The Man who Missed the War (28 page)

Soon afterwards came Dunkirk with the Navy and the Air Force going to the rescue of the stranded Army. Once again, as Philip pointed out, the bulk of the officers and men of the Royal Navy could play no part in a major operation which was pre-eminently a Naval responsibility. They had to remain biting their thumbs in Scapa Flow and other safe harbours, tied to their big ships which were much too vulnerable to risk anywhere within striking distance of enemy aircraft. But the destroyer flotillas, aided by volunteer sailors in their little ships, did the job with the calmness, efficiency and courage for which the Royal Navy has ever been famous, and added yet another chapter of glory to the proud annals of Britain’s seafaring men.

On June the 10th the raft actually crossed the Equator, although it was still moving so slowly as to be almost becalmed. The days were sweltering and the greater part of them had to be spent under cover of a large awning that Philip had rigged up on deck some days after the virtual disappearance of the wind. By this time both of them were baked almost mahogany colour and, owing to the long periods they spent in the water, could have taken prizes for their diving and swimming in any regatta.

Bathing and fishing were, in fact, practically their only recreations. Gloria still did a little sketching occasionally, but she seemed to have lost much of her enthusiasm for her art. The routine of their days had formed itself even before they had landed on the African coast, and it was rarely altered except through adverse weather.

On waking they swam, then had their early meal. The morning passed in preparing food, shifting cargo, cleaning, cooking, washing, and the scores of odd jobs necessary to their daily lives.
During the hottest hours of the afternoon they adopted the Spanish siesta, then they bathed again and, on most days, fished a little before dinner. Some evenings they listened to the radio, but others they just talked, and, whenever they stopped to think about it, they found it quite amazing how quickly the time went.

Italy’s entry into the war surprised Philip. The disaster which had overtaken the Allied Armies in France had not shaken his faith in Germany’s ultimate defeat. He knew that it would now be a long stiff business, but he felt convinced that sooner or later the United States would come to Britain’s assistance, so the only thing that filled him with real concern was his old worry as to whether the Navy would be able to keep Britain’s Atlantic Life-Line open. Yet, even if they failed, he felt instinctively that Britain would never surrender, and that with the Empire behind them the King and his Government would continue to fight the war from Canada. Therefore, it seemed to him that, although he had never thought Mussolini a fool, the Italian Dictator was certainly behaving like one now, as he was sacrificing a safe and extremely profitable neutrality for almost inevitable defeat and personal liquidation in a few years’ time.

The news of the collapse of France was grim, but the blow was to some extent deadened by coming at the end of nearly ten weeks of unrelieved disaster. In view of the military situation, one could hardly blame the French for seeking terms for their armies in Metropolitan France, but Philip spent hours cursing the treachery of the French politicians and the cowardice of Marshal Pétain which immobilised the great resources of the French Empire and prevented the war against the Axis being carried on from North Africa.

Towards the end of June a light breeze arose, which carried the raft slowly but surely on a new course, slightly West of South, down the coast of South America, although still several hundred miles from it.

After the fall of France there came an ominous pause in the war. It had now assumed its own individuality and was not, after all, to be merely a repetition of 1914–1918. Yet the present situation had more than a superficial similarity to 1802 when Napoleon’s Armies were massing at Boulogne for the invasion of
England. Then, as now, in her great extremity Britain had been given a great Englishman to lead her. William Pitt, aided by her brilliant band of Admirals, had humbled the pride of France and brought the schemes of the ambitious Corsican to naught; and now, Winston Churchill, equally well served by his Air Marshals, was to use Britain’s new Navy—the Fleet of the air—to render the might of Germany impotent and turn all Hitler’s past victories to ashes in his mouth.

For those outside the picture the Battle of Britain began almost imperceptibly in ever-increasing attacks by the Luftwaffe on British shipping and the Southern ports. But by mid-August it was obvious even to Philip—thousands of miles away in the middle of the South Atlantic—that one of the most titanic battles in the history of the world was now in full swing.

