The Raft & Socrates Asks Why Read online

  THE RAFT

  and

  SOCRATES ASKS WHY

  Two Conversations

  by

  ERIC LINKLATER

  TO

  JAMES BRIDIE

  A CIVILISED MAN

  Contents

  The Raft

  Socrates Asks Why

  A Note on the Author

  The Raft

  A raft is floating on the Atlantic. The long swell lifts it, raising first one corner so that it lies steeply tilted, and the opposite corner dips into the sea. The water, with a flourish of white, runs along its lower side. The bodies on the raft begin to roll downhill, but they have been tied to the planking, and the ropes halt their movement abruptly. Then the raft is tilted in the opposite direction, and again the bodies move a little way, uneasily.

  The Atlantic is almost black, and the swell is ribbed with afresh wind, here and there white-bearded. The sky hangs low in dull and formless clouds. A shower of rain, swift and savage, runs over the sea and striking hard upon the raft, rebounds, from planking and bodies, in small crystal fountains. There is a break in the clouds, and the view enlarges. On the desolate circle of ocean there is nothing to be seen but the raft. It rises on a swell, and disappears into a darker gulf.

  There are six bodies on it. Two of them, on the sleeves of their sodden jackets, wear tarnished gold braid. One of them, very young, his lank hair a light gold, is a LIEUTENANT in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. The other, also young but dark and thick-set, was SECOND MATE of the ship that has been torpedoed. Between them lies the tall figure of a STOKER. He is a very big man with enormous feet. He has tied a grey blanket round his shoulders, but one arm, thickly muscled, is naked to the wind.

  On the other side of the raft are a WIRELESS OPERATOR, a GUNNER, and a PASSENGER. The first, lightly built with sharp features, wears a black oilskin lashed tightly round his thin body. The GUNNER, in a dufflecoat and soldier’s khaki trousers, is the survivor of the crew of a twin-Lewis, the ship’s anti-aircraft armament. The PASSENGER, the oldest man there, in his middle forties, is hooded in a tartan travelling-rug buttoned into a dark civilian greatcoat.

  Between these six men, so different in many ways, there is one close resemblance. They are in the borderland between life and death, and they wear a look of peace. Their minds have been released from pain, and their thoughts make conversation.

  PASSENGER

  I felt the rain. I don’t think I shall feel anything more.

  WIRELESS OPERATOR

  I felt nothing.

  GUNNER

  Nor I.

  LIEUTENANT

  Yes, it was rain. The last time I sailed a race, in the summer before the war, there was a rain-squall like that as we rounded the buoy for the last leg to windward. A summer squall, but fierce and blinding. I was third across the line, but I won on handicap.

  STOKER

  It was raining when I left Liverpool. My wife didn’t want me to go back to sea. She said: ‘You’ve been bombed, and torpedoed, and wrecked ashore. Three ships you’ve lost already. You’ve done your share if any man has. Stay with me now. Get a job on land.’ — But she didn’t make a fuss when I said no. She’s a good wife, light of heart, and the child takes after her.

  PASSENGER

  You have been wrecked three times before this?

  STOKER

  Two years ago was the first time. More than that. It was the week when the Germans bombed Rotterdam and murdered, how many thousand? A fine port, Rotterdam. We had discharged there, and were outward bound in ballast. But a U-boat met us three hundred miles west of Land’s End. I fell and burnt my shoulder getting out of the stoke-hole. We were five days in a lifeboat, nineteen of us, but the weather wasn’t too bad. Then we got picked up, and I was back to sea within a fortnight.

  About nine or ten months after that we went ashore somewhere in the Outer Hebrides. I forget the name of the place. We were light again, being west-bound, and a full gale was blowing into the Minch. It was a dirty night. There were more ships than one lost that night. In time of war, when all the lighthouses are dark, ships are like blind men, very subject to disaster. But some of us got ashore, over rocks that were sharp as a razor where they weren’t slippery with seaweed. And a few cuts don’t take long to heal, if you’re healthy.

  PASSENGER

  Then you went back to sea?

  STOKER

  I went back to sea, and the next time it was a Dornier coming out of low cloud off the Humber. A bomb struck the after-end of the engine-room casing, another exploded alongside and started some plates. The sea came in quickly. But I was lucky that day. I was on deck when the bombs fell, and though a funnel-stay, parting like a fiddle-string, came down and broke my left arm, I got into a boat. Into the only one that got away. We were picked up and put ashore the next night.

  PASSENGER

  Then you went back to sea?

  STOKER

  I was in hospital for some time. Then I came back, or I wouldn’t be here now.

  PASSENGER

  And why do you always go back to sea?

  SECOND MATE

  What else should he do? He is a sailor.

  WIRELESS OPERATOR

  And sailors do their duty.… I meant that for a joke, but it isn’t a very good one, is it? For they do. But don’t ask me why. I suppose they have a sense of duty, but God knows where it comes from. It isn’t that England has given them so rich rewards that all their hearts must overflow with gratitude. England has never given them more than a scavenger’s wage, a dirty bunk in the bows of a six-thousand-ton tramp when afloat, and two rooms in a slum when ashore.

  STOKER

  My wife always kept them clean and tidy, and the child was well-dressed too.

  WIRELESS OPERATOR

  You may have had a wife who looked after you, but that doesn’t mean you had a Government that looked after you. Once I read, in some book I found, that men must be taught to serve the good, the beautiful, and the true. But has England ever taught you even to recognise either goodness or truth? Where, in your life, have you known beauty?

