HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) by Nicholas Monsarrat Read Free Book Online Page A

sky. ‘She seems a lot easier, sir.’
    ‘Yes, the wind’s going down.’ The phrase was like a blessing.
    ‘By God, we’ll do it yet!’ Chief, preparing to go down again, slurred his feet along the deck and found it sticky. ‘Bit of a mess here,’ he commented.
    ‘Blood,’ said the Captain shortly. ‘They haven’t cleaned up yet.’
    ‘We’re going to be pretty short-handed,’ said Chief, following a natural train of thought. ‘But that’s tomorrow’s worry. Good night, sir.’
    ‘Good night, Chief. Get some sleep if you can.’
    But later he himself found sleep almost impossible to achieve, weary as he was after nearly nine hours on the bridge. He lay in his sleeping bag on the hard floor of the asdic hut, feeling underneath him the trials and tremors of the ship’s painful labouring. It was very cold. Poor Marlborough , he thought, losing between waking and sleeping the full control of his thoughts. Poor old Marlborough . We shouldn’t do this to you. None of us should: not us, or the Germans, or those poor chaps washing about in the fo’c’sle. No ship deserved an ordeal as evil as this. Only human beings, immeasurably base, deserved such punishment.

    Bridger woke him at first light, with a mug of tea and an insinuating ‘Seven o’clock, sir!’ so normal as to make him smile. But the smile was not much more than a momentary flicker. Under him he felt the ship very slowly rolling to and fro, without will and without protest: she seemed more a part of the sea itself than a separate burden on it. The weather must have moderated a lot, but Marlborough might be deeper in the water as well.
    Cold and stiff, he lay for a few minutes before getting up, collecting his thoughts and remembering what was waiting for him outside the asdic hut. It would be bitterly cold, possibly wet as well: the ship would seem deformed and ugly, the damage meeting his eyes at every turn: the blood on the bridge would be dried black. All over the upper deck there would be men, grey-faced and shivering, waking to face the day: not cheerful and noisy as they usually were, but dully astonished that the ship was still afloat and that they had survived so far; unwilling, even, to meet each other’s eye, in the embarrassment of fear and disbelief of the future. And there were those other men down in the fo’c’sle, who would not wake. There were the burials to see to. There was the bulkhead.
    He got up.
    The bulkhead first, with the Chief and Adams. The rating outside the watertight door said: ‘Haven’t heard anything, sir,’ in a non-committal way, as if he did not really believe that they were not all wasting their time. He was a young stoker: sixteen men in his mess had been caught forward: no hope of any sort had yet been communicated to him. Noting this, the Captain thought: I’ll have to talk to them, some time this morning … Inside, things were as before: there was a little more water, and the atmosphere was now thick and sour: but nothing had shifted, and with the decrease in the ship’s rolling the bulkhead itself was rigid, without sound or movement.
    ‘I think it’s even improved a bit, sir,’ said the Chief. He ran his hand down the central seam, which before had been leaking: his fingers now came away dry. ‘This seems to have worked itself watertight again. If we could alter the trim a bit, so that even part of this space is above the waterline, we might be able to save it.’
    ‘That’s going to be today’s job,’ said the Captain, ‘moving everything we can aft, so as to bring her head up a bit. I’ll go into details when we get outside.’
    On his way back he visited the boiler and engine rooms. The boiler room was deserted, and already cooling fast: here again the forward bulkhead was a tangle of shores and joists, braced against the angle-pieces that joined the frames.
    ‘What about this one?’ he asked.
    ‘Doesn’t seem to be any strain on it, sir,’ Chief answered. ‘I think the space