Ten Were Sunk

I

THE saloon buzzed faintly, and warm air drifted in through the open ports. On deck the sun shone; a solid shaft came through the central port and scattered itself among the knives and forks, reflected from the bald patch on the mate’s head, dazzled his eyes, and spilled over his plate. The bald patch was brown and weatherbeaten, with a small fuzz of light hairs beginning to grow again, impeding the progress of a fly adventuring there. The fly, exploring outwards from the smooth centre, was beginning to get bogged amongst the stubble when the steward came in and flashed a plate onto the table, upsetting the fly into a clumsy retreat. ‘Salt fish or mince collops, sir?’ ‘Mince collops,’ I said, rather too definitely, for the Captain turned on me inquiringly. ‘Nice bit of salt fish, this,’ he said.

‘I don’t like salt fish very much, sir,’ and, feeling rather strongly about it, added, ‘At least not this sort of salt fish.’

The Captain looked hurt, as though I had implied that he salted the fish himself. ‘It’s the same sort they have at home,’ he said. ‘They eat barrels of it in Cardiff. Why, at Easter time the fishmongers run out — can’t get enough of it.’

I thought of the people of Cardiff, and Lent, and looked at the rapidly disappearing piece of greasy yellow ling on the Captain’s plate, shuddered at the vicious smell (like a fish-shop dustbin on a hot day), and decided there was maybe more in the remark than was at first apparent.

I started eating my collops, while the Captain swiveled his chair and went out muttering, ‘Barrels of it.’ The second was also eating it with relish.

‘I don’t believe for a minute that any ordinary person could eat that fish,’ I said. ‘It must be some other sort of salt fish they live on in Cardiff — the smell alone, apart from the look of it, would convince anyone it was bad, without having to taste it.’

‘It’s no worse than some sorts of cheese,’ said the mate.

‘No,’ I said, getting warmed up a bit, ‘but most sorts of cheese at least don’t taste the same way they smell, and this is exactly — ‘ The raucous noise of the klaxon came down from the bridge, calling us to action stations. We all gulped our tea and ran for tin hats.

On the bridge the sun shone warm for a moment on our backs and then disappeared behind a cloud. We had come to look on clouds as abetting the enemy, and I felt a cold shiver not altogether due to the sudden shadow cast over us — it might well be a more sinister shadow we were sailing into. All day long we had been on the alert, with enemy planes hovering around the horizon, waiting for a chance to break through the ring of escorting craft. We were the biggest ship in this convoy, and an obvious target if the chance came. Our own Catalina toured around too, on an inner circuit, but her job is submarines, and not enemy aircraft.

There appeared to be two aeroplanes this time, moving in opposite directions, only still a longish way off. The sun came out again, and warmed me as I stood tin-hatted in the starboard bridge gun position. The gun was shiny blue steel, sleek like the back of a porpoise, and seemed firm and efficient and quite friendly. The grip was warm in my hand as I checked the strips of bullets, with their pale harmless-looking silver heads, and saw the tiny pin was pushed out to show they were properly pressed home and ready for action.

I swiveled the gun round a time or two, squinted through the sights, and then concentrated on the enemy planes. They looked like Heinkels, and were still manœuvring a long way off, though not quite so aimlessly as before, I thought.

The ship was spread out below me, gently wallowing along in a slight swell, looking very quiet in the sun, the worn decks slightly polished by years of feet and weather — more than twenty-five years in all the oceans and every sort of weather, from tropical sun which made them too hot for rubber shoes to icy blizzards blowing from the Poles, coating them with frozen spray; sometimes deep in green foaming water or wet from warm English rain. And in one minute, or five minutes’ time, they might be a mass of twisted steel and fire. I tried hard to realize that — to get some sort of perspective into what might happen, some sense of immediacy. In wartime at sea this thing and many others may happen without warning, and everyone who goes to sea knows it — and yet no one really seems to know it at all.

I felt that if only I could really grasp that in no time at all this thing might happen to us I should have captured some sense of reality, and connected two things which always eluded connection. Perhaps the ship with all its experience was too impersonal a subject for such a revelation, and I had better try and apply it to myself.

Then one of the planes turned inwards towards the centre of its circle, and another cloud passed overhead. Behind me they were anxiously looking for the second plane, which disappeared while we were watching the first. Then the cloud moved away from the sun, the hum turned to a whine, and what had been a mere minnow on the horizon emerged as a great silver bird, getting larger and larger. ‘Fire a little ahead,’ I thought, ‘so he’ll fly into it — that must be five hundred yards. This is it!’ Suddenly I pressed the trigger, and everything seemed to open up at once; I heard only the first stuttering explosion in the general roar.

