COMMISSION OF INQUIRY

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 15, 31 July 1944, Page 23

COMMISSION OF INQUIRY

SHORT STORY

By

R.N.Z.N.

This story was awarded first prize in its section in the recent Services’ literary competitions.

« X">an you swear ? ” So nervous was I, eager, shaking for his approval that would sign me on to his ship, to work at I didn’t care what, for what pay I wasn’t bothering, that it wasn’t for months that I smiled mocking smile, I suppose— my ingenuousness : Too damn right.” I said. If I answered stronger than “ damn,” it flashed through my mind at the moment of the question, he might think I was not the right type ; that I was not disciplined; that my parents had been slack in my upbringing. That is what I thought. I was not experienced in much besides saying “ Sir ” to schoolmastersnot at that time—and, anyway, I was nervous. Because I wanted his approval, I wanted to work on that ship. There was a war, I was young and wanted to do something. I wanted his approval, and I got it: to work on that ship, to live (and nearly to die, want to die at times) through the life that followed ; his approval for the months ahead months of hard, sweating tropics, work that was dirty to my hands and dirty inside me, short hours in ports, men —I thought they weren’t at first, I wasn’t used to their ideas. I found they were, and human.

His approval for the monotony of days that meant nothing ; days of separate minutes, each like the ceaseless drips, and as slow, of water from the roof of a cave I knew, and still remember, as a boy. One followed by another, and there was no end. No hurry, no breathing there. Those days meant nothing, I said ; they didn’t ; and if I had let them I couldn’t have stood it. So he gave me his approval ; and it went also for all that was the life on that ship: even for the awkward and ever-continuing, unremitting motion, always the same. That ship never gave a false step. I said once in a letter home that we rolled so much and for so long that the cow we kept on board finished by giving churned butter instead of milk. Had there been a cow it might have been true. I wasn’t unhappy ; I didn’t feel anything much after a while. There seemed no use. He asked whether I could swear. He looked, this captain, as though he had been with the ship as long as the cockroaches I was afterwards to curse—l cursed the captain and the cockroaches. Christian Clemensen, his name ; and, like the ship, he was Norwegian in nothing but name. M. V. “ Skaanen ” — London businessmen were the owners ; port of registry, San Pedro; built on

Scottish ways ; and fitted with engines stamped “ Sweden.” The origins of her captain were as varied. He and his ship had the same streaks of colour; for thirty years they set their courses by the same stars ; and Fate was to deal each of them a blow as bitter as the curses which were all they had for each other. They lived their lives together, and for each other they had neither love nor respect —maybe something of stormy hate which could not be let loose when their existences, the reasons for their living, were bound so closely together. For the owners, knowing nothing of the sea and its incalculable moods of storm and fog, rocky coast-lines and unknown ports, all the rest — owners not knowing and not caring demanded certain standards, set schedules that were always hard and often dangerous. Non-acceptance of those standards, deviation from the schedules — it would have meant the scrap-heap for the two of them. “ Get her there, we’ve got our costs to consider—and, anyway, she’s well insured. Get her there, but if there’s an accident we don’t want survivors with tales of negligence and long claims of damages.” That’s what the owners said; they didn’t use those words, but that is what they meant. With quiet satisfied smiles they let the captain know what they wanted ; and how well he understood his nicely-worded instructions could best be realized had the story been told of a freighter run down in fog, hanging thick and still, off the coast of northern Ireland. The “ Skaanen ” at the time was driving full speed ahead. But the story was never told. Of the freighter’s crew there was no man to tell it. Only cries in the darkness, and they might have been, but they weren’t, sea-birds calling. There was no chance of lowering a boat from the “ Skaanen ” in that fog—and there was no purpose. Tightened lips and throbbing hearts, but there was no purpose . So I had the captain’s approval. My apprehension was not necessary. The ship was known to every one but me. A vacancy in the crew was hard to fill. I was to find out why.

Each trip I made I swore would be the last—and with our speed too slow for convoy escort and with submarines eager for such targets, I wonder now the first trip wasn’t the last. But we lived. We were lucky. For a time we were lucky. We steamed into ports, hours later we steamed out again. A tanker’s cargo takes little time to clear. Three weeks of sea ; if we were lucky, eighteen hours in port; and with a hundred things to do it didn’t mean eighteen hours of freedom. So little time ashore has the crew of a tanker that conditions aboard, compared with other types of cargo ships, generally are of a higher standard. What must necessarily be their home is made more attractive. It wasn’t like that on the “ Skaanen.” And the men were not the sort that minded, or appeared to mind. Perhaps they had never known a home—that was how it seemed to me —or perhaps their homes were of a happiness that made them prefer the conditions of this ship. Twenty-five of them there were ; and I think from their speech that they represented the squalor and filth of the slums of twenty-five cities. In every way they were of a dirtiness that I could hardly believe and had not before thought possible. It was true enough. I felt I had to stand clear of them and their ways of life. I suppose it all sounds rather grim and dreary. It was ; but she was no hellship —nobody starved, and if ulcerated stomachs were common it was probably the booze as much as the food ; wages were earned and paid and spent; and if the work was hard and madly monotonous, there was always time for sleep if you were tired of looking at the sea. The men were hard, I wasn’t used to them, and they wouldn’t have joined such a ship if their papers had been in order, if the conditions they were prepared to accept had not been easier than those they wished to leave behind. Even now I’m not sentimental when I think of them, I never felt much love for them, but I do say that ultimately, underneath their appearance, their speech, their ways of life, they were decent and simple enough. They had their humour and they weren’t bitter. I think they

