Alexander Fullerton - Surface!

The Captain spoke quietly. “We’ll be staying here until midnight tomorrow night. Then we’ll surface for two hours and run the fans, and dive again until the next night when we pick up the Army.

“Any man who makes a noise of any sort will be for it in a big way. If one of your stokers, Chief, drops a wheel-spanner in the Engine Room, I’ll kick him to death. Any sound can give us away. There are to be no lights other than what’s absolutely necessary, and no unnecessary movement. I want everyone off watch to sleep, all the time if they can. That won’t be difficult, for some of you.” The Captain glanced at Chief again as he said it.

“Right, Number One. The hands can go into four watches. Officers of the Watch as usual. Carry on.”

It is always quiet in a dived submarine at Patrol Routine. Now, under these circumstances, there was not even the low hum of the motors, nor any noise from the air-conditioning plant. Silence, complete silence, such as a lone mountaineer knows and few others in a noisy world have ever encountered, settled through the compartments. A coarse whisper in the Control Room raised a smile in the wardroom. The silence was deadening, suffocating, as the heat began to build up in the steel tube which, lying in tepid, shallow water, would be like an oven when the sun rose in the morning.

Number One shook Chief violently by the shoulder to wake him up. Chief looked up angrily from his sweat-damp bunk.

“Lie on your side, damn you. You’ve been snoring. I thought it was the klaxon.”

The Captain lay on his bunk, smiling to himself as he thought about his last leave and Bird, the Second Cox’n. On their last evening he and Chief had quite a few bottles left intact, and so they hired a small room on the ground floor of the hotel and invited a score of the Seahound ’s sailors, who were spending their leave in the local rest-camp, to come up. It turned out to be a riotous evening, with much singing as the spirits sank in the bottles and rose in the men. The Manageress, a little woman who could easily have been a blood-relation of a hen, met Bird when he was on the way to the lavatory. Bird was singing at the top of his voice, and she told him to be quiet. He was in no mood to be treated in that manner by a person whom he considered to be a “silly old geyser”, and after a certain amount of Billingsgate repartee he gave chase, brandishing the gong-stick and uttering threats.

As they flashed through the small lounge, the Captain observed, “She shows a remarkable turn of speed, for her age.”

Chief agreed. “‘m. But I’d put my money on Bird, from the point of view of endurance.”

“Oh, dear,” said the Captain. “I suppose I’d better do something. Shadwell – Parrot – go and catch Bird and put some sense into him.”

A few minutes later they brought him back, fed-up and depressed. “Proper flippin’ leave this is,” he complained.

Looking back, afterwards, on those two days spent lying on the bottom, none of them could produce very clear recollections. It took in their minds the form of a pipe-dream: it was seen through a haze of heat, an opaque, heavy curtain of heat that hung over the eyes and dulled the ears, choked and stifled any coherent thought about how the time had been spent. There were blurred recollections of waking in a bunk that was a pool of sweat, taking over a watch in a silent Turkish Bath of irritation, depression and impatience. There were vague memories of meals that consisted always of corned beef, corned beef that was unrecognisable because it had melted into a greasy soup which was eaten with dry bread because the butter ran like water and could only have been poured on from a jug. There were memories of the Captain and the First Lieutenant forcing men to put salt in their drinking water to replace the salt that they were losing in sweat, and the taste of the warm salted water mingled with the blanket of heat, until you felt that you could scream, but no screaming would have made any difference.

In the after Mess, a very young stoker began to giggle to himself, and he went on giggling for over an hour in spite of his messmates’ attempts to stop the horrible noise. After a time the Leading Stoker had a word with Stoker Johnson, who was a large, very powerful and kindly man, and Johnson stopped the giggling in the only possible way, a short, swift right-arm jab to the jaw that brought relief to everyone and was just in time to stop a few others giving way to the pressure in their brains.

In the middle of the night the nightmare was interrupted when they surfaced for two hours and ran the fans to clear the air. It was a relief, but the faces of the men as they stood open-mouthed gulping in the cool night air, noisily like pigs at a trough, bore expressions of weary apprehension, the faces of men whose torture would shortly be resumed, as resumed it was when at two in the morning the hatch crashed down and they sank to the bottom to do it all over again.

At eleven o’clock on the second night the Captain, wearing a strip of torn shirt round his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes, walked into the Control Room and said, “Diving Stations.” To the men who heard it, the order meant only one thing: relief, fresh air, cool air. To the Captain it meant much more. It meant that within an hour he would know whether they’d failed or succeeded, whether the Major and his men were dead or alive. If the party failed to appear at midnight, or by one o’clock, which was the agreed time-limit, his orders were to leave the area. It would mean, if the soldiers were not there, that they were either killed or captured, and that meant that the enemy would have an idea that a submarine was at the bottom of the Straits. In those circumstances his duty was to save his ship, and nothing else. This was the zero hour.

Number One disturbed his thoughts. “Ready to surface, sir.”

“Surface.” Water was pumped out of the trimming tanks, and after a few minutes they felt the submarine move. The needle jerked a little in the depth gauge, and began to circle slowly. At periscope depth the Captain ordered, “Up periscope,” and carefully searched round. He stayed at the periscope for five minutes, while Number One battled with the trim and the submarine moved slowly ahead on one motor.

“Surface!” The word was music.

The Signalman stands in the centre of the bridge, behind the Captain and the Sub-Lieutenant. The Captain’s glasses are motionless, fixed on the small strip of beach. Sub keeps an all-round lookout, continually resisting the temptation to stop his glasses on the shore and watch for the signal. Below, in the Control Room, Bird and his men wait under the hatch. Up for’ard, the T.I. and his torpedo-men sit in the empty Mess and wait.

Suddenly there’s a gasp from the Captain.

“Signalman!” The Signalman jumps to his side, the blue lamp ready. The Captain speaks again: “No – wait… Yes, by God! On the left edge of the beach. Two blue flashes… Give ’em two flashes, damn you!” The Signalman sights his lamp at the beach, presses the trigger twice. The Captain shouts down the voice-pipe.

“Tell the T.I. to stand by. Tell the First Lieutenant to be ready for any casualties. Slow ahead together. Casing party on the bridge.”

He straightens up, and says quietly to the Sub, “Go on down. Don’t open up until I give you the word.” A few minutes pass, and the Captain sees the first canoe, half-way between the shore and the submarine. He shouts over the front of the bridge, “Stand by! Open up, Sub!”

Out of the night shoots the first canoe: it slides alongside, and they grab hold of it, lying on the casing. The men scramble out and Bird and Parrot lift the canoe out of the water and slide it into the hatch where hands are waiting to receive it. The Major climbs down after it, but the man with him is no sergeant. He is small, grey-haired, a civilian in a crumpled, off-white suit. They are too busy to wonder about it as the next canoe comes alongside: it contains Captain Bowers and his sergeant. The third canoe is manned by only one sergeant, the other cockpit empty. The last one holds young Montgomery and his sergeant.