Soldier, Sail North (1987)

by Pattinson, James

Vernon remembered the black women who came with baskets of fruit balanced upon their heads—oranges, tangerines, bananas, bread-fruit, pawpaws—luscious fruits at a farthing apiece. He remembered, too, the swimming-pool, with its warm, limpid water and the wire fence that kept out sharks and barracudas; he remembered the tiny green lizards rustling among the dead leaves under the citrus-trees, and the sun beating fiercely down upon the concrete fives court, where they played until the sweat poured from them. He had only to close his eyes and he could see again the white buildings glinting in the sun; he could see the Blue Mountains thick with tropical vegetation; he could see the surf creaming up on the long, white beaches; he could see the palm-trees and the black children fishing from the jetty’s end—and over it all the blessed, blessed shimmer of heat.

  Oh, God, he thought, to feel the warmth of the sun again! Oh, God, let me not die here; not here in the Arctic! Let me feel the warmth of the sun again before I die.

  And the hours of the watch dragged by upon their leaden feet, and the cold slid down from the Pole, and the northern lights flickered and Miller cursed. Miller’s hands were cold and his feet were cold; his whole body was cold and his heart seemed dead. So he stood, almost hidden beneath Balaclavas and duffel-coat, his shoulders hunched, his hands thrust into his pockets; so he stood, cursing softly and fluently, cursing the cold, cursing the wind, cursing the War; cursing everything that came into his mind to curse.

  And as Miller cursed and Vernon dreamed and Warby thought of home the convoy moved northward at five knots, and each hour brought it nearer the ice.

  When morning came there was no sun, only a cold grey light filtering through the unbroken roof of cloud. The wind had fallen and the sea was calm, scarcely a ripple disturbing its surface. From their tall platform the gunners looked towards the horizon, the almost indistinguishable meeting of sky and sea; and in whichever direction they looked they could see nothing but the ships of the convoy and their escorts: nothing else broke the surface of the water; nothing flew in the air; they were alone and unmolested. Yet, such was the awesome character of those desolate regions, this calm seemed but the presage of fearful things to come, so that each one went about his business with a sense of foreboding, and men spoke quietly, as though always listening; and their eyes moved restlessly, as though in search of a warning—some sign upon the waters or in the sky. But the day passed and no sign came, and as night closed upon the convoy, shutting it into its little, moving world, a light breeze sprang up astern and moved forward with them—a ghostly, nocturnal companion, bearing with it scuds of fine, pricking snow.

  Tomorrow, thought Payne, feeling the raw bite of cold in the middle of his back, tomorrow and the day after and the day after that—and we shall still be up here on the roof of the world. Five knots! Oh, God, what a bloody speed! A whole day and you shift less than a hundred and fifty miles. And zig-zagging at that. Jerry must find us; we’re so slow; he must find us. Five knots! Why a man could walk as fast. Five knots! If I ran along the deck from bows to stern I’d be going back faster than the blasted ship was taking me forward.

  Payne swung his arms for warmth, and moved round the confined circle of the gun-platform, his heavy leather sea-boots crunching on the cinders.

  Just like a damned great elephant, thought Ben Cowdrey. What a weight to carry about! Ought to keep him warm, though.

  Ben was suffering from wind-sores; his lips were cracked, and sometimes the cracks bled; it hurt him to smoke. He had tried smearing butter on them, but the butter was salt, and the salt had gone into the cracks. Cowdrey did not complain, but he longed for warmer weather. He remembered tropical nights when he had gone on watch clad in no more than a shirt and denims; he remembered cursing the heat in the Red Sea. Yet how could anyone ever curse the heat? It seemed unthinkable. After this he would never again complain of heat.

  “Ben,” said Bombardier Padgett, “slip down and see if the stove is all right.”

  “O.K., bom.”

  Cowdrey eased himself away from the gun and climbed over the steel protecting wall, only too glad to snatch a few minutes below and a chance to thaw his frozen limbs.

  “Don’t go to sleep down there,” said Padgett.

  “Bombardier! As if I would! Go to sleep! Oh, dear me!”

  “All right, all right. Get cracking.”

