Go In and Sink! Read Free Page A

going through here at the moment. Would you care to dine with them this evening? The sight of a real veteran might broaden their outlook a bit.’
    Marshall shook his head. ‘Thank you, sir. But no. I’ve a couple of people to see. Some letters.’
    ‘Very well. Take yourself off and relax for a bit. I’ll see you before you go tomorrow.’
    He watched him leave and then picked up the telephone. When Marshall had been suggested for the appointment he had had no doubts at all. His record, his list of sinkings and other operations spoke volumes. The fact that he had survived was proof enough. But now, having seen him, he was no longer so sure. Yet he could not put his finger on it. Marshall was good all right. On paper, the best man for the job. But there was something missing. He sighed deeply.
Youth
. That was what Marshall had lost. Somewhere back there in
Tristram’s
wake. It had been ground right out of him.
    He snapped tersely, ‘Yes?’
    The voice was complaining about supplies and spare parts. The captain tried not to think of Marshall’s eyes. Lost? Desperate? He pushed it from his thoughts and concentrated on the voice in his ear.
    After all, it was no longer his affair.

    If Marshall harboured any doubt as to the urgency of his secret appointment he was soon made to think otherwise. With first light little more than a grey blur over Portsmouth Harbour he was accompanied by the base captain in a staff car to a Fleet Air Arm station a few miles inland.
    Once strapped into a seat aboard a noisy and apparently unheated transport plane, he turned up his greatcoat collar and considered his experiences of the previous day. For the most part they had been disappointing, even fruitless. It had all begun badly with his farewells to Tristram
’s company. Despite being so close for so long, the mood of sentiment and parting seemed to elude them all. It was often so in the Service. Embarrassment perhaps at showing true feelings. Eagerness to be away and to find what awaited them at home.
    He was still not too sure what Gerrard thought about the sudden change of plans. He seemed more worried about what his wife would think than anything. Of his proposed command course he had said nothing, which had surprised Marshall. Gerrard was a good submarine officer, and as the base captain had remarked, they made a comfortable team together.
    When the last man had hurried ashore and the dockyard workers had clattered on to the deserted casing, Marshall had taken a last look round. It was stupid to give any boat character. Maybe that staff officer’s attitude was safer. Steel and machinery. Spare parts and fuel.
Men
made a submarine work. It was a weapon, not a way of life.
    And yet, as he had hesitated inside the tiny wardroom, had glanced at the stained curtains on each bunk which had given them their only brief privacy, he had found such reasoning hard to accept. The footsteps on the casing above had seemed muffled, remote, so that the boat had appeared to be listening, like himself. For those other familiar voices. The mixed accents and dialects which made up her company. The wits and the hard-cases, the dedicated and the ones who looked upon work as a disease. Separated, or seen as individuals in some peacetime street, you would not have noticed more than a handful. But bound together within
Tristram’s
toughened steel they had become an entity, a force to be reckoned with.
    Having discovered where he was to sleep that night, and arranged to be called in time for the ride to the air station, he had gone ashore. A rare taxi had carried him to the house on the outskirts of Southampton, and each mile of the journey he had wondered what he was going to say to Bill’s widow, the girl his best friend had married just two months before they had sailed for the Med. He remembered her well. And so he should. Small and dark, with the vitality and wildness of a young colt.
    What had he gone to tell her? That he had seen Bill before he had