The Jedge and the Submarine

by E. C. DRAKE

1

THE wake of the Nora Wilson, our converted fishboat, congeals in the greens and whites of a country stream frozen in mid-ripple, a long slub in the pattern of breeze-shingled water. The Atlantic rests. No wave makes a trough to hide a periscope; no mist conceals a conning tower and a deck awash. It is a perfect hour to concentrate on nothing.

But, the quartermaster’s eyes search over the water as always, and I say to myself: He cannot take himself away from the horizon and from home. Indeed, why should he?

Our quartermaster is a quiet man from the merchant marine. There is nothing to his tall and weathered figure but bone and tendon, acute black eyes that find the buoys coming up before the lookout calls them, and a heart that homes to Richmond, where there are the woman he married after the last war and a daughter of eighteen he calls “the little girl.” It is seldom that he speaks more than a word, and that is ground, honed, and reserved for the occasion. His quietness is a moat between him and the rest of us, no more so than the distant set of his eyes. It is no discourtesy that the quartermaster’s eyes are over our shoulders when he talks to us on the bridge: it is simply that his business is on the horizon, and his heart homes to Richmond.

The lookout shouts, “Smoke two points on the starboard bow!”

The quartermaster searches the bearing a moment and say’s, “A flock of birds,” and returns to the rail, to the horizon and home.

Or so I believe until he says, “One of these days they are going to call quits. We are coots enough to let them, like the last time.”

I did not know that the quartermaster thought of the war as anything but a duty. Here is an intimation that he thinks it an issue with past, future, and resolution. To be resolved how? Now something unsuspected may be learned about the quartermaster, as we have learned that Hasely plays the guitar, that Semmes draws, that the engineer has had four wives, that Levin can bend an iron spike, that Schmid is a father, that Morrison fought Henry Armstrong, that Lordino has read Pareto.

“I don’t hear any sentiment anywhere for calling it off,” I say. “I’ll go along that if at the end of the war there is any doubt about who won it, we’ll not keep it won very long.”

“There are about fifty million too many Germans in the world. The time to stop the war is when there are just enough.”

“You don’t have it in you to kill fifty million people, quartermaster. Neither do I.”

“Ten million, then, and put a wall around the rest.”

“It is only revenge. You get sick of it in a few months. It is no answer.”

“Lad, do you want to come out here and do this every twenty-five years? Twice is enough for me,

2

GORDON, the j.g. chaplain, came aboard one Saturday afternoon while Nora lay in the district yard. Gordon is of medium height and color. He wears glasses, speaks pleasantly and fluently. He is, as he describes himself, a personality who is the pivot of society only by ordinance. Yet that does not say enough, for his convictions exert a force of character that, if not axial, is polar, and to hear the clash of his theology with the captain’s is to hear a historic commotion.

On this Saturday afternoon, Gordon came aboard to extend an invitation. “I noticed you were a new ship in here,” he said. “We should be very happy to have you and your men at services and Mass tomorrow morning.”

“That’s very cordial of you. Come below and meet our captain, Lieutenant Welles.”

Before the war the captain, Lieutenant Welles, was a Florida “cotehousc lawyer” — reason enough for him to be known now as “the Jedge.” The captain took a liking to Gordon and kept him on to see what was in him. During supper Gordon mentioned the line between chaplains and men —the line as clear as a rank stripe, and the stratagems used to erase it.

“The first item of chaplain indoctrination,” Gordon disclosed, “is directed toward bringing us closer to the men. That we are separated is assumed. There is a suspicion everywhere that religion has got away from the people, so the Services have invented the Dale Carnegieisms to make us one again. To this end a chaplain first must absorb the two S’s — sports and swearing. The importance of sports and a moderate amount of selected cussing is apparent.

“After we become reasonably proficient in the two S’s we progress to the three F’s of sermonics — facts, fun, and fight. A sermon has to be built around a tangible — a date, a name, an event. Then a joke to relieve the strain of ten minutes of pure religion. Then a fighting moral. The usual way to organize a sermon is to go to the concordance, turn up the name of someone who did nothing, — say, Gomer, son of Japheth, my text for tomorrow, — arbitrarily call him a sea captain, go to a joke book for something appropriate, invent an episode that leads to the joke, state the moral — bang! sermon.

