J. E. MacDonnell - 139

by Death Of A Destroyer(lit)

  "Number One!" Sainsbury's voice snapped out, harsh, defensively abrupt. "What the hell's holding up that lifeboat? Get on to it, man!"

  "Aye aye, sir," Caswell answered stupidly. He left the bridge.

  By the time Spindrift drew level with the vapour wall of Mack's agony, there was nothing on the surface of the sea but a widening circle of splintered debris and scum. The swell rose and lowered sluggishly, smothered under the tenacious covering of fuel oil. Pieces of wooden wreckage - boats, spars, carley floats - bobbed and curtsied under the shadow of the smoke. And they smelled the stench.

  "My God," whispered Cramer the asdic officer. His hair was ruffled by the anti-flash helmet now in his hand. Of her 1500 tons and 150 men there was left intact her motorboat, either blown clear by some freak of the explosion or cut clear by some thinking seaman. And in it Caswell could see, in the moment before he jumped into the whaler, human forms. There might be a chance for them - Doherty was standing-by.

  The boat splashed into the water; the oars rattled out and were jammed into the rowlocks. Caswell shouted the stroke:

  "Heave!... Heave!... Heave!"

  Suddenly, in the intervening strip of water between them and Mack's motorboat, Caswell, standing and shouting, sighted a head and an arm. He steered the whaler up to his find; leaned far out from the stern, both hands extended eagerly, and got hold of the man. It had been a stoker from the boiler-room. Even as he held him, Caswell's hands instinctively opened to let him go. The stoker's head was denuded completely of hair, and the flesh of his skull and face had turned a strange, parboiled white. His nose was bulged out of shape, and the white arch of his collar-bone showed with grisly clarity through the stripped tendons of his shoulder. His dead eyes, shorn of eyelids, stared with fixed and terrible intensity at the sky. Caswell's hands fully opened and the horrible thing slipped from his grasp and sank beneath the sea.

  Caswell came upright. His face distorted.

  "Lay on those oars, damn you!" he yelled.

  The rowers' faces were red and dripping sweat. Their teeth were clenched. They heaved at each stroke in the burning heat as if it were the last act of their lives. Caswell fixed his eyes with an agony of intensity on the motorboat ahead, dreading what he would find in it. They were almost on the boat, when Caswell was astonished to see the craft suddenly get under way. Someone in it had crawled aft, started the engine, and then, too weak to grasp the tiller, had collapsed across the engine-housing. Now the motorboat was careering erratically around in an unguided circle.

  Turn this way, Caswell thought, for God's sake turn this way so I can get a man aboard on that tiller.

  He tried to direct his whaler across the other's course, but in the very moment he thought he was intercepting her she changed direction once more. His crew were tiring; sailors don't do much boat-pulling except at regatta times, and already they'd had a long pull from the ship. The motorboat was getting farther and farther away. Yet there was some life aboard it. He had to reach it. If only he could get a man at that tiller!

  As if the intensity of the wish he shot along his gaze at that swinging tiller handle had a power too strong for fate to resist, an apparition, a long distorted object of blood and rags and flesh that looked unreal in the sunlight, rose from the bottom of the motorboat and crawled fumblingly on all fours to the tiller. Grasping the handle, it pulled itself upright, a horrible creature sharply outlined against the luminous background of the sky.

  "No!" Caswell breathed in wonderment. "Bledsoe, the captain!" His voice rose in a shout, a shout right from the depth of his feelings. "Stay with her, Skipper... stay with her!"

  Lieutenant-Commander Bledsoe did stay with her. He stayed there at that tiller, a tall, gaunt figure, stiff and appalling, and steered his vessel past the whaler and straight at the waiting length of Spindrift. The crowd of watchers lining her rails gasped when the motorboat finally crashed bow-on into the ship, gasped as they had been a single individual struck violently in the stomach. Then, for an instant, the rush of a rescue party was checked by the stench, acrid, fleshy, nauseating, that poured up in hot waves from that boat. In that instant Lieutenant-Commander Bledsoe turned, holding on to the tiller behind him with one claw of a hand, and said to the seamen above him, speaking as a man speaks who has fought to hold his breath for a long time:

  "Bomb... boiler-room... get my men out, please." Then he swung slowly about and faced in the direction of the bridge, where Sainsbury's head was visible above the windbreak. It seemed for a moment as if he were about to walk straight over and up to his fellow-captain; but instead he sank to his knees, then on to his side, and pillowed his head on the odious thing that had been his arm.

  Chapter Six

  Sainsbury's face was lined and austere, his eyes stony, as he turned to Pilot.

  "Put her on the northward leg, original course and speed."

  The navigator had been in since the age of thirteen; his hesitation was fractional. "Aye aye, sir."

  Spindrift swung away from that charnel area and headed for the northern horizon. When Caswell came up to the bridge he had changed into clean clothes; they smelled the scent of soap on his hands. But he couldn't wash his mind clear; it showed on his face. Sainsbury looked his query.

  "They're all dead, sir, lasted only a few minutes after we got them out. Seven altogether, including the captain. I've got the Buffer and half a dozen hands sewing them up in canvas. What's left...Oh Christ..." He turned away, biting his lip.