As I swung my gun into an upright position I saw what looked like a flight of swallows coming towards us, but my brain didn’t connect until I saw a huge fountain of sea rise up just beyond us and blot out the rest of our line. What had been smooth blue swell was sprouting white mushrooms round a giant pillar of foam, as machine-gun and cannon shells overshot their mark. ‘ Missed,’ I thought, and, while the word filled my mind, jammed another strip into the gun, clicked the bolt to ‘automatic,’ pointed it to starboard, and eased the strap of my tin hat under my chin.

The second plane had disappeared into the cloud, stretching away over the starboard beam, and in another second or two would break the edge of the cloud as he stooped down on us. I could no longer hear the engines. I saw the sun on the edge of the gun pit; the ochre paint looked dry and bleached, the rivet heads cast long shadows; over the edge, far below, was blue sea smudged with white.

I thought, ‘In a few seconds from now you may have ceased to exist; what are you thinking about?’ Another level of consciousness suddenly flashed horrible mutilated images across my mind, to be immediately suppressed by the stronger questioning one, trying to find some connection between the present and eternity. There was no connection at all — the sun and the color of the sea, perhaps, the rounding off of a story in someone else’s mind, which had been part of my mind, the only realities. This silver shape that was even now emerging, growing larger, aiming a death that would tear us to pieces if it could, was completely impersonal, rather beautiful, and incredibly vivid now, a black silhouette against the sun, hanging in space, forever crystallized in my mind — as impersonal as the gun I held pouring bullets up at it in a fiery stream. And then a noise arose out of all that blanket of noise, engulfing me, and I was no longer holding the gun, but picking myself up from the corner of the gun pit, wiping something from my eyes, all I could see a tower of brown streaked with white, and then away above it the silver shape tipped on its side, zigzagging across the sky. . . . The tower of water gradually subsided, as the ship shook herself and appeared again, still a ship. Across her crooked wake a huge brown patch settled down and spread out, smaller ones away beyond it.

The planes were rapidly becoming minnows again, chased by little puffs of smoke. A great humming silence seemed spread over everything. The rest of the convoy looked completely as usual; a lamp began to flash from the Commodore:‘C-o-n-g-r . . .’‘Congratulations,’and again ‘Congratulations.’ Someone handed me the lamp, and I flashed back at him: ‘Thanks.’ ‘Should have said, “Thank you,’” I thought. ‘Nice of him — very nice of him.’

‘The Commodore sends his congratulations, sir,’ I said. The Captain’s face slowly came unfrozen, and he looked pleased. An escort was flashing from astern — I missed the beginning. ‘ Do you want us?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he flashed back, ‘have you sustained any damage?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so’ — I remembered ‘Thank you’ this time. All over the ship men were talking in little groups.

Some of them fired in the air with imaginary guns, made swooping movements with their hands; all the ones from the starboard guns had their faces blotched with dried brown patches of cordite and sea water. (The two Heinkels had dropped all their bombs and gone away. Their machine guns and cannon had all gone wide; we must have embarrassed their gunners a little.) I turned round and found I could hear with my other ear. The mate was grinning broadly and gesticulating—‘Like a bluebottle fly,’ he said. ‘He pulled out and buzzed off like a bluebottle fly.’

I joined the group, taking off my tin hat and letting the breeze blow through my hair, smiling happily at the image the mate had conjured up. Nothing had happened to us. The sun still shone and the ship had steadied on her course again — that dark silhouette against the sun, which had been the last thing reflected in so many dead eyes, had already mixed its identity with the bluebottle fly of the mate’s fancy. These things happened to some people, but not really to us. We went below to try to restore order to our cabins, and talked until the sun went down; as it sank the Commodore’s submarine flag went up. We felt a little proud about the message he had flashed to us, as though in some way we were responsible. We hoped at least they had taken some of our bullets back with them, and we had kept on firing. This Commodore was easy on the flags, too — the sort of commodore we liked.

II

It was a lovely evening, warm with a cool breeze, and magnificent banks of annuli round the horizon, gray and white and gold, with a pale turquoiseblue background getting deeper as it rose towards us — away on the starboard side an opalescent mist over everything, a thin veil from crimson to blue rising from the sea, and, following it, darkness. It moved in an arc above us, and slowly dropped its veil before the golden mountains, turning the green sky blue and then purple, the darkness from below following it until the last spark died; the mountains of cloud became pale gray shapes, and night had swallowed the last of the day.