  Ben disappeared down the ladder, and the elephantine shape of Payne came drifting round the gun.

  “Quiet,” observed Payne. “Real quiet, ain’t it?”

  “You’re right.”

  “I bet there’s something brewing. Oh, Lord! I bet we’re due to cop a packet.”

  “You think too much,” said Padgett. “Personally, I like it quiet. When it’s quiet you know there’s nothing happening.”

  Payne pushed his Balaclava helmet up over his mouth, so that when he answered his voice came thick and muffled through the wool. “Yes, I know that, but all the same, you can’t help thinking that something is going to happen. P’raps it’s the northern lights; p’raps it’s the ice and snow; whatever it is, there’s something queer about these regions: it’s too far north, that’s what it is—too near the Pole. I’d rather do twenty Atlantic crossings than one of these Russian trips. Beats me why they want to send all this stuff to the Russkis; you’d think we could use it ourselves—and we wouldn’t lose half of it at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean neither.”

  “When you get to be Commander-in-Chief you’d better see about it,” said Padgett.

  “That I will,” said Payne, stamping his feet. “That I will.”

  Cowdrey had replenished the stove, had taken a few quick draws at the stump of a cigarette which he had found in his duffel-coat pocket, and, not being able to think of a valid reason for staying below any longer, had clambered once again up the iron ladder to the cold discomfort of the deck. Stumbling out into the open, he was just in time to see a vivid spearhead of flame shoot up from the level of the sea away on the port beam. Seconds later came the rumble of an explosion.

  Cowdrey stood with his hand on the ladder to the gun-platform, suddenly immobilized, his heart jumping, as he watched the flame growing bigger and bigger, lighting up the sky as if it were the sun rising.

  It’s one of the escorts, he thought. It couldn’t be anything else out there. We’re in the outside column; there aren’t any more merchant ships on our port. It must be a corvette or a destroyer; might even be a trawler.

  The flame was still growing, blood-red against the darkness of the night; but after the single initial explosion no sound had reached Cowdrey’s ears. The flame grew silently, a gigantic, semicircular glow reflected in the water and throwing into relief the raft hanging on the after rigging of the Golden Ray.

  Then the alarm-bells began to ring, and Cowdrey, waking from his stupor, grasped the ladder and climbed up on to the gun-platform. He heard Payne’s excited voice.

  “I told you it was too damned quiet; I told you something was brewing. I bet that sub was lying in wait. God, what a fire! That’ll melt the ice on her decks.”

  There were other gunners climbing out of the bowels of the ship, men roughly torn from sleep, not yet knowing what had happened, dragging on duffel-coats and helmets, shivering as the cold struck suddenly into their bones. Willis was the first to reach the gun-platform; nobody ever beat him to the jump; Ben used to say the sergeant slept with his eyes open.

  He spoke to Padgett—quietly, unexcitedly. “What happened?”

  “One of the escorts,” Padgett said. “Must have been torpedoed—no warning—nothing at all—just the flame suddenly leaping up.”

  Five minutes had passed since Cowdrey had come out on deck, and the flame on the port beam was still growing. The end came with startling rapidity; the flame burst upward and outward, carrying with it billowing masses of black smoke that cast grotesque shadows upon the fire. Then the rumble of the explosion—the final, shattering explosion—came rolling across the sea.

  “The magazine,” said Padgett; “the ma
gazine’s gone up.”

  In the morning there was a gap in the defences; a destroyer was missing. The convoy moved onward to the music of depth-charges, and sleep became a rarity.

  But the day and the night passed without further incident, and so they moved on into the third day. They were steaming along the edge of an ice-field when five German heavy destroyers came up over the southern horizon, and the defending warships moved out to meet them. And while the battle raged outside the ships of the convoy took refuge behind the glassy ramparts of the ice-field, thrusting their way through where no thin-plated destroyer could follow—through into an ice-surrounded lake of clear water. On that lake they stayed for three hours, steaming round and round, like ducks upon a pond, until it should be safe to break out and continue their journey.

