Miller did not know that Randall had leapt to take his place on the gun; the pause in its action was scarcely more than momentary; then it was rocking on its pedestal again, the barrel going in and out, recoil and recuperation, the shells flying up, up, up, the tracer painting its golden arc across the sky. But Miller knew nothing of this, for he was lying unconscious at the back of the platform, where they had dragged him. He did not know that a minute later the action was over and the bombers gone; nor was he aware of Padgett picking him up like a roll of carpet and carrying him down to the cabin, taking off his coat and life-jacket, and laying him gently on one of the lower bunks. It was only later that Miller came back to the agony of consciousness, only then that he felt the steel imbedded in his stomach, the pain shuddering up through his stunted body in sweating waves of horror.
He saw Willis looking down at him; at least he thought it was Willis; but he could not be sure because the face was blurred, seeming to expand and contract, to advance and retreat, to waver confusingly.
“How are you feeling?” Willis asked.
Miller did not answer; he could not answer; his throat was parched, his tongue dry, like old leather.
Willis appeared to understand. “Not so grand, eh? You had tough luck.”
Miller lost sight of him then. But he was back a moment later with a sponge soaked in water. He raised Miller’s head and sponged his lips and brow, handling him gently, as one would handle a child. Coming from Willis, such gentleness was unexpected and surprising. Miller lay back again, and his head throbbed; brilliant lights seemed to flash up behind his eyeballs and fade out again. From a long way off, it seemed, he heard Willis speaking.
“You got one in the guts. The steward bandaged it up. You’ll be all right till they take you off. You’ll be all right. No need to worry.”
Miller did not understand. What was the sergeant talking about? What did he mean by that talk of taking him off? How could he be taken off. They were at sea—miles from land. What was Willis gassing about?
Willis said, “The Old Man is going to send a signal to one of the destroyers asking them to take you off. You’ll be all right then—proper sick bay—proper M.O. You’ll be all right then; you’ll be all right.”
All right! thought Miller. All right! Oh, Jesus Christ!
He lay with the pain grinding at him, and the sweat stood out on his forehead. He lay in a tiny world of pain—isolated, cut off from all human contact—a world holding only two things: himself and the pain.
On the bridge of the Golden Ray the second mate was signalling with an Aldis lamp to one of the destroyers. “We have a wounded gunner. Can you take him off?”
The question came flashing back, slowly spelt out: “How bad is he?”
The second mate swore, nettled by the implied condescension to Merchant Navy speed in the slow rate of signalling. “What do they think this is?—a bloody kindergarten?”
It had been his early ambition to become a naval officer. Obstacles had stood in the way, chief among them a family lack of money. The Merchant Navy had been a second best, and his disappointment took the form of trying at every opportunity to demonstrate its superiority over the other service. The signals rating on the bridge of the destroyer was surprised at the speed with which the answer to his question flickered back.
“He is very bad. Wound in stomach. Medical attention essential.”
The second mate smiled with satisfaction as the reply came across from the destroyer at full naval speed. But the signal itself gave him little satisfaction. It read: “Regret cannot take your rating now. Will do so when heat is off.”
“Heat!” snorted Captain Pownall, when the signal was repeated to him. “Some heat!”
But he knew as well as the second mate did what heat it was—the heat of submarine attack. Until things quietened down the destroyer could not risk drawing alongside, could not risk many lives in the hope of saving one.
Captain Pownall himself took this information to Sergeant Willis, lowering his creaking body down the iron ladder to the gunners’ quarters.
“Where is he—your wounded man?”
Willis pointed to the bunk where Miller lay, and the captain, hat under arm, the scabs on his head and face showing dark against the pallor of his skin, bent down and looked at Miller. He did not speak, but he laid his hand on Miller’s forehead and stood thus, silent for a long minute. And the gunners, watching him, were silent too, so that there was no sound in the cabin but the beat of the engines, the creak of straining timbers, and the occasional rattle of a plate or mug moving with the roll of the ship. Then the captain straightened himself, and the others saw that Miller was asleep.
