The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  Evans had arrived at this deplorable situation by a fatal process of enterprise. He was not in the least good-looking; it was just that he could never take ‘No’ for an answer.

  But recently there had been a new and more serious development. Just before Compass Rose had sailed, the two official ‘wives’ had found out about each other: the ship had in fact only just cleared harbour in time for him to escape. But he could guess what would happen now. The wives would combine against the other women, and rout them: they would then combine again, this time against himself. He saw himself in the police court for breach-of-promise, in the dock for seduction, in prison for debt, in jail for bigamy: he could imagine no future that was not black and complicated, and no way out of it, of any sort.

  When, towards three o’clock in the morning, the time came for him to fight for his life against the cold, he felt only lassitude and despair. It seemed to him, in a moment of insight, that he had had a good run – too good a run to continue indefinitely – and that the moment had come for him to pay for it. If he did not pay for it now – in the darkness, in the cold oily water, in private – then he would have to meet a much harsher reckoning when he got home.

  He did not exactly surrender to the sea, but he stopped caring much whether he lived or died; and on this night, an ambiguous will was not enough. Evans did not struggle for the favour of life with anything like the requisite desperation; and that potent region of his body which had got him into the most trouble seemed, curiously, the least determined of all in this final wooing. Indeed, the swift chill spreading from his loins was like a derisive snub from headquarters; as if life itself were somehow, for the first and last time, shaking its head and crossing its legs.

  Morell died, as it happened, in French, which was his grandmother’s tongue: and he died, as he had lately lived, alone. He had spent much of the bitter night outside the main cluster of survivors, floating motionless in his kapok life jacket, watching the bobbing red lights, listening to the sounds of men in terror and despair. As so often during the past, he felt aloof from what was going on around him; it did not seem to be a party which one was really required to join – death would find him here, thirty yards off, if death were coming for him, and in the meantime the remnant of his life was still a private matter.

  He thought a great deal about Elaine: his thoughts of her lasted as he himself did, till nearly daylight. But there came a time, towards five o’clock, when his cold body and his tired brain seemed to compass a full circle and meet at the same point of futility and exhaustion. He saw now that he had been utterly foolish, where Elaine was concerned: foolish, and ineffective. He had run an antic course of protest and persuasion: latterly he had behaved like any harassed stage husband, stalking the boards in some grotesque mask of cuckoldry, while the lovers peeped from the wings and winked at the huge audience. Nothing he had done, he realised now, had served any useful purpose: no words, no appeals, no protests could ever have had an ounce of weight. Elaine either loved him or did not, wanted him or could do without, remained faithful or betrayed him. If her love were strong enough, she would stay his: if not, he could not recall her, could not talk her into love again.

  It was, of course, now crystal clear that for a long time she had not given a finger snap for him, one way or the other.

  The bleak thought brought a bleaker chill to his body, a fatal hesitation in the tide of life. A long time passed, with no more thoughts at all, and when he woke to this he realised that it was the onset of sleep, and of death. It did not matter now. With calm despair, he stirred himself to sum up what was in his mind, what was in his life. It took him a long and labouring time; but presently he muttered, aloud: ‘Il y en a toujours l’un qui baise, et l’un qui tourne la joue.’

  He put his head on one side, as if considering whether this could be improved on. No improvement offered itself, and his slow thoughts petered to nothing again; but his head stayed where it was, and presently the angle of inquiry became the congealing angle of death.

  Some – a few – did not die: Lieutenant-Commander Ericson, Lieutenant Lockhart, Leading-Radar Mechanic Sellars, Sick Berth Attendant Crowther, Sub-Lieutenant Ferraby, Petty Officer Phillips, Leading-Stoker Gracey, Stoker Grey, Stoker Spurway, Telegraphist Widdowes, Ordinary-Seaman Tewson. Eleven men, on the two rafts; no others were left alive by morning.