  Many of the British destroyers were old and small; some were ex-Americans obtained in the Bermuda exchange, and easily distinguishable by their four funnels; but, old and small as they were, they drove off the German ships. Then the convoy came out of its retreat and proceeded on its way.

  On the fourth day a Focke-Wulf Kurier found them and began to fly round the convoy without coming within range of the guns. The gunners, standing to action stations, watched it, cursing their own impotence. For an hour it circled them—a cold, slow hour of watching and waiting; while the ships slid almost imperceptibly through the icy sea and the plane held them effortlessly within its sight, as though mocking their futile efforts to escape.

  Warby shook his fist at it in sudden rage. “You bastard! Come closer, you rotten bastard, and we’ll show you! Come closer, d’you hear? Come closer!”

  The others looked at Warby in surprise. It was so unlike the slow, phlegmatic countryman. There was a sense of shock also, a feeling that if Warby could act like this anything might happen; others might break down under the strain. They looked at him, but said nothing, and Warby stopped shaking his fist and fell silent, a little ashamed of himself. They were all silent.

  The Focke-Wulf had been with them for almost two hours. But for the shape, it might have been a Catalina or a Sunderland keeping watch for submarines. But the shape gave it menace, and it was a menace they could not shake off. They could only watch and plough on at their five knots, which was so pitiful a speed. And the Focke-Wulf, circling easily under the grey cloud-covering, now at the head of the convoy, now at the rear, was like a vulture waiting for a death.

  It’s like a nightmare, thought Vernon. You run as fast as you can, and you make no headway at all.

  At eight bells the galley-boy made his way aft and called up to the gunners the information that dinner was ready. The galley-boy was wearing a duffel-coat which at some time or other he had scrounged from a naval rating. When he threw his head back to call to the gunners on their high platform the hood of the coat fell back and left his head bare. He had a pale, pimply face and bad teeth; he was shivering, partly from cold, partly from nervousness; he was sixteen years old, and he had been six months at sea.

  “It’s scouse,” he shouted, “an’ spotted Dick for afters. Can you come and get it?”

  They were all hungry, and the thought of hot food was attractive. Sergeant Willis rang through to the bridge and asked for permission to send the men down for dinner, one watch at a time. Permission was given, and he sent Vernon, Miller, and Warby down first, because they had been on deck the longest. The remaining six stamped their feet, beat their hands, and watched the Focke-Wulf.

  “Round and round and round,” Payne grumbled. “It’s enough to make you dizzy.”

  Vernon had taken exactly one mouthful of food when the alarm-bells began ringing. A minute later he and Miller and Warby were again on the gun-platform, and the gun was beating out its restless tune as twenty Heinkel 111’s came in on a low-level torpedo attack.

  They shot down one Heinkel; they had that satisfaction. They saw the pilot climb out of the wreckage before it sank, and they saw him drift past, kept afloat by his life-jacket in the icy water. They saw his white face silhouetted against the dark sea; and now, robbed of his lethal weapon, his black aircraft, he seemed suddenly very helpless, very much alone—a piece of useless human flotsam caught upon the tide of war.

  He floated past in his life-jacket, his body wrapped about by the cruel waters of the Arctic Ocean, and his white face gazed up impotently at the grey ships he had come to sink. And from those ships men gazed back at him—watching without pity, since pity had been killed in them. They watched the white face with hate in their hearts, and as they watched an Oerlikon gun suddenly chattered and the face dissolved in pulp. And the convoy steamed on.

  But the s.s. Merryweather did not steam on with the other ships; the s.s. Merryweather would never steam on again. And Panton-Smith would keep an eye on the Golden Ray no more; for Panton-Smith was dead.

  The convoy fought fiercely for its life; it fought the Heinkels off with a bright spray of scarlet fire and bursting steel until they turned and ran for home. But in the night the U-boats pressed home their attack, and on the following day a dozen Junkers 88’s dive-bombed the ships. And still they fought, spending their nerves, their last reserves of strength, for the one purpose of clinging to that life which all had many a time cursed as futile. And at five knots the ships steamed on, crawling, like flies upon a globe, across the frozen roof of the world.

  “At this rate,” Payne said, “we shall be home at Christmas.”