Captain Pownall spoke to Willis. “We hope to have him taken aboard the destroyer later. At present they are busy—too busy. He’ll be all right once he’s aboard the destroyer.”
He bent his way through the cabin doorway, rammed his hat fiercely on his bald head, and climbed back to the deck. And immediately, as though to demonstrate how busy the destroyers were, a salvo of depth-charges exploded on the port beam, drumming loudly on the sides of the Golden Ray. The vessel shuddered, and Miller awoke from his brief sleep, and, awaking, felt the pain in his stomach and cried out in agony, “God! Oh, my God!” not realizing how strange it was that he should call upon a deity in whom he professed not to believe.
When the aircraft alarm sounded Miller was left alone. He lay gazing at the bunk above him and waiting for the waves of pain to beat up through his body. Somewhere, far away it seemed, he could hear the sound of gunfire and the whine of dive-bombers. He knew that again the ships were fighting their way through; he knew that at any moment the Golden Ray might be struck by a bomb; but he was past caring; he could not bring his mind to bear upon anything but the agony within him; that was everything; there was nothing else.
It was almost dark when the gunners came down again. They had seen another ship sunk; the bomb had gone down her funnel and blown the middle out of her. She had sunk in less than a minute, and only one boat had got away.
But the lame duck was still with them.
On the bridge of the Golden Ray the third mate was taking a signal from the destroyer. “Too dark to remove your rating now. Will have him tomorrow.”
“‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’” he muttered to himself, and tried to remember what play the words came from. Was it Macbeth or was it Hamlet? Or perhaps Othello? It worried him that he could not remember, and the words kept nagging him, breaking in upon his thoughts. Other lines came into his mind; he felt sure they were from the same speech. “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.” The third mate smiled grimly. “Dusty death” was not a visitation he feared just then. He would have been grateful for the promise of such an end. “I would fain die a dry death—” That was from Shakespeare too—Gonzalo in The Tempest. He was sure of that one because he had acted Gonzalo in his last year at school. God! he thought. We have come a long way since then.
He turned to the apprentice standing beside him on the wing of the bridge.
“Go and tell the sergeant his wounded man will be taken off in the morning.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tempest
THE wind came out of the north. It was a bitter wind, scudding down from the polar ice-cap. As the night wore on it grew steadily in strength, lashing the sea into heaving protest. When Padgett, Payne, and Cowdrey went on watch at midnight it was blowing half a gale; when they crawled thankfully below decks four hours later a full gale was spending its fury on the convoy, and the seas were rising.
Vernon and Warby, deprived now of the company of Miller, huddled in the lee of the gun and braced themselves against the roll of the ship. The wind was like a living thing, a wild, howling virago. It shrieked through the rigging with a high-pitched wail that filled the darkness with fearful sound. To make themselves heard Vernon and Warby had to shout to each other at a foot distance, and the wind tore their words away and scattered
them in the wastes of the night.
Sometimes snow came with the wind, beating across the decks in a blinding blizzard that stung like the lash of a whip. Spray and spindrift were flung over the ship in a continuous cascade of moisture that froze on bridge and mast and gun and davit; froze, too, on duffel-coat and Balaclava, casing all it could find in a sheath of ice.
Vernon peered into the darkness, trying to make out the shape of other ships; but he could see nothing. Nothing was visible but the white crests of waves sliding past. He wondered whether the officer of the watch could see anything, or whether he was trusting to prayer or luck. Suppose the following ship were to ram the stern of the Golden Ray! Suppose she drifted away to starboard and crashed into the next column! In such a night a ship might be invisible two yards away.
All day it had been the Germans who had harried them; now in the black womb of night was born this other danger. Storm could be as lethal as bomb or torpedo, and if they should be blown too far off course there were rocks that could rend as surely as any mine. Oh, God, thought Vernon, was it not enough that they had been attacked again and again, that they were weary to the point of exhaustion? Was it not enough that they had the incessant cold to endure, the cold biting into the marrow of their bones, tearing at the skin of their faces, seeking for any opening through which to strike and flay? Was not all this enough, but now they must have the storm to batter their bodies and threaten their lives?