Hour after hour, he waited impatiently for each fresh bulletin and listened to their staggering figures of German aircraft—three, four, even five to one—shot down compared with the Royal Air Force losses. Gloria, too, was enthralled and once asked him, with awe in her voice:

‘But how do they do it, Boy? The Germans are swell fighters—you must give them that. They’re brave and they’ve got good machines. Yet the R.A.F. puts it over them every time.’

‘I suppose we owe it more than anything to Lord Trenchard,’ Philip replied. ‘He is a Marshal of the Royal Air Force, and for years during the peace he fought a most desperate battle. He battled to keep our Air Force as a separate Service and to prevent it being brought under the Army, as the Generals and many of our statesmen wished it to be. How he managed to win his fight with such a tremendous weight and influence and interest against him God only knows; but he did, and the policy, arming and training of the R.A.F. continued to be governed by airmen instead of by soldiers. I think the fact that the R.A.F. is a young Service has saved it from a lot of the deadening taboos which often stifle initiative in the others, and as flying is much more exciting than footslogging I don’t doubt that a pretty high percentage of our more adventurous young men have gone into the Air Force; but I’m quite certain that wouldn’t cut any ice if the basis of the thing had been wrong.

‘The pride of place which in all German minds is given to the
Army caused them to slip up in laying down the policy of the Luftwaffe. They went in very strongly for dive-bombers and that sort of thing, owing to their conception that the main rôle of an Air Force is to assist the Army. Our people did not make that mistake. The British doctrine is that the first function of the Air Force is to drive the enemy Air Force from the skies, and its second function is to destroy the enemy’s capacity to make war. If it can do the first, the Army obviously won’t be bothered by the enemy’s dive-bombers, and, if it can do the second—smash up all the enemy’s munition factories—all the Army will have left to do will be to hunt the stragglers out of the rubble. Anyhow, the Royal Air Force was organised and trained to fight an air war, and they have been given the finest machines that British mechanical genius could conceive. That’s why they’re shooting the Germans to hell.’

It was some ten days later—on September the 4th, to be exact—that a major tragedy occurred in the small world of the raft. Philip switched on the radio as usual that morning for the eight o’clock news, but nothing happened. Examination disclosed that the batteries had run out and they had no more. To their consternation they found themselves still thousands of miles from any land and now completely cut off from all news of the outside world.

Throughout September and early October they continued to drift a little erratically, but mainly on the same course. Once they heard distant gunfire, which told them that the war at sea had even reached these southern latitudes, and once another raft, a poor makeshift affair with three dead bodies on it, remained floating for two days in their vicinity. They now rarely saw a vessel, even hull-down on the horizon.

These autumn days were spring in the Southern Hemisphere, and, as they moved ever further southwards, they were extremely grateful for this fact. Although they had now left the airless and torrid heats of the equatorial region, fine, calm weather and the pleasantly hot days of a normal summer were travelling south with them and they were able to continue their swimming and lazing in the sun.

By mid-October they had reached the latitude of Cape Town, and it was soon after this that Philip noticed on the chart he
kept that their main direction had now altered to south-east, and it looked as if they were about to pass south of Africa and enter the great watery wastes that lie below the Indian Ocean.

It was early in November that they saw the first trails of weed. It grew in long bright green streamers, rather like smilax, and at first they noticed only comparatively small patches of it several miles apart. After another three or four days, however, the patches had become great banks, and the sea, now as calm as a mill-pond, was split up into a number of channels intersecting the innumerable verdantly deceptive islands of this strange archipelago.

At first, the change of scene, after the wearisome monotony of the empty ocean, was pleasant, but on the fifth day after they had first seen the weed they realised that they had now entered an area devoid of currents and that their drift had become so slow as to be almost indiscernible. Their latitude was a little south of the 50th parallel, and the temperature very similar to that in the English Channel in June, but it irked them badly to be hung up. The weed provided them with two changes in their diet—small, soft-shelled crabs and baby octopuses, both of which lived among it in great numbers—but it also very nearly proved the death of Gloria.

