Decoy

by Dudley Pope

  ‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me. Heinrich might be a born killer whose vocation is sinking enemy ships and bumping off survivors, but he’ll probably be the only such man on board. It’s more likely that Heinrich has finally learned he can live without a Knight’s Cross and the Führer’s embrace: he comes up to periscope depth every hour or so in daylight, takes a look round, and goes back to a hundred feet where he doesn’t feel the swell waves.

  ‘He doesn’t get any dirty looks from his lieutenants, either. The sub-lieutenant might still be inexperienced enough to be breathing fire and Nazi brimstone, but the first depth-charging will cool him off. I’m only saying, really, that I reckon most of the Heinrichs of this world are doing their duty but no more. They know that the Tommies have learned a few tricks about escorting convoys, so the days of easy killings are gone for good. They know they’ll never be a new Schepke, or a Kretschmer.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The slice of bread passed along by Sergeant Keeler tasted delicious, taking away the greasiness left by the meat, but Ned’s mouth felt dry and salty. Every dam’ thing was salty – his eyelids, lips, hands: rubbing an itching eyelid resulted in a sharp sting as encrusted salt grains caught the eyeball.

  Bobbing around this blustery and cold sea in a lifeboat, Ned thought to himself, seems far removed from the bold talk in the ASIU. He took a dipper of water held out to him by Keeler. A dipper a day keeps the doctor away. They had plenty of water, in addition to the two wooden breakers, but it was so cold they were not losing it by perspiration and did not need so much. Dipper – an odd word, but it certainly described the narrow cylinder of metal, closed at one end and with a line secured at the open end so that it could be dipped into the small barrel, quaintly called a breaker. A memory stirred…was not ‘breaker’ a corruption of the Spanish word for a cask, barrica? Why the blasted thing was not called a keg he did not know.

  As he handed the dipper back to Keeler, slowing swilling the small ration round his mouth as a portly cardinal would savour a rare wine, spray hit him in the face and, as he swallowed the fresh water, the salt trickled inside his jacket and soaked down his spine. His neck was becoming sore from the chafing and his shirt collar did little more than lodge round his neck after he pulled out the stud. Ironically, the fact that he wore a shirt and tie might matter on a calm day, when wearing it was no inconvenience: but it certainly did not matter in this weather, when collar, tie, coat with the four gold stripes and diamond of the master of a merchant ship were hidden under a duffel.

  The Croupier said unexpectedly: ‘Thank God for duffel coats.’

  ‘Wrong chap,’ Jemmy growled. ‘They’re Spanish.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ the Croupier exclaimed. ‘Did Ferdinand and Isabella give Columbus one to wear on his first voyage to the New World?’

  ‘They might well have,’ Jemmy retorted. ‘It started life as a huntsman’s coat in Brabant – which, I am sure you don’t know, was a Spanish province in what is now Belgium – and gets its name from the town of Duffel.’

  ‘Coo!’ the Croupier said in mock amazement. ‘And to what do you owe this erudition?’

  ‘Reading guide books. I was taken to Belgium on holiday as a child. Pouring with rain, no toys in the bloody hotel, father in a temper – I retreated and read a guide book. Hence Duffel, in Brabant.’

  ‘And wet duffels, as in lifeboats,’ said the Croupier and in the few moments before he drifted into unsettled sleep Ned remembered his earlier thought that he hoped the inventor of the coat had become a millionaire.

  Daybreak on the third day confirmed what they had felt and hoped during the dark hours of the night: the weather was improving. The heavy, grey nimbus cloud had lifted; patches of pale sky appeared fleetingly, like a teasing girl at a window. The sea was slowly easing, freed from the urgent thrusting of the previous week’s strong winds.

  The oars had been shipped; they were lashed down along the centre-line of the boat, which drifted like a large piece of flotsam, sometimes rolling heavily as it twisted beam-on to the waves, sometimes pitching.

