There was no hatred of the enemy. Knowledge is the prelude to hate, and they did not know the enemy. Men cursed the enemy, respected him, feared him and killed him if they could: if they didn’t, the enemy would kill them. Nor did men see themselves as fighting for King and country: they saw the necessity for war, but objected to camouflaging this necessity under a spurious cloak of perf ervid patriotism: they were just doing what they were told, and if they didn’t, they would be stuck against a wall and shot. Love of kinsfolk-that had some validity, but not much. It was natural to want to protect your kin, but this was an equation where the validity varied according to the factor of distance. It was a trifle difficult for a man crouched in his ice-coated Oerlikon cockpit off the shores of Bear Island to visualise himself as protecting that rose-covered cottage in the Cots-wolds… But for the rest, the synthetic national hatreds and the carefully cherished myth of King and country, these are nothing and less than nothing when mankind stands at the last frontier of hope and endurance: for only the basic, simple human emotions, the positive ones of love and grief and pity and distress, can carry a man across that last frontier.
Noon, and still the convoy, closed up in tight formation now, rolled eastwards in the blinding snow. The alarm halfway through dawn stations had been the last that morning. Thirty-six hours to go, now, only thirty-six hours. And if this weather continued, the strong wind and blinding snow that made flying impossible, the near-zero visibility and heavy seas that would blind any periscope … there was always that chance. Only thirty-six hours.
Admiral John Tyndall died a few minutes after noon. Brooks, who had sat with him all morning, officially entered the cause of death as”
post-operative shock and exposure.” The truth was that Giles had died because he no longer wished to live. His professional reputation was gone: his faith, his confidence in himself were gone, and there was only remorse for the hundreds of men who had died: and with both legs gone, the only life he had ever known, the life he had so loved and cherished and to which he had devoted forty-five glad and unsparing years, that life, too, was gone for ever. Giles died gladly, willingly. Just on noon he recovered consciousness, looked at Brooks and Vallery with a smile from which every trace of madness had vanished. Brooks winced at that grey smile, mocking shadow of the famous guffaw of the Giles of another day. Then he closed his eyes and muttered something about his family-Brooks knew he had no family. His eyes opened again, he saw Vallery as if for the first time, rolled Ms eyes till he saw Spicer. “A chair for the Captain, my boy.” Then he died.
He was buried at two o’clock, in the heart of a blizzard. The Captain’s voice, reading the burial service, was shredded away by snow and wind:
the Union flag was flapping emptily on the tilted board before the men knew he was gone: the bugle notes were broken and distant and lost, far away and fading like the horns of Elfland: and then the men, two hundred of them at least, turned silently away and trudged back to their frozen mess-decks.
Barely half an hour later, the blizzard had died, vanished as suddenly as it had come. The wind, too, had eased, and though the sky was still dark and heavy with snow, though the seas were still heavy enough to roll 15,000-ton ships through a 30° arc, it was clear that the deterioration in the weather had stopped. On the bridge, in the turrets, in the mess-decks, men avoided each other’s eyes and said nothing.
Just before 1500, the Vectra picked up an Asdic contact. Vallery received the report, hesitated over his decision. If he H.U. 193 G sent the Vectra to investigate, and if the Vectra located the U-boat accurately and confined herself, as she would have to do, to describing tight circles above the submarine, the reason for this freedom from depth-charging would occur to the U-boat captain within minutes. And then it would only be a matter of time until he decided it was safe to surface and use his radio that every U-boat north of the Circle would know that FR77 could be attacked with impunity. Further, it was unlikely that any torpedo attack would be made under such weather conditions. Not only was periscope observation almost impossible in the heavy seas, but the U-boat itself would be a most unstable firing platform: wave motion is not confined to the surface of the water, the effects can be highly uncomfortable and unstabilising thirty, forty, fifty feet down, and are appreciable, under extreme conditions, at a depth of almost a hundred feet. On the other hand, the U-boat captain might take a 1,000-1 chance, might strike home with a lucky hit. Vallery ordered the Vectra to investigate.