“That is all well and good, but it doesn’t make the chaplain much more one of the boys. So, boring right on, they make us recreation officers. If the boys want a football they get it from the chaplain. If they need somebody to help get special liberty, try the chaplain. Then there is publicity: photo — chaplain and sailor in undershirts; tag line — ‘Chaplains take part in every phase of Navy life’; statistics—‘Chaplains hold X number of services in X months, X number of men attending, a religious coefficient of X prime.’ And the easy slogans— ‘There are no atheists in foxholes.’

“It follows, of course, everybody loves the chaplain — only they don’t. There’s something missing. What the Navy wants us to do is to get ourselves absorbed, when really our mission is to get what we stand for absorbed. It is not the chaplain but the religion that ought to be absorbed, and we are going about it like friendly traders with trinkets for cannibals. Something is missing.”

“Religion,” observed Welles. “Religion is missing. You are no longer religion and you are trying to hang on to what you are. You have staked out a claim on the word, and the ground has moved out from under you.”

“I don’t for a moment believe it,” Gordon retorted. “Religion is where it always was. That is why it is religion. It is the word you are moving, not the ground.”

“What is missing, sir,” said Welles evenly, “is religion. You have kept all the techniques — the churches, the schools, the orders, the gifts — and let the religion go. It has gone elsewhere. It does not matter what sect, it is all the same, the religion has gone. Take me — I am a churchgoing man and I am a religious man, but I am not getting my religion from the Church. That is going on not only in my church but in yours and among the Jews and the rest of them. I hope I do not offend when I say it is true of your church particularly because it is the mother church and has to do with vastly more human beings than do the mutation churches.”

“You do not offend at all, for you are saying what has been said since the Reformation. Luther said it. Huss said it. ‘The Catholic Church is a carcass,’ they said. ‘The religion is gone out of it.’ And yet the Church has endured.”

Gordon sobered to the debate. “It is not the Church the Reformation catches up with,” he continued gravely. “It is the people. And when it docs, God pity them. The new prophet of the Reformation is Stalin.”

“Yes, Stalin,” the captain agreed. “Well, one of the new prophets at any rate. Unfortunately all the new prophets seem to be secular.”

“The new prophet of the Reformation,” Gordon repeated. “The lineal descendant of Martin Luther, He thinks it is something you do with society that is the salvation of the people, when it is the salvation of the individual man — man by man — that is the only hope of society. The fundamental error is the rejection of the principle that salvation, and hence personal peace, proceeds person by person. For this has been substituted the error that first there must be organized a world that is conducive to salvation. That is the whole program of the new materialism — you first perfect society; men can wait. But it is men who must first be saved.”

“Oh, my goodness!” the Jedge interjected. “Men won’t hold still long enough to be saved your way. You get one man saved, and when you turn your back on him to save another, the first fellow backslides. You have been at that now for two thousand years — and if I may say so, the method is hoeing corn with a sickle.”

Gordon said, “When enough of us find salvation, the inward peace of individual men will flow over the world, and the ethical society you pursue will be freely given by God.”

“Amen,” the Jedge said. “Let me assault you on new ground, which you will say is the very oldest ground and I will agree. I am wondering which the Church is holding harder to — the historic doctrine of grace or the institutions that propagate it. As I say, you have not only let the ethical nature of religion go and hung on to the doctrine: you have even let the doctrine go in the rush, and today you would a damn’ sight rather lose a thousand believers than a cathedral.

“Would you like that proved? Well, did the Church not turn its back on the believing people of Spain in favor of a cynical, sophisticated political cabal that undertook to salvage the real estate? You have become the allies of the crassest materialists on earth! If the Church continues to align itself with the Francos against the absolutely inexorable yeasting of the people, the Church is setting itself up to manufacture a war a year from now to the sixth Sunday in April.”

