The Good Shepherd

by C.S. Forester

what money price can be put on an hour’s freedom for the world?

for in war the character and personality of the leader is decisive of events much more than minor questions of material.

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.

Let thy words be few, said Ecclesiastes; the officer drafting an order had to bear that recommendation in mind, but a retread admiral addressing an escort commander had to remember the Psalms and make his words smoother than butter.

We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement.

And only experience would tell if he had the others; if he would stand at his post amid dead and wounded, amid fire and destruction, and still pass on orders without tripping over a word.

Plain cowardice was far rarer than idiocy, just as plain courage was more common than nerve.

With left full rudder Keeling was chasing her tail again in the opposite direction. An ignorant observer might think the analogy to a kitten’s behavior a close one, if he was not aware of the life and death battle she was waging against an invisible opponent.

A childish stratagem indeed, simplicity itself, like most of the stratagems of war; but, like most of the stratagems of war, more easily thought of than executed.

Every man shall bear his own burden, and this was his—that was a text from Galatians; he could remember learning it, so many years ago—and all he had to do was his duty; no one needed an audience for that.

There was nothing spectacular to him about a man doing his duty.

it was an advantage to be of an unsympathetic temperament. Then other people’s excitement pushed one into indifference.

“Did you get the bearing, Mr. Watson?” “Only approximately, sir. We were turning at the time.” Speak every man truth with his neighbor. Far better to be honest than to pretend to knowledge one did not have.

a more irregular spread with their somewhat random downward fall. Streamlined depth charges would be more effective than clumsy cylinders; they were already in production and Krause wished he had them.

Eagle to George, and Harry to George, and Dicky to George. Those code names were an excellent choice. Four distinct vowel sounds, impossible to confuse even with serious distortion. He gave the order in his flat voice.

Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.

Better a radar out of kilter than no radar at all. The night cometh, when no man can work. There was much to do still.

It was fantastic how two minutes could alter one’s whole outlook for the better—or for the worse.

It was remarkable—it was good news—that no more than three ships were out of station besides Cadena, seeing that a U-boat and a destroyer had both passed clean through the convoy and a ship had been torpedoed in the heart of it.

There was no Christian charity in the North Atlantic. It would be imperiling his ship. Keeling and her crew were worth a thousand merchant seamen’s lives—two thousand perhaps.

An incautious step nearly lost him his footing again on the ice-glazed deck, and after he had grabbed at the rail he realized that he had crushed the remnants of his half-eaten sandwich into the furry palm of his glove. That must be a horrible mess; he almost blessed the darkness for concealing it from him. He tried to wipe it on the rail.

The hours fled by when filled with action and concentrated thought. A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

There was nothing positive in Carling’s tone, all the same. Nor was there any bloodthirsty eagerness. It was possible that Carling was at this moment regretting his choice of a profession.

Krause shut his eyes to consider a problem in trigonometry. Even in the dark that was a help to concentration.

It was satisfactory that he had a reliable helmsman even if he had an O.D. who was doubtful.

Krause began to realize that Carling’s vagueness was the result of nerves. He was too excited, or too agitated, or—possibly—too frightened to think clearly.

Prove all things; hold fast to that which is good. Yet the possibility was a deciding factor.

The British officer who had lectured on antisubmarine warfare at Casco Bay had been fond of quoting an army story of the previous war in which two infantry privates put their clothes through a newly invented machine for delousing them. “Why,” said one, bitterly, after inspecting results, “they’re all alive still.” “Yes,” said the other, “but I expect they’ve had the hell of a fright.”

Usually—too often—an encounter between a U-boat and a destroyer ended merely in the U-boat’s having had more or less of a fright and receiving no hurt. To cleanse the sea of the U-boat vermin called for killing; no amount of narrow escapes would deter the U-boat captains with their fanatical esprit de corps—and with the iron hand of Doenitz to force them into action.

Luckily they could not be aware of the other circumstances which rankled as badly in Krause’s heart, that he had been marked with the words—utterly damning although innocent enough in appearance—“fitted and retained,” and that he had been twice passed over for promotion and had only made commander with the expansion of the navy in 1941.

He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.

It was his duty to stay unangered, to speak in a flat tone, with every word distinct, and with no trace of emotion.

He longed for that coffee; he was accustomed to drinking eight big cups every day of his life and had always guiltily put aside the self-accusation that he was a coffee-hound dependent on a drug.

