by Herman Wouk
Jellybelly turned a bored, bleary glance at him. “Didn’t get it nowhere, sir. Navy system.”
“How about these?” Willie thrust the ledgers at Jellybelly. “Ever see them?”
The yeoman shrank away from the books, as though they were leprous. “Sir, that’s your job, not mine-”
“I know, I know-”
“Mr. Keefer, he tried half a dozen times to get me to log in that secret stuff. It’s against regulations for an enlisted man to-”
“All I want to know is, are these ledgers official, or what?” The sailor wrinkled his nose. “Official? Christ, that system would give any yeoman third class a hemorrhage. Mr. Funk, he invented it back in ’40. He give it to Mr. Anderson, he give it to Mr. Ferguson, he give it to Mr. Keefer.”
“Why didn’t they use the Navy system? It seems so much simpler-”
“Sir,” said the yeoman dryly, “don’t ask me why officers do anything. You wouldn’t like my answer.”
In the next weeks Willie overhauled his entire department. He installed standard Navy systems of filing and logging. He burned some sixty obsolete registered publications, and he sorted the rest into order, so that he could find any book in an instant. In this process he caught himself wondering often about Keefer. It became obvious that the novelist had wasted a fearful amount of time in communications. Willie remembered searches for letters or publications that had consumed whole afternoons, searches punctuated with a fire of Keefer’s sour wit about the Navy’s foul-ups. He remembered the communicator bending over the ledgers for hours, cursing. Willie knew that above all things the novelist prized time in which to write and read. He knew, too, that Keefer had the cleverest mind on the Caine. How, then, could this man have failed to see that he was defeating himself and blaming the Navy for his own mistakes? Willie began to look at Keefer with different eyes. The novelist’s wisdom seemed to tarnish a bit.
During the remaining time before the Kwajalein sortie Captain Queeg fell into a curious lassitude. He could be found at almost any hour of the day in his bunk, or at his desk in his underwear, playing with a jigsaw puzzle. He emerged only at night, when they were in port, to watch the movie on the forecastle. At sea, during rehearsal maneuvers, whole days passed when he was not seen on the bridge. He gave orders to the DOD’s through the speaking tube. The rasp of the captain’s buzzer became as common a sound on the bridge as the ping of the sound-search gear. He stopped coming to the wardroom for meals, and ate almost nothing but enormous quantities of ice cream with maple syrup, brought to his cabin on a tray.
The other officers imagined that Queeg was busy memorizing the documents of the operation, but Willie knew better. When he brought decodes to the captain’s cabin he never found Queeg studying any battle plans or books of tactics. His occupation was either sleeping, or eating ice cream, or reading a magazine, or simply lying on his back, staring with round eyes at the overhead. He acted, thought Willie, like a man trying to forget a terrible sorrow. The ensign guessed that perhaps Queeg had had a quarrel with his wife during the overhaul, or else had received bad news of some other kind in the flood of mail. It never crossed the ensign’s mind that the bad news might have been the operation order.
Willie’s attitude toward the coming battle was a mixture of excitement, faint alarm, and a very immediate pleasure at knowing the secret. There was something reassuring in the great bulk of the operation order, in the lengthy catalogue of ships that were to take part, in the very excess of dry detail which made the blurry gray sheets so hard to read. He felt, deep down, that he was pretty safe, venturing out against the Japs under the Navy’s wing.
On a bright warm January day, a horizon-spanning horde of ships swarmed out of the harbors of Hawaii, formed itself into a vast circular pattern, and set a course for Kwajalein.
The armada moved peacefully over the wastes of the sea, through quiet days and nights. There was no sign of the enemy; nothing but rolling waters, blue by day and black by night, an empty sky, and ships of war in every direction as far as the eye could see, steaming in a great majestic diagram under the stars and the sun. Radar, the ghostly measuring rod, spanning empty space accurately to within a few yards, made the preservation of the diagram a simple matter. This vast formation, so precise and rigid, yet so quick and fluid to change course or rearrange itself, a seagoing miracle surely beyond the dreams of Nelson himself, was maintained with careless ease by hundreds of officers of the deck, not one in ten of whom was a professional seaman: college boys, salesmen, schoolteachers, lawyers, clerks, writers, druggists, engineers, farmers, piano players-these were the young men who outperformed the veteran officers of the fleets of Nelson.
