He turned back to the Kapok Kid. “Yes, that seems all right, Pilot.
It’ll make good reading for their lordships,” he added bitterly. “The ones the Germans don’t get, we finish off for them… Remember to signal the Hatteras in the morning, ask for the name of the master of the Vytura.”
“He’s dead… You needn’t trouble yourself!” said Ralston bitterly, then staggered as the Commander’s open hand smashed across his face.
Turner was breathing heavily, his eyes dark with anger.
“You insolent young devil!” he said softly. “That was just a little too much from you.”
Ralston’s hand came up slowly, fingering the reddening weal on his cheek.
“You misunderstand me, sir.” There was no anger, the voice was a fading murmur, they had to strain to catch his words. “The master of the Vytura, I can tell you his name. It’s Ralston. Captain Michael Ralston. He was my father.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
SATURDAY
TO ALL things an end, to every night its dawn; even to the longest night when dawn never comes, there comes at last the dawn. And so it came for FR77, as grey, as bitter, as hopeless as the night had been long. But it came.
It came to find the convoy some 350 miles north of the Arctic Circle, steaming due east along the 72nd parallel of latitude, half-way between Jan Mayen and the North Cape. 8° 45′ east, the Kapok Kid reckoned, but he couldn’t be sure. In heavy snow and with ten-tenth cloud, he was relying on dead reckoning: he had to, for the shell that had destroyed the F.D.R. had wrecked the Automatic Pilot. But roughly 600 nautical miles to go. 600 miles, 40 hours, and the convoy-or what would be left of it by that time, would be in the Kola Inlet, steaming up-river to Polyarnoe and Murmansk … 40 hours.
It came to find the convoy, 14 ships left in all-scattered over three square miles of sea and rolling heavily in the deepening swell from the NNE.: 14 ships, for another had gone in the deepest part of the night.
Mine, torpedo? Nobody knew, nobody ever would know. The Sirrus had stopped, searched the area for an hour with hooded ten-inch signalling lamps. There had been no survivors. Not that Commander Orr had expected to find any-not with the air temperature 6° below zero.
It came after a sleepless night of never-ending alarms, of continual Asdic contacts, of constant depth-charging that achieved nothing.
Nothing, that is, from the escorts’ point of view: but for the enemy, it achieved a double-edged victory. It kept exhausted men at Action Stations all night long, blunting, irreparably perhaps, the last vestiges of the knife-edged vigilance on which the only hope, it was never more, of survival in the Arctic depended. More deadly still, it had emptied the last depth-charge rack in the convoy. … It was a measure of the intensity of the attack, of the relent-lessness of the persecution, that this had never happened before. But it had happened now. There was not a single depth-charge left-not one. The fangs were drawn, the defences were down. It was only a matter of time before the wolf-packs discovered that they could strike at will…
And with the dawn, of course, came dawn Action Stations, or what would have been dawn stations had the men not already been closed up for fifteen hours, fifteen endless hours of intense cold and suffering, fifteen hours during which the crew of the Ulysses had been sustained by cocoa and one bully-beef sandwich, thin, sliced and stale, for there had been no time to bake the previous day. But dawn stations were profoundly significant in themselves: they prolonged the waiting another interminable two hours-and to a man rocking on his feet from unimaginable fatigue, literally holding convulsively jerking eyelids apart with finger and thumb while a starving brain, which is less a brain than a well of fine-drawn agony, begs him to let go, let go just for a second, just this once and never again, even a minute is brutal eternity: and they were still more important in that they were recognised as the Ithuriel hour of the Russian Convoys, the testing time when every man stood out clearly for what he was. And for the crew of a mutiny ship, for men already tried and condemned, for physically broken and mentally scourged men who neither could nor would ever be the same again in body or mind, the men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame. Not all, of course, they were only human; but many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side.
For some men, neither precipice nor valley ever existed. Men like Carrington, for instance. Eighteen consecutive hours on the bridge now, he was still his own indestructible self, alert with that relaxed watchfulness that never flagged, a man of infinite endurance, a man who could never crack, who you knew could never crack, for the imagination baulked at the very idea. Why he was what he was, no man could tell.
Such, too, were men like Chief Petty Officer Hartley, like Chief Stoker Hendry, like Colour-Sergeant Evans and Sergeant Macintosh; four men strangely alike, big, tough, kindly, no longer young, steeped in the traditions of the Service.
Taciturn, never heard to speak of themselves, they were under no illusions as to their importance: they knew, as any Naval officer would be the first to admit-that, as the senior N.C.O.s, they, and not any officer, were the backbone of the Royal Navy; and it was from their heavy sense of responsibility that sprung their rock-like stability. And then of course, there were men-a handful only-like Turner and the Kapok Kid and Dodson, whom dawn found as men above themselves, men revelling in danger and exhaustion, for only thus could they realise themselves, for only this had they been born. And finally, men like Vallery, who had collapsed just after midnight, and was still asleep in the shelter, and Surgeon Commander Brooks: wisdom was their sheet anchor, a clear appreciation of the relative insignificance both of themselves and the fate of FR77, a coldly intellectual appraisal of, married to an infinite compassion for, the follies and suffering of mankind.
At the other end of the scale, dawn found men-a few dozen, perhaps-gone beyond recovery. Gone in selfishness, in self-pity and in fear, like Carslake, gone because their armour, the trappings of authority, had been stripped off them, like Hastings, or gone, like Leading S.B.A.
Johnson and a score of others, because they had been pushed too far and had no sheet anchor to hold them.
And between the two extremes were those-the bulk of the men-Who had touched zero and found that endurance can be infinite-and found in this realisation the springboard for recovery. The other side of the valley could be climbed, but not without a staff. For Nicholls, tired beyond words from a long night standing braced against the operating table in the surgery, the staff was pride and shame. For Leading Seaman Doyle, crouched miserably into the shelter of the for’ard funnel, watching the pinched agony, the perpetual shivering of his young midships pom-pom crew, it was pity; he would, of course, have denied this, blasphemously.
For young Spicer, Tyndall’s devoted pantry-boy, it was pity, too-pity and a savage grief for the dying man in the Admiral’s cabin. Even with both legs amputated below the knee, Tyndall should not have been dying.
But the fight, the resistance was gone, and Brooks knew old Giles would be glad to go. And for scores, perhaps for hundreds, for men like the tubercular-ridden McQuater, chilled to death in sodden clothes, but no longer staggering drankenly round the hoist in ‘Y’ turret, for the heavy rolling kept the water on the move: like Petersen, recklessly squandering his giant strength in helping his exhausted mates: like Chrysler, whose keen young eyes, invaluable now that Radar was gone, never ceased to scan the horizons:
for men like these, the staff was Vallery, the tremendous respect and affection in which he was held, the sure knowledge that they could never let him down.
These, then, were the staffs, the intangible sheet anchors that held the Ulysses together that bleak and bitter dawn, pride, pity, shame, affection, grief-and the basic instinct for self-preservation although the last, by now, was an almost negligible factor. Two things were never taken into the slightest account as the springs of endurance: never mentioned, never even considered, they did not exist for the crew of the Ulysses: two things the sentimentalists at home, the gallant leader writers of the popular press, the propagandising purveyors of nationalistic claptrap would have had the world believe to be the source of inspiration and endurance, hatred of the enemy, love of kinsfolk and country.