A Twist of Sand

London had been a failure. I had taken my chief's advice and tried to get drunk. I had given it up in disgust. Somewhere in the club had been that Intelligence man, but I never saw him. I had rung Wendy with the firm intention of spending one last night with her. Half-way there the air raid sirens went and the mood of depression became so strong that I never got as far as her flat. The thought of the sheer hopelessness of it all overwhelmed me. The absolute secrecy was a further burden. The prospects if the Germans made use of their frightful new weapon in the Atlantic, as they were bound to when NP I. returned from her successful cruise, were appalling. I decided to get out of London and see old Captain Peace before he died. The sight of the old sailor dying so manfully, with a flood of nautical phrases and oaths on his lips, affected me more even than unburdening my secret would have done. The old captain had been delirious off and on since my arrival the previous night. Now the salt of a sea life blew like spindrift through the sickroom.

The nurse came and took the dying man's pulse. She looked across at me and shook her head slightly She was middle-aged, bosomy, and kind. I have never yet encountered the blonde, glamorous nurse of the cinema sickroom. The more crow's feet at the corners of their eyes, the better nurses they have been.

"It's a wonder he has lasted all this time," she said "He must have a constitution like iron. You know, if thrombosis doesn't kill in the first attack, they sometimes linger on. The following fortnight is the dangerous time."

"You don't think he'll make it?" I asked. Death seemed everywhere.

She glanced at me keenly. "No, he can't. He is very near the end, now. You should take some rest yourself."

My laughter rang harshly in my own ears. Rest! I'd soon rest throughout eternity.

She came round the bed and stood looking down at me as I sat. "I don't know what your job is in this war, but you've been through it, I can see. Forget what has happened."

"Look," I said. "You're very kind to show an interest in me. All I can say is that I envy that old man dying in his bed."

Tears filled her eyes, and she hurried from the room.

NP I must have a base. That thought went through my mind, over and over again. The two naval chiefs were sure that she had not. I sat in the pleasant morning sunshine by old Captain Peace and turned the problem over in my mind, while from the bed came half-incoherent oaths, sailing-ship directions, mutterings all about winds and tides.

I tried to put myself in the place of the U-boat commander. The first thing, I thought, must be to rid myself of the fear which had engulfed me of this new frightful weapon. Was it, I asked myself again and again, quite as awe-inspiring as the Intelligence man had made out ? Where was the flaw, the flaw of human fallibility? He had spoken of her radar as the Achilles heel. Well, that was one card in my hand, and likely to be a trump if well played. I projected myself into the skin of the U-boat commander Hans Tutte. Before I left the Admiralty I had asked for everything they had about him. Certainly the pipsqueak clerk had resented giving me the top-secret Admiralty appreciation of Tutte, but with my backing it seemed that I could ask what I wished. So also, I thought grimly, can a man on the eve of his execution.

Tutte was not the flamboyant extrovert that the great aces like Schepke and Prien were. The training of these great U-boat aces, their successes in early years and so on had been very similar. But when it came to attack, Tutte was different. There had been survivors' accounts of that dreadful blood-and-oil bath in the North Atlantic, some hysterical, some non-committal, but on putting them together I found that Tutte, daring, brave, resolute, was a master of the calculated risk. There was a fierce precision about his sinkings, even amid the tumult of burning ships, star shells and thudding torpedoes. It did not surprise me to read that his father had been a professor of mathematics. There had been throughout the momentary holding-off while he assessed the rate of risk and either he held back altogether, or struck with a rapid, deadly blow. His crew idolised him; there was warmth in the man to his crew and record of humanity towards boat survivors. One merchant first mate noted how, eight hours after Tutte had sunk his ship in one of those hideous melees in the North Atlantic at night, Tutte had surfaced alongside and passed a Thermos of coffee, some hunks of bread and a bottle of rum into the boat.

"The North Atlantic is a bastard," he had said in excellent English. "We sailors all know that. Steer such and such a course."

Imagine yourself such a man fresh from the North Atlantic, I told myself. Here is what Blohm and Voss says is the perfect U-boat. Reaction? First, call in your battle-trained officers and examine the new submarine in detail. I could imagine that conference in the as yet unliving control room of NP I.