“Whatever else may be said of Franco,” replied Gordon, “he stood for the preservation of the Catholic system, which is the system through which grace is given to men. Franco, in the measure of eternity, will be accounted the friend of peace, for he stood for grace and the ultimate gift of peace. You are talking about a few years and an episode. The Church is talking about eternity.”

Against such steadfastness the Jedge finally retreated and, shaking his head in dissatisfaction, got to his feet. “I have devoted two cigars to this completely useless discussion, and that is all I can afford. But I appreciate the talk, sir, and you will find me in your congregation tomorrow morning if you will let me get to sleep tonight.”

“You will learn something about Gomer, son of Japheth. That I assure you.” Gordon smiled and said good-bye.

3

THE shores open and Nora Wilson dips her peak to the swell, knowing she has met the great bay, the intimation of the sea whose water will no longer be the sustainer but a convulsion ridden by sufferance alone. I reach for the handrail overhead. The captain leans heavily on the chart table. In the chart drawer, in the hold under the wheel, in the medicine locker, unsecured bulks scrape and roll the width of their cells before Nora steadies again.

At the weather station, the small-craft warning flies. Small craft seek shelter! That is not for us. We are the Navy.

Land falls behind scrim after scrim until only haze remains. We turn from the mine sweeper we are escorting to worry a piece of ocean a mile away. A half mile astern is another converted fishboat, the Sweep. Out here we can see how absurd it is for the Sweep to be in a war. And for us also, for she is only a reflection of ourselves.

At the dock we look like Navy — husky, done up in battle paint, a pelorus on each wing, searchlights and automatic guns topside, a three-inch rifle cocky on the forward deck, depth charges racked on the fantail. But out here, looking at the Sweep, we can see ourselves for what we are: a little fishboat with half the gouge of the forward well decked over; where the fatbacks once were piled is a torpedo-shaped room in which men now cook, eat, sleep, and play cards. The Sweep moves like a breast-stroking swimmer, head down, head up, though not so rhythmically. Rather, her deckhouse craning high, she moves as a stiff-necked dowager across a plowed field, without regard to the contour of the medium under her; she steps into air where the sea should be; her red-lead petticoat shows, and the foam laces back to the stern.

The meaning of that step we feel in Nora — the drop away of a roller coaster, the stagger and rise of a deer shot in mid-blunder. A wash boards the deck, bucketing water high on the bridge so that the quartermaster must turn on the windshield wipers. Bulks shift everywhere in the ship. The steersman drops to a boxer’s wary crouch.

Yet it really was no swell at all, perhaps six feet before our bow exploded it. Nothing like a comber with a pegasus mane you see on the beach; not one of those terrifying fifty-foot visitations of Joseph Conrad. Nothing but a pucker of the sea.

“There’s discoloration on the water just ahead, captain,” the quartermaster says. “Oil. Or maybe somebody’s pumped his bilges.”

The Jedge, our captain, studies the area through the glasses. It is hard to say just what this fingering slick is, other than an opaque skin on the black water, spotted with iridescence and twigs and scraps of near-shore flotsam. Nora pushes through it. “A probable contact turned up out here the other night,” the Jedge says. “The Five Sixty depthcharged it. Nothing conclusive.” He puts up the glasses. “Like to save all these patches and have a quilt some day. Who’s on the sound gear? Morrison? See that he stays sharp, will you?”

It is time for the wheel watch to change. Below me Schmid sticks his head out of the galley where he has been drying. He reconnoiters the weather, then steps out on the weather deck, “like a scout in no man’s land,” the Jedge remarks.

The figure is true enough. There are three shelter areas on the deck: the foc’sle bulkhead, the stack, and the upended life raft. There are three hazards: the roll of the ship, the wash on the deck, and the bitter spray off the bulwark. The gunner darts with a tense, low movement from bulkhead to stack, and balances against the roll. The gauge in the pilot house says Nora is leaning thirty degrees, a third of the way to lying down. We are taking the sea on the quarter; the worst we have ever rolled is sixty degrees. The gunner steadies himself in the lee of the raft, and as Nora regains her keel, he skitters to the ladder, eyes over his shoulder on the next roller.