weren’t different from other people —- it only seemed they were. The sun rose and set. The days passed. Slowly, like autumn leaves falling, shadowing the ground, no hurry, falling to be forgotten. More and more to bury the others. It was the monotony of those days, not danger or thoughts of danger, that made me fearful—the days to come. Everlastingly. A silvery rushing of water straight for the ship several times made me cry " torpedoes.” My listening ears heard the bump. There was never the explosion I waited for. Not torpedoes, but porpoises. . Smack into the side they would come. I wondered whether in the night they could not see the blackness that was our ship ; or perhaps with the freedom of a million miles of rolling ocean always before to themselves they were not caring. Had no need to care. They frightened me. ■ We steamed through the days. Through the ocean ; seas alive, breathing with the tides, ebbing and flowing to and from rocky ribs of coast-line. Our throbbing engines were this ocean’s heart. But they had not the strength—the beating-power of the engines of a thousand ships would not have the strength. The ocean has no heart. Mighty, impersonal, and cruelly impartial in its might. Nothing warm —no feeling there to show a heart. The greyness of early dawn. A submarine. A torpedo. No porpoise. A torpedo. A crash of explosion that was purple in the intensity of its sound. A sheet of flame, vivid lightning, rising from the crash. We had been hit. Fire. .We were on fire. The ship was on fire. Spreading flames, spreading through our forward compartment. It all happened quicker than my realization of its happening. It was true ; I knew it to be true when I found myself shouting words that had no sense, with excitement rather than fear. The sea was dead flat, greasily calm. We might have been sliding in the oil we carried. The oil that now was on fire. Somewhere out there was a submarine, satisfied. We did not see her, nor did we care.

The captain worked like a madman. But he was beaten and outwitted. Something stronger than himself, more deadly, had taken control of the ship that was his. We waited for the second explosion that must have meant the end. It did not come. A light breath of wind stirred into a breeze, swelling the roaring of fire, the flames spreading. We must get away, minutes wasted and it would be too late. The men had not waited to hear the captain’s order to lower the boats, to abandon the ship. But he gave that order ; even he realized there was no use fighting the fury that was oil on fire. " I name this ship ‘ Skaanen,' and Bless all that sail in her.” That was said, years ago, with flags and shouting and champagne, said over bows that were white and fresh. It did not matter that the clear-cut eagerness of those bows had been lost, the freshness of colour gone forever, against the wharfs of the world and from ill-considered encounters with other ships—-ships that still caredand from rocks and reefs that did not. “ Bless all that sail in her.” For more than thirty years in the importance of life and death, andto the owners—the still greater importance of a safe ship, cargoes delivered, that Blessing had held. Now those bows were twisting and cowering with flame, oil was on fire—the Devil was mocking that Blessing, safe and sure of success in his mockery, laughing in his work. Down splashed the boats, the men into them, tumbling and rushing. The captain, too ; frightened and full of fear, not from terror of the flames and the danger of the second explosion that must be the end, but because his ship was burning and lost. Only the ocean could still that fury, but he knew that when it did all, already, would have been lost ; it would be too late. He did not realize, and if there had been realization there would have been no caring with it, that this Fate that had knifed into his being so shockingly, with such grim suddenness, was similar to that which —this man himself—by his flaunting for profit of the rules of sea safety had imposed on others less strong than himself. Now strength greater