Willie Keith was a full-fledged officer of the deck now, and he took for granted all the mechanical aids that eased his task. He did not consider the work easy. He was enormously and continually impressed with his quick-won mastery of the sea, and with his military authority. He prowled the wheelhouse, lips compressed, chin high, forehead puckered in a squinting scowl, shoulders hunched forward, hands clenching the binoculars through which he frequently frowned at the horizon. Histrionics apart, he was a competent OOD. He quickly developed the impalpable nervous feelers, reaching from stem to stern of the ship, which are the main equipment of a conning officer. In five months on the bridge he had picked up the tricks of station keeping, the jargon of communications and reports, and the ceremonial pattern of the ship’s life. He knew when to order the boatswain’s mate to pipe sweepers, when to darken ship, when to call away cooks and bakers in the early morning, when to rouse the captain and when to allow him to sleep. He could gain or lose a few hundred yards by slight changes of rudder or engines, and could calculate course and speed to a new screening station in ten seconds by drawing a single pencil line on a maneuvering diagram. The dense blackness of a rain squall at midnight did not scare him; not while the radar scope picked out the task force for him in a neat pattern of green dots.
The Caine was placed on the right flank of the formation, in the inner anti-submarine screen. Two belts of destroyers surrounded the troop transports, carriers, cruisers, battleships, and landing craft. Each destroyer constantly searched a narrow cone of water for echoes, and the cones overlapped. No submarine could approach the formation without causing telltale pings aboard one of the destroyers. A single screen would have been enough; the double screen was an instance of the American taste for generous safety factors. The Caine was in a position abaft the beam of the guide, where an approach of a submarine was almost impossible, because the attacker would have been committed to a stern chase under water. The minesweeper was therefore a safety factor added to a safety factor. For an American man of war her combat role lacked something of the dash of the Bonhomme Richard attacking the Serapis. Nevertheless she was sailing into the waters of the foe, pinging. Had John Paul Jones been OOD instead of Willie Keith, he could have done no more.
As the attack force steamed slowly through the wheeling days and nights, life aboard the old minesweeper fell into a cycle that repeated with the circlings of the clock. It became more and more clear that a new pattern of living was hardening on the Caine, after the churning flux caused by the change of command.
One morning in Pearl Harbor, just before the sortie, Captain Queeg had seen some cigarette butts mashed on the deck. After excoriating the OOD he had gone to the ship’s office and dictated this document:
Ship’s Standing Order #6-44.
1. The main deck of this vessel will always be spotlessly clean.
2. Failure to comply will result in heavy disciplinary action for the entire crew.
P. F. QUEEG
The order was prominently posted. Next morning he found a cigarette butt in a scupper of the forecastle, and canceled all liberty for the crew. During the next couple of days the deck force kept the main deck constantly swept. As soon as the Caine sailed for Kwajalein the order was shelved, and the deck was as dirty as before, except at sweeping times; but one of the deck hands was detailed
to keep cleaning the small patch of the deck between the captain’s cabin, the bridge ladder, and the hatchway leading to the wardroom.