  “Which Christmas?” asked Andrews.

  “Who cares!” said Padgett. “It would be good to sleep! Think of all the people who’re snug in bed at this minute; just think of it! And here we are freezing to death; and not an egg-cupful of sleep for four days. How much longer is it going to last?”

  That was what they all wondered. How much longer? How much longer could they endure it? How much longer would they be there to endure it? Ah, that was the great question that lurked behind each man’s weary eyes. By day and by night the ships were being picked off. When would it be their turn?

  The lame duck was still with them, and there were many who looked across at that tanker grinding through the seas on her patched-up engines with the thought that if she were gone it might be better for the others. For without the lame duck they would be able to increase speed—perhaps to double it; and so much less time would they have to live under the threat of bomb and torpedo. So every morning they looked across to the starboard column just to see if the tanker was still there; and always she was, ploughing on and holding them all down to their five knots. No one would have admitted that he wanted the tanker to be sunk; they did not go as far as that; but many a man watched the log-line trailing slackly from the taffrail of his own ship and turning lazily, lazily over as it registered the slow miles; and many a man thought: Lord, if it’s got to be any ship, why not the lame duck? But life is sweet, and the lame duck did not want to die.

  So they moved on into the sixth day—weary, unshaven, haggard men standing to the guns; men whose faces had become graved with deep lines in which the grime lay unheeded; men whose eyes were red and aching from the everlasting wind; whose lips were salt with the taste of spray; whose feet and hands and bodies were permanently cold; men almost sleeping as they stood, yet whom the enemy would never allow to rest; men who wondered each day how much longer they could carry on, and yet, between brief snatches of sleep, did carry on, enduring because they must, because there was no retreat, no place to hide, no choice but to persevere.

  On the sixth day the sun shone briefly, but there was little warmth in its rays. It shone on the ice clinging to the bows of the Golden Ray, the ice coating the forecastle head, the ice blown in freezing spray upon masts and derricks, rafts and boats, the ice blocking up the scuppers and making treacherous every alleyway and cat-walk, the ice lying like a glassy lid upon the hatches, the ice on bollard and winch, on davit and pulley, on bulwark and handrail, on ventilator and shell-locker—the ice everywhere. The sun shone upon it, and found rich colours inside the substance of it, drawing them o
ut for all to see; but the sun did not melt the ice: from all that shining, glacial surface it brought forth no single drop of water, no slightest suggestion of moisture. There was glitter and sparkle and colour; but there was no warmth: the ice was master.

  And along the path of the sun came the bombers, and the guns swung to meet them, spitting out their venom. Flame and steel and high-explosive came up like a curtain, and the Junkers and Heinkels broke upon that curtain and scattered over the sky, coming in to attack in ones and twos, some from one side, some from another, so that the gunners hardly knew which way to turn. On the Bofors platform of the Golden Ray empty shell-cases were rolling about, and the gun-barrel was burning hot. Randall trod on a shell-case and fell with a clip of shells in his hands. Willis swore at him, and he struggled up, handing the shells to Miller on the loading-platform.

  For Miller the action was all noise; he could see nothing but the clips of shells that were handed up to him and the auto-loader which sucked them in like a mincing-machine. When shells were slow in coming up Miller yelled for more, standing with legs wide apart, braced against the rocking of the gun and swaying of the ship which combined in an attempt to throw him from his perch. Miller did not dare to look up at the planes which he could hear roaring overhead, nor at the ship to starboard which had been hit and was pouring out black smoke. Miller knew that if he once took his eye off the shells and the auto-loader the gun would jam, and there would be hell to pay. So he kept his head down, ramming in clip after clip, too busy to feel afraid.

  The small splinter of cannon-shell which hit Miller had ricocheted off the gun-mounting. It seemed to Miller as though a hammer had struck him in the stomach and torn its way in through clothing and skin and flesh. He doubled up, and the clip of shells which he had been about to load fell from his hands and went clattering to the deck. Miller shrieked with pain and fell also. The deck seemed to fly up towards him, to crash into his face; he felt the blinding shock of impact, and then all the pain and confusion dissolved in oblivion.