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3. Které výrazy bude nutné vyhledat a ověřit?
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Nicholas Monsarrat - The Cruel Sea
Part Three: 1941 - Grappling
7
The smiling weather of that late summer helped them to
settle down to sea-going again, after the relaxation of their refit. It was a
curious business, this tuning-up of men and machinery, and in some cases it
caught both of them unawares. Compass Rose hit the knuckle of the jetty –
fortunately not very hard - on her way out of dock, owing to a small defect in
her reversing gear; and one seaman, to his lasting shame, was actually seasick
on the five-minute trip across the river to top up at the oiler. ... But these
were odd items in a quick process of re-establishment: when they picked up
their convoy off the Bar Light Vessel they were already half-way back to the
old routine, and by the time they were two days out, clear of land and heading
in a wide south-westerly circle for Gibraltar, the ship was fighting fit again.
The weather gave them a wonderful succession of sunlit days and calm nights;
and conscious of their luck in sailing for hour after hour over a deep blue, mirror-calm
sea, the sort of warm and lazy trip that cost a guinea a day in peace-time,
they quickly made the transfer from land to seafaring. It was, from many
angles, good to be back on the job again: clear of the dubious and emotional tie of land, they
were once more part of an increased escort - two destroyers and five corvettes
- charged with the care of twenty-one deep-laden ships bound for Gibraltar.
This was their real task, and they turned to it again with the readiness of men
who, knowing that the task was crucial, were never wholly convinced that the
Navy could afford to let them take a holiday.
The treachery of that perfect weather, the lure of the easy
transition, were not long in the declaring.
It started with a
single aircraft, possibly an old friend, a four-engined Focke-Wulf reconnaissance plane which closed the convoy
from the eastwards and then began to go round them in slow circles, well out of
range of any gun-fire they could put up. It had happened to them before, and
there was little doubt of what the plane was doing - pin-pointing the convoy,
shadowing it, noting exactly its course and speed, and then reporting back to
some central authority, as well as tipping off any Uboats that might be nearby.
The change this time lay in the fact that it was occurring so early in their
voyage, and that, as they watched the plane circling and realized its mission,
the sun was pouring down from a matchless sky on to a sea as smooth and as
lovely as old glass, hardly disturbed at all by the company of ships that
crossed it on their way southwards. Unfair to peaceloving convoys, they thought
as they closed their ranks and trained their glasses on the slowlycircling messenger
of prey: leave us alone on this painted ocean, let us slip by, no one will
know. ...
At dusk the plane withdrew, droning away eastwards at the
same level pace: up on the bridge,
preparing to darken ship and close down for the night, they
watched it go with gloomy foreboding.
'It's too easy,' said Ericson broodingly, voicing their
thoughts. 'All it's got to do is to fly round and round us, sending out some
kind of homing signal, and every U-boat within a hundred miles just steers
straight for us.' He eyed the sky, innocent and cloudless. 'I wish it would
blow up a bit. This sort of weather doesn't give us a chance.'
There was nothing out of the ordinary that night, except a
signal at eleven o'clock addressed by the Admiralty to their convoy. 'There are
indications of five U-boats in your area, with others joining,' it warned them
with generous scope, and left them to make the best they could of it. As soon as
darkness fell the convoy changed its course from the one the aircraft had
observed, going off at a sharp tangent in the hope of escaping the pursuit:
perhaps it was successful, perhaps the U-boats were still out of range, for the
five hours of darkness passed without incident, while on the radarscreen the
compact square of ships and the out-lying fringe of escorts moved steadily
forwards, undisturbed, escaping notice. Viperous, making her routine dash round
the convoy at first light, signalled: 'I think we fooled them,' as she swept
past Compass Rose. The steep wave of her wash had just started them rolling
when they heard the drone of an aircraft, and the spy was with them again.
The first ship was
torpedoed and set on fire at midday. She was a big tanker - all the twenty-one ships
in the convoy were of substantial size, many of them bound for Malta and the
eastern Mediterranean: it was a hand-picked lot, a valuable prize well worth
the pursuit and the harrying. And pursued and harried they were, without
quarter: the swift destruction of that first ship marked the beginning of an
eight-day battle which took steady toll of the convoy, thinning out the ships each
night with horrible regularity, making of each dawn a disgusting nursery-rhyme,
a roll-call of the diminishing band of nigger-boys.
They fought back, they did their best: but the odds against
them were too high, the chinks in their armour impossible to safeguard against
so many circling enemies.
'There are nine
U-boats in your area,' said the Admiralty at dusk that night, as generous as
ever; and the nine U-boats between them sank three ships, one of them in
circumstances of special horror. She was known to be carrying about twenty
Wrens, the first draft to be sent to Gibraltar: aboard Compass Rose they had
watched the girls strolling about the deck, had waved to them as they passed,
had been glad of their company even at long range. The ship that carried them
was the last to be struck that night: she went down so swiftly that the flames
which engulfed the whole of her after-part hardly had time to take hold before
they were quenched. The noise of that quenching was borne over the water
towards Compass Rose, a savage hissing roar, indescribably cruel. 'By God, it's
those poor kids!' exclaimed Ericson, jolted out of a calm he could not preserve
at so horrible a moment. But there was nothing that they could do: they were
busy on a wide search ordered by Viperous, and they could not leave it. If
there were anything left to rescue, someone else would have to do it.