The position is taken. Another skirmish with weather, the apparent enemy, is won. The official enemy we seldom meet, and then only as a noise in the sound gear and a slick of oil that may as well be the sweat of running as the blood of a wound; he drifts to the back of our minds.

The quartermaster continues to watch the oil patch over the stern until it disappears.

The gray weather has raced the dusk since late afternoon and will win. It quarters the sea upon us with insistent will, lifting the screw from the water until it grutches in the panicked voice of an animal flung out of its element: then down again screw deep, rudder post deep, floods spouting through every scupper in the deck bulwark.

As the weather closes, officers and hands gravitate toward the bridge on errands more or less legitimate. Each takes a minute to appraise the prospects. Every man but the captain, who wears a fresh shirt and tie, is stripped down to undershirt. Every undershirt is drenched with sweat. The air in the pilothouse is heavy with smoke and sweat and stillness.

“The glass is moving up, sir,” advises the quartermaster striker who has come up to check the barometer. “Is that right? It should go down. It’s gone from twenty-nine-three-five to thirty-zerofour-zero in the last half hour.”

“Might go either way just before the storm, Bregg,” the quartermaster says. “What you watch for are radically fast changes. That’s what counts.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lordino puts his head in. “Permission to cover the fifty-calibers, sir. Keep them dry.”

“Granted.”

“What time do you expect to find the convoy, captain?” I ask.

“About seven-thirty. How do they say it in the Navy? Nineteen-thirty? We could run into the escorts any time now. What do you say you post another lookout? Put Cookie up there. Tell him to watch sharp for something low. Hardly can see a cutter in this sea.”

Baskell, the new gunnery officer, comes on just to look around. He is pale, and when the Diesel smoke hits him through the porthole he goes outside to retch and spit and rest his forehead on the cool steel rail. Semmes reports to tinker with the fathometer, which has begun to behave erratically, showing thirty fathoms over all bottom; we are already beyond the hundred-fathom curve where the coastal shelf tips into deep water. The engineer, handing in the evening fuel and water record, is projected through us from port to starboard by an unexpected tipsiness of Nora. Bringing up against the burninghot degaussing panel, he curses, “This damn’ fishboat!” There is a welt on his left shoulder.

When the heat and traffic on the confined bridge show signs of getting out of hand, I begin to shoo off the unnecessary men.

“Temperature still ninety-eight dry bulb,” Bregg says.

“It’s not the heat, it’s the humanity,” Baskell grunts. The Jedge chuckles, then motions me to follow him onto the wing.

“Damned if I like this,” he says. “Feels like there’ll be more than small-craft warning weather. Damn’ shore stations always underrate the weather. Better keep one foot out here till we make the convoy.”

We walk the pilothouse brow trying to project visibility, straining to find the suggestion of a hull in the murk. Occasional beads of spray fly up, refreshing a particle of sodden skin. The following breeze, deadened by the ship’s momentum, allows the Diesel smoke to hang at the mercy of every current, swirling now toward the bow, now, sickening, toward the bridge. In the west there is vague visibility to the horizon. South and east, banks of haze have crept in upon us. The north is a massive indigo shawl with a fringe of rain threading into the sea; soundless, restless lightning wickers in it, seeking a huge escape until, with the abruptness of fright, the fabric splits in brightness and thunder enough to make a statue flinch.

The cold front pours out on us fresh and clean, remindful as music, carrying the air of caves and streams and moss-graved granite rocks in the hemlock woods. The scent of a hundred intimate memories is in it.

“ Down to ninety-six already, sir. Ninety-five — ” Bregg calls. “Ninety-four—”

“Get me a quote on Steel,” Baskell mutters and is at the rail retching again, this time into the wind. “Ach.” Baskell is four months out of a law office. This is his first real weather.

“Go on, get off your feet, Baskell,” the Jedge urges, “Get some rest. No use killing yourself. We’ll call you if we need you.”

“I’m all right,” Baskell says.

