The Ship Read online

  The blood was pulsing faster in his veins. A bibliophile finding in the twopenny box a long-sought first edition would know nearly the same thrill as Whipple felt, or a knight of the Round Table at a vision of the Grail. There were thousands of Italians there to be killed, ships which were the pride of the Italian navy were there to be destroyed. ‘The thicker the hay,’ said Alaric once, when the odds against his army were being pointed out to him, ‘the easier it is mown.’ ‘The bigger they come,’ said Bob Fitzsimmons, ‘the harder they fall.’ Whipple thought along the same lines. The appalling strength of the hostile force meant nothing to him, literally nothing, from the point of view of frightening him. He was merely glad that the enemy were presenting themselves in such numbers to be killed. If at that moment some impossible chance had put Whipple without time for reflexion in command of the English squadron, the light cruisers would have dashed headlong into action and destruction. But Whipple was not in command. He was perfectly conscious that he was merely the masthead lookout in HMS Artemis, and as such a man with a definite duty to perform to the best of his ability.

  ‘Two battleships and a heavy cruiser,’ he reported down the voice pipe, ‘heading a little abaft our beam. On the same bearing now as the other ships. The other ships are turning now astern of them.’

  Whipple was reporting the development of the Italian fleet into line of battle, and in exactly the same tone as he would have used if he had been reporting sighting a buoy. That was the contribution he was privileged to make to the cause his mother had talked about to him over the midday dinner table in Bermondsey. Ordinary Seaman Albert Whipple, aged eighteen, was a prig and a self-righteous one. A cynic might well define esprit de corps as self-righteous priggishness – the spirit which inspired Sir Richard Grenville or Cromwell’s Ironsides. From the yardarm close beside Whipple fluttered the signal flags which he had set a-flying.

  9

  From the Captain’s Report

  …the behaviour of the ship’s company was most satisfactory…

  The Italian fleet was up over the horizon now, their upper works visible under the smoke, and the British squadron had wheeled about once more. The Italians were heading to interpose between the convoy and Malta; if it were not for that slow, lumbering convoy, crawling along at its miserable eleven knots, the light cruisers could have circled round the Italian battleships like a hawk round a heron. As it was the British squadron was like a man with a cannon ball chained to his leg, crippled and slow, forced to keep its position between the convoy and the Italian warships – those battleships were designed for twenty-nine knots and even when mishandled were quite capable of twenty-five. They could work steadily ahead, until they barred the route, forcing the British to attack to clear the path – as if a man with a penknife could clear a path out of a steel safe – and if the British sensibly declined the attempt and turned back, they would be pursued by the Italians, whose superior speed would then compel the light cruisers either to stay and be shot at or move out of the Italian path and leave the convoy to destruction.

  It was all perfectly logical, positive, and inevitable when the data were considered – the eleven-knot convoy, the thirty-knot battleships, the Italian fifteen-inch guns, the British six-inch; the four hours remaining of daylight and the extraordinary clearness of the air. Fog might save the English, but there was no chance of fog in that sparkling air. Nightfall might save the English, too, for it would be most imprudent for battleships to engage in a night action with cruisers – that would be like staking guineas against shillings in a game of pitch-and-toss. But it was still early afternoon, and no more than half an hour would be needed for the Italians to reach their most advantageous position. Then five minutes of steady shelling would be sufficient to sink every cruiser in the British line; less than that to destroy the helpless convoy. Then Malta would fall; the running ulcer in Italy’s side would be healed; Rommel in Africa, the submarines in the Atlantic would feel an instant lessening of the strain upon them; the Vichy government would be informed of one more step towards the German conquest of the world; the very Japanese in seas ten thousand miles away would be aware of a lightening of their task.

  So obvious and logical was all this that the inferences must be clear to the rawest hand anywhere in the ship. It was not necessary to have studied Mahan, or to have graduated from the Staff College, to understand the situation. The ship’s company of Artemis might not stop to think about Vichy or Rommel or the Japanese; but they knew the speed of the convoy, and the merest whisper of the word ‘battleships’ would tell them that their situation was a perilous one. And a mere whisper – with implied doubt – would be far more unsettling than any certainty. Not one man in ten in Artemis could see what was going on, and in a ship at action stations it was hard for information to filter through by word of mouth.

