The Northern Garrisons

by Eric Linklater

  Then, approaching us, we saw another fleet, pointing to the west. We had brought home our gear, and they were seeking the same granary to fetch another harvest in.

  Gallant ships, untiring and undaunted. May they have as good an escort and as bright good fortune as ours, we said.

  VIII. The Faeroes

  Some of the Faeroe islands are whimsically named. There is Kalsö the Man Island, Kunö the Woman Island, and Svinö the Swine Island. There is Big Demon and Little Demon, and running thereabout is a tidal stream that makes a whirling, wild, and mountainous sea in which the fishing-boats that are used to carry troops from one island to another may assume, within a very few minutes, almost every position of disequilibrium, and perform the most strenuous antics short of somersaulting. The most mobile of our troops in these islands are the Lovat Scouts, who, till a few weeks before their departure oversea, were a mounted unit. And having lost their horses they had to acquire, not only marching muscles, but sea-legs also.

  One of the most agreeable contrasts imaginable is that between the seaward and landward appearance of the islands. From the sea they are geographical savages. They lift themselves in sudden menace, mountain-tops whose base is hidden by the water—over-falls and spray—and whose peaks are dark as iron in a smoky sky. But there is a change for the better as you approach the land, and when you go ashore you meet a many-coloured lively scene.

  Crowded quays and red-capped fishermen. Men coming out of little boats—the perfect model of a Viking long-ship—with feathery bundles of razorbills, puffins, and guillemots. Painted houses, with the new grass growing on their turf roofs, and hopeful gardens. Fields bordering every hill, and ditches golden with a sudden growth of kingcups. And children everywhere, swarms of hearty children, so that you may think the land as productive as the sea of fish.

  As the Faeroe men are industrious farmers and brave seamen, so their women are hardworking and talented housewives. Their homes are the very nonpareil of tidiness and cleanliness. A house may be small indeed, and if you listen you will hear a pair of cows breathing heavily in the basement, but the rooms will be as brightly immaculate as a good shop-window.

  The Faeroese are hospitable and kindly people. Very soon after the occupation they opened their houses to our soldiers, who now, except the incurably shy, have all a modest circle of acquaintances. Their hospitality mollifies one of the routine duties of the Lovat Scouts: the patrolling, that is, of hill-top paths and hidden fjords, of tiny hamlets under a mountainside, and almost inaccessible beaches. Some of their patrols are short, a few hours’ marching, but others are three-day tours, and on these they must make their own bivouacs, do their own field-cooking. But whenever they come to a village, someone is almost sure to ask them in for cakes and coffee.

  The Lovat Scouts

  I joined, one morning, a Corporal and his small command, who were about to do one of the short patrols. We started along the road at a brisk pace. A quicker step than route marching, but nothing to complain about. After a mile or two we left the road and struck uphill across the moor. Here and there was some evidence of a track, but it was rather an article of faith than a path.. Cairns, built roughly at intervals, showed the direction. The path grew steeper, but our pace did not slacken.

  The hillside became rough, and the track led over an upward slope of scree. Then it climbed a sort of rampart, a protrusion of rock that ribboned the whole length of the hillside. This was hard scrambling, not marching, and my lungs grew mutinous, my heart as furious as a street-corner orator. I was marching light, but the men wore steel helmets, carried arms and ammunition, rifles and automatic guns that would enable them to fight, if need be, a miniature but effective battle. But they went uphill, up the rocky wall, without a halt or any sign of distress.

  Then, on a shoulder of the mountain with a wide view, we rested for five minutes and the Corporal told me that he had been a gillie in Inverness-shire. There were, he said, a good many gillies and stalkers in the regiment, and the other men, who had not been brought up to such advantage, were very satisfactory too. They were learning to walk quite well, considering all things.

  They had, I thought—still breathing painfully—learnt all there was to know.

  We continued our patrol and came to a long ridge over which the clouds blew thick and low, so that one could see for no more than fifty yards, and the next cairn was hardly visible. But the leading man showed no hesitation, and the Corporal told me that in winter, of course, it was very much worse, when the cloud was really thick and the dark came early. They must march by compass then. But they had had a lot of training in compass marching, and it was quite easy when you knew how to do it, he said.

