HMS Ulysses

Brooks smiled faintly.

‘That’s what they call—ah—seditious talk, Johnson,’ he said mildy.

‘Sorry, sir. Suppose I shouldn’t—it’s just that I—’

‘Never mind, Johnson. I asked for it. Can’t stop anyone from thinking. Only, don’t think out loud. It’s—it’s prejudicial to naval discipline…I think your friend Riley wants you. Better get him a dictionary.’

He turned and pushed his way through the surgery curtains. A dark head—all that could be seen behind the dentist’s chair—twisted round. Johnny Nicholls, Acting Surgeon Lieutenant, rose quickly to his feet, a pile of report cards dangling from his left hand.

‘Hallo, sir. Have a pew.’

Brooks grinned.

‘An excellent thing, Lieutenant Nicholls, truly gratifying, to meet these days a junior officer who knows his place. Thank you, thank you.’

He climbed into the chair and sank back with a groan, fiddling with the neck-rest.

‘If you’ll just adjust the foot-rest, my boy…so. Ah—thank you.’ He leaned back luxuriously, eyes closed, head far back on the rest, and groaned again. ‘I’m an old man, Johnny, my boy, just an ancient has-been.’

‘Nonsense, sir,’ Nicholls said briskly. ‘Just a slight malaise. Now, if you’ll let me prescribe a suitable tonic…’

He turned to a cupboard, fished out two toothglasses and a dark-green, ribbed bottle marked ‘Poison’. He filled the glasses and handed one to Brooks. ‘My personal recommendation. Good health, sir!’

Brooks looked at the amber liquid, then at Nicholls.

‘Heathenish practice they taught you at these Scottish Universities, my boy…Admirable fellers, some of these old heathens. What is it this time, Johnny?’

‘First-class stuff,’ Nicholls grinned. ‘Produce of the Island of Coll.’

The old surgeon looked at him suspiciously.

‘Didn’t know they had any distilleries up there.’

‘They haven’t. I only said it was made in Coll…How did things go up top, sir?’

‘Bloody awful. His nibs threatened to string us all from the yardarm. Took a special dislike to me—said I was to be booted off the ship instanter. Meant it, too.’

‘You!’ Nicholls’s brown eyes, deep-sunk just now and red-rimmed from sleeplessness, opened wide. ‘You’re joking, sir, of course.’

‘I’m not. But it’s all right—I’m not going. Old Giles, the skipper and Turner—the crazy idiots—virtually told Starr that if I went he’d better start looking around for another Admiral, Captain and Commander as well. They shouldn’t have done it, of course—but it shook old Vincent to the core. Departed in high dudgeon, muttering veiled threats…not so veiled, either, come to think of it.’

‘Damned old fool!’ said Nicholls feelingly.

‘He’s not really, Johnny. Actually, he’s a brilliant bloke. You don’t become a DNO for nothing. Master strategist and tactician, Giles tells me, and he’s not really as bad as we’re apt to paint him; to a certain extent we can’t blame old Vincent for sending us out again. Bloke’s up against an insoluble problem. Limited resources at his disposal, terrific demands for ships and men in half a dozen other theatres. Impossible to meet half the claims made on him; half the time he’s operating on little better than a shoe-string. But he’s still an inhuman, impersonal sort of cuss—doesn’t understand men.’

‘And the upshot of it all?’

‘Murmansk again. Sailing at 0600 tomorrow.’

‘What! Again? This bunch of walking zombies?’ Nicholls was openly incredulous. ‘Why, they can’t do that, sir! They—they just can’t!’

‘They’re doing it anyway, my boy. The Ulysses must—ah—redeem itself.’ Brooks opened his eyes. ‘Gad the very thought appals me. If there’s any of that poison left, my boy…’

Nicholls shoved the depleted bottle back into the cupboard, and jerked a resentful thumb in the direction of the massive battleship clearly visible through the porthole, swinging round her anchor three or four cable-lengths away.

‘Why always us, sir? It’s always us. Why don’t they send that useless floating barracks out once in a while? Swinging round that bloody great anchor, month in, month out—’

‘Just the point,’ Brooks interrupted solemnly. ‘According to the Kapok Kid, the tremendous weight of empty condensed-milk cans and herring-in-tomato-sauce tins accumulated on the ocean bed over the past twelve months completely defeats all attempts to weigh anchor.’