  It reminded Lockhart of the way a party ashore gradually thinned out and died away, as time and quarrelling and stupor and sleepiness took their toll. At one stage it had been almost a manageable affair: the two Carleys, with their load of a dozen men each and their cluster of hangers-on, had paddled towards each other across the oily heaving sea, and he had taken some kind of rough roll-call, and found that there were over thirty men still alive. But that had been a lot earlier on, when the party was a comparative success . . . As the long endless night progressed, men slipped out of life without warning, shivering and freezing to death almost between sentences: the strict account of dead and living got out of hand, lost its authority and became meaningless. Indeed, the score was hardly worth the keeping, when within a little while – unless the night ended and the sun came up to warm them – it might add up to total disaster.

  On the rafts, in the whispering misery of the night that would not end, men were either voices or silences: if they were silences for too many minutes, it meant that they need no longer be counted in, and their places might be taken by others who still had a margin of life and warmth in their bodies.

  ‘Christ, it’s cold . . .’

  ‘How far away was the convoy?’

  ‘About thirty miles.’

  ‘Shorty . . .’

  ‘Did anyone see Jameson?’

  ‘He was in the fo’c’sle.’

  ‘None of them got out.’

  ‘Lucky bastards . . . Better than this, any road.’

  ‘We’ve got a chance still.’

  ‘It’s getting lighter.’

  ‘That’s the moon.’

  ‘Shorty . . . Wake up . . .’

  ‘She must’ve gone down inside of five minutes.’

  ‘Like Sorrel.’

  ‘Thirty miles off, they should have got us on the radar.’

  ‘If they were watching out properly.’

  ‘Who was stern escort?’

  ‘Trefoil.’

  ‘Shorty . . .’

  ‘How many on the other raft?’

  ‘Same as us, I reckon.’

  ‘Christ, it’s cold.’

  ‘Wind’s getting up, too.’

  ‘I’d like to meet the bastard that put us here.’

  ‘Once is enough for me.’

  ‘Shorty . . . What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Must be pretty near Iceland.’

  ‘We don’t need telling that.’

  ‘Trefoil’s all right. They ought to have seen us on the radar.’

  ‘Not with some half-asleep sod of an operator on watch.’

  ‘Shorty . . .’

  ‘Stop saying that . . . ! Can’t you see he’s finished?’

  ‘But he was talking to me.’

  ‘That was an hour ago, you dope.’

  ‘Wilson’s dead, sir.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes. Stone cold.’

  ‘Tip him over, then . . . Who’s coming up next?’

  ‘Any more for the Skylark?’

  ‘What’s the use? It’s no warmer up on the raft.’

  ‘Christ, it’s cold . . .’

  At one point during the night, the thin crescent moon came through the ragged clouds, and illuminated for a few moments the desperate scene below. It shone on a waste of water, growing choppy with the biting wind: it shone on the silhouettes of men hunched together on the rafts, and the shadows of men clinging to them, and the blurred outlines of men in the outer ring, where the corpses wallowed and heaved, and the red lights burned and burned aimlessly on the breasts of those who, hours before, had switched them on in hope and confidence. For a fe
w minutes the moon put this cold sheen upon the face of the water, and upon the foreheads of the men whose heads were still upright; and then it withdrew, veiling itself abruptly as if, in pity and amazement, it had seen enough, and knew that men in this extremity deserved only the decent mercy of darkness.

  Ferraby did not die: but towards dawn it seemed to him that he did die, as he held Rose, the young signalman, in his arms, and Rose died for him. Throughout the night Rose had been sitting next to him on the raft, and sometimes they had talked and sometimes fallen silent: it had recalled that other night of long ago, their first night at sea, when he and Rose had chatted to each other and, urged on by the darkness and loneliness of their new surroundings, had drawn close together. Now the need for closeness was more compelling still, and they had turned to each other again, in an unspoken hunger for comfort, so young and unashamed that presently they found that they were holding hands . . . But in the end Rose had fallen silent, and had not answered his questions, and had sagged against him as if he had gone to sleep: Ferraby had put his arm round him and, when he slipped down farther still, had held him on his knees.

  After waiting, afraid to put it to the test, he said: ‘Are you all right, Rose?’ There was no answer. He bent down and touched the face that was close under his own. By some instinct of compassion, it was with his lips that he touched it, and his lips came away icy and trembling. Now he was alone . . . The tears ran down Ferraby’s cheeks, and fell on the open upturned eyes. In mourning and in mortal fear, he sat on, with the cold stiffening body of his friend like a dead child under his heart.