  Suddenly before us the hillside fell away, and we looked through the mist to a lake blue in the sunshine, and the sea beyond. The wind blew coldly, but the far-off picture was warm and bright. We scaled a hill and crossed another moor.

  I talked with a Lance-Corporal who came from Benbecula in the Outer Isles. He liked the Faeroes, he said, and the people too. A few words of their language were the same as Gaelic. The word for a bull was the same. He denied, most modestly, any real knowledge of the language, but the words he mentioned were spoken with the very intonation, the subtle cadence of Faeroese.

  At a great pace we descended the hill, came to a hamlet of eight or ten houses, looked at a little harbour, rested for a few minutes, and turned to the ramp of another high moor, beyond which we should see the village wherefrom we had started. A fjord, indeed, would lie between us, but all we had to do was walk up one side, round the head of it, and down the other. If the world’s petrol supply should fail, or the internal combustion engine cease to be manufactured, the Lovat Scouts would be unperturbed. They could still walk.

  Tommy Guns and Bagpipes

  It was a great pleasure to see one of their squadrons playing a war-game, attacking over a wide valley, for the scouts who first advanced had been stalkers on one of the great deer forests, and they moved with the speed and economy, the expert ease of professionals. And the troopers following them went swiftly and with confidence, for they knew that sort of ground very well indeed—rough moorland, peat-bog, and grey boulders—and could find without delay the paths that would take them forward, yet keep them under cover. It was incongruous, of course, but none the less impressive, to see a pair of highly respectable gillies walking-up their game with Tommy-guns.

  A pleasure, too, was to hear their pipers, who all come from South Uist and North Uist, where piping is a serious art. Their Pipes and Drums, when they lead a squadron through Torshavn, will bring all the inhabitants to the street, as if to a festival; but marches and reels and strathspeys are not their whole repertory. They have pipers who can play the greater music, the pibroch, with its infinite variations on some wild and noble theme. When they embarked for the Faeroes the pipers, playing the troopers aboard, made their own choice of a tune and chose The Big Spree. And in Torshavn I heard one evening a man from North Uist play the McCrimmon pibroch, The Lament for the Children, so finely that in that northern place—the night was clear, the grey sea calm—it sounded like a universal threnody, for youth that savage circumstance destroys.

  Brushes With the Enemy

  The garrison’s experience of hostile action has so far been slight, but interesting. A sea-shore strong-point was on one occasion nearly torpedoed; for a German plane, diving at some trawlers anchored off Torshavn, released a pair of torpedoes which went below their target and ran ashore, where their explosion narrowly missed a much astonished Lance-Corporal.

  Some weeks later a raiding Heinkel was shot down by Bren guns and fire from a Naval trawler. It came down in a fjord, in a thick snowstorm, and the crew took to their rubber boat. They brought off some papers and a bottle of brandy. Then they perceived, awaiting them on the shore, a single trooper, so they threw their papers overboard, drank the brandy, and surrendered.

  The Scouts then decided to salvage the Heinkel, which lay in thirty feet of water. They
borrowed a trawler and persuaded a local diver to help them. They got the Heinkel safely ashore, and keeping only its crest and a propeller blade for souvenirs, packed up the wreckage and sent it to England. The cost of these operations was two bottles of whisky and one bottle of Drambuie.

  There are other troops, of course, in the Faeroes, and to say nothing of them is sheer injustice. But those others, who come from many parts of Britain, live in much the same state as their fellow soldiers in Orkney, Shetland, Iceland, and endure the same discomforts. They are in lonely places, who were born to crowded towns. They are separated from their families and their friends. They know boredom and anxiety. And like the other garrisons they accept these conditions of their service, stand by their guns with vigilance, maintain their purpose, keep their huts and weapons clean. Life is harder for them than for the Scouts, who find nothing much amiss in the quietness of village life; but the Scouts, because of their mobility, have become part of the Faeroese landscape. Their blue-diced bonnets are known to Syderö in the south and Svinö in the north, and if the Faeroese Dance—that national exercise—is ever modified by new steps, they will surely be a memorial to the Highlanders who broached the northern peace with bagpipes and the Eightsome Reel.