  "Good work, Number One," Sainsbury said at once, professionally crisp. "We'll have the burial service as soon as the Buffer's finished, with me handling it. I'd like you to take the ship."

  "Yes, sir." Caswell turned back, more in control of himself, and looked about him; longing for the discovery of some dereliction of duty he could jump on, something to occupy his mind. He saw nothing of that nature; but he became aware of one thing that easily took his mind off the horror down below. For this, he had only to glance at the lowering sun - to port.

  "We're heading north, sir." He just stopped his words from being exclamatory.

  "That's right. Original course and speed."

  "But we've been sighted. I thought you said you weren't gong to hang about here?"

  "So I did, Number One." How could he speak to Caswell, to any man, of that last look? That poor, pitiful, proud stare from Bledsoe's lidless eyes, directed at him before he fell back and died? As clearly as if he'd spoken, Bledsoe had said: / did my best. And so, by God, would he!

  "However, Number One," Sainsbury went on evenly, showing none of his mental turmoil, "that second aircraft was damaged, and might not reach its base. So far, at least, we have intercepted no transmissions from it. In any case," his voice hardening against his will, "it doesn't matter a damn about being sighted. We're here for a purpose, and we owe it..." His head turned, aft to where those pitiful bodies had been hauled aboard, "...to them."

  Slowly, Caswell nodded. "Yes, sir."

  Sainsbury looked at his watch. It showed twenty minutes to four; twenty minutes before Caswell was due to take over the first dogwatch.

  "Go below and have your afternoon tea."

  It was unusual for a captain to be so solicitous; after all, the first lieutenant knew something of the ship's routine, being responsible for it. Caswell looked into a pair of eyes that, surprisingly, showed him compassion, and understanding. "Thank you, sir." he said, and hurried off. Inside twenty minutes he would have full control of himself.

  And inside that time Sainsbury had done his organising. He told Mr Meeking, officer of the afternoon watch, to have the main armament crews and all close-range weapons closed-up when the time came; it would be stupid to have the whole ship's company gathered on the quarterdeck; a beautiful target for just one bomb. The tube and depth-charge crews would suffice for the service, he told Meeking.

  "Aye aye, sir. Officers?"

  "Just me."

  Meeking nodded his understanding. The captain had to be there, but Bledsoe and
his men would agree it was pointless risking any other officers.

  Then Caswell returned to take the watch, Hooky Walker reported that all was ready, and Sainsbury, after a final look round that smiling, terrible sky, went down to his cabin for his prayer-book.

  Hooky Walker was in charge on the quarterdeck; Coxswain Smith was at the wheel. He called the score or so men to attention, then stood them at ease at the captain's nod. Sainsbury glanced at the seven canvas-covered shapes laid out side by side near the ship's side. Some of the shrouds looked odd, as if they were not fully filled by normally straight bodies, and his mind sheered away from thinking about the reasons.

  "The men we are burying today," he started, his voice sombre, like their faces, "are all that remains of a very gallant ship's company. They were beaten by a determined and skilful enemy, but they did their best, and that is what counts, not the end result. They did their best," he repeated, then opened his prayer book.

  "We therefore commit their bodies to the deep, looking for the resurrection of the body (when the sea shall give up her dead), and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself!"

  Sainsbury lifted his head. Caswell caught the gesture and said to Pilot behind him, "Stop both engines."

  "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen."

  He nodded at Hooky, who raised his hand. Seven strong men lifted the seven mess stools, until, resting on the top guard-rail, they were level. Then Hooky glanced at the quartermaster, a man skilled in the use of his bosun's pipe, and as the long piercing call shrilled out the stools lifted higher and the bodies slid off them and dropped into the sea. Quite deliberately - it would be intolerable to leave any of them floating - Sainsbury looked aft. But Hooky had weighted each shroud well with heavy practice shot, and as Spindrift moved forward with the way still on her, the seven bodies sank straight down through the blue.

  Sainsbury looked again at Caswell. As the burial party fell-out Spindrift's quarterdeck began to shake, and in a few minutes she was back to fifteen knots. The mess stools went back down below, and the quarterdeck returned to its normal state: quiet, ordered, and menacing with its scores of depth charges.

  * * *

  So now they knew, Caswell, thought, watching the thin, almost frail-looking figure coming forward with those short steps. The face, the attitude, the pedantic delivery; the endless talk in the wardroom about the hell they had here... It was all resolved. They had a captain who'd forgotten more than any of them knew about ship handling that turn to allow the pom-pom and the 3-inch to bear on the fight-bomber had been ordered at precisely the right time, with precisely the right amount of rudder - a captain who'd remained calmly steadfast and in command of his senses when the whole bridge team had been stunned by Mack's tragedy, and a captain with common guts.

  Nothing unusual about that, Caswell conceded in his mental admiration of the captain - but there wouldhave been nothing unusual, either, if Sainsbury had ordered a course set for home after being sighted, alone on such an unfriendly sea. It might be bravado, but he didn't think so; not after the way Sainsbury had said, "We owe it to them." To Caswell it sounded like nothing more or less than a simple declaration of determined intention.

