Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

by The Caine Mutiny(Lit)

  Willie said to himself that he would be damned. He had suffered five months without thinking of this simple escape. "Hm. Well, now, you're supposed to assist me in communica-tions, and-"

  "I'll be glad to try, sir, but I don't know beans about com-munications-"

  "What do you know about?"

  "Practically nothing, sir. You see, my-that is, I got a direct commission into the Navy. My mother owns most of a shipyard in Boston, and so-the whole thing is just a mess. Just one letter of the alphabet fouled me up-one letter. When they were making out my commission they asked me whether I wanted to be an S or a G. I didn't know. They said S meant Specialist and G meant General. So I asked which was better and they said that a G was regarded as much superior. So naturally, I asked for G. That was my mistake. My God, it was all ar-ranged. I was supposed to go into Public Relations. I did, too. But I got ordered to some hole down in Virginia. And suddenly one day this directive came through saying that all ensigns designated G were to be sent out to sea. It all happened so fast there just wasn't a thing my mother could do about it. So, here I am."

  "Tough."

  "Oh, I don't mind. Public Relations is worse than the Caine, I think. The paper work! If there's one thing I'm no good for, it's paper work."

  "Too bad. Communications is all paper work, Ducely. You'll just have to get good at it-"

  "Well, don't say I didn't warn you, sir," said Ducely with a resigned sigh. "Naturally, I'll do my best. But I'm just not go-ing to be worth a damn to you-"

  "Can you type?"

  "No. And what's worse, I'm absent-minded. I can't remem-ber where I've put a paper two seconds after I've laid it down."

  "Beginning tomorrow you'll get yourself a typing course from Jellybelly and learn to type-"

  "I'll try, but I don't think I'll ever learn. I'm all thumbs-"

  "And I think you'd better get started on decoding right away: Do you have a watch tomorrow morning?"

  "No, sir."

  "Fine. Meet me in the wardroom after breakfast and I'll show you the codes-"

  "I'm afraid that'll have to wait, sir. Tomorrow morning I have to finish my officers' qualification assignment for Mr. Keefer."

  It had grown dark now, and the sky was crowded with stars. Willie peered at the dim face of his assistant and wondered whether he himself had ever seemed such a mixture of effron-tery and stupidity. "Well, stay up a little late tonight and finish your assignment."

  "I will if you insist, Mr. Keith, but I'm really horribly fagged out."

  "The hell with it. Get a good night's sleep by all means," said Willie. He started to walk away. "We'll start decoding in the afternoon. Unless, of course, you have something more im-portant to do."

  "No, sir," said Ducely, with bland sincerity, tagging after him, "I don't believe I have."

  "Great," said Willie. He twisted the dogs on the forecastle door viciously, motioned his assistant through, and slammed the door with a clang that was heard in the after crew's quar-ters.

  This force will assault and capture Kwajalein Atoll and other objectives in the Marshall Islands, with the purpose of estab-lishing bases for further attacks to the westward-

  Willie stared at the blotchy mimeographed words. He tossed aside the thick operation order and snatched a war atlas from the bookshelf. Turning to a map of the Central Pacific, he saw that Kwajalein was the largest of the atolls, in the very heart of the Marshalls, surrounded by Jap strongholds. He whistled.

  Official mail was heaped two feet high on his bunk. He had dumped the tumbled mass of envelopes stamped with crimson secrecy warnings out of three gray mail sacks which lay crumpled on the deck. The stuff had accumulated in Pearl Harbor for a month. It was all his now, to log, file, and be responsible for; his first batch of secret mail since inheriting Keefer's job.

  Willie threw a blanket over the rest of the mail and brought the operation order up to the captain. Queeg was in the cabin on the main deck which had formerly housed two officers. It had been altered at the Navy Yard under his careful direction so that it contained one bed, a wide desk, an armchair, a lounge seat, a large safe, and numerous speaking tubes and squawk boxes. The captain paused in his shaving to riffle through the sheets, dripping soap on them. "Kwajalein, hey?" he said casually. "Kay. Leave this stuff here. You'll discuss this with nobody, of course, not even Maryk."

  "Aye aye, sir."

  When Willie began to log and file the mail he made un-pleasant discoveries. Keefer had turned over to him a set of dog-eared ledgers and the keys to the filing cabinet, and had offhandedly added several handfuls of secret mail which lay on the deck of his closet under shoes and dirty laundry. He assured Willie that the correspondence was "meaningless gar-bage."

  "I've been figuring on logging it in when the next batch came. You may as well do it," he said, yawning. He climbed back on his bunk and resumed reading Finnegan's Wake.

  Willie found the file cabinet in a hopeless jumble. Letters in it would have been easier to locate had they been stuffed in a gunnysack. The ledgers contained an idiotically complicated system for entering the arrival of mail, using four different notations for each letter. Willie calculated that it would take him five or six solid working days to log the mail. He went to the ship's office and watched Jellybelly logging tremendous sackfuls of non-secret correspondence. The yeoman typed en-tries on green form sheets, and in less than an hour disposed of as much mail as Willie had in his room. "Where'd you get that system?" he asked the sailor.

  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 remem-bered 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 com-municator 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 Cap-tain 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 fore-castle. 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 oc-cupation 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 pres-ervation 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, school-teachers, 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 binoc-ulars through which he frequently frowned at the horizon. Histrionics apart, he was a competent OOD. He quickly de-veloped the impalpable nervous feelers, reaching from stem to stern of the ship, which are the main equipment of a conn-ing 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 al-low 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 nar-row cone of water for echoes, and the cones overlapped. No submarine could approach the formation without causing tell-tale 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 harden-ing 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 un-expected 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. Prob-ably 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 offi-cers, 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 par-ticular object of Queeg's dislike. The gunner's mate was sus-pended 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 cap-tain'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 im-possible 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 re-garded as the captain's pet, and was the target of much jok-ing for it; and, in point of fact, Queeg was warmer and pleas-anter 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 Har-bor, and steamed into Japanese waters.

  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 in-creased 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.