than his had done its work. Judgment had been passed. He did not know it. He knew nothing more than that his ship was lost, burning and abandoned. The wind was freshening from the west. The sun had not yet risen. It was dawn ; and for us the light of that day came first not from the sun. I don’t know how long it was from the first explosion to the time the ship’s boats — first one then the other — away from the burning sides, the oars pulled frantically and irregularly, pulled by strength rising from fear that had left reason twisted into smoke. There was little talking, hardly a look at what was still in front of our eyes. Two of the crew had been left behind—one trapped in the crow’s nest, the other in the gun-turret, where he had rushed with the first alarm and from which sheeting of flame made escape impossible. There was no help for them. Their shrieks had quietened into unconsciousness and death before the boats had splashed the water. Trapped in the crow’s nest, at first high above the flames —but a metal crow’s nest on a metal mast meant torture that even the Devil in his mockery might have blanched at. Metal that carried through itself a molten angry inescapable heat. That man was dead before the flames reached him. Cooked meat. And dead. Many of the men in the boats had been burned, their bodies lashed by flames, with fear so far knotting into nothingness the pain that in days to follow could be eased only by death. In several cases that pain was relieved. Mercifully. The need to race from the flaming ship before the second explosion was so desperate that every man had to pull an oar. Every man, burned or not. With some of them it was the triumph of the struggle for continued life against the supremity of pain. A grim and cruel fight. Emotions that showed no mercy. Hands with the flesh burnt were later found to be seared to the wood of the oars. “ Bless all that sail in her.” The words go through my mind. Hands that with a knife later had to be cut from those oars. Shrieks that were sharper than that knife and more piercing than its steel.

Still there was no second explosion. Dully we wondered. The forward section of the ship was a shrine of smoke. “ The smoke. Jesus, look at that smoke. It’s driving forward across the bows. The smokeit’s swung round. The wind’s changed. Christ, the wind . . .” For the first time since leaving his ship the captain spoke, he stood to his feet. Not yet was he past caring. I could not catch his meaning, my mind had lost its reasoning. But the wind had changed. The smoke, the flames, were chasing ahead and over the bows into the sea — driving away from the other compartments of the ship. The wind was freshening ; with every minute it became stronger. The captain was on his feet. There was hope in his face, a new hope. With fierce words and angry tones he threshed into us some of the strength and meaning of the hope responsible for the light in his eyes of chance for life ; the chance that had made him rise to his feet, the hope he made us feel and sense even if we could not understand or see the reasons for it. His shouted imprecations pressed into us the spirit that once more pulled those oars—back again. The wind had changed. The fire was driving not further into but out of the ship. We began to understand the reasons for his cursing excitement, the light in his eyes, his standing to his feet. We saw that chance. Not many of us caring. Men had been burned : it was too late for caring. But the ship’s boats returned, closer to their ship, the captain’s ship. The oars moved slowly, jerking ; there was none of the rhythm of the dip-flash-dip of regular rowing. Men had been burned ; and in them even though there was nothing left for talk, for reason, for thought or understanding, there was still, even then, room for fear — of that second explosion, fear of the wind blowing back on itself and the promise it had given, changing again its direction. Fear of what already had passed and was there still. Just fear. The oars moved slowly, no rhythm ; they would not have moved at all if it had not been for the captain, his standing to his feet again, that look in

his eyes, his fierce words of encouragement that, transmuting reason into faith, could not be denied. Nor they were. It was not in vain. How long it took before that fire was completely in control, before it was finally killed, how many hours, of suffering and agony—hours when that smoke all but suffocated our reborn hope, those flames scorched meaningless and empty our faith —how long it was I do not know. I was past counting. Day into night, another dawn. For many of that crew it was too long. But the fire' was controlled, driven into the sea. Dead after so much life. Those men triumphed men whose idea of living to me once seemed so crude as to place them beyond decency of living and the standards necessary for man to live with man. It was not only the fortune of the change of wind, or the foamite we used, the strength of the captain, that controlled those flames and saved the ship —it was the men, their spirit, what was in them and of them. Without that nothing could have been possible. The victory against oil on fire had been theirs ; and that victory was a tribute, not to be contradicted, to all Man. That it was not recognized does not matter ; that they continued their lives in ways no better and no worse, no different, alters nothing. Their trial had been fire. Men who had been burned. There were three weeks before we reached port. Three more weeks. For the last seven days a destroyer escorted us. It made me laugh to see her, looking after us so carefully. We reached port,

and I paid off. The ship went into dock ; it wasn’t long before she was on the seas again. Looking neither dirtier nor grander. The ship was on the seas again, carrying her cargoes of oil ; but not with the same captain. Another man. I didn’t hear the story until later, and when I did I could not believe it. I found it to be true. A commission of inquiry had been set up. Witnesses were heard, all the evidence considered—the hearing took ten days. Judgment was found against the captain. He had, they said, given an order to abandon a ship he was in charge of before such an order had been necessary, while there was still chance of saving her. It amounted to deserting his post in time of war, they considered ; and they talked a lot about that time of war, duty, and patriotism, and the trust of the people (of the Allies) that captains accept when they take command of ships and their cargoes. I couldn’t believe it at first, but I know it’s true because I spent a lot of time reading the evidence and the findings. It was all set out in the usual legal phraseology, formal and typewritten, but that was what it all amounted to. That is what these men with their paunches and fountain pens and secretaries decided behind their polished desks. The captain lost his ticket, and I heard he never again went to sea. There couldn’t have been much left for him. I don’t know what happened to him after he left the sea.