"The Chief T.G.M. and Ralston, he's the senior L.T.O.
Good men both."
"Right. Bentley, detail a man to accompany them in the boat.
We'll signal Asdic bearings from here.
Have him take a portable Aldis with him." He dropped his voice. "Marshall?"
"Sir?"
"Ralston's young brother died in hospital this afternoon."
He looked across at the Leading Torpedo Operator, a tall, blond, unsmiling figure dressed in faded blue overalls beneath his duffel.
"Does he know yet?"
The Torpedo Officer stared at Vallery, then looked round slowly at the L.T.O. He swore, softly, bitterly, fluently.
"Marshall!" Vallery's voice was sharp, imperative, but Marshall ignored him, his face a mask, oblivious alike to the reprimand in the Captain's voice and the lashing bite of the sleet.
"No, sir," he stated at length, "he doesn't know. But he did receive some news this morning.
Croydon was pasted last week.
His mother and three sisters live there, lived there.
It was a land mine, sir, there was nothing left."
He turned abruptly and left the bridge.
Fifteen minutes later it was all over.
The starboard whaler and the motorboat on the port side hit the water with the Ulysses still moving up to the mooring.
The whaler, buoy-jumper aboard, made for the buoy, while the motor boat slid off at a tangent Four hundred yards away from the ship, in obedience to the flickering instructions from the bridge, Ralston fished out a pair of pliers from his overalls and crimped the chemical fuse.
The Gunner's Mate stared fixedly at his stop-watch.
On the count of twelve the scuttling charge went over the side.
Three more, at different settings, followed it in close succession, while the motorboat cruised in a tight circle.
The first three explosions lifted the stern and jarred the entire length of the boat, viciously-and that was all.
But with the fourth, a great gout of air came gushing to the surface, followed by a long stream of viscous bubbles.
As the turbulence subsided, a thin slick of oil spread over a hundred square yards of sea....
Men, fallen out from Action Stations, watched with expressionless faces as the motorboat made it back to the Ulysses and hooked on to the falls just in time: the Hotchkiss steering-gear was badly twisted and she was taking in water fast under the counter.
The Duke of Cumberland was a smudge of smoke over a far headland.
Cap in hand, Ralston sat down opposite the Captain.
Vallery looked at him for a long time in silence.
He wondered what to say, how best to say it.
He hated to have to do this.
Richard Vallery also hated war.
He always had hated it and he cursed the day it had dragged him out of his comfortable retirement.
At least, "dragged" was how he put it; only Tyndall knew that he had volunteered his services to the Admiralty on 1st September, 1939, and had had them gladly accepted.
But he hated war.
Not because it interfered with his lifelong passion for music and literature, on both of which he was a considerable authority, not even because it was a perpetual affront to his asstheticism, to his sense of Tightness and fitness.
He hated it because he was a deeply religious man, because it grieved him to see in mankind the wild beasts of the primeval jungle, because he thought the cross of life was already burden enough without the gratuitous infliction of the mental and physical agony of war, and, above all, because he saw war all too clearly as the wild and insensate folly it was, as a madness of the mind that settled nothing, proved nothing except the old, old truth that God was on the side of the big battalions.
But some things he had to do, and Vallery had clearly seen that this war had to be his also.
And so he had come back to the service, and had grown older as the bitter years passed, older and frailer, and more kindly and tolerant and understanding.
Among Naval Captains, indeed among men, he was unique.
In his charity, in his humility, Captain Richard Vallery walked alone.
It was a measure of the man s greatness that this thought never occurred to him.
He sighed.
All that troubled him just now was what he ought to say to Ralston.
But it was Ralston who spoke first.
"It's all right, sir." The voice was a level monotone, the face very still. "I know.
The Torpedo Officer told me."
Vallery cleared his throat. "Words are useless, Ralston, quite useless.
Your young brother and your family at home.
All gone.