He moved stiffly to the captain’s stool in the starboard corner of the pilothouse. He never sat on that stool while at sea; he had a theory that captains should never sit down—it was allied to the theory that all self-indulgence was suspect—but theories were liable to be discarded under practical test. He could have groaned both with pain and relief as he sat down, but instead it was “Right standard rudder. Steer course zero eight seven.”

The removal of the red spectacles was a kind of symbolic act, transferring his attention from within the ship to outside it.

Krause conjured up a picture of the ideal escorting force—three more escort vessels to guard the front while he and Viktor acted as a pursuit force; two more to reinforce Dodge and James; one to cover the rear; yes, and another pursuit force as well. With eight escort vessels and four destroyers a good job could be done; and air cover; the thought of air cover shot up in Krause’s weary mind like a rocket. He had heard of the small carriers that were being built; with radar-equipped planes they would give a wolf pack a whole lot more to think about.

But meanwhile it was his duty to fight his way through as best he could with the means at his disposal. Every man’s work shall be made manifest.

He sank onto the stool and spread his legs. After all, this was in the darkness, and the people in the pilothouse were hardly able to see their captain lounging in such a slack fashion. He had compounded with his sense of what he could permit himself regarding sitting down, admitting that it was necessary, but he still had qualms about what would be the effect upon discipline and esprit de corps if the men upon whom he kept such a taut hand should see him slacking off with so little excuse.

“After lookout reports fire in the convoy, sir,” said a talker. He was on his feet again, with hardly time to think of this as retribution for his self-indulgence.

He had to choose; it was the most painful moment he had ever known, more painful than when he had heard about Evelyn. He had to leave those men to die.

The U-boat which had done the damage would now be harmless for a short space at least while reloading her tubes. It was humiliating, it was infuriating that he should find comfort even for one moment in such a thought.

Men were dying behind him, men he was supposed to protect. What he had to do was to solve little trigonometrical problems in his head quickly and accurately, and give his orders calmly, and issue his information intelligibly, and anticipate the submerged U-boat’s movements as freshly and as rapidly as he had done ever since yesterday. He had to be a machine that did not know emotion; he had to be a machine that did not know fatigue.

A destroyer captain was under the same handicap that a duck hunter with a beautiful hard-hitting gun would be with weights on his wrists to slow down his swing, with no power of estimating the height of the flying duck, and having to shut his eyes two seconds before he pulled the trigger and keep them shut for half a minute afterwards.

One more burden on his shoulders. A destroyer without depth charges might be as wise as a serpent, but would be as harmless as a dove.

The single charge made it more urgent than ever that he should take Keeling in to the attack with the utmost exactitude. But he always had tried to do that; he could not be more exact than he had been.

“Eagle to George. Do we look as cold as you do, sir?” So he had to joke as well as fight U-boats. He had to goad his weary mind into a prompt reaction, and think of some lighthearted wisecrack, and he was a man who joked with difficulty. He thought academically along the lines of what he believed would be considered funny, and produced an academic pun. “George to Eagle. You look North Polish.”

Very likely. Perhaps the U-boat captain, with a sharp eye on the thermometer readings recording the outside water temperature, had noted a steep rise in the temperature gradient, had sought the cold layer which that indicated, and was now lying deep deep down, trimmed to a milligram, deathly silent, balanced miraculously upon the invisible and fragile support of a stratum of denser water. The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him—that was a blasphemous thought.

“One moment, please sir,” said the T.B.S., the wording, so oddly like that of a long-distance operator, in quaint contrast with the precise English accent. A new voice made itself heard in Krause’s listening ear. “This is Lieutenant Commander Rode, commanding, sir.”

“Good morning, Captain,” said Krause. Formality always boded ill. “As soon as we are in visual touch I shall make a report to you, sir. I am taking this opportunity of calling your particular attention to it.” “You can’t tell me now?” asked Krause. “No, sir. Jerry’s been in on this circuit more than once during the night. He has an English-speaking rating who chips in with rude remarks, and I wouldn’t like him to hear this.”

He did not want to leave his captain there on the bridge, with his white face and his hollow cheeks and his staring eyes. But there was no chance of argument when an order had been given. That was naval discipline, which had them all in a rigid grip which the exigencies of war did no more than tighten slightly.