  In the Captain’s opinion distorted news was dangerous. He knew his men, and he believed that his men knew him; if they heard the truth he could rely upon them whatever the truth might be. A crisis in the battle was close at hand, and he could spare not one moment from the bridge to tell them himself. He turned a little on his stool, caught Jerningham’s eye, and beckoned to him. Jerningham had to wait a second or two while the Captain brought himself up to date again regarding the situation, looking at flagship and convoy and enemy, before he took the glasses from his eyes and turned a searching glance at his secretary. Jerningham was acutely conscious of that glance. He was not being sized up for any trifle; it was not as if he was a mere applicant for a job in a City office. The business he was to do was something touching the whole efficiency of the ship – the safety of Malta – the life or death of England. The Captain would not have trusted him with it if he were not absolutely sure of him. In fact, the Captain was faintly surprised at finding that he was sure of him; he wondered a little whether he had previously misjudged his secretary or whether the latter was one of those people who had moods, and was sometimes reliable and sometimes not. But whether he had misjudged him or not, and whether he had moods or not, this was the right time to impose responsibility upon him and to make amends if he had misjudged him, or to give him confidence in the future if this was merely an exalted mood.

  ‘Go down,’ said the Captain, ‘and tell the ship about the situation.’

  Jerningham stood a little startled, but the Captain already had his binoculars to his eyes again. He had given his order, and an order given by a Captain in a ship of war is carried out.

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Jerningham, saluting as he jerked himself out of his surprise.

  He turned away and started down the ladder. He was an intelligent man, accustomed in his private life to think for himself, accustomed to selling ideas to advertising managers, accustomed to conveying ideas to commercial artists, accustomed to telling the public truths or fictions in the fewest and clearest words. The Captain might easily have expanded the brief order he gave his secretary, telling him what to say and how to say it, but the Captain knew that it was not necessary; and also that to leave the responsibility to his secretary would be good for him.

  Jerningham’s mind was feverishly turning over words and phrases as he descended the ladder; he did not have time to assemble any, but, on the other hand, he did not have time in those few seconds to become self-conscious, nor had his weakness time to reassert itself.

  ‘I’ve a message for the ship from the Captain,’ he said to the bosun’s mate beside the loudspeaker bolted to the bulkhead.

  The petty officer switched on and piped shrilly, the sound of his call audible in every part of the ship.

  ‘The Captain has sent me to tell you,’ said Jerningham to the mouthpiece, ‘we’ve got the Eyety navy in front of us. Battleships, heavy cruisers, and all. They’ve run away from us once, the heavy cruisers have. Now we’re going to see if the battleships’ll run too. Three hours of daylight left, and the convoy’s got to reach Malta. Good luck to us all. There’s none like us.’

  Jerningham opened his mouth to sa
y more, but his good judgement came to his rescue and he closed it again. He had said all there was to say, and in an illuminated moment he knew that anything he were to add would be not only superfluous but possibly harmful. Men of the temper of the crew of Artemis did not need rhetoric; a plain statement of the facts for the benefit of those men below decks who had no idea what was happening was all that was needed.

  He turned away from the unresponsive instrument, not knowing whether he had done well or badly; in the days of wooden ships, before public address systems had even been heard of, his words might have been received with cheers – or boos – which would have been informative. The ludicrous thought crossed his active mind that it was just like an advertising problem. How often had he devised ingenious methods by which to ‘key’ advertisements to discover which had the greateat pulling power?

