Command, p.6
Command, page 6
“Tomorrow,” Bentley told him, “I will do rounds. Full, Saturday morning rounds.”
“But we’re in dockyard routine, sir,” Smith almost squealed.
“I know we’re in dockyard routine!” Bentley snarled. He recovered himself, and said coldly:
“Report to me with the ship ready for inspection at 1100 tomorrow. That’s all.”
Smith went out with a stunned look on his face, on which confusion struggled with anger.
The gunner knocked and came in before Smith had shut the door.
“Good afternoon, sir,” he said respectfully. “You wanted to see my ledgers.”
Bentley had to grin at his ugly, friendly face. He knew Lasenby was efficient. Normally, it was damned hard to rise from lower-deck to wardroom—when you did it by way of the gunnery branch, you had to be way above standard.
“Yes, Guns.” He gestured to a chair, and kept his gaze on Lasenby’s face as he added:
“I’m doing a full inspection tomorrow. Normal Saturday rounds. That means the magazines.”
He need not have worried. The gunner’s eyes looked back frankly into his as he lowered himself into the chair Smith had vacated.
“Aye, aye, sir. I’m ready now if you’d like an earlier run around.”
Bentley felt his face racking in a wide smile. He hoped it did not show the sweet relief he felt.
“Tomorrow will do, Guns. Now. Let’s see how many high-explosive bricks we’ve got to throw around.”
The inspection was a heart-breaking experience. Before, with Danvers, Bentley had been mainly concerned with finding where equipment and compartments were, not with their state of cleanliness or efficiency. But today’s inspection was as much a test of what Smith could do in twenty-four hours as it was of actual cleanliness. And Lieutenant Smith failed dismally.
Although guns and bridges and asdic compartments and so on were vitally important to the ship’s functioning, and, indeed, her continued life, Bentley found his most significant discovery on the mess-decks. Battles, he knew, are not so much battles of machines as of men. And if a ship’s men were slovenly, it followed as naturally as day precedes night that their tools of fighting would be in the same shape, between-decks. Wind Rode was a pigsty.
He was in the fo’c’slemen’s mess-deck. There was a sour, acrid smell of sweat, of wet towels hung anyhow to dry, of sea boots and sou’westers and dirty overalls flung into corners. He opened a kit-locker, and a shower of gear tumbled out and hit him in the chest. The corticene decks between the tables had been scrubbed for the inspection. He peered into a narrow alleyway beside a scullery and found the deck a quarter-inch thick in greasy dust.
He inspected every corner of her, and throughout it all he maintained a grim silence. Once, in the forrard magazine, he looked round the immaculate whiteness of bulkheads and ship’s sides, at the neatly stacked boxes of ammunition, at the ordered rows of big shells, and he turned and looked for three seconds straight into Number One’s eyes. They had come from the odoriferous mess which was the stokers’ living quarters.
He got back to the clean clear sunlight of the upper-deck, and he knew what he had to do. It was unusual. Another captain might have waited a week or so before pronouncing judgement. But though Bentley had been in some chatty ships in his time, he had never ever been aboard one so disgustingly filthy as this, his own.
He turned to the first-lieutenant as they stepped over the brass strip marking the quarter-deck and ordered curtly:
“Clear lower-deck.”
Smith looked at him for an instant in surprise. Then he muttered “Aye, aye, sir,” and called to the quartermaster. “Clear lower-deck” meant that every man on the ship, no matter what branch or what duty, must fall-in according to his part of ship or division. Only those actually on watch were excused.
Bentley heard the quartermaster’s shrill pipe through the loudspeakers, and he left his group of attendant officers and walked aft on to the quarter-deck. There he paced up and down in surreptitiously observed isolation, while the crew began to emerge from their holes.
He was not thinking about the speech he would make. What he had to say would be short and pungent. He was noting that, here and there, a petty-officer or leading-seaman was shouting, urging the stragglers on. There was a sense of awareness about those shouted exhortations, as if memories of better ships, of stricter discipline, were prompting their use here now.