  As Ned watched the men eating what passed for breakfast (the last of the bread and meat from the City of Norwich, followed by sections of concentrated chocolate from the lifeboat rations, and washed down by a dipper of water), he took stock. All the men needed a good shave: the bristling chins made them look like a gang of cut-throats, or maybe a guerrilla band operating in the mountains, busily blowing up bridges and generally irking the enemy. For three days their only rest had been sleeping where they sat, in sodden clothes. But they were no longer numbed by the cold. It had not become warmer, but after the first day and night the cold no longer soaked into their bodies and occupied all their thoughts. They were still cold, but they accepted it as though it was normal, and few could really remember what it was like to be pleasantly warm. Ned found himself trying to recall life in the Tropics: wearing white shorts and shirt, white cap cover and epaulettes and cursing them all because they were too hot now seemed an absurd reaction. In fact the phrase ‘too hot’ was absurd: nothing could be too hot. In the past he had complained of a cup of tea or coffee being ‘too hot’. Just let them try to serve it too hot now! Anyway, that was the first problem overcome, the cold.

  The next was morale. The third and fourth, hunger and thirst, would come later, but morale was good. Not just good but almost absurdly good. Even though wet, cold and tired the men were cheerful, teasing each other as if they were in Chatham barracks, making private jokes, swapping their slices of meat because some preferred a fatty piece, others wanted lean.

  Their morale was high because…? An interesting point. They were trained to kill effectively and usually silently – not skills that helped you keep cheerful in a lifeboat. None of them came from the Marines, a corps famous for its comradeship, and ten were RN petty officers and seamen, yet the strongest comradeship did not help you keep dry and warm, or stop you getting cold and wet. The officers – yes, Ned admitted he was lucky. Both Jemmy and the Croupier were as much ‘at home’ in the boat as Yon, who although a newcomer fitted in perfectly with the ASIU trio.

  How would survivors from a torpedoed merchant ship be feeling three days after they had abandoned her in a near-gale? Well, it would take a couple of days to get over the shock – more for the nervous or imaginative. Not the incapacitating white-faced, pain-deadening shock from being wounded, but the dazed, almost numbing feeling after discovering that what cannot happen has just happened: that one’s ship is not immune, but like other ships in the convoy she can be torpedoed, and indeed just has been.

  Real survivors would be rowing, and several of them would be imagining the time before the hit: when that periscope was watching in the darkness, unseen by them, but seeing. The German captain at the periscope would have been calling ranges and bearings and speeds, and other men would have been calculating the speed of the target (their ship) and the number of degrees the torpedo would have to be ‘aimed off’ to intercept the ship at some point along her course. That thought alone, that an unseen hunter had been watching from the darkness, had aimed and fired and hit, could leave men lethargic from this particular form of battle shock.

  Purpose – that was important, too. A genuine survivor getting into a lifeboat had only one hope, or purpose: to be picked up. Yet he knew the odds were against him. For a start there was the Admiralty order that no ship in the convoy was allowed to stop to pick up survivors. That order had been accepted by the Merchant Navy because it made good sense: with a pack of, say, a dozen U-boats attacking a convoy (and by today’s standards that would be a small pack), an individual U-boat could, and often did, torpedo one ship and then wait for the next astern in the column to stop to pick up survivors. The second ship had to stop almost alongside the victim – providing the U-boat with a second target: a stopped sitting duck needing only a single torpedo to bring the score to two.

  So the survivors now sat in
their lifeboat and waited. Did they hope or did they despair? Probably half of them despaired and half hoped, when the weather was bad. The important point was that they did not know whether or not they would ever be picked up – and fear, Ned knew only too well, is not knowing. Once you know for certain one way or the other, fear usually disappears. Knowing for sure that you were going to die did not mean you danced and cheered, but it gave life some certainty, if only the certainty that circumstances had put a term on it, and helped most men to keep up a brave face. But a survivor in a lifeboat was never certain until he was either rescued or eventually lost consciousness from exposure, hunger, thirst or cold, or a combination of them all. Thus, from the time he found himself in a lifeboat, a survivor was really in a state of shocked apprehension. He might laugh and joke to keep up the spirits of his shipmates, but beneath it all he knew his chances of rescue were low.