Nicholls didn’t seem to hear him.

‘Week in, week out, months and months on end, they send the Ulysses out. They change the carriers, they rest the screen destroyers—but never the Ulysses. There’s no let-up. Never, not once. But the Duke of Cumberland—all it’s fit for is sending hulking great brutes of marines on board here to massacre sick men, crippled men, men who’ve done more in a week than—’

‘Easy, boy, easy,’ the Commander chided. ‘You can’t call three dead men and the bunch of wounded heroes lying outside there a massacre. The marines were only doing their job. As for the Cumberland—well, you’ve got to face it. We’re the only ship in the Home Fleet equipped for carrier command.’

Nicholls drained his glass and regarded his superior officer moodily.

‘There are times, sir, when I positively love the Germans.’

‘You and Johnson should get together sometime,’ Brooks advised. ‘Old Starr would have you both clapped in irons for spreading alarm and…Hallo, hallo!’ He straightened up in his chair and leaned forward. ‘Observe the old Duke there, Johnny! Yards of washing going up from the flagdeck and matelots running—actually running—up to the fo’c’sle head. Unmistakable signs of activity. By Gad, this is uncommon surprising! What d’ye make of it, boy?’

‘Probably learned that they’re going on leave,’ Nicholls growled. ‘Nothing else could possibly make that bunch move so fast. And who are we to grudge them the just rewards for their labours? After so long, so arduous, so dangerous a spell of duty in Northern waters…’

The first shrill blast of a bugle killed the rest of the sentence. Instinctively, their eyes swung round on the crackling, humming loudspeaker, then on each other in sheer, shocked disbelief. And then they were on their feet, tense, expectant: the heart-stopping urgency of the bugle-call to action stations never grows dim.

‘Oh, my God, no!’ Brooks moaned. ‘Oh, no, no! Not again! Not in Scapa Flow!’

‘Oh, God, no! Not again—not in Scapa Flow!’

These were the words in the mouths, the minds, the hearts of 727 exhausted, sleep-haunted, bitter men that bleak winter evening in Scapa Flow. That they thought of, and that only could they think of as the scream of the bugle stopped dead all work on decks and below decks, in engine-rooms and boiler-rooms, on ammunition lighters and fuel tenders, in the galleys and in the offices. And that only could the watch below think of—and that with an even more poignant despair—as the strident blare seared through the bliss of oblivion and brought them back, sick at heart, dazed in mind and stumbling on their feet, to the iron harshness of reality.

It was, in a strangely indefinite way, a moment of decision. It was the moment that could have broken the Ulysses, as a fighting ship, for ever. It was the moment that bitter, exhausted men, relaxed in the comparative safety of a landlocked anchorage, could have chosen to make the inevitable stand against authority, against that wordless, mindless compulsion and merciless insistence which was surely destroying them. If ever there was such a moment, this was it.

The moment came—and passed. It was no more than a fleeting shadow, a shadow that flitted lightly across men’s minds and was gone, lost in the rush of feet pounding to action stations. Perhaps self-preservation was the reason. But that was unlikely—the Ulysses had long since ceased to care. Perhaps it was just naval discipline, or loyalty to the captain, or what the psychologists call conditioned reflex—you hear the scream of brakes and you immediately jump for your life. Or perhaps it was something else again.

Whatever it was, the ship—all except the port watch anchor party—was closed up in two minutes. Unanimous in their disbelief that this could be happening to them in Scapa Flow, men went to their stations silently or vociferously, according to their nature. They went reluctantly, sullenly, resentfully, despairingly. But they went.

Rear-Admiral Tyndall went also. He was not one of those who went silently. He climbed blasphemously up to the bridge, pushed his way through the port gate and clambered into his high-legged armchair in the for’ard port corner of the compass platform. He looked at Vallery.

‘What’s the flap, in heaven’s name, Captain?’ he demanded testily. ‘Everything seems singularly peaceful to me.’

‘Don’t know yet, sir.’ Vallery swept worried eyes over the anchorage. ‘Alarm signal from C-in-C, with orders to get under way immediately.’

‘Get under way! But why, man, why?’

Vallery shook his head.

Tyndall groaned. ‘It’s all a conspiracy, designed to rob old men like myself of their afternoon sleep,’ he declared.