It was a night of star shells, bursting torpedoes, and thudding depth charges. In the morning the Commodore had gone; all that marked his going had been a small flurry of bobbing white lights in the water — a very small flurry, hardly any sound after the double explosion, only star shells going up around and ahead of us.

The Commodore and more than a hundred with him — most of them still in their bunks, with that last magnificent sunset tight behind their closed eyelids, I hoped. The two torpedoes had done their deadly work so quickly that perhaps for most of them there had been no time for that last undignified moment of panic. They were not alone — the first gray light saw ships sliding into empty positions, re-forming the convoy. By the time the sun rose we had a new commodore.

Far away astern, escorts nosed around among abandoned boats and rafts and wreckage, picking up the final survivors. In the half-light, lamp messages flickered between them, odd scraps of news, names of ships, instructions. With full daylight a smaller convoy, completely orderly, nosed its way through the smooth grayish swell, and before the watch ended the enemy aircraft flag flew from all mastheads. . . .

And so it went on. All day we watched the silver minnows cruising round the horizon, sometimes a larger black one. If one came too close, little black puffs would appear behind his tail, or ahead, and the sun would catch his wings for a moment as he wheeled away. One hot afternoon one of the ships lagged behind; the minnows grew more active, but no low clouds came to help them. They lost themselves in the sun, and suddenly, around the laggard, the sea rose up in tall white mushrooms, none of them very near, but near enough to bring him pointing up with a very creditable wave around his tank-like bow. The two planes flashed in the sun, small and silver in the blue as they wheeled away. A few puffs followed them; nothing else happened.

Our tin hats would get hot, and our eyes tired with continual watching. Sometimes for a short hour or two no warning flag flew at the masthead, and everyone who could slept — an uneasy sleep ending with a jerk of gunfire or klaxon, or the jarring hammer blow of a depth charge. The cheerful reaction to our first bombing had long ago disappeared; we longed for those elusive minnows to come near enough to have a crack at them. We knew too well what happened after their daylight reconnaissance — what the night would bring. We no longer believed as firmly that such things didn’t really happen to us. Something else was taking the place of that blessed shock-absorbing screen, which by now had worn very thin.

No one spoke of it particularly, only our reactions to the warning hooter had speeded up — we no longer stopped to gulp our tea. At night those on watch would find the bridge full of misshapen life-jacketed forms that appeared silently at the first explosion. All night long small murmuring groups appeared and disappeared on the decks and hatches. When a star shell went up during an attack a row of palely illuminated faces would be seen at the rail. On the fo’c’sle, or the poop, or amidships, everyone was waiting.

Sometimes a night would pass quietly; sometimes bedlam was let loose, and a patch of little red or white lights twinkled past us, or broke out abeam; faint shouts, rather high-pitched, calling names; sometimes singing, in high, slightly hysterical voices; once a sudden sharp bloodcurdling screaming following a hiss of escaping steam, then a second explosion, and silence again. Every morning the same little convoy steadily ploughed its allotted course, getting gradually smaller, always re-forming — washing hanging out between derricks in the sun, breakfast bells tinkling down on the wind at eight bells, bright flags on the halyards.

III

One gray morning a destroyer answered someone with his lamp, ‘Has-

any morphia aboard? If so, advise using one quarter gr—’ The lamp went out of focus. I was leaning against the side of the gun pit, watching the strip of bullets in my gun catch the light as the ship rolled slowly. The destroyer’s message sent a chill down my spine—I always tried to think of it as a sudden break, just a cessation of being. That message was a grim reminder of pain: lying stiffly on a narrow bunk in a stuffy cabin smelling of antiseptic, everything swaying gently from side to side. I hope whoever it was had the morphia — a small ship at sea is no comfortable place for badly wounded men. I thought of an afterdeck with a crowd of bareheaded men, a faint drift of a hymn on the breeze, and white shapes slipping into the green water. I was glad some flags were wanted then; I couldn’t thrust the goblin images away so easily now, and some sort of action helped. I kept thinking of the ten little nigger boys — must be lack of sleep, I thought — we were all thinking that. The flag was the enemy aircraft signal, and there was a heavy mass of gray cloud overhead.

I slept after breakfast, heavy sleep, and woke too hot in my clothes. It was a tin-hat afternoon, gray and close. The clouds cleared just before sunset with darkness suddenly following. The aircraft signal changed to the submarine flag.