  Lockhart did not die, though many times during that night there seemed to him little reason why this should be so. He had spent most of the dark hours in the water alongside Number Two Carley, of which he was in charge: only towards morning when there was room and to spare, did he climb on to it. From this slightly higher vantage point he looked round him, and felt the cold and smelt the oil, and saw the other raft nearby, and the troubled water in between; and he pondered the dark shadows which were dead men, and the clouds racing across the sky, and the single star overhead, and the sound of the bitter wind; and then, with all this to daunt him and drain him of hope, he took a last grip on himself, and on the handful of men on the raft, and set himself to stay alive till daylight, and to take them along with him.

  He made them sing, he made them move their arms and legs, he made them talk, he made them keep awake. He slapped their faces, he kicked them, he rocked the raft till they were forced to rouse themselves and cling on: he dug deep into his repertoire of filthy stories and produced a selection so pointless and so disgusting that he would have blushed to tell them, if the extra blood had been available. He made them act ‘Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree’, and play guessing games: he roused Ferraby from his dejected silence, and made him repeat all the poetry he knew: he imitated all the characters of ITMA, and forced the others to join in. He set them to paddling the raft round in circles, and singing the ‘Volga Boatmen’: recalling a childhood game, he divided them into three parties, and detailed them to shout ‘Russia’, ‘Prussia’, and ‘Austria’, at the same moment – a manoeuvre designed to sound like a giant and appropriate sneeze . . . The men on his raft loathed him, and the sound of his voice, and his appalling optimism: they cursed him openly, and he answered them back in the same language, and promised them a liberal dose of detention as soon as they got back to harbour.

  For all this, he drew on an unknown reserve of strength and energy which now came to his rescue. When he climbed out of the water, he had felt miserably stiff and cold: the wild and foolish activity, the clownish antics, soon restored him, and some of it communicated itself to some of the men with him, and some of them caught the point of it and became foolish and clownish and energetic in their turn, and so some of them saved their lives.

  Sellars, Crowther, Gracey, and Tewson did not die. They were on Number Two Carley with Lockhart and Ferraby, and they were all that were left alive by morning, despite these frenzied efforts to keep at bay the lure and the sweetness of sleep. It was Tewson’s first ship, and his first voyage: he was a cheerful young Cockney, and now and again during the night he had made them laugh by asking cheekily: ‘Does this sort of thing happen every trip?’ It was a pretty small joke, but (as Lockhart realised) it was the sort of contribution they had to have . . . There were other contributions: Sellars sang an interminable version of ‘The Harlot of Jerusalem’, Crowther (the sick berth attendant who had been a vet) imitated animal noises, Gracey gave an exhibition of shadow-boxing which nearly overturned the raft. They did, in fact, the best they could; and their best was just good enough to save their lives.

  Phillips, Grey, Spurway, and Widdowes did not die. They were the survivors of Number One Carley, with the Captain; and they owed their lives to him. Ericson, like Lockhart, had realised that sleep had to be fought continuously and relentlessly if anyone were to be left alive in the morning: he had therefore spent the greater part of the night putting the men on his raft through an examination for their next higher rating. He made a round game of it, half-serious, half-childish: he asked each man upwards of thirty questions: if the answer were correct all the others had to clap, if not, they had to boo at the tops of their voices, and the culprit had to perform some vigorous kind of forfeit . . . His authority carried many of the men along for several hours: it was only towards dawn, when he felt his own brain lagging with the effort of concentration, that the competitors began to thin out, and the clapping and shouting to fade to a ghostly mutter of sound: to a moaning like the wind, and a rustling like the cold waves curling and slopping against the raft, the waves that trustfully waited to swallow them all.