The interior of the storm is a gigantic cathedral the color of midweek worship, transepts towering, dissolving, and reshaping, corridors reaching to the mingling borders of dusk and mist. Clouds float on the sea itself so that the rain sluices at us as solid matter not yet dispersed into drops. Eyes cannot be held open against this downpour; vision squeezes through slit lids, through felted lashes which the hands mop momentarily clear. Without limit the torrent reaches effortlessly, minute by minute, toward new crescendos. The chop is beaten back into the swell; even the swell seems to hood itself, exerting its strength blindly, in confused, unpredictable directions.

Ducking into the pilothouse for a breather, I see we have yawed twenty degrees off course. Bryan watches the compass as he fights the wheel a turn to the right. There is barely daylight through the fogged portholes.

“Ahead two thirds.”

The quartermaster rings the reduce speed order to the engine room.

The thrum of rain on sheet metal and the static rasp of the radio, sensitive to every electric nuance in the atmosphere, are the only continuing noises in the house. Small talk has ceased. The quartermaster takes the sending phone off its hook and hangs it on a binocular case. The circuit takes ten seconds to warm after the transmitter is lifted from the hook; now it will be ready for instant use. That is the quartermaster’s admission that he does not like the weather.

4

SHIP two points abaft the starboard beam — I think it’s a ship,” the lookout reports doubtfully.

Simultaneously the captain shouts, “What’s that to starboard? Is that a ship?”

The quartermaster and I break for the wing, searching through the rain. Glasses are useless. I can see nothing but the false hulls formed by clouds and waves, appearing and disappearing.

“I say I saw it, but I don’t see it now,” the captain says. “Lookout, can you still see that ship? Is it a ship?”

Cookie leans over the lookout rail, watching the sea as he shouts to us, “No, sir. . . . I don’t see it now. . . . You see it, then it fades out. . . . It’s in that light mist there. . . . There. . . . No. . . .”

“Ahead one third. Bryan! Ring down one third.”

“Something is there, sure enough,” the captain insists. “Couldn’t make much of the profile — seemed to be how on to us. Only there for a second.”

“Wasn’t much to it, sir. Looked like a cutter. I guess it’s the escort, sir.”

“It hears two points on the quarter,” the quartermaster says flatly.

Still I see nothing, nor does Welles. Cookie finds it again. “Yes, sir. A cutter, sir. An eighty-four.”

“It’s no cutter,” the quartermaster states. “It’s like no cutter I ever saw.”

Faintly now, through slackening rain, the suggestion of a vessel materializes, seen and gone and seen in the edge of the mist. The deckhouse structure is close to the bow, the hull low; this is a cutter profile. For once the quartermaster is wrong.

Now the shape is gone, and when it reappears it does not seem to be quite what it was — the bow and the house have drawn apart. Is it two vessels passing?

“It is coming about to starboard. It is no cutter,” the quartermaster continues. “Too long. Too much room between the house and the bow.”

The suspicion of what it is paralyzes the backs of our minds, but we do not say it. It is too foolish for an adult to believe. Submarines are found in the sound gear; if they are seen, it is by someone else. If they are seen, it is at dawn at a great distance on a quiet sea, out of effective gun range, so that the ballistic may be computed, the ship made ready, the course changed, the contact report radioed — not in this dreamlike way, within rifle shot, on a heaving sea where a gun deck cannot be made to hold still; swinging away from us leisurely, without belligerence.

The captain acknowledges it. “Submarine, God damn it,” he shouts.

“On the surface?” Baskell is incredulous. “What’s he doing on the surface?”

“We will go over and ask,” Welles replies and turns the general quarters button.

This is no drill. The men know it. This is no drill, not in this weather, at this hour, Nora lumbers heavily as her rudder sends her right. Above me on the ladder, Klein loses his footing and swings pendulum-like until Nora recovers. On all the decks, ladders, and catwalks, men take positions efficiently, in oilskins, in drawers, in shoes without socks, barefooted. The siren screams. The accelerating engine trembles.

Hasely stands by the boxes of broken-out reserve ammunition. “Is it really a sub, sir?”

“Yes. I’ve lost track of where it is. Report the machine guns ready to the bridge.”

