Storm Below. Hugh Garner
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they had required was a spoonful of bicarbonate the morning after their rescue.
It seemed that sailors only became gravely ill in port, and except for mal de mer, of which there was plenty on a corvette — especially among the new men the first day out — there was not enough sickness among his charges to let him earn his passage.
The voice of the sub-lieutenant interrupted his thoughts.
“Can you find out whether he has any internal injuries?”
“No, sir. We should get a surgeon to look at him.”
“Will you leave him here?”
“There’s nowhere else, except in one of the officer’s cabins.” Sub-Lieutenant Smith-Rawleigh blanched as he suddenly remembered that he, as junior officer, would be the one who would be asked to give up his berth and sleep on the wardroom settee. (This had happened when they took aboard the newspaper correspondent for the trip from Gibraltar to Londonderry before Christmas.)
Several of the bystanders snickered when they realized that it would be the subby’s cabin which would become the sickroom. To cover his retreat from such insubordination Smith-Rawleigh barked, “You fellows see that he doesn’t fall off the table,” pointing to the injured man. Then he said to Bodley, “The captain wants you to report to him immediately.”
Bodley followed the officer under the blackout curtains and along the deck to the ladder leading to the bridge.
The sky which now stretched overhead was a deep blue, and the clouds which had scudded across the sun following the dawn had melted into the horizon where they lay like a low pile of slate-grey dough. The wind had dropped, and with it the sea had ceased to run so wildly as during the night. The waves were longer and greasier, and their white tops no longer blew from crest to crest, but melted into the green with every falling motion.
The Riverford was passing close to the convoy as it made a bow sweep. The first file of merchantmen lay to starboard a quarter of a mile away. Members of the closest ship, an empty British tanker, were standing alongside the forward structure watching the movements of the little corvette, while on its poop the gun’s crew were cleaning the gun, stopping now and again in their labours to point at the smaller ship.
As the sub-lieutenant and the sick bay tiffy reached the bridge they found the captain working on a chart in the asdic cabin. He motioned them inside. “How is the lad?” he asked, addressing Bodley.
Smith-Rawleigh began, “He’s got a broken —”
“That’s all for now,” said the captain crisply, dismissing the officer with a nod. Then he turned to the other.
“Well, sir, his right arm is broken below the elbow, but I’m afraid that there is more wrong with him than that. I don’t like his pulse, and he’s unconscious.”
“Traumatic shock?”
“Beg pardon? — oh, yes, probably, sir.” It was remarkable how much a ship’s captain could know about another’s job.
“Is he warm and fairly comfortable?”
“Yes, sir,” Bodley answered. He looked around him at the asdic operator, who lolled on his stool and held an earphone to his ear. There was the steady, rhythmic “p-i-ing” of the submarine detection gear as it sent back its echoes through the earphones.
“We’ll leave him where he is then until after the watches are changed. You stay with him and try to bring him around. If he is still the same we’ll move him down to one of the officer’s bunks.”
“Yes, sir,” Bodley answered, wondering whether to salute or not. He suddenly remembered that they were under cover so, desisting, he turned on his heel and went below again.
“Butch” Jenkins, ordinary seaman, RCNVR, leaned his back against the mast, and from his lofty position in the crow’s nest surveyed the gently pitching expanse of ocean clove by the dipping bows of the Riverford.
To starboard the nearest file of plodding freighters seemed stationary, but for the small white bones they bore in their teeth. The coxswain had told him that they were carrying nothing but a ballast of sand and shale in their holds, the tankers weighted down with water ballast. He could see the crew of a ship standing in the lee of a deck house as they watched the corvette passing before them. He hoped that they noticed his woollen-helmeted form as he stood there doing his part to protect them. It made him feel proud and — part of things, to be one of those doing his bit out here. The sight of the merchant sailors was the first real intimation that the convoy was not only formed of the shapes of ships, but also contained human beings, who, like him, formed a close-knit fraternity arrayed against the U-boats. He wondered how many people were represented by the ships stretching over ten square miles of ocean. He thought, I’ll give them at least seventy-five men to a ship. There are fifty-six merchant packets and seven escorts, counting the trawler. That makes sixty-three ships at seventy-five men apiece — almost five thousand men out here. The thought of being only one of so many suddenly raised his chances of survival.
As he watched the merchantmen, they began a flag-hoist, first one and then the other along their ranks bending the pendants to their halyards as they answered the convoy commodore’s signals. The gaily coloured bunting reminded him that this was the culmination of everything he had trained and hoped for since leaving high school the year before. He had been afraid that the war would end before he had a chance to get into it, and at night he had lain awake dreaming that if God was willing to keep it going a few more years he would probably end up in London on the Horse Guards Parade while the king placed on his chest the wine-coloured ribbon of the Victoria Cross….
He happened to glance below and caught Lieutenant Harris staring up at him. Suddenly he was all eyes for U-boats. Turning from the convoy side he regarded the empty sea stretching a thousand, no, ten thousand! miles to the south — stretching to the barren ice of Antarctica, with nothing between. It was hard to believe that out there beyond the horizon, or closer even, under the ripple of the chop, were the submarines lying in wait for their slow-moving target. It seemed impossible that there could be anything else on the surface, or under it, of this peaceful sea.
This was his first trip on a corvette, and he had been pleasantly surprised to find that there was no apprenticeship. They had left Londonderry behind, and as soon as they were running down the swiftly moving River Foyle to the sea he had been shown the Watch and Quarter Bill, and the coxswain had said, “Read it and remember your stations. You will be on ack-ack ammunition supply at action stations, you’ll take to No. 5 carley float if we abandon ship, and you’ll eat at the port table in the seamen’s mess. You’re in the red watch, and you go on watch in the second dog.”
It had been exciting, and a little scary too, when the coxswain had mentioned taking a carley float when the ship was abandoned. He had found the leading hand of the watch, a fellow called McCaffrey, and had asked him what time he had to go on. “Six o’clock,” the leading hand had answered. “You’ll eat when they pipe ‘second dog-watchman to supper’.”
And so he had learned what he had to know. He had found that a dog watch is two hours long, and that the second one began at six o’clock. After that the watches were four hours long until the next afternoon at four, when the first dog began. Through using his head and ears he had discovered during the last eleven days (except for the second and third when he was too seasick to get out of his hammock) what some of the terms meant, and those which he heard, yet could not fathom, he had enquired about.
Now he looked upon himself as a sailor, a veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic. He had been in an encounter with German submarines five days out from the United Kingdom, and the convoy had lost one ship, while another pad been damaged and had gone to Reykjavik, Iceland, for repairs. To the older hands in the crew it had been but an incident, but to him it was the epitome of death and destruction.
Everybody aboard knew that the ship was due for a refit this trip, and he was glad. He would go home to Verdun with something more to talk about this time than barrack-room tales. He could picture himself and Knobby Clark, who had promised