  IX. Tale of a Tanker

  A tanker, deep in the water with a great cargo of petrol, was attacked by a German bomber about a hundred and twenty miles west of the Faeroes. A bomb struck the vessel amidships, on the starboard side, and blew away the bridge. Piercing one or more of the tanks, it set the escaping petrol on fire, and, as if in a furnace, all the upper part of the ship was burnt to utter ruin. Nineteen members of the crew were killed, either by fire or the bomb, but sixteen managed to get away. The ship was abandoned in a cloud of flame and filthy smoke. And then, without exploding the other tanks, the fire mysteriously went out, and the ship, still deeply laden, remained afloat.

  Two rescue tugs were sent to bring her in. They found her wallowing in the Atlantic swell, her port rail level with the sea, and her rudder jammed. They boarded her and made fast their cables, but because her helm was hard-over, and could not be freed, she would not tow in the ordinary fashion. They had to shift their cables and tow her, slowly and clumsily, stern-first. They brought her to Torshavn and anchored her under the shelving side of Nolsö, the island that lies like a breakwater eastward of the port. It is a peaceful island, and its little village, for some reason, is more backward than most of the Faeroese hamlets. Its inhabitants breed ducks in large numbers and play a game like croquet.

  But the arrival of the tanker disturbed their peace. Soon after its coming a German plane flew out of a cloudy dawn, machine-gunned a lonely hill, and apparently noted the position of the rescued ship. Two days later a Condor flew along the sound and dropped four bombs around the tanker.

  In the meantime the crews of the rescue-tugs had been hard at work. They got the ship’s rudder straightened, and borrowing a pump from the soldiers in Torshavn—a pump intended for fire-fighting—they succeeded in trimming it by pumping out a flooded tank on the one side, by sealing and filling a damaged tank on the other. The ship now rode on nearly an even keel, but still, for some obscure reason, was unmanageable. An attempt was made to tow her, but she behaved with so contrary a motion that she had to be brought back to her anchorage under Nolsö.

  Then the Naval authorities sent James Mackenzie to the Faeroes; Mackenzie who raised from Scapa Flow the German Fleet that scuttled itself after the first German war; who knows all there is to be known about salvage, and is diagnostician in excelsis, bone-setter in chief, and miraculous healer to all marine wreckage. Mackenzie spent a day aboard the tanker, and by evening announced that she was ready to sail.

  The weather had been fine, and the glass was high, but about eight o’clock a strong breeze sprang up, and the tugboat skippers were reluctant to put to sea. Mackenzie pointed to the hills, from which the clouds were lifting as though sucked away by the westering sun, and to the upper sky. There was no carry in the sky, he said, and the wind was local. They would up-anchor and go.

  His judgment was right, and the sea beyond Nolsö grew calm again. But suddenly the tanker made a wild sheer to port, and while the tugs were valiantly straining to the south, she was pulling viciously to go east. A tidal run, streaming from the islands, had got under her, and for an hour or two her progress was wayward as an ox on a rope. But before nightfall she had settled down, and was towing steadily, though still with an obstinate nose to the east.

  We were five ships all together. There were the two tugs, snub-nosed and sturdy, with the yellowish hulk behind them, and on either flank a trawler for escort. Very early in the morning, when a grey light was shouldering-off the meagre dark, we were joined by an aeroplane, a Hudson of the Coastal Command, and for hour after hour it circled widely above, watching the sky and the sea for enemies. About eleven o’clock it was relieved by another of the same sort, which continued the guard.

  “Bit of a —— !”

  The day was fine, with a calm sea, and there was no interruption to our progress till mid-afternoon, when suddenly one of the tows parted. We had been making good speed—nearly seven knots—and we were about halfway to Orkney. It was terribly exasperating to be brought to a halt, and see our prize, so vulnerable, lie still upon the water.