  His eyes met those of the bosun’s mate, and then travelled on to exchange glances with the other ratings – messengers and resting lookouts – stationed here. One or two of the men still wore the expression of philosophic indifference which so often characterized the lower deck, but there was a gleam in the eyes of the others, a smile at the corners of their mouths, which told him that they were excited, and pleasurably excited. That telepathic sympathy of his, which had assisted him to the downfall of so many young women, made him aware that the men were feeling the same inconsequent exhilaration as he felt – inconsequent to him, and novel and strange, but something they had known before and recognized. A climax was at hand, the climax to months and years of training and forethought, to the unobtrusive mental conditioning for which the Mephistophelian Captain on the bridge was responsible, to the life’s mission to which men like Ordinary Seaman Albert Whipple had devoted themselves, or to the long line of fighting ancestors, which had generated them – like A. B. Dawkins down at the wheel, whose great-great-grandfather had run with powder charges over the bloody decks of the Temeraire at Trafalgar. It was the prospect of such a climax which exhilarated them, just as, ridiculously, it exhilarated him, and left them all careless of any possible consequences to themselves. He ran up the steep ladder again to the bridge, disregarding the way in which it swayed and swung to the send of the sea.

  Ι0

  From the Captain’s Report

  … increasing speed and at the same time making smoke…

  Back on the bridge, Jerningham looked round him to see that there had been no radical change in the situation during the short time of his absence. There were the minutest possible dots on the horizon below the Italian funnel smoke which showed that the Italian fleet was now actually in sight. A new string of flags was breaking out on the halliards of the flagship.

  The Captain knew this was the moment. The Admiral had let them round until they were properly stationed with regard to the wind which now blew in a line from them to a point ahead of the Italians – that blessed wind, of such a convenient strength and from such a convenient quarter – and he had timed his arrival in this situation at the very moment when the Italians would be almost within range with their fourteen-inch guns. And so far the Admiral had shown none of his hand, except to display a determination to yield nothing without fighting for it, and the Italians must have been expecting that at least, as was proved by their caution in bringing up their battleships only behind a heavy force of cruisers.

  The Chief Yeoman of Signals interpreted the flagship’s signal, and the Captain was ready for it – the plan which he held on his knee laid it down as the next step.

  ‘Revolutions for thirty-one knots,’ he ordered. ‘Make smoke.’

  The Navigating Lieutenant repeated the order, and the Officer of the Watch pressed the plunger which ordered smoke.

  Down in the engine-room the Commander (E) stood on the iron grating; being a tall man the top of his head was no more than a few inches below the level of the sea. He stood there with the immeasurable patience of his breed, acquired during countless hours of standing on countless gratings, and with his feet apart and his hands clasped behind him in the attitude he had first been taught as a cadet eighteen years before. He was the supreme lord of this underworld of his, like Lucifer, and he seemed marked out as such by the loneliness of his position, without a soul within yards of him, and by the light-coloured boiler suit which he wore, and by the untroubled loftiness of his expression. The very lighting of the engine-room by some strange chance accentuated the fact, glaring down upon his face and figure with a particular brightness, specially illuminating him like a character on the stage. He was a young man to have the rank of Commander and to carry the responsibilities of his position, to have hundreds of men obedient to him, to have sixty-four thousand horse-power under his control, to be master of the pulsating life of a light cruiser, but it would be a hard task to guess his age, so deliberate were his movements and so unlined and yet so mature was his face.

  All the Commander (E) had to do was to stand there on the grating and do nothing else. A crisis might be at hand, but it could not affect the Commander (E) unless some catastrophe occurred. His work was done for the moment; it had been accomplished already during the years Artemis had been in commission. He had trained the engine-room complement into complete efficiency – the Engine-room Artificers and the Mechanicians and the Stokers; the Lieutenants and Sub-Lieutenants (E) who were his heads of department and his subordinates – not so many years younger than he – loved him as if he were their father, and would have found it hard to explain why if called upon to do so. None could appreciate the magic serenity, that endless patience, who had not served under him. Because of the love they bore him they knew his will without his expressing it, and they laboured constantly to anticipate it, to perfect themselves in their duty because he wished it, so that the organization and routine of the engine-room ran as smoothly and as efficiently as did the turbines at that moment.