To stop the gun from swinging they lashed the barrel to an upright. In such conditions it was not likely to be needed in a hurry. Indeed, in such conditions it would have been almost impossible to use it, far less to fire with any degree of accuracy. Anti-aircraft gunnery was difficult enough with solid ground beneath the gun; a gun mounted on a madly bucking ship would have required supermen to handle it effectively. With the possible exception of Bombardier Padgett, none of the gunners had any illusions that he fitted the rôle of superman.
The previous watch had tied the cover on the Bofors gun, but soon the gale loosened it. Vernon and Warby were forced to lash it more securely, fumbling with numb fingers at ropes they could scarcely see. The wind snatched at the canvas, lifting it and slapping it back upon the gun with a report like thunder. It was a wild, hectic night, and the Golden Ray struggled, shuddering, through a torrent of darkness, groping her sightless way from wave to wave while the sea poured across her decks.
“What price being on one of them trawlers or corvettes!” shouted Warby.
Vernon yelled back, “This is bad enough for me.” He could not worry about trawlers or corvettes. He had doubts even about the Golden Ray. He would have had doubts of any ship in such a sea.
But the gale had not attained its full strength. By the time daylight had crept up over the horizon it was a yelling, tearing shattering demon, and the convoy was broken—scattered over a sea that was nothing but great foam-capped mountains and deep white-streaked valleys. There was no question of maintaining formation; it was a sufficient battle simply to stay afloat. The human enemy was forgotten. Here was an enemy more powerful, more terrifying—the primeval foe of all mariners—the tempest.
It was a strange sight, viewed from the deck of the Golden Ray. From horizon to horizon ships lay struggling in the grasp of the storm, some on one course, some on another, tossed here and there, raked by creaming seas, shuddering and groaning. At times it seemed that the trawlers were gone, sunk beneath the towering waves; but always they rose again upon the crest, riding it out as well as any of the ships.
“Brought up to it,” growled Petty Officer Donker. “Trawlers take some sinking. Tough little baskets, they are. Want to be to get through this lot, though. I’ve seen some weather, but this beats anything. Oh, my, my! Look at them bloody seas! You wouldn’t think water could pile itself up that height. Look out! Here we go again! Oh, my, my!”
Half-way through the morning a particularly heavy sea broke over the side of the Golden Ray and stove in the two starboard lifeboats. An hour later one of the starboard rafts was carried away. Life-lines had been rigged across the decks, but in spite of this a fireman making his way aft to the crew’s quarters at the noon watch change was caught by a sea and carried overboard. He was not seen again.
Below decks was chaos. In the gunners’ mess-room plates and mugs careered hither and thither; a drawer opened and a cascade of cutlery fell out; a tin of jam crashed to the floor, and a pack of playing-cards, floating down from the shelf on which they had been stowed, settled upon the sticky mass like autumn leaves caught in a bog; and from the stove hot cinders shot out upon the hearth, sometimes accompanied by a burst of flame darting out like a serpent’s tongue.
The noise was scarcely less than that on deck. Every timber, every plate, every rivet in the ship, seemed to be groaning in protest. Every moment she seemed to be threatening to crack in two under the terrible strain that was being put upon her. Sometimes, mounting a wave, she seemed to be standing upon her stern, her bows pointing to the sky; then she would tilt upon the crest, hesitate a moment, and dive, shuddering, into the trough beyond. At such times her propeller would be flung clear of the water! and, finding suddenly no resistance, would thresh wildly, the engines racing and sending vibrations through the length and breadth of the ship.
So it went on, hour after hour. The Golden Ray nosed her way through the seas, rolling, pitching, tossing, trembling, creaking, groaning—a hell above decks and below, and the one slender link that bound her crew to life. For all knew well that if the Golden Ray foundered there was no hope—no hope in all that raging ferment of waters; no boat could live in it, and a man on a raft would not be able to cling to life for two minutes.