Then the open space about the end of the banks of torpedo tubes was filled up with men. and Smith came aft to report:
“Lower-deck cleared, sir.”
Bentley returned his salute and walked forward with him. The first-lieutenant called the ship’s company to attention, reported them to the captain, and, at Bentley’s nod, stood them at ease. They waited there, at anything but ease. Some faces were sullen, some were expectant, but all were interested.
Bentley stood in front of them, his head up, his legs straddled, his arms straight down at his side. His starched drill uniform shone whitely, the gold in the rings on his shoulders gleamed. The group of two-hundred seamen and stokers and signalmen and torpedomen saw in him, standing upright before them with grimness in his face, the complete example of that remote symbol of impeccable and irresistible power, the captain.
They were quite still. There was not even a cough. They stood there, silent, waiting.
“I have just inspected the ship,” Bentley said, and his voice confirmed what they read in his face. “It is quite the dirtiest vessel I have ever served in. We are in dockyard hands. But there is a difference between unavoidable dirt and the filth of neglect.”
He felt the officers stir behind him. He ignored it. He swept the intent glare of his eyes round the massed body in front of him.
“This ship is my home and your home. It is more than that. It is the vehicle which will keep us alive through our next commission, or feed us to the sharks. It is not only a matter of common sense that the ship should be kept clean—it is a matter of plain bloody survival!”
He spoke those words as if he bit them off. He saw, he felt, a tightening in the faces before him; he felt a surge in his own breast. He knew he had them. He did not add anything about what he could, or would, do if the ship were not brought up to standard. He said, in that clipped command that imbues words with a sense of assured and definite command:
“I will do rounds again three days from now.”
His eyes swung to the first-lieutenant, beside him and a little to the rear.
“Carry on, Number One.”
Smith saluted. His harsh voice called them to attention. Bentley strode past them, feeling their eyes flicking to him as he went quickly by. Then he was clear, and walking along the empty stretch of the upper-deck to his cabin.
He saw, with a dull feeling of hopelessness, that it was no good. He knew that they had worked in those three days, and now, as he walked again through the mess-decks, he knew that what they lacked was efficient direction. The main fault lay in the first-lieutenant and the chief bosun’s mate. Scores of signs spoke to his seaman’s mind in clear and definite language.
Part of the superstructure had even been painted. It should have been scrubbed clean, then painted when she got clear of the dirt of the dockyard; the hammock-bins had all been scrubbed white, and the hammocks stacked inside them were still dirty brown in colour, ropes were coiled down left-handed instead of right-handed, against the natural lay of the rope, and so were bundled on the deck in crinkled untidiness, and dozens of similar points.
The effort had been put into it, but it had been mainly wasted. Inefficient direction. It was a heavy blow. While he walked and examined, he was thinking that it would always be like this; it would be his job, the captain, to supervise the cleanliness of his own ship. An impossible situation. That was what he carried a first-lieutenant for.
They came back to the quarter-deck and Smith waited for his decision, for a word of praise, the smile on his face. Bentley did not have the heart to be truthful. He said, dying to make his voice sound friendly:
“We did better that time, Number One.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll be stepping ashore at 1800.”
He returned Smith’s salute, and wheeled for his cabin. The feeling of sympathy he had for the stricken look on the lieutenant’s face faded in swift retrospect when he remembered that all his worries were centred on Smith and the Buffer. He had enough to worry about in a brand-new command without having the additional duty forced upon him of ship’s cleaner. And yet he could do nothing about getting rid of Smith and Toose. A request to the drafting office from a captain not a week in command would reflect more on himself than on Smith. And if he shot Toose off, after what he had done to retain him …
Bentley stepped into his cabin and threw his cap on to the table. He sank down in a chair, crossed his legs and rubbed his tired eyes with his fingers. He thought of his old captain, so austere and human and wise, and of his beautifully-run ship. Impulsively, Bentley rose and went to his desk. He pulled out paper, and almost without thought began to write to Sainsbury.