This was typical of the new order. The crew with its vast cunning had already charted most of the habits and pathways of the captain. He was moving now in a curious little circle of compliance that followed him like a spotlight, extending to the range of his eyes and ears; beyond that, the Caine remained the old Caine. Now and then the captain would make an unexpected sally out of the circle. A discordant hubbub would ensue, and Queeg’s disapproval would be crystallized on the spot into a new ship’s law. This fresh edict, whatever it might be, was carefully observed-within the circle of compliance; in the rest of the ship it was ignored. It was not a conscious conspiracy. Individual sailors of the Caine would have been surprised at such a description of life aboard their ship. Probably they would have denied its accuracy. The attitude of the crew toward Queeg varied from mild dislike, as a general thing, to poisonous hate in a few men who had run foul of him. He was not without partisans. Outside the circle of compliance life was easier, filthier, and more lawless than ever; anarchy, indeed, tempered only by the rough community rules of the sailors themselves and a certain respect for two or three officers, especially Maryk. There were sailors, those who enjoyed dirt or gambling or late sleeping, who pronounced Queeg the best skipper they had ever known, “just so’s you keep out of his sight.”
It was well known among the crew that Stilwell was the particular object of Queeg’s dislike. The gunner’s mate was suspended in an agony of worry about the letter that Maryk had sent to the Red Cross regarding his mother’s illness. No answer had come yet. The sailor was growing gaunt as the weeks slipped by and he waited for the ax to fall. Every watch he stood at the helm within range of Queeg was torture for him. The sailors who were against Queeg went out of their way to be friendly with the gunner’s mate, and tried to cheer him up; and so the opposition came to center around him. The rest of the crew avoided Stilwell. They feared that the captain’s hatred might spread out to include his cronies.
In the wardroom there were three distinct parties. One was Queeg himself, daily more frosty and secluded. One was Maryk, retreated into a stolid, humorless silence, maintaining whatever contact existed between the captain and his ship. The executive officer saw what the crew was doing. He was aware that it was his responsibility to enforce the captain’s rules; he was also aware that most of the rules were either impossible of enforcement on the overworked, overcrowded, rough-minded crew, or enforceable only at an unacceptable cost to the ship’s narrow margin of seaworthiness. He winked at the circle of compliance, and set himself the task of keeping the ship functioning adequately outside that circle.
A third party included all the other officers, with Keefer as ringleader. A strong open detestation of Queeg began to serve as a bond of affection among them, and they passed hours in sarcastic joking about him. The new officers, Jorgensen and Ducely, quickly absorbed the air of the wardroom and were soon in full cry after Queeg with the rest. Willie Keith was regarded as the captain’s pet, and was the target of much joking for it; and, in point of fact, Queeg was warmer and pleasanter in manner to Willie than to any of the others. But he joined vigorously in satirizing the captain. Maryk alone took no part in the ribaldry. He either kept silence or tried to defend Queeg, and if the jokes became too prolonged he would leave the wardroom.
This was the condition of the U.S.S. Caine when it crossed the mythical line on the broad sea, five days out of Pearl Harbor, and steamed into Japanese waters.
CHAPTER 20
The Yellow Stain
The evening before the fleet was due to arrive at Kwajalein, Willie had the eight-to-midnight watch. He observed an increased tension among the sailors on the bridge. Silence, even in the captain’s absence, hung heavily in the wheelhouse. The perpetual discussion of sex in the black radar shack, among ghostly faces lit by the dim green glow of the scopes, had not ceased; but it was sluggish, and dwelt mainly on venereal disease. The signal gang crouched on the flagbags over cups of rancid coffee, muttering.
There had been no official word passed that the ship would be at Kwajalein in the morning, but the crew had its intelligence agent in the quartermaster who solved the star sights each night with Maryk. They knew the distance from the objective as well as the captain.
Willie did not share the general gloom. His mood was buoyant and devilish. Within twelve hours he would be in battle; within twenty-four hours he would be a man who had risked his life for his country. He felt invulnerable. He was rolling toward an edge of danger, he knew, but it seemed an entertaining kind of danger, like a jump over a high hurdle on horseback. He was proud of his lack of fear, and this buoyed him yet more.
He alone, beside the captain, knew that the Caine was going to perform a hazardous mission at dawn. One of the top-secret guard-mail letters had contained new orders. The minesweeper was to shepherd a wave of attack boats from their transport to a line of departure only a thousand yards from the beach, fairly into the muzzles of the shore batteries; the reason being that correct navigation would be hard for the low-lying boats by themselves. Willie plumed himself on being in better spirits than the men though they were combat veterans and he wasn’t; though he knew of a great impending risk and they didn’t.