Four of the girls
were in fact picked up by another merchant ship which had bravely stopped and lowered
a boat for the job. They were to be seen next morning, sitting close together
on the upper deck, staring out at the water: there was no gay waving now, from
either side.... But the ship that rescued them was one of the two that were
sunk that same night: she too went down swiftly, and Compass Rose, detailed
this time to pick up survivors could only add four to her own total of living passengers,
and six to the dead. Among these dead was one of the Wrens, the only one that
any ship found out of the draft of twenty: included in the neat row of corpses
which Tallow laid out on the quarterdeck, the girl's body struck a note of
infinite pity. She was young: the drenched fair hair, the first that had ever
touched the deck of Compass Rose, lay like a spread fan, outlining a pinched
and frightened face which would, in living repose, have been lovely. Lockhart,
who had come aft at dawn to see to the sewing-up of those that were to be
buried, felt a constriction in his throat as he looked down at her. Surely
there could be no sadder, no filthier aspect of war. ... But there were many
other things to do besides mourn or pity. They buried her with the rest, and
added her name to the list in the log, and continued the prodigal southward
journey.
Six ships were gone already: six ships in two days, and they
still had a week to go before they were near the shelter of land. But now they
had a stroke of luck: a succession of two dark nights which, combined with a
violent evasive alteration of course, threw the pursuit off the scent. Though
they were still on the alert, and the tension, particularly at night, was still
there, yet for forty-eight hours they enjoyed a wonderful sense of respite: the
convoy, now reduced to fifteen ships, cracked on speed, romping along towards
the southern horizon and the promise of safety. Aboard Compass Rose, a cheerful
optimism succeeded the sense of ordained misfortune which had begun to take a hold;
and the many survivors whom they had picked up, wandering about the upper deck
in their blankets and scraps of clothing or lining the rails to stare out at
the convoy, lost gradually the strained refugee look which was so hard on the
naval conscience. Hope grew: they might see harbour after all. ...
So it was for two days and two nights; and then the
aircraft, casting wide circles in the clear dawn sky, found them again.
Rose, the young signalman, heard it first: a stirring in the
upper air, a faint purring whisper which meant discovery. He looked round him
swiftly, his head cocked on one side: he called out: 'Aircraft, sir -
somewhere...' and Ferraby and Baker, who had the forenoon watch, came to the
alert in the same swift nervous movement. The throbbing grew, and achieved a
definite direction - somewhere on their port beam, away from the convoy and
towards the distant Spanish coast. 'Captain, sir!' called Baker down the
voice-pipe. 'Sound of aircraft -' but Ericson was already mounting the
bridge-ladder, brought up from his sea-cabin by the hated noise. He looked
round him, narrowing his eyes against the bright day, and then: 'There it is!'
he exclaimed suddenly, and pointed. On their beam, emerging from the pearly
morning mist that lay low on the horizon all round them, was the plane, the
spying eye of the enemy.
They all stared at it, every man on the bridge, bound
together by the same feeling of anger and
hatred. It was so unfair. ... U-boats they could deal with -
or at least the odds were more level: with a bit of luck in the weather, and
the normal skill of sailors, the convoy could feint and twist and turn and hope
to escape their pursuit. But this predatory messenger from another sphere,
destroying the tactical pattern, eating into any distance they contrived to put
between themselves and the enemy - this betrayer could never be baulked. They
felt, as they watched the aircraft, a helpless sense of nakedness, an
ineffectual rage: clearly, it was all going to happen again, in spite of their care
and watchfulness, in spite of their best endeavours, and all because a handful
of young men in an aircraft could span half an ocean in a few hours, and come
plummeting down upon their slower prey.
Swiftly the aircraft must have done its work, and the
U-boats could not have been far away; within twelve hours, back they came, and
that night cost the convoy two more ships out of the dwindling fleet. The hunt
was up once more, the pack exultant, the savage rhythm returning and
quickening. ... They did their best: the escorts counter-attacked, the convoy
altered course and increased its speed: all to no purpose. The sixth day
dawned, the sixth night came: punctually at midnight the alarm-bells sounded
and the first distress-rocket soared up into the night sky, telling of a ship mortally
hit and calling for help. She burned for a long time, that ship, reddening the
water, lifting sluggishly with the swell, becoming at last a flickering oily
pyre which the convoy slowly left astern. Then there was a pause of more than
two hours, while they remained alert at Action Stations and the convoy slid
southwards under a black moonless sky; and then, far out on the seaward horizon,
five miles away from them, there was a sudden return of violence. A brilliant
orange flash split the darkness, died down, flared up again, and then guttered
away to nothing. Clearly it was another ship hit - but this time, for them, it
was much more than a ship; for this time, this time it was Sorrel.