He was too late. The order would have been too late anyway. The Vectra was still winking acknowledgment of the signal, had not begun to turn, when the rumble of a heavy explosion reached the bridge of the Ulysses.
All eyes swept round a full circle of the horizon, searching for smoke and flame, for the canted deck and slewing ship that would show where the torpedo had gone home. They found no sign, none whatsoever, until almost half a minute had passed. Then they noticed, almost casually, that the Electro, leading ship in the starboard line, was slowing up, coming to a powerless stop, already settling in the water on an even keel, with no trace of tilt either for’ard or aft. Almost certainly, she had been holed in the engine-room.
The Aldis on the Sirrus had begun to flash. Bentley read the message, turned to Vallery.
“Commander Orr requests permission to go alongside, port side, take off survivors.”
“Port, is it?” Turner nodded. “The sub’s blind side. It’s a fair chance, sir, in a calm sea. As it is…” He looked over at the Sirrus, rolling heavily in the beam sea, and shrugged. “Won’t do her paintwork any good.”
“Her cargo?” Vallery asked. “Any idea? Explosives?” He looked round, saw the mute headshakes, turned to Bentley.
“Ask Electro if she’s carrying any explosives as cargo.”
Bentley’s Aldis chattered, fell silent. After half a minute, it was clear that there was going to be no reply.
“Power gone, perhaps, or his Aldis smashed,” the Kapok Kid ventured.
“How about one flag for explosives, two for none?”
Vallery nodded in satisfaction. “You heard, Bentley?”
He looked over the starboard quarter as the message went out. The Vectra was almost a mile distant rolling, one minute, pitching the next as she came round in a tight circle. She had found the killer, and her depth-charge racks were empty.
Vallery swung back, looked across to the Electro. Still no reply, nothing… Then he saw two flags fluttering up to the yardarm.
“Signal the Sirrus,” he ordered. “‘Go ahead: exercise extreme care.'”
Suddenly, he felt Turner’s hand on his arm.
“Can you hear ’em?” Turner asked.
“Hear what?” Vallery demanded.
“Lord only knows. It’s the Vectra. Look!”
Vallery followed the pointing finger. At first, he could see nothing, then all at once he saw little geysers of water leaping up in the Vectra’s wake, geysers swiftly extinguished by the heavy seas. Then, faintly, his straining ear caught the faraway murmur of underwater explosions, all but inaudible against the wind.
“What the devil’s the Vectra doing?” Vallery demanded. “And what’s she using?”
“Looks like fireworks to me,” Turner grunted. “What do you think, Number One?”
“Scuttling charges-25-pounders,” Carrington said briefly.
“He’s right, sir,” Turner admitted. “Of course that’s what they are.
Mind you, he might as well be using fireworks,” he added disparagingly.
But the Commander was wrong. A scuttling charge has less than a tenth part of the disruptive power of a depth-charge, but one lodged snugly in the conning-tower or exploding alongside a steering plane could be almost as lethal. Turner had hardly finished speaking when a U-boat, the first the Ulysses had seen above water for almost six months-porpoised high above the surface of the sea, hung there for two or three seconds, then crashed down on even keel, wallowing wickedly in the troughs between the waves.
The dramatic abruptness of her appearance, one moment the empty sea, the next a U-boat rolling in full view of the entire convoy, took every ship by surprise, including the Vectra. She was caught on the wrong foot, moving away on the outer leg of a figure-of-eight turn. Her pom-pom opened up immediately, but the pom-pom, a notoriously inaccurate gun in the best of circumstances, is a hopeless proposition on the rolling, heeling deck of a destroyer making a fast turn in heavy weather: the Oerlikons registered a couple of hits on the conning-tower, twin Lewises peppered the hull with as much effect as a horde of angry hornets; but by the time the Vectra was round, her main armament coming to bear, the U-boat had disappeared slowly under the surface.