His optimism was really founded on a cunning estimate of his position (but a completely unconscious one) made by his viscera and nerves. He was not going to land on any beach; there was no risk of face-to-face encounter with stocky little yellow men brandishing bayonets. What confronted him was an increased likelihood of some crippling misfortune befalling the Caine, in the shape of a shell, a torpedo, or a mine. The odds in favor of his living through the next twenty-four hours had dropped from, say, a normal ten thousand to one to a smaller but still comfortable figure: seventy or eighty to one, maybe. So reasoned Willie’s nervous tissue; whereupon it sent up to his brain some stimulating fluid that produced the ensign’s glow of bravery.
The nerves of the crew made less cheerful calculations for a simple reason. The crew had seen the results of misfortunes of battle; ships burning red and yellow, ships sinking, men scrambling over dripping slanted hulls, men soaked in oil, men ripped bloody, and floating dead men. They were inclined to think less of the odds than of the disagreeable possibilities.
“Officer of the deck!” It was the voice of Queeg, resonating in the speaking tube from the charthouse. Surprised, Willie glanced at the dim phosphorescent clockface. Ten-thirty, time for the captain to be in his cabin. He stooped to the conical brass mouthpiece of the tube.
“Keith, aye aye.”
“Come in here, Willie.”
The captain, fully clothed, with his life jacket on, had crawled into the canvas bunk that hung over the navigator’s table. This picture flashed on Willie when he closed the door of the charthouse, automatically lighting the room with one red shaded bulb on the bulkhead. The air was foul with cigarette smoke. “How are things going, Willie?”
“Everything normal, sir.”
The captain rolled over on his side and peered at the ensign. His face was drawn and bristly in the red light. “You read my night orders?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Call me if there’s anything the least bit unusual, do you understand? Don’t worry about interrupting my beauty sleep. Call me.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
But the watch passed in the routine of pinging, zigzagging, and maintaining station. Harding stumbled up to him in the breezy gloom of the starboard wing at a quarter to twelve. “Ready to relieve you,” he said sadly, exhaling a faint fragrance of coffee.
“Well, forty miles to go, and still nothing.”
Willie hesitated before going below, and considered curling up in a corner of the main deck. Coming down the bridge ladder, he saw that half the crew had had the same idea. There were no corners left on the deck, and no very wide pathways for walking. The sight made Willie disdainful and bold. He went bel
ow, took off his clothes, and slipped between the sheets. Despite the hour, it felt queer to be in his bunk, somewhat as though he had fallen ill and taken to bed in the daytime. He was still congratulating himself on his hardihood when he fell asleep.
GHANG, ghang, ghang, ghang, ghang ...
The general alarm had not yet stopped ringing when he came bolting out on deck in his underwear, clutching shoes, socks, shirt, and trousers. He saw a calm sea, a starry black sky, and ships crisscrossing here and there in the melting formation. Sailors went thundering through the murky passageways and up and down ladders; no need to penalize any of them this time for not wearing helmet and life jacket! As Willie stepped into his pants the hatchway to the wardroom clanged shut behind him, and sailors of the forward repair party dogged it down hard. The ensign slipped his shoes on his naked feet and scrambled up the bridge ladder. The clock in the wheelhouse showed three-thirty. The little space was crowded with shadowy figures. Willie could hear the rasping of steel balls rubbed together. He took his life jacket and helmet from a hook and approached the stoop-shouldered form of Harding. “Ready to relieve you. What’s up?”
“Nothing. We’re there.” Harding pointed off the port bow and handed Willie the glasses. Willie saw, at the horizon, on the line between sea and sky, a thin irregular smudge, perhaps a fingernail wide. “Roi-Namur,” said Harding.
Tiny yellow flashes appeared along the smudge. Willie said, “What’s that?”