They all knew it must
be Sorrel, because at that distance it could not be any other ship, and also because
of an earlier signal which they had relayed to her from Viperous. 'In case of
an attack tonight', said the signal, 'Sorrel will proceed five miles astern and
to seaward of the convoy, and create a diversion by dropping depth-charges,
firing rockets, etc. This may draw the main attack away from the convoy.' They
had seen the rockets earlier that night, and disregarded them: they only meant
that Sorrel, busy in a corner, was doing her stuff according to plan. ... Probably
that plan had been effective, if the last two hours' lull were anything to go
by: certainly it had, from one point of view, been an ideal exercise, diverting
at least one attack from its proper mark. But in the process, someone had to
suffer: it had not cancelled the stalking approach, it did not stop the torpedo
being fired: Sorrel became the mark, in default of a richer prize, meeting her
lonely end in the outer ring of darkness beyond the convoy.
Poor Sorrel, poor sister-corvette. ... Up on the bridge of
Compass Rose, the men who had known her best of all were now the mourners,
standing separated from each other by the blackness of night but bound by the
same shock, the same incredulous sorrow. How could it have happened to Sorrel, to
an escort like themselves ...? Immediately he saw the explosion, Ericson had
rung down to the wireless office. '"Viperous from Compass Rose",' he
dictated.' "Sorrel torpedoed in her diversion position. May I leave and
search for survivors?"' Then: 'Code that up,' he snapped to the telegraphist
who was taking down the message. 'Quick as you can. Send it by RAT.' Then, the message
sent, they waited, silent in the darkness of the bridge, eyeing the dim bulk of
the nearest ship, occasionally turning back to where Sorrel had. been struck.
No one said a word: there were no words for this. There were only thoughts, and
not many of those.
The bell of the wireless-office rang sharply, breaking the
silence, and Leading-Signalman Wells, who was standing by the voice-pipe, bent
down to it.
'Bridge!' he said, and listened for a moment. Then he
straightened up, and called to the Captain across the grey width of the the
bridge. 'Answer from Viperous, sir.... "Do not leave convoy until daylight".'
There was silence again, a sickened, appalled silence.
Ericson set his teeth. He might have
guessed.... It was the right answer, of course, from the
cold technical angle: Viperous simply could not afford to take another escort
from the screen, and send her off on a non-essential job. It was the right
answer, but by Christ it was a hard one!... Back there in the lonely darkness,
ten miles and more away by now, men were dying, men of a special sort: people
they knew well, sailors like themselves: and they were to be left to die, or,
at best, their rescue was to be delayed for a period which must cost many
lives. Sorrel's sinking had come as an extraordinary shock to them all: she was
the first escort that had ever been lost out of their group, and she was, of
all the ones that could have gone, their own chummy-ship, the ship they had
tied up alongside after countless convoys, for two years on end: manned by
their friends, men they played tombola with or met in pubs ashore: men they
could always beat at football. ... For Sorrel to be torpedoed was bad enough;
but to leave her crew to sink or swim hi the darkness was the most cruel stroke
of all.
'Daylight,' said Morell suddenly, breaking the oppressive
silence on the bridge. 'Two more hours to wait.'
Ericson found himself answering: 'Yes' - not to Morell's
words, but to what he had meant. It was a cold night. With two hours to wait,
and then the time it would take them to run back to where Sorrel had gone down,
there would be very few men left to pick up.
There were in fact fifteen - fifteen out of a ship's company
of ninety.
They found them
without much difficulty, towards the end of the morning watch, sighting the two
specks which were Carley rafts across three miles or more of flat unruffled
sea. However familiar this crude seascape had become to them, it was especially
moving to come upon it again now: to approach the loaded rafts and the cluster
of oily bodies washing about among Sorrel's wreckage: to see, here and there in this
filthy aftermath, their own uniforms, their own badges and caps, almost their
own mirrored faces. ... The men on the rafts were stiff and cold and soaked
with oil, but as Compass Rose approached, one of them waved with wild energy,
foolishly greeting a rescuer not more than twenty yards away from him. Some of
the men were clearly dead, from cold or exhaustion, even though they had gained
the safety of the rafts: they lay with their heads on other men's knees,
cherished and warmed until death and perhaps for hours beyond it. Ericson,
looking through his binoculars at the ragged handful that remained, caught
sight of the grey face of Sorrel's captain, Ramsay, his friend for many years.
Ramsay was holding a body in his arms, a young sailor ugly and pitiful in
death, the head thrown back, the mouth hanging open. But the living face above the
dead one was hardly less pitiful. The whole story - the lost ship, the lost
crew, the pain and exhaustion of the last six hours - all these were in
Ramsay's face as he sat, holding the dead body, waiting for rescue.
It was a true captain's face, a captain in defeat who
mourned his ship, and bore alone the monstrous burden of its loss.
RAT