He wrote frankly, as one captain to another, for he knew that Sainsbury would know he was trying to rectify the state of affairs, and was not merely indulging in whining excuses. He told him of the first-lieutenant, and of the chief bosun’s mate, of the general slackness throughout the ship, and the material he had to counteract it.
He wrote more objectively than personally, as though he and the other commander were discussing a ship of the squadron which badly needed tightening up. Bentley could write that way, because Wind Rode was not yet his own ship: she was nothing at all like the ship he wanted her to be.
Halfway through the letter he stopped and read it over. He almost tore it up, because he realised that he was merely putting his own thoughts on paper. Then he grinned as he pictured in his mind how Old Aunty would receive it; he could see the prim mouth tightening as he read of slackness and dirtiness which would be anathema to his meticulous soul.
Bentley began again, and finished the letter. Then be sealed it, pressed his buzzer, and gave it to the messenger to post in the ship’s mail-box. Feeling better now that he had shared his worries with an understanding audience, he showered and dressed. Anne finished at the newspaper office at eight o’clock. He had arranged to pick her up there, and then a bite of supper. The rest of the evening would look after itself.
Captain Sainsbury was essentially a man of routine. Two days after the officer whom he looked upon as a son had written to him, he was sitting in his large and airy cabin, with the day’s mail laid out before him by his secretary. The small pile was separated into two heaps—official and private. It was indicative of the man that he should deal with the brown-enveloped official mail before relaxing with his personal letters. So, it was some two hours before he picked up Bentley’s letter, looked at the postmark curiously, and then, remembering, slit it open eagerly.
It was his first word from his former first-lieutenant. Sainsbury read quickly, and justified his writer’s prescience by pursing his thin mouth into a disapproving pucker as he learned what confronted his protege. He knew, even better than Bentley, what the young captain was up against. With two men like Smith and Toose aboard her, she would be always held back; they were king-pins.
They were the bottleneck in which the chain of command broke down—the impetus and drive being choked to a slight ineffective trickle, powerless to stem the overall breakdown of discipline.
Sainsbury laid Bentley’s letter slowly down on his desk. He leaned back in his chair, his left hand resting on his thigh, the forefinger and thumb on his other hand, on the table, rubbing slowly together. He was a destroyer-man and he had decided at once what he would do—or would like to do. What he had to consider now was whether young Bentley would take kindly to what he might construe as interference.
Sainsbury thought of Bentley as his own son—in the strict privacy of his own mind. That was all right. But the lieutenant-commander, he knew, was a man of decided opinions. What would give Sainsbury pleasure might well, in Bentley’s opinion, reflect on his own ability.
The old captain thought back to his first command. He was damned touchy then, he remembered: not actually resenting, but intolerant of senior-officer advice and help. But Sainsbury had had a good team. Bentley had a useless first-lieutenant and a weak chief bosun’s mate.
Sainsbury leaned forward abruptly and pressed a buzzer. Almost at once a smartly dressed able seaman stepped into the cabin. His uniform was freshly pressed, his cap in his hand was snowy white, his shoes gleamed and his face was brown and shaven.
“Yes, sir?” The voice was crisp and alert.
“Ask the signal yeoman to speak to me, please,” said Captain Sainsbury.
Three weeks later Bentley stepped slowly across the hatch-coaming and into his sea-cabin. He lit a cigarette and blew a slow spear of smoke at the deckhead as he sank down in the chair. With his long legs stretched out, the hand with its cigarette dangling down at his side, he stared at the opposite bulkhead. He noticed that, under the porthole, a streak of red rust ran down from one of the brass clips, fouling the whiteness of the paint.
He drew the end of his cigarette to a fierce red glow. The expression on his face was a mixture of impatience, disgust and weariness. Wherever he walked now in his ship he automatically noted things like that streak of rust: not only noticed them, but was aware of the fact that nothing had been done about their removal.