And always the cruel, bitter wind was driving them south, driving them towards the jagged coast of Norway. The wind had scattered the convoy—scattered it as a child with one puff may scatter the seeds of a dandelion. They could not stand before the storm; they could only bow their heads and wait for its fury to abate.
And as the storm raged, as the Golden Ray rolled and trembled, Miller lay on his bed of pain and groaned in agony. There was no longer a question of taking him off: the chance of that had gone; not until the sea had calmed would it be possible for a destroyer to come alongside; and no one knew when that would be.
So Miller lay and groaned, his face ashen, while every roll, every vibration, of the ship sent fresh waves of agony shooting through his body. The gunners took it in turns to hold him, trying to shield him against the movement; but, try as they might, they could not protect him completely. Sometimes he coughed; sometimes blood welled up like froth upon his lips; sometimes he cried out, and his cries joined with the clatter of plates, the rattle of the engine that drove the rudder-chains, the clank of an insecure derrick-boom, and the crash of waves against the hull.
There was little sleep for anyone; and they wanted sleep so much. They were haggard, their eyes sore from the wind, and their limbs and muscles aching from the constant strain of walking, standing, sitting, or lying; for there was no real rest in any of these positions. They had forgotten what it was like to sleep in comfort. They had been only a week at sea, and it seemed as though they had been wandering in this world of blizzard and storm, of bomb and torpedo, this world of hate and terror, of cold and discomfort, for years without number. They could not see the end of it; the old world had faded into the semblance of a dream, far away and unreal; only this was real—this world of ice-capped waves, of blown snow demons, and the northern lights. Of this there was no end.
Even to fetch the meals was a hazard. Leaping from ladder to hatch, from hatch to deck, they watched the seas warily, judging the moment when it was safe to move, clinging to the life-line with one hand, carrying the food-containers in the other, and feeling their feet slipping on the wet ice.
The galley itself was awash. The seas had burst in, and now, as the ship rolled, water swilled backward and forward along the floor, carrying with it a mess of dead cinders, coal-dust, and scum. The cook, standing with hi
s gum-boots ankle-deep in icy water, was in a flaming temper. He swore at the galley-boy; he made the maximum of clatter with saucepans and kettles; he almost threw the food at those who poked their heads in at the galley door. It was all spiced with curses and flavoured with ash from the cigarette which seemed glued permanently to his upper lip.
The cook had not shaved for a week; nor, to judge by his appearance, had he washed. His hands were black with soot, his check trousers smeared with grease, and the white jersey, which was his concession to the temperature, showed evidence of every meal that he had prepared since donning it. Added to this, he had recently been in heated argument with one of the firemen, who had saved him a certain amount in dentist’s bills by removing two teeth without the aid of anaesthetic. He had then followed up this painful and wholly unnecessary operation by closing one of the cook’s eyes. The cook, therefore, was neither feeling nor looking his best, and his temper, sour at all times, was now worse than vinegar.
Not that the gunners worried about the cook’s gall; they had other things to worry about, and one of these was how to move from quarters to galley and back again without being washed overboard. Sometimes it became a choice between food and life; when two hands were needed on the life-line the food was abandoned. Few of them considered it worth eating, anyway; toast and cheese, toast and jam—this was the staple diet. As Vernon remarked, “You’ve got to toast the bread; it’s the only way of getting it properly cooked.”
So the stove was kept stoked up, and the kettle, wired to the pipe, shot boiling water from its spout whenever the ship heeled over to starboard, scalding the hands of those toasters who were not quick enough on the retreat. To keep the stove going they had to fetch coal from the stokehold amidships. It was worse than fetching meals, for the heavy bucket filled with coal was a difficult burden to carry across the heaving, slippery deck, washed by high-running seas.
Soldier, Sail North (1987) Page 18