  And the turbines ran smoothly because of the previous labours of the Commander (E) – the sleepless vigilance which had watched over material and supplies, had read every engine-room log, had studied the temperatures of every bearing, the idiosyncrasies of every oil jet. There had been the endless desk-work, the reports written to the Admiralty (the strange gods of Whitehall whose motives had to be guessed, and who had to be propitiated by exact and complicated paper ceremonial, but who, once propitiated, were lavish like the savage rain gods of Africa), the statistics to be gathered and studied, the plans that had to be made against future contingencies. In time of war a light cruiser repairs and reconditions when she can and not when she should; and the Commander (E) had had to use forethought, and had had to display prompt decision, deciding what should be done, what opportunities snatched at, what might safely be postponed, anticipating future needs, doing today what would have to be done anyway during the next two weeks, leaving until some uncovenanted future doing the things which were not immediately essential.

  As a result of all this the Commander (E) had nothing to do now; everything was being done by itself. Even the Senior Engineer, Lieutenant (E) Charles Norton Bastwick, felt a lack of anything to do, and came lounging up to take his stand beside the Commander (E), hands behind him, feet apart, in the ‘at ease’ position; it would be some minutes before he would once more feel the urge to walk round again, reading gauges and thermometers, and thereby debarring the Commander (E) from doing the same. It would only be if an emergency arose – if some near-miss shook up a condenser so that it leaked, or if a torpedo hit flooded a compartment, or some similar damage was inflicted – that they would have their hands full, improvising and extemporizing, toiling along with their men to keep the ship afloat and the propellers turning. And if the ship were to meet her death, if the sea were to come flooding in and the scalding steam – steam as hot as red-hot iron, steam that could roast meat to a frizzled brown – should pour into boiler-room and engine-room, and the order ‘abandon ship’ should be given, they would be the last of all to leave, the last to climb the treacherous iron ladders up to sea level and possible safet
y.

  The engine-room was hot, because the ship had been going twenty-seven knots for some time now. The thermometer on the forward bulkhead registered 105 degrees, but for an engine-room, and according to the ideas of men accustomed to working in one, that was not really hot. And the place was full of noise, the high-pitched note of the turbines dominating everything – a curious noise, in its way an unobtrusive noise, which sounded as if it did not want to call attention to itself, the loudest whisper one could possibly imagine. The ears of a newcomer to the engine-room would be filled with it, all the same, so that he could hear nothing else. Only after long experience would he grow so accustomed to the noise that he could distinguish other noises through it, and hear human voices speaking at their normal pitch. Until that should come about he would see lips move and not be able to understand a word.

  Bastwick and the Commander (E) were aware that above them, on the surface of the sea some sort of action was taking place. All through the forenoon they had heard the four-inch and the Oerlikons and the pompoms firing in savage bursts, and they had known that the convoy and escort were under aerial attack; but then the guns fell silent over their heads, and food had been brought to them, and there had been a brief moment of tranquillity. But then the bridge had rung down for twenty-seven knots, and they had had to switch over from the cruising turbines to the main engines (that blessed fluid flywheel which made the changeover so rapid and easy!) and the ship had begun rapid manoeuvring. Since then course had been altered so often that it was hard to reconstruct the situation in the mind. And once the ship had rolled and quivered to an explosion close alongside – God only knew what that was, for not a gun had been fired in the ship since the morning.

  The squeal of the bosun’s pipe suddenly made itself heard through the loudspeaker in the engine-room, attracting everyone’s attention to Jerningham’s voice which followed it. ‘We’ve got the Eyety navy in front of us… now we’re going to see if the battleships’ll run too…‘ Jerningham’s voice came to an end, but the Commander (E) and Bastwick still stood at ease on the iron grating, unmoved and unmoving. At any moment a fifteen-inch shell might come crashing through the deck above them, to burst in the engine-room and rend the ship apart while dashing them to atoms. Around them and beneath them a thousand-odd tons of fuel oil awaited the chance to burst into flame and burn them like ants in a furnace. A hundred tons of high explosive, forward and aft, needed only to be touched off.