“Just went into that muck a point on the starboard bow,” Bryan says, flexing his knees, feeling the balance of his gun.

The deluge has diminished to the volume of forthright rain punctuated by receding lightning and thunder. Visibility is irregular, dusk settling more rapidly than the rising breeze can drive away the haze and the steaming shreds of storm. The gunners’ problem is not decreased by the helmets, which, while they provide sufficient eaves to shed rain from eyes, afford no assistance in the principal ballistic, Nora’s roll in the trough of the sea. Against this wallow nothing avails but to reach for the nearest fixed object — a rail, a gun, a box, an anchor man — and hang on until the weight below the waterline asserts itself and Nora reluctantly stands upright before lurching again.

Baskell’s pointer and trainer work incessantly to keep the three-inch gun aimed within some respectable range of the target. Baskell’s small, alert figure holds onto Schmid, who, in turn, holds the gun breech. The ammunition party with their heavy loads skid helplessly on the wet decks, crashing roughly into each other. Baskell shuffles right and left trying to fit himself into the pattern of the trained gun team. But all action moves successfully, however crudely, toward the ultimate purpose of a loaded and ready gun. It can be no better on the sub, whose deck is awash in this miserable sea.

“This int the way we drilled for it, is it, sir?” Bryan asks. Then visibly his breath is constricted as though the last window in the body had been shut down in preparation for a storm. The mind has been distracted by the hurrying events and the physical exertion. Now the situation is at rest. There is nothing but the enemy and the gun and the dry, suspended nerve that is the self. There is neither courage nor fear. The animal, intelligent man is ready to fight. Only men who consciously stand apart from themselves, distrusting the completeness of the moment, have breath for nervous talk or epigrams. Not even “This is it” can be felt or said.

“Hold fire!” Welles shouts. “Hold all fire! I don’t think they see us yet.”

The words are barely out before the shadowy shape — Is that the sub? Is that a waterspout? — begins to wink without sound the quick, green code of machine-gun fire. Our reply is instant.

“Bryan, fire!” The gun answers in short bursts that seal the ears, tracers veering toward, then away from, the target, slopping as Bryan leans

against Nora’s roll to pivot the gun back to range, then veering toward and away again.

The submarine’s fire no less than ours is wild. Tracers, spaced among the armor-piercing shells, travel at finite speed, cores of hard light striking the ocean and ricocheting in startling bounds out of sight in the sky. The submarine continues to turn away. Our forward gun comes into action, each shot recoiling brutally through the decks.

“Klein, fire!” The port gun speaks and jams. Klein rattles the bolt without effect. Opening the breech, I pry the jammed shell out with a screw driver. “Try it!” The gun fires freely, spitting cartridge cases in my face and chest while I stupidly try to fathom what the hail is.

A line of submarine tracer begins high off the bow and swings down until it is snuffed out in the water. Then the enemy is gone. On the surface he has seven knots more than we, and the cover of night.

Hours later, miles away, the Five Sixty dumps charges on a perfect contact, and in the morning another opaque slick fingers along the Atlantic swells . . . the sweat of running . . . the blood of a wound . . .

In the morning we put Baskell in the wherry and transfer him across a settling sea to the Osbert in the inbound convoy. The pharmacist’s mate turns back the sheet to see what there is to report. Apparently the shell did not pass through, but, upon entering the throat, splintered through the mouth and cheeks, in which all features are pulped and obliterated. In each eye the blood is clotting and soon will rust to the color of a holy penny.

From these wars the heroes will return, ten or fifteen million strong, seasick cooks and legless gunners, fighting men and writing men, line officers and supply officers, and who shall say which is greater? Some, like Baskell, will return only as a memory in an empty bed, and they will be no less real for it.

To what shall we return? Is it not the deepest truth to say that we shall return not only to the infinitesimals of our personal worlds and to the infinities of statecraft, but that, more than anything else, we shall return to ourselves?

We shall return to a world the ten or fifteen millions of us make. And to those who are not of us, I say: Do not put too much trust in us. And to those who are of us, I say: We are the generation who said our fathers let us down. What will our children say of us?