Read HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) for Free Online Page A

rewired, for a start), then they might be able to do something: creep southwards, perhaps, till they were athwart the main convoy route and could get help. It was the longest chance he had ever taken: sitting there in his chair up on the bridge, brooding in the darkness, he tried to visualize its successive stages. Funnier things had happened at sea … But the final picture, the one that remained with him all that night, was of a ship – his ship – drawing thirty-two feet forward and nothing aft, drifting helplessly downwind with little prospect of surviving till daylight.
    No one ashore knew anything about them, and no one would start worrying for at least three days.
    With the ship, ignoring and somehow isolating itself against this preposterous weight of odds, there was much to do; and with no officers to call on except the doctor, who was busy with casualties, and the Chief, whom he left to make a start in the engine room, the Captain set to work to organize it himself. He kept Bridger by him, to relay orders, and a signalman, in case something unexpected happened (there was a faint chance of an aircraft on passage being in their area, and within signalling distance): Adams was installed a virtual First Lieutenant; and from his nucleus the control and routine of the ship was set in motion again.
    The bulkhead he could do nothing about: Chief set to work on the main switchboard, the first step towards raising steam again, and the leading telegraphist was working on the wireless transmitter; the boats and rafts were left in instant readiness, and the more severe casualties taken back under cover again. (A hard decision, this; but to keep them on the upper deck in this bitter weather was a degree nearer killing them than running the risk of trapping them below.) Among the casualties was the midshipman, still alive after a cruel lacerated wound in the chest and now in the sick bay waiting for a blood transfusion. The bodies of the other three who had been killed on the bridge – Haines, the look-out, and the bridge messenger – had been taken aft to the quarter-deck, to join the rest, from ‘X’ gun’s crew and the party on the boat-deck, awaiting burial.
    Then, after a spell of cleaning up, which included the chaos of loose gear and ammunition round ‘A’ gun, which had been directly over the explosion, the Captain told Adams to muster what was left of the ship’s company and report the numbers. He was still in his chair on the bridge, sipping a mug of cocoa, which Bridger had cooked up in the wardroom pantry, when Adams came up with his report, and he listened to the details with an attention which he tried to rid of all personal feeling. These crude figures, which Adams, bending over the chart-table light, was reading out, were men, some of them well known and liked, some of them shipmates of two and three years’ standing, all of them sailors; but from now on they must only be numbers, only losses on a chart of activity and endurance. The dead were not to be sailors any more: just ‘missing potential’, ‘negative assets’ – some damned phrase like that.
    Adams said: ‘I’ve written it all down, sir, as well as I could.’ He had, in his voice, the same matter-of-fact impersonal tone as the Captain would have used: the words ‘as well as I could’ might have referred to some trifling clerical inconvenience instead of the difficulty of sorting out the living, the dead, and the dying in the pitch darkness. ‘There’s the ones we know about, first. There’s three officers and twelve ratings killed – that’s the Gunnery Officer, Lieutenant Haines, and Mr Merrett, and the gun’s crew and the ones on the boat-deck and the two up here. The surgeon lieutenant has one officer and sixteen men in the sick bay. We’ll have to count most of them out, I’m afraid, sir. Nine of them were out of the fo’c’sle. Then there’s’ – he paused – ‘one officer and seventy-four men missing.’ He stopped