  Already he liked their new captain. Now, as he heard the light, deliberate steps on the bridge ladder, his liking was deepening to something stronger. But then, as he might learn if he lived long enough and met certain other men, he was not alone in that.

  "Thank God that's over," Sainsbury said as he came to the binnacle. "A woman once told me - she's the wife of an Admiral - that burial at sea was most touching. She'd seen a fictional one on film. In actuality I find them unbearably depressing. It is... so lonely back there."

  Caswell nodded, but he was thinking of that word "them". So this wasn't the first time Sainsbury had officiated at a burial. He must have got around a hell of a lot. But then, in the Atlantic, a week could more than equal in savagery a year in the Indian Ocean, or in parts of the Pacific for that matter.

  "There's one consolation, sir," he said, seeing the pain in Sainsbury's eyes, "those seven are beyond caring."

  "Like their hundred and forty-odd shipmates. Yes, Number One, I suppose that is the attitude to take."

  Caswell knew he hadn't helped much, and he changed the subject. "The drill on the 3-inch paid off. The pom-pom was hitting, but the gun got him."

  Sainsbury nodded. "You might pass on my compliments to the crew."

  "Will do, sir."

  "I'm going below for tea. Keep an eye on that cloud ahead. If they send anything out from Rabaul, it will come from that direction. Warn radar and the lookouts." "Aye aye, sir."

  In his cabin Sainsbury had a cup of tea and five coconut biscuits, for which he had a fondness. This stemmed from years ago, when as a boy - the son of a postmaster at Cottesloe, near Perth - his mother used to send him down to the grocer's to pay the monthly bill - which in those post-Depression days was never large - and the grocer, being a kindly man, would take pity on his thin, fragile frame - which, actually, was wiry, having been fed nothing but good plain food and in a twist of brown paper he would drop a couple of handfuls of broken coconut biscuits. To Sainsbury these were caviar, and the comparative richness of their taste stayed with him. But coconut biscuits were not normal Navy fodder; those he was eating now he'd brought from Townsville on the way up, a couple of pounds of them. In relation to the face and frame and attitude of his new lord, the captain's steward had thought the provision of coconut biscuits perfectly normal. He had since been instructed to keep a supply on hand, by means fair or foul. In Moresby this was a pretty tall order, but there were always American ships about, veritable cornucopias compared to the British or Australian, and stewards, especially captain's stewards, are renowned for scrounging; that art being a basic requirement of their trade, at least in a destroyer.

  Sainsbury looked at the biscuit jar - it had started life as a big pickle bottle - then resolutely screwed the top on. He went to the little desk bolted to the deck and began writing his report of the recent action in longhand; he didn't rate a secretary, but one of the supply-assistants could type it up later. The report took only a few minutes, as he was as precise on paper as he was by nature, and it had been somewhat less than a Fleet action. But after that was finished he had another task, and this one he found much harder. He could not, of course, write to the next-of-kin of every man who had died with Mack, but that last heroic gesture of Bledsoe's remained vividly in his mind, and he felt a compulsion to make contact with the valiant American's wife, or mother or father; Bledsoe's senior officer would know who to send the letter to. But it had to start with Somebody Bledsoe, whether wife or parent - again, the senior officer would know and could insert the title - and it had to be hand-written.

  Sainsbury's remembering mind was a composition of anger and pity for the destroyer's crew as he pulled out a sheet of paper and began to write. He wrote the letter rapidly, almost mechanically; to the tempo, as it were, of the current of thoughts running below those concerned with the letter... he had lost half his force... he was going on with the mission... he might be leading his own ship and men to a death as ghastly as the Americans'.

  He made a restless error with his fountain pen, spoiling the letter. When he had read what he had written, he realised he would have to write an entirely different letter.

  What he had put down was true enough; but what the bereaved wife in the States would want to know was something definite and comforting about the way her husband had died. (He envisaged Bledsoe's next-of-kin as his wife: it was too difficult for him to think of a mother and father, or brothers and sisters.) He could make the letter definite enough, he thought grimly, but there was nothing comforting about Bledsoe's horrible death.

 
; He strove to imagine the wife reading this letter, or the next, better one if he could manage to write it; but he could not see a wife in his mind's eye, because he had none himself. He crumpled the first sheet and took up another.

  "Dear...Bledsoe:

  This is a hard letter I have to write to you. By the time you receive it the Navy will have informed you of Lieutenant-Commander Bledsoe's death out here on duty. As the senior officer of the force, and his colleague, I thought you would like to know something more personal about it, and that we did the best we could for him."

  As he poised the fountain pen for the next paragraph, he shifted his body with dissatisfaction, shoved the butt of the pen through the unruly area of his hair. He was no good at this sort of thing... What he was writing was as dry as dust... that burned officer was the hope of her life...

  Yet if he tried too hard he would make it odiously obvious. He bent to the paper. "Lieutenant-Commander Bledsoe was assigned to an operation with my ship. While we were carrying it out his ship was attacked by an enemy aircraft. The ship blew up. He..."