Now fear took hold. Some men jumped straight away, and struck out from the ship, panting with the cold and calling to comrades to follow them: others held back, and crowded farther towards the stern, on the high side away from the water; when at last they jumped, many of them slid and scraped their way down the barnacled hull, and their clothes and then the softer projections of their bodies—sometimes their faces, sometimes their genitals—were torn to ribbons by the rough plating. The sea began to sprout bobbing red lights as the safety-lamps were switched on: the men struck out and away, and then crowded together, shouting and calling encouragement to each other, and turned to watch Compass Rose. High out of the water, she seemed to be considering the plunge before she took it: the propeller, bared against the night sky, looked foolish and indecent, the canted mast was like an admonishing finger, bidding them all behave in her absence.
She did not long delay thus: she could not. As they watched, the stern rose higher still: the last man left on board, standing on the tip of the after-rail, now plunged down with a yell of fear. The noise seemed to unloose another: there was a rending crash as the whole load of depth-charges broke loose from their lashings and ploughed wildly down the length of the upper deck, and splashed into the water.
From a dozen constricted throats came the same words: “She’s going.”
There was a muffled explosion, which they could each feel like a giant hand squeezing their stomachs, and Compass Rose began to slide down. Now she went quickly, as if glad to be quit of her misery: the mast snapped in a ruin of rigging as she fell. When the stern dipped beneath the surface, a tumult of water leapt upwards: then the smell of oil came thick and strong towards them. It was a smell they had got used to, on many convoys: they had never thought that Compass Rose would ever exude the same disgusting stench.
The sea flattened, the oil spread, their ship was plainly gone: a matter of minutes had wiped out a matter of years. Now the biting cold, forgotten before the huge disaster of their loss, began to return. They were bereaved and left alone in the darkness; fifty men, two rafts, misery, fear, and the sea.
Despite the claims of many that a realistic war story could not be written, since war is ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent unbelievable horror, Nicholas Monsarrat wrote The Cruel Sea in 1951, and a few years later, Ealing Studios made an equally brilliant film from it, with the redoubtable Jack Hawkins as Captain Ericson and a couple of young blokes named Denholm Elliot and Donald Sinden in support. Both book and film are easily the best realistic portrait of the ghastly business of escorting convoys in the North Sea in a destroyer designed to hunt U-boats. Two of them in fact since halfway through, the HMS Compass Rose is torpedoed and sunk with the loss of about half the characters, and replaced with the HMS Saltash. For all the profoundly detailed years of searching, they sink just three U-boats, and wonder at the end if they won or lost. Superbly brilliant stuff, never equalled before or after.
Nine Hours to Rama, by Stanley Wolpert, is a rather boring account of the assassination of Ghandi, from the assassin’s point of view. Just plain terrible. I might have blotted it from my memory altogether, had I not seen the film in the hangar of the aircraft carrier HMAS Sydney on my way to Vietnam. But it is ironic—they could not have known that Ghandi’s ideas of passive resistance was where we were all actually headed. It was screened as a double feature with Von Ryan’s Express, a not bad POW escape fantasy which seemed even less appropriate to the circumstances.