  Aldis lamps began to speak, from tug to trawler, from trawler to the aeroplane. “Tug has parted its tow,” we informed the aeroplane. “Bit of a —— !” replied the Hudson philosophically, and continued its spiral guard. “How long will it take you to get your tow aboard?” we asked the tug. “One hour to haul it in,” he answered.

  The tow-rope was eighteen inches in circumference, as thick as a man’s thigh, and to haul its great length from the sea was a tedious job. We steamed up and down, and passing close to the tanker saw that the wire hawser by which the rope was made fast had parted near the fair-lead. The nose of the tanker, always worrying to work away to port, had slowly fretted through it.

  Never was a more desolate sight than that rusty tanker. Her bridge had disappeared, all of it but some steel decking, bent like a bow, and some twisted stanchions, and this remnant drooped miserably overside. There was a great ragged hole in her deck, surrounded by thick petals of torn steel, and from here the fire, gushing like an oil well, had clothed the whole ship in flame. All her stern part, the after-bridge and the accommodation under it, had been burnt to a shell. The long cat-walk, from bridge to after-bridge, had been contorted by the heat, and sprung apart. Her main deck was buckled, and nowhere did an inch of paint remain. Her naked hull had covered itself with rust. She was rusty as if she had been drifting about the sea for ten years. And in small heaps of debris on her deck—little rubbish heaps of red dust—were fragments of bone. Swallowed in the furnace of escaping oil, many of her crew had been burnt to death.

  But the bulk of her cargo remained. There were nearly eight thousand tons of petrol in her holds, and the ship herself might be repaired, or, at the worst, broken up to make valuable scrap. She had escaped fire and a Condor—and the glass was still high.

  From the Edge of Beyond

  Two hours went by, a long-hundred of slowly dragging minutes. Then the tug, having made fast a new cable, began to pay out his tow. He rang his engines to half-speed ahead, and the rope straightened. Too fast, too fast, we thought, as the rope lifted and like a sea-serpent leapt from the water. Too fast, he’ll break it! There was thirty-five hundred horse-power in the tug-boat’s engines, and a huge dead weight behind.

  But he slowed in time, and gradually the tanker began to move, and the two tugs, side by side like carriage horses, went steadily on. A little white wave showed at the tanker’s stem, and quite suddenly we were all happy again.

  Just before dusk, on the port bow, a rocky shape grew visible on the horizon. “Foula,” said the Captain of the trawler, “the Edge of Beyond.”

  He began to talk about books and authors. He had read widely and quite unsnobbishly, as a rolling stone will read,
who takes his books like his landfalls, by choice if possible but by chance if need be. He had a mate’s ticket, but in addition to seafaring he had been a farmer in Kenya and a commercial traveller in Glasgow. He had abandoned commerce when he perceived that he hated all his customers ; and returned to sea.

  He named some of his favourite authors—a mixed company—and asked, “What do you think about Virginia Woolf? I like her better than anyone else, though I had to read her hard before I could make out what she was driving at. I read The Waves three times, and the third time it was grand.”

  At four o’clock on the following morning I returned to the bridge. It was not dark, but not yet light enough to see very far. But quickly the sky cleared, and far away on the one side was the tall broken back of Fair Isle, and on the other, barely visible above the sea, like a pencil lying on a shadowy table, the flat island of North Ronaldshay. By breakfast time we were in Orkney waters, and a little later, with fighter-planes above and the guns of a shore-battery ahead, our escort duty was done.

  Mackenzie and the tugs had saved another ship from Germany and the engulfing sea.

  X. Orkney and Shetland

  Aboard the ship that brought us back from Iceland there was a soldier going home—to an empty home—on compassionate leave. He lived in Lowestoft. His wife and their little boy had one day been walking along a street when a German plane, diving from cloud, came down with machine-guns firing. It raked the harmless street, scattered the women on the pavement. The soldier’s wife was killed, and on the road beside her the child lay with a couple of bullets in his left thigh. … The soldier told me this without much visible emotion. He was a grim-looking fellow who had been a fisherman, and he had learnt, at sea, the sternest sort of patience. But now in his patience there was an expectant quality, as though he were watching the anger that smouldered in his mind. Watching, and waiting, for the chance to let it flame.