’

There was a muffled explosion, which they could each feel like a giant hand squeezing their stomachs, and
Compass Rose
began to slide down. Now she went quickly, as if glad to be quit of her misery: the mast snapped in a ruin of rigging as she fell. When the stern dipped beneath the surface, a tumult of water leapt upwards: then the smell of oil came thick and strong towards them. It was a smell they had got used to, on many convoys: they had never thought that
Compass Rose
would ever exude the same disgusting stench.

The sea flattened, the oil spread, their ship was plainly gone: a matter of minutes had wiped out a matter of years. Now the biting cold, forgotten before the huge disaster of their loss, began to return. They were bereaved and left alone in the darkness; fifty men, two rafts, misery, fear, and the sea.

There was not room for them all on the two Carleys: there never had been room. Some sat or lay on them, some gripped the ratlines that hung down from their sides, some swam around in hopeful circles, or clung to other luckier men who had found a place. The bobbing red lights converged on the rafts: as the men swam, they gasped with fear and cold, and icy waves hit them in the face, and oil went up their nostrils and down their throats. Their hands were quickly numbed, and then their legs, and then the cold probed deep within them, searching for the main blood of their body. They thrashed about wildly, they tried to shoulder a place at the rafts, and were pushed away again: they swam round and round in the darkness, calling out, cursing their comrades, crying for help, slobbering their prayers.

Some of those gripping the ratlines found that they could do so no longer, and drifted away. Some of those who had swallowed fuel oil developed a paralysing cramp, and began to retch up what was poisoning them. Some of those who had torn their bodies against the ship’s side were attacked by a deadly and congealing chill.

Some of those on the rafts grew sleepy as the bitter night progressed; and others lost heart as they peered round them at the black and hopeless darkness, and listened to the sea and the wind, and smelt the oil, and heard their comrades giving way before this extremity of fear and cold.

Presently, men began to die.

Some men died well: Chief Petty Officer Tallow, Leading-Seaman Tonbridge, Leading-Torpedoman Wainwright, Yeoman of Signals Wells; and many others. These were the men who did all things well, automatically; in death, the trick did not desert them.

Tallow died looking after people: it had always been his main job aboard
Compass Rose,
and he practised it to the last. He gave up his place on Number One Carley to a young seaman who had no lifebelt: when he saw the man’s plight, Tallow first reprimanded him for disobeying standing orders, and then slipped down off the raft and shouldered the other man up. But once in the water, a fierce cramp attacked him, and he could not hold on to the ratlines; even as the man he had rescued was grumbling about the ‘bloody coxswain never giving them any peace’, Tallow drifted away and presently died of cold, alone.

Tonbridge overspent his strength trying to round up people and guide them towards the Carleys. He had already brought in half a dozen men who were too far gone to think or act for themselves, when he heard another choking cry from the farther darkness, another man on the point of drowning. He set off, for the seventh time, to help, and did not come back.

Wainwright, having decided that it would be better if the two Carleys kept close together, set himself the job of steering and pushing one towards the other. But it was heavier than he thought and he was not as strong as he hoped; he soon lost his temper with the sea that kept forcing the rafts apart, and the cold that robbed him of his strength, and he wrestled with the task to the point of exhaustion, and died in a fierce rage.

Wells died making lists. He had been making lists nearly all his seagoing life: lists of signals, lists of ships in convoy, lists of code flags. Now it seemed to him essential to find out how many men had got away from
Compass Rose,
and how many were left alive: the Captain was sure to ask him and he didn’t want to be caught out. He swam round counting heads, for more than an hour; he got up to forty-seven, and then he began to be afraid that some of the men he had counted might have died in the meantime, and he started to go round again.

It was much slower work, this second time, and presently, as he swam towards a dark figure in the water, a figure who would not answer his hail, the man seemed to draw away instead of coming nearer. Wells approached him very slowly, unable to manage more than one stroke at a time, resting for long pauses in between; and within a few minutes of finding that the man was dead, he died himself, calling out a total which was now far from accurate.

Some men died badly: Chief Engine room Artificer Watts, Able-Seaman Gregg, Petty Officer Steward Carslake; and many others. These were the men whose nature or whose past life had made them selfish, or afraid, or so eager to live that they destroyed themselves with hope.

Watts died badly: perhaps it was unfair to expect him to do anything else. He was old, and tired, and terrified; he should have been by the fire with his grandchildren, and instead he was thrashing about in oily water, bumping in the darkness against men he knew well, men already dead. He never stopped crying out, and calling for help, from the moment he jumped from
Compass Rose:
he clung to other men, he fought wildly to get on to one of the Carleys which was already crammed with people, he got deeper and deeper into the grip of an insane fear. It was fear that killed him, more than anything else: he became convinced that he could stand no more, and that unless he was rescued immediately he would perish. At this, a last constricting terror began to bind his weak limbs and pinch the brittle arteries of his blood, until abject death itself came to rescue him. It had nothing about it that the death of an old pensioner should have had, and both his service and his normal spirit deserved far better than the last prayerful wailing that saw him out. But that was true of many other people, at this fearful ending to their lives.

Gregg died badly, because he clung to life with ferocious hope; and on this account he met death in a curious way. Just before the ship sailed, Gregg had got another letter from his friend in the Army. ‘Dear Tom,’ it said, ‘you asked me to keep an eye on Edith when I got home on leave. Well . . .’ Gregg found it hard to believe that his wife could have gone straight off the rails again, the moment he had left her and returned to his ship; but even if it were true, he felt sure that he could fix it all up in a couple of days. Just let me get back to her, he thought: she’s only a kid, all she needs is a good talking-to, all she needs is me to make love to her . . . For that reason, he felt that he could not die: it was a feeling shared by many of his shipmates, and the competition to stay alive was, in out-of-the-way corners, spiteful and violent.

It took Gregg an exhausting hour to jostle and force his way to a place alongside one of the Carleys: he saw that it was hopeless to try to get on top of it, but his immense determination drove him to do all he could to see that he did not lose his place. He finally squeezed his body between the side of the Carley and the ratline that ran round it, so that he was fastened to the raft like a small parcel tied to a larger one; and there, securely anchored, he aimed to pass the whole night, dreaming of home and the wife who must surely love him again as soon as he got back . . . But he had been too greedy for his life: as the night progressed, and he weakened and grew sleepy with cold, the rope slipped from his shoulders to his neck – the rope which ran, through loops, all the way round the raft, and was being drawn tight by a score of desperate men clinging to it. He woke suddenly, to find it pressing hard on his neck; before he could struggle free, the raft lurched upwards as a man on top fell from one side to the other, and the rope bit deep under his chin and lifted him from the water. It was too dark for the others to see what was happening, and by that time, Gregg’s strangled cries might have been any other strangled cries, the ordinary humdrum sounds of drowning. His wild struggles only shortened the time it took to hang himself.

Carslake died a murderer’s death. The small baulk of wood which floated near him during the darkest hour of the night was only big enough for one man, and one man was on it already, a telegraphist named Rollestone. Rollestone was small, bespectacled, and afraid; Carslake matched him in fear, but in nothing else, and the fact that he had not been able to get a place at one of the Carleys had inflamed in him a vindictive frenzy to preserve his life. He saw Rollestone’s figure, prone on the plank of wood, and he swam over slowly, and pulled at one end of it so that it went underwater. Rollestone raised his head.