The Lonely Sea. Alistair MacLean

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СКАЧАТЬ if he could only drop some smoke floats, he thought, he might still sail the Rawalpindi to safety. His ship was holed and sinking, damaged beyond help or repair and visibly dying: his guns were gone, his crew was decimated, but still he fought for survival. Such indomitable courage, such unyielding tenacity of purpose when all reason for purpose has long since vanished lies barely within the realms of comprehension.

      Captain Kennedy vanished into the smoke and the flame, and died.

      He was not long survived by his ship or by all except a tragic minority of the crew that had so magnificently served both himself and the Rawalpindi. Another shell from the Scharnhorst brought the coup de grace—a tremendous roar and a column of white flame lancing high into the gathering gloom of the evening as the erupting main magazine blew out through the sides and deck and burning superstructure and almost severed the Rawalpindi in two.

      The guns of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau fell silent: every salvo now could only be so much wasted ammunition. For the handful of men still left alive aboard the Rawalpindi nothing could be achieved by remaining where they were but a death swifter and even more certain than that offered by the ice-cold waters slowly climbing up the rent and gaping sides of the sinking ship.

      Miraculously, almost, two of the lifeboats had survived the ferocity of the Germans’ shells, and those few men—twenty-seven in all—who were able, slid down the falls and pulled desperately away from the blazing Rawalpindi: at any moment an explosion might reach out and destroy them, or destroy the ship and pull them after it as it sunk swiftly down to the deep floor of the ocean.

      These men, picked up by the German ships, were the only survivors apart from a handful rescued the following morning. Most of the others had been killed by shell-fire, burnt to death or trapped below decks and drowned in the rising waters. Some men who could not reach the lifeboats, jumped into the sea, searching frantically for broken bits of boats, oars, wreckage, anything that would offer even a passing moment’s security before the numbing cold struck deep and their hearts just stopped beating. And many there were, scattered here and there over the decks and in passages and compartments below, too desperately wounded either to move or to call out, who just sat or lay waiting quietly for the end, for the blessing of the freezing waters that would bring swift release from their agonies.

      Two hundred and forty men went down with the Rawalpindi, and, in light of the fanatical courage with which they had served both their ship and their commander, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to think that some of those who were still alive when the waters closed over them at 8 o’clock that evening may have derived no little consolation from the thought that if they had to go down with their ship, they could have asked no greater privilege than to do so in the incomparable company of Captain Edward Kennedy.

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