  What about his own men, now hunched on their thwarts, some taking off their duffels like bears shredding their furs, in the hope that their clothes beneath would start to dry out? First of all, they had not suffered the shock of a torpedo sinking their ship, so they still felt invulnerable. And they were in the lifeboat for a reason they knew all about and for which they had been trained, so knowing that, they had no reason for fear. No shock, no fear, just a few uncomfortable days to be endured, and which were probably preferable to conditions in their early commando training, which was designed to weed out the men who were tough from the men who thought they were.

  Two weeks of this, and then if nothing had happened, they’d open the special suitcase that contained a wireless already tuned in to 500 metres, the distress frequency, and start calling every hour on the hour. A corvette at sea and specially detailed for the task would be listening and, all being well, would find them. All being well. If there was not another gale lasting a week, and if the corvette left Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the appointed time. And if her wireless was working properly and her operators were listening all the time and not looking through copies of Men Only, or Razzle, or playing uckers. Why the Navy had taken to ludo, renaming it, he did not know. What was apparently a mild dice-and-counters game for children brought out the worst in adults on the Navy’s messdecks.

  ‘You know,’ Jemmy said suddenly, in a conversational tone of voice, ‘I went back to my old school just before we left.’

  ‘Did you?’ Ned responded, knowing that the series of violent twitches showed that whatever Jemmy had to say was important to him.

  ‘Yes. The headmaster wanted me to give a talk to the boys, and the Admiralty loved it. Submarine ace stuff all makes good propaganda, and we’ll eventually need these kids, the way this war is dragging out.’

  ‘And they cheered the hero home from the wars, eh?’

  ‘Yes, and it was all very embarrassing. But I told ’em a few tales about some of the Med operations. If I could have signed ’em on then and there the whole school would have volunteered for submarine service.’

  ‘Bit young, though.’

  ‘It’s a young man’s game. You’re old at thirty. Twenty-five is middle-aged. Twenty is good.’ He twitched again and added gloomily: ‘I reckon about sixteen is ideal. Plenty of dash and fire and you think you’re immortal.’

  ‘What,’ Ned enquired, ‘brings on this bout of bullshit and misery?’

  ‘Oh, yes, well, in the assembly hall, where the whole school starts off the day with prayers, a hymn, and the headmaster’s announcements, there’s a large wooden panel, with the school’s crest carved at the top. In the middle of the panel are three columns of the names of all the school old boys who were killed in the Great War. I remember as a kid I used to read them, while the headmaster said the prayer, trying to picture what they looked like. I remember I visualized them as being as old as sixth formers.’

  Jemmy stopped, having clearly slipped back in time, his eyes dull as he looked unseeingly across the toppling waves.

  ‘Yes,’ he said suddenly. ‘the headmaster was the same chap that used to give me the whack – six whacks, rather; he always awarded them in half-dozens – every week. He’d retired, then come back when the new headmaster that replaced him went off into the Army for this war.

  ‘What was I rattling on about? Oh yes, the war memorial. There were sixty-three names on it. Three were the same, brothers, all in the same battalion, all killed on the Somme. There were four pairs of brothers.’ He paused a moment. ‘My own family’s surname was up there three times – my father, in the RN, one uncle in the Royal Flying Corps, and the other a soldier who won a posthumous DSO commanding his battalion at Gallipoli. He raised the battalion as a territorial unit, and took it into action. Must have been gratifying.’

  Ned nodded, and noticed that the Croupier and Sergeant Keeler were listening.

  ‘Sixty-three names,’ Jemmy repeated. ‘Lot for such a small school. Mostly Army of course: when you think we lost a million and a half in the trenches. That’s why we’re so short of leaders in their forties and fifties today: the chaps that should be leading are lying in all those great war cemeteries.

  ‘Then the headmaster showed me a list of the chaps already killed in this war. Seventy-eight. Nine of them were from my class. Made me feel guilty to be still alive. The eerie thing was that in bed that night, and just before I went to sleep, I found I could remember the names of everyone in my class, and in alphabetical order…’

  ‘Most of us can,’ Ned said, ‘and as you recite them to yourself you see them as the kids they were, and then you remember the ones that have been killed. That spotty little chap you never liked was a fighter pilot, killed in the Battle of Britain; the fellow who was captain of the cricket team and bowled faster than cannon balls died at Dunkirk, covering his men with a Bren gun as they waded out to a cabin cruiser brought to the beaches by a drunken yachtsman.’