Before setting out on his original voyage, Philip had realised that he and the crew of five that he had intended to take with him would have to live entirely on tinned foods for from eight to fourteen weeks, so, as a precaution against scurvy, he had shipped a large consignment of tinned spinach. It was partly to the fact that he and Gloria made a meal from one of the tins about every ten days that Philip attributed their excellent health. They still had a large part of the consignment left, but the seaweed’s delicate green looked so fresh and its shoots were so tender that they thought it possible that it was one of the edible kinds and decided to try it as a vegetable.

The result was surprising. Philip felt no ill effects whatever, but within an hour poor Gloria was rolling on the floor in agony and choking for breath, while great beads of sweat bedewed her freckled forehead. There could be no doubt at all that she had been seriously poisoned, so Philip gave her an emetic and forced
her to keep awake, even when her pains temporarily lessened; which, with his very limited knowledge of medicine, was the only method he knew of dealing with such a situation.

There were times during the night when from the violence of her vomiting and subsequent spells of complete exhaustion he felt certain she was going to die; and it was during those anxious hours, while he was doing all he could to alleviate her suffering, that he realised how much her loss would mean to him.

After their one most unfortunate experience he had been too frightened to attempt to make love to her again, although he had frequently been tempted to do so, particularly during the more sultry nights when they had often bathed by moonlight together. Yet their perpetual closeness and dependence on each other had formed a strong bond between them. Occasionally the little habits of each would get on the other’s nerves, but they were both too well balanced to allow such small irritations to affect them seriously. During their long companionship they had come to respect each other and to admire many of the qualities each possessed. They were rarely silent for very long, never dull and always in good spirits; and, as Philip tightly held Gloria’s hands during her terrifying convulsive spasms, he was very conscious of all he owed to her.

It was three days before he felt reasonably sure that she would recover, but, in the meantime, she had broken out in an ugly rash and was so emaciated by fever that she could hardly sit upright without assistance. Philip formed a theory that she was what doctors call an ‘iodine hound’ and thus allergic to the drug, which is found in considerable strength in certain seaweeds. However, they never knew for certain if it was this or possibly some bad crab-meat in her portion of the weed that had caused the trouble. The rash gradually subsided, but for a long time she took things very quietly, and it was mid-December before she was her old self again.

The long, pleasant, sunny days ran on until the 18th of the month, when the sky became overcast, and that night they took all precuations to meet another gale. It was by no means so severe as the last they had experienced, and it blew itself out in thirty-six hours. To their surprise and delight, when they next ventured out they found that the storm had carried them out of
the area of the weed. The raft was once more floating in open water, and a pleasant breeze was pushing it along.

They soon found they were travelling south and east again, and as they moved through the Fifties to the Sixties they enjoyed the long twilights and short nights that would have been their portion had they been in Scotland during the latter part of the summer. But, from the end of January, the nights began to shorten, as the autumn of the Southern Hemisphere was now setting in.

The two months that followed were by far the most unpleasant they had so far experienced. There was no severe storm, but the sea was almost continuously choppy. There was rain, mist and, at times, hail, while the temperature fell steadily, until even during sunny spells they could never sit out on deck unless well wrapped up. Swimming and sunbathing were only happy memories, and, apart from fishing to maintain their food supply, their only diversion was watching—with a certain trepidation for their own safety, the gambolling of the huge whales that frequented these far southern waters.

Their only consolation for the increasing cold and hardship—and a very dubious consolation at that—was the thought that soon they would again strike land. Philip’s workings showed beyond dispute that they were heading for the Antarctic Continent, and, unless the raft were caught up in a contrary current, it could hardly fail to beach itself before the end of March.