Three weeks of it. Three weeks of diplomatic urging, of blunt badgering, of absorption in duties far removed from his proper sphere. With his own important duties neglected through the stubborn incompetence of the first-lieutenant and his off-sider, Toose.
The result was much more far-reaching than mere failure to clean the ship properly, for, in its unremitting fight against the corrosive attacks of the sea, a ship’s efficiency and its life lay in its cleanliness. But because Smith and Toose lacked, or chose not to employ, the ability to supervise the hands properly, the whole vessel’s progress towards Bentley’s ideal of a fighting craft was slowed down.
In three weeks she should have been absolutely spotless, almost as clean and efficient as Scimitar, the flagship of the flotilla. If Bentley’s aim could be reckoned as ten, then Wind Rode rated a shaky five.
But there was the other thing. He had found in his time aboard that a captaincy was nothing like the sinecure he had imagined it to be. Sainsbury seemed always to have plenty of time on his hands. Now Bentley knew that that state of desirable affairs had been reached only through Sainsbury’s vast experience, and his meticulous training of the sound material under his command. Here, instead of making himself familiar with his captainly duties—and they were legion—Bentley found himself occupied almost wholly with trying to train his Number One to a sense of responsibility, trying to inculcate in his vapidly-smiling head a measure of pride in his ship and his rank.
What made it doubly infuriating was that Bentley realised the importance of lifting Smith up to a standard of efficiency. He had to keep at it. Rust on a sea boat’s lowering tackle could render the boat inoperative in an emergency; if the training-stop on a gun mounting seized up it could prevent the weapon from firing; not being able to lower a guard-rail because the pin would not come out could mean that the guns could not fire at a surfaced submarine close-in.
Because he had to supervise all these things—doing, in short, his first-lieutenant’s job aboard Scimitar—the time he had to study his own job was considerably shortened. They had one more week in dockyard hands. After that they would go to sea, fit in all respects, according to Navy Board’s requirements, to be sent straight into action.
Action? Bentley raised his hand and held it suspended over the brass ashtray. He opened his fingers and let the cigarette drop. He had two new radar sets fitted, linked into the ship’s fire-control system. It would take solid training for the control team to familiarise themselves with the new layout. The time which should have been devoted to that training had been spent on ensuring that the guns would fire, radar or no radar …
And he was lonely. In every other ship he had found it markedly easy to mix with the men, on terms of respectful familiarity. There, his orders had been carried out with a cheerful air and a crisp “Aye, aye, sir!” Here, he was obeyed just as blindly, but apprehensively. Wind Rode’s men obeyed through fear of the consequences if they did not.
Bentley was ruling through the force of the rings on his shoulders. He knew officers who had to do that, but he had never thought he might become one of them. The cause was that the crew, uneducated by Smith and Toose in the correct method of working, thought him a driver, a never-to-be-satisfied menace who you did your best to avoid. He was in the unfortunate position of being compared with Danvers, without having anything to show for his zeal and determination regarding the ship’s efficiency.
Smith and Toose, Toose and Smith. Always the circle of his thoughts came back to those two. He reached for his cigarettes, felt the sharp burning taste of too much smoking in his mouth, and looked at his watch. Four o’clock. He lifted himself wearily from the chair and began pulling off his shirt. Even Anne had lost her initial favour; but he was honest enough to realise that the fault was not with her. He would take her dancing tonight, as arranged.
With no spring in his step he went into the bathroom.
Nearly all the men who were going ashore had gone, with the exception of the duty-watch. One of these exceptions was Leading-Seaman Snade, who, being the ship’s money-lender, and with pay-day a week away, still had business to do before he stepped ashore. It was very lucrative business. For one pound loaned, Snade received twenty five shillings back the following pay-day. If the repayment were held over till the next pay-day, the interest mounted to ten shillings. It was worth fourteen days in cells if he were caught, for most of a ship’s thieving could be traced to attempts to pay back Snade and his ilk. But he had little fear of being informed upon—mess-deck ethics would never have allowed it, and you never knew when you might want a pound or two to get ashore.