  ‘What you’re saying is that I’m not telling an unusual story, eh?’

  As Ned nodded, Sergeant Keeler coughed and said: ‘Beggin’ yer pardon, sir, it’s the officers.’

  A startled Ned raised his eyebrows. ‘Not all the chaps from my school who were killed in the Great War were officers.’

  ‘Oh no, sir, I didn’t mean that. This war’s what I’m talking about. More officers and more of them get killed. Take the RAF blokes. When the war began only the pilot and perhaps the navigator of a bomber was commissioned: the rest were sergeants.

  ‘Then, as the Germans shot down more and more of our bombers and the aircrews were taken prisoner, so they started commissioning the sergeants so they’d get better treatment. So all those bombers and fighters shot down – it’s officers what get the chop. Not that being commissioned means much if you’re dead. But the Navy’s the same. More small boats – take Coastal Forces. Blow one up and you’ve knocked off three officers, and a mid, and six or eight seamen. Twenty-five per cent officers. All mounts up. In the last war it was the Army slugging it out in the mud of the trenches. This time the Army, apart from Dunkirk, can only get at the Jerries in the Western Desert. S’pect they’ve heavy casualties to come, but not so far. Hope I ’aven’t spoken out of turn.’

  ‘You’re quite right,’ Jemmy said. ‘Never thought of it like that.’

  ‘Yes, well sir, I expect your school provided more officers than mine, too. You got to know sums to get into the Air Force – if you want to fly, that is.’ He eyed the three officers who looked like three down-and-outs drinking meths. ‘And to get through Dartmouth, too. And Keyham,’ he added, nodding towards Yon in the bow.

  ‘If we win the war – when we win the war,’ the Croupier corrected himself, ‘it means in about thirty years’ time Britain is once again going to be short of leaders: all the good ones will have been killed in this war, just like the last. I suppose that frightful little Aneurin Bevan, who keeps attacking Churchill, and places like the Ministry of Fuel and Power are riddled with some pretty weird chaps. They’l
l come out after the war – T E Lawrence was right.’

  ‘Wait!’ Ned exclaimed. ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Introduction where he says “we were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for.” He says something about living many lives in those campaigns but “when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew…” Then that bitter phrase, “we stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”

  ‘But if we win, it’ll be very different this time. It won’t be “old men” creeping out, it’ll be the young men who have been hiding in reserved occupations in the ministries, reading Karl Marx or Fabian Society pamphlets. They’ll make damned sure that no one who was away achieving anything in the war will get a look in.’

  Ned stopped suddenly. A lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic was not the place to express contempt for the dodgers, nor criticize the weird crowd who had a firm grip on such curious organizations as the Army Education Corps, most of whose members were either incapable of coherent speech or were mousy men wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and nervously clutching Fabian pamphlets as though they were lucky charms.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said briskly, ‘mark the day!’

  Keeler slid a hand inside his duffel and brought out a heavy knife. He moved along the thwart and then twisted round to cut another notch alongside earlier ones.

  Ned reflected that the earliest calendars were probably notches cut on twigs, recording the passing of the day and the seasons, and perhaps some were specially marked, indicating the time for sowing certain seeds and reaping harvests. Oddly rural thoughts in a giant meadow of a sea.

  The next meal would be plain lifeboat rations. The three days’ extra sustaining food from the City of Norwich had gone. Assuming she too found good weather, she should be approaching Halifax, Nova Scotia, by now. Apart from a fondness for her officers and men, Ned had other grounds for hoping that she arrived safely: Captain Painter was to report where he had finally launched the lifeboat, well to the west of the anticipated position, so if the operation failed, the corvette would know roughly where to search at the end of the two weeks. Where – in which five hundred square miles – to begin looking!