The first torpedo must have been meant for us; someone a little ahead on the beam stopped it — a tug, small and black against our own black silhouette, loaded with survivors. We had envied the men on the tug; we thought she would be the last of the little nigger boys, she was so small. In a little over a minute she had twizzled round and sunk; we could hear someone calling to his mates in the water; their little lights bobbed very near us and were left astern. We stood about on the bridge waiting for the next. An hour or more went by; some of the figures disappeared below or lay down somewhere in the dark.

Suddenly there was another explosion, to port this time, and a little ahead. We were all there again, waiting — a small blue flame flickered where the torpedo had struck, went out, flickered again, brighter.

With no warning but the small blue flame there was suddenly a ‘whoosh’ as though a piece of celluloid had caught fire — for a moment the whole ship was silhouetted from end to end, small and black against the orange background; no upper works, just a black hull which slowly disappeared in a vast orange fire.

Above it rose a column of curling black smoke, orange at the base, slowly rising and spreading in a solid pillar, the slow smooth swell reflecting it. We hadn’t dared to light a cigarette before; now we were illuminated as though a red searchlight were turned on us. We were all gathered in the gun pit on the port wing of the bridge, as though in the box of some Grand Guignol theatre. It was a very quiet theatre. There was no sound except a soft crackling noise; the column of smoke rose in a solid rolling shaft, broadening out above our heads, lit from the flaming sea until far away above us it disappeared into a black sky filled with pale stars; the star shells that thudded up around us were no brighter than matches struck in the sky.

Round the white-hot mass on the water brilliant little groups of flames sprang up on the edge of the fire — we thought at first they were survivors making a desperate effort to escape the creeping flames. They would sparkle for a moment and go out; then a tongue of flame would creep after them, light them again, and join the main blaze, only to be mocked by other tiny sparkles starting up farther away, and again being engulfed. We knew a few minutes before there had been men on the tanker, sailors and mates and cooks and firemen, but that had been a few minutes ago; now we couldn’t tell it had been a ship any more.

I think we had all forgotten our own ship and the submarines the escorts were desperately searching for — that Norse funeral of living men held our attention until the glow of it was far astern, and the smoke from it had spread until it blotted out the stars. I wasn’t conscious of any sound except the faint crackling, and someone blaspheming vividly and softly behind me — there wasn’t much to say anyway. The air was full of the sweet sickly smell of burnt paraffin.

We went below in twos for a shot of something. By torchlight in the steward’s tiny cabin were two bottles and glasses; I chose brandy. Later on there were more torpedoes, more star shells, less attendance on the bridge. Towards dawn we heard gunfire from over the horizon (the mate and I were alone) — heavy guns, then pom-poms, then the whole lot in a rising crescendo, and suddenly silence; one star shell soared into the gray dawning sky above the horizon, hung suspended, and went out. We had listened with rapt attention, as though to some lovely music. As the star shell sank we shook hands and smiled again. Part of the score had been wiped out, a small part, but it seemed to thaw us out, and after that we talked. I began to wonder how long one could go on like this; tried to examine my thoughts and reactions, found they were all screwed up in a tight ball in my head: no past, no future, just the immediate present, the cool fresh wind and a whole body the only things one could hold on to — anything beyond that brought too many emotions, and emotions bred fear. It became a matter of getting enough sleep somehow, so that the ball didn’t become too tightly wound and break somewhere.

‘This might become quite a situation,’ I thought, ‘if it, goes on much longer and we are still afloat. Really too much like the little nigger boys to be funny any more.’ We all looked much the same — a little drawn around the eyes, perhaps. We said and did the same things — neither much more nor much less. But every sudden bang, or even a tense quick movement, made us jump. ’Just one night in bed would make all the difference,’ the mate was saying. ’Just one night in bed, in pyjamas — or even one day without those bloody flags.’

It was a long, hot day, with fish for tea — no one made any remarks about it. Only a week since, splattered with burnt explosive on the bridge, we had laughed about the bluebottle fly. We were up there again when the ship ahead started flashing at us, the lamp very clear and bright: ‘[Our convoy number] will proceed on course-to anchor in the —— [a neutral port].’ We repeated it to each other, wrote it down, grabbed the lamp to pass it on. My heart suddenly felt like a singing bird. Word was passed round the ship, and I was back on the bridge again. My head felt full of flying wings, as though a too long imprisoned cage of pigeons — familar threads of thought into the past and future, and other presents — were suddenly loosed. They circled round to feel the air, and then fled on their joyful passage. The evening regained its color, the past events their perspective — the ball was unwinding.

As the evening fell we turned into a lighted estuary, and a final depth charge marked the full stop to our sinister passage. As though we had passed into a magic circle, we lit cigarettes on deck, hung over the rail, turned on all the lights, and, later, slept.