  The Captain did not die: it was as if, after Compass Rose went down, he had nothing left to die with. The night’s ‘examination’ effort had been necessary, and so he had made it, automatically – but only as the Captain, in charge of a raftful of men who had always been owed his utmost care and skill: the effort had had no part of his heart in it. That heart seemed to have shrivelled, in the few terrible minutes between the striking of his ship, and her sinking: he had loved Compass Rose, not sentimentally, but with the pride and the strong attachment which the past three years had inevitably brought, and to see her thus contemptuously destroyed before his eyes had been an appalling shock. There was no word and no reaction appropriate to this wicked night: it drained him of all feeling. But still he had not died, because he was forty-seven, and a sailor, and tough and strong, and he understood – though now he hated – the sea.

  All his men had longed for daylight: Ericson merely noted that it was now at hand, and that the poor remnants of his crew might yet survive. When the first grey light from the eastward began to creep across the water, he roused himself, and his men, and set them to paddling towards the other raft, which had drifted a full mile away. The light, gaining in strength, seeped round them as if borne by the bitter wind itself, and fell without pity upon the terrible pale sea, and the great streaks of oil, and the floating bundles that had been living men. As the two rafts drew together, the figures on them waved to each other, jerkily, like people who could scarcely believe that they were not alone: when they were within earshot, there was a croaking hail from a man on Lockhart’s raft, and Phillips, on the Captain’s, made a vague noise in his throat in reply.

  No one said anything more until the rafts met, and touched; and then they all looked at each other, in horror and in fear.

  The two rafts were much alike. On each of them was the same handful of filthy oil-soaked men who still sat upright, while other men lay still in their arms or sprawled like dogs at their feet. Round them, in the water, were the same attendant figures – a horrifying fringe of bobbing corpses, with their meaningless faces blank to the sky and their hands frozen to the ratlines.

  Between the dead and the living was no sharp dividing line. The men upright on the rafts seemed to blur with the dead men they nursed, and with the derelict men in
the water, as part of the same vague and pitiful design.

  Ericson counted the figures still alive on the other Carley. There were four of them, and Lockhart and Ferraby: they had the same fearful aspect as the men on his own raft: blackened, shivering, their cheeks and temples sunken with the cold, their limbs bloodless; men who, escaping death during the dark hours, still crouched stricken in its shadow when morning came. And the whole total was eleven . . . He rubbed his hand across his frozen lips, and cleared his throat, and said: ‘Well, Number One . . .’

  ‘Well, sir . . .’

  Lockhart stared back at Ericson for a moment, and then looked away. There could be nothing more, nothing to ease the unbearable moment.

  The wind blew chill in their faces, the water slopped and broke in small ice-cold waves against the rafts, the harnessed fringe of dead men swayed like dancers. The sun was coming up now, to add dreadful detail: it showed the rafts, horrible in themselves, to be only single items in a whole waste of cruel water, on which countless bodies rolled and laboured amid countless bits of wreckage, adrift under the bleak sky. All round them, on the oily, fouled surface, the wretched flotsam, all that was left of Compass Rose, hurt and shamed the eye.

  The picture of the year, thought Lockhart: ‘Morning, with Corpses.’

  So Viperous found them.

  PART FIVE

  1943: The Moment of Balance

  1

  Three out of the fourteen mirrors that lined the walls of the smoothest bar in London gave Lockhart three versions of himself to choose from. There was the looking-straight-at, and the looking-sideways-to-the-right, and the looking-sideways-to-the-left: having nothing better to do, while he waited for Ericson to keep their midday appointment, he studied, with a certain speculative interest, these three different aspects of the lean young naval officer relaxing from the fatigues of active service. The uniform was immaculate: the face was thin, but not without a significant determination: the smudges under the eyes were an understandable tribute to the rigours of the past . . . Against the background of this enormously sophisticated room, with its thick carpet, shiny furniture, and general air of luxury, the face and figure were perhaps a trifle on the functional side: though there were other officers, from all three services, lined up at the bar or seated at the flanking tables, they were hardly warlike – in fact they looked as though they had been sitting where they were since the beginning of hostilities; and the women they escorted had, to an even greater degree, this same air of permanent availability. But he did not appear wholly out of place, Lockhart decided; if he could not attain the easy self-confidence of the habitués, at least he brought to his corner of the room an authoritative look, a dark blue consequence which matched the carpet. And one more pink gin would come near to putting him in the habitué class, in any case . . . He glanced around him.