There had been no survivors.
Not that Commander Orr had expected to find any-not with the air temperature 6
It came after a sleepless night of never-ending alarms, of continual Asdic contacts, of constant depth-charging that achieved nothing.
Nothing, that is, from the escorts' point of view: but for the enemy, it achieved a double-edged victory. It kept exhausted men at Action Stations all night long, blunting, irreparably perhaps, the last vestiges of the knife-edged vigilance on which the only hope, it was never more, of survival in the Arctic depended.
More deadly still, it had emptied the last depth-charge rack in the convoy....
It was a measure of the intensity of the attack, of the relent-lessness of the persecution, that this had never happened before. But it had happened now. There was not a single depth-charge left-not one.
The fangs were drawn, the defences were down.
It was only a matter of time before the wolf-packs discovered that they could strike at will...
And with the dawn, of course, came dawn Action Stations, or what would have been dawn stations had the men not already been closed up for fifteen hours, fifteen endless hours of intense cold and suffering, fifteen hours during which the crew of the Ulysses had been sustained by cocoa and one bully-beef sandwich, thin, sliced and stale, for there had been no time to bake the previous day.
But dawn stations were profoundly significant in themselves: they prolonged the waiting another interminable two hours-and to a man rocking on his feet from unimaginable fatigue, literally holding convulsively jerking eyelids apart with finger and thumb while a starving brain, which is less a brain than a well of fine-drawn agony, begs him to let go, let go just for a second, just this once and never again, even a minute is brutal eternity: and they were still more important in that they were recognised as the Ithuriel hour of the Russian Convoys, the testing time when every man stood out clearly for what he was.
And for the crew of a mutiny ship, for men already tried and condemned, for physically broken and mentally scourged men who neither could nor would ever be the same again in body or mind, the men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame.
Not all, of course, they were only human; but many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side.
For some men, neither precipice nor valley ever existed.
Men like Carrington, for instance.
Eighteen consecutive hours on the bridge now, he was still his own indestructible self, alert with that relaxed watchfulness that never flagged, a man of infinite endurance, a man who could never crack, who you knew could never crack, for the imagination baulked at the very idea.
Why he was what he was, no man could tell.
Such, too, were men like Chief Petty Officer Hartley, like Chief Stoker Hendry, like Colour-Sergeant Evans and Sergeant Macintosh; four men strangely alike, big, tough, kindly, no longer young, steeped in the traditions of the Service.
Taciturn, never heard to speak of themselves, they were under no illusions as to their importance: they knew, as any Naval officer would be the first to admit-that, as the senior N.C.O.s, they, and not any officer, were the backbone of the Royal Navy; and it was from their heavy sense of responsibility that sprung their rock-like stability.
And then of course, there were men-a handful only-like Turner and the Kapok Kid and Dodson, whom dawn found as men above themselves, men revelling in danger and exhaustion, for only thus could they realise themselves, for only this had they been born.
And finally, men like Vallery, who had collapsed just after midnight, and was still asleep in the shelter, and Surgeon Commander Brooks: wisdom was their sheet anchor, a clear appreciation of the relative insignificance both of themselves and the fate of FR77, a coldly intellectual appraisal of, married to an infinite compassion for, the follies and suffering of mankind.
At the other end of the scale, dawn found men-a few dozen, perhaps-gone beyond recovery.
Gone in selfishness, in self-pity and in fear, like Carslake, gone because their armour, the trappings of authority, had been stripped off them, like Hastings, or gone, like Leading S.B.A.
Johnson and a score of others, because they had been pushed too far and had no sheet anchor to hold them.
And between the two extremes were those-the bulk of the men-Who had touched zero and found that endurance can be infinite-and found in this realisation the springboard for recovery.
The other side of the valley could be climbed, but not without a staff.
For Nicholls, tired beyond words from a long night standing braced against the operating table in the surgery, the staff was pride and shame.
For Leading Seaman Doyle, crouched miserably into the shelter of the for'ard funnel, watching the pinched agony, the perpetual shivering of his young midships pom-pom crew, it was pity; he would, of course, have denied this, blasphemously.
For young Spicer, Tyndall's devoted pantry-boy, it was pity, too-pity and a savage grief for the dying man in the Admiral's cabin.
Even with both legs amputated below the knee, Tyndall should not have been dying.
But the fight, the resistance was gone, and Brooks knew old Giles would be glad to go.
And for scores, perhaps for hundreds, for men like the tubercular-ridden McQuater, chilled to death in sodden clothes, but no longer staggering drankenly round the hoist in 'Y' turret, for the heavy rolling kept the water on the move: like Petersen, recklessly squandering his giant strength in helping his exhausted mates: like Chrysler, whose keen young eyes, invaluable now that Radar was gone, never ceased to scan the horizons: for men like these, the staff was Vallery, the tremendous respect and affection in which he was held, the sure knowledge that they could never let him down.
These, then, were the staffs, the intangible sheet anchors that held the Ulysses together that bleak and bitter dawn, pride, pity, shame, affection, grief-and the basic instinct for self-preservation although the last, by now, was an almost negligible factor.
Two things were never taken into the slightest account as the springs of endurance: never mentioned, never even considered, they did not exist for the crew of the Ulysses: two things the sentimentalists at home, the gallant leader writers of the popular press, the propagandising purveyors of nationalistic claptrap would have had the world believe to be the source of inspiration and endurance, hatred of the enemy, love of kinsfolk and country.
There was no hatred of the enemy.
Knowledge is the prelude to hate, and they did not know the enemy.
Men cursed the enemy, respected him, feared him and killed him if they could: if they didn't, the enemy would kill them.
Nor did men see themselves as fighting for King and country: they saw the necessity for war, but objected to camouflaging this necessity under a spurious cloak of perf ervid patriotism: they were just doing what they were told, and if they didn't, they would be stuck against a wall and shot.
Love of kinsfolk-that had some validity, but not much.
It was natural to want to protect your kin, but this was an equation where the validity varied according to the factor of distance.
It was a trifle difficult for a man crouched in his ice-coated Oerlikon cockpit off the shores of Bear Island to visualise himself as protecting that rose-covered cottage in the Cots-wolds...
But for the rest, the synthetic national hatreds and the carefully cherished myth of King and country, these are nothing and less than nothing when mankind stands at the last frontier of hope and endurance: for only the basic, simple human emotions, the positive ones of love and grief and pity and distress, can carry a man across that last frontier.
Noon, and still the convoy, closed up in tight formation now, rolled eastwards in the blinding snow.
The alarm halfway through dawn stations had been the last that morning.
Thirty-six hours to go, now, only thirty-six hours.
And if this weather continued, the strong wind and blinding snow that made flying impossible, the near-zero visibility and heavy seas that would blind any periscope... there was always that chance. Only thirty-six hours.
Admiral John Tyndall died a few minutes after noon.
Brooks, who had sat with him all morning, officially entered the cause of death as post-operative shock and exposure."
The truth was that Giles had died because he no longer wished to live.
His professional reputation was gone: his faith, his confidence in himself were gone, and there was only remorse for the hundreds of men who had died: and with both legs gone, the only life he had ever known, the life he had so loved and cherished and to which he had devoted forty-five glad and unsparing years, that life, too, was gone for ever.
Giles died gladly, willingly.