  STOKER

  Sometimes at sea. And at home.

  PASSENGER

  Even in time of peace the sea has peril enough, of hurricane, iceberg, and fog, uncharted wreck and treacherous reef. But in time of war there is danger unceasing. A ship is only a skin of iron that encloses a dead weight of cargo, great engines, and a handful or a small town-ful of men. Break open the skin — it is tender, the warhead of a torpedo will open a cathedral door in it — and all those men are adrift on the huge enmity of the sea. They crowd into a little boat, or a thing of matchwood like this, and the nearest land, it may be, is twelve hundred miles away.

  Now, in the deadliest time of the war, Germany is sinking week after week two hundred thousand tons of our shipping. More than that. The seas are strewn with wreckage. Under every quarter of the sky there are drifting little boats with quiet figures in them of sailors dead or dying. But the sailors who are rescued go back to sea. They do their duty. They go back, unflinching, to the fearful duty which no one has ever taught them.

  LIEUTENANT

  The heart of man is a boundless thing, and his mind is a great instrument that will do marvels if virtue move him. And virtue goes to sea in all our ships, the virtue of our land, of the islands that have left their fingerprint, for good or evil, in every corner of the world. Chiefly for good, is my belief. I believe in the people of this kingdom. There is in their hearts an ancient thing, native to their land, that has not of late been much regarded, but is strong though it has no speech, and is capable of greater deeds than have yet been done. This I believe when I think of the sailors who go back
to sea.

  PASSENGER

  Such a faith has not been — shall we say, obvious? — in the young men of your generation.

  LIEUTENANT

  We were not living, till lately, in an age of faith. It was an age of doubt. We used a passionate scrutiny — my generation — and weighed in a goldsmith’s balance all debatable values. We examined motives with a cold and suspecting eye, we were nervously aware of our faults, and we desired, without knowing how, to make better much that had been taken for good in the past. All that was a sign of life. It was a good generation, I think, but I agree with you when you say it had little faith. Faith began to come when we were put to the proof.

  PASSENGER

  There were those, of your generation, who did much harm by making of their intellect a barrier between themselves and their fellow-men. They appeared to believe that intellectuals need have no contact with the common herd, and could find no pleasure in its way of life. Surely intellect should be a general servant? But they made of it a private plaything.

  LIEUTENANT

  Wasn’t it the common herd which drove the poor intellectuals into a sort of reservation, as though we were the surviving members of a Red Indian tribe in Arizona? The great majority, having decided that thinking made them uncomfortable, took pleasure in activities which prevented them from thinking. They felt guilty, however, and in the presence of people who still found it agreeable to exercise intelligence they were ill-at-ease, and showed it. The little company of intellectuals, being as sensitive as the others, thereupon withdrew to their reservation.

  PASSENGER

  You might, I think, have made of your intelligence a more persuasive thing. Despite an air of confidence, the English are in some ways a diffident people. They are not easily upset by war and discomfort, but they are mortally afraid of ideas. And you intellectuals, dealing in brand-new ideas, dealt with them in so truculent a fashion that you frightened us out of our wits. You compelled us to seek comfort in the simpler noises of creation, such as the yelping of greyhounds, or the dance-orchestras that made such a very similar noise. Yes, you frightened us.

  GUNNER

  There was a friend of mine who used to be very easily alarmed by any loud noise.

  PASSENGER

  That isn’t exactly what I meant.… But tell me about your friend.

  GUNNER

  He has been killed in the war. I have been thinking about him a great deal during these last few days.

  LIEUTENANT

  Where do you come from, Gunner?

  GUNNER

  From Stornoway. That is in the island of Lewis, which you will have heard about.

  PASSENGER

  Was your friend a sailor?

  GUNNER

  No, he was in the Cameron Highlanders. He was my cousin as well as being my friend, and he joined the Camerons nearly six years ago, because that was the regiment that his father, my uncle, used to be in. My cousin was killed on the mountains that rise in front of Keren. It was a long battle there, and Andrew, my cousin, was afraid nearly all the time.

  SECOND MATE

  Keren? In Eritrea? They’d have gone ashore at Port Sudan, where the sun hits you like the blow of a hammer. I was there in a troopship, that was in the winter of 1940, but we were carrying Indian soldiers. I didn’t see any Camerons.

  GUNNER

  The Indian soldiers were also very good. But I will tell you about Andrew.

  There were two subalterns who led his Company to the attack. They had three hours’ climbing from the valley to the ridge, over naked rock where the only cover was a little thorn-scrub, and all the way they were under fire. The sun was hot upon their backs, but the sweat ran down their arms, and when the bullets came it was like the little draughts of cold air you will sometimes feel on your neck. The Italians were strong there. They held the mountain-tops with many guns, they had guns in the crannies and caves of the rocks, and nine men out of ten, looking at those heights, would have said, ‘They can never be taken.’

  But the Camerons, a Company led by two subalterns not long out of school, went up the nearest ridge. They made use of the ground in a clever way, like stalkers, and as well as being clever, their blood was up. So they took a corner of the ridge, and held it till morning. Then the rest of the Battalion came up, under fire from a mountain called Dologorodoc, over the gorge, and they held the ridge against all attack for thirteen days.

  That was the crest that was given the name of Cameron Ridge. Beyond it there was a wilder range, with a big rough head on it called Sanchil. It was attacked by English soldiers and by Indians, who were as brave as any story of bravery in the world. But they could not take it. So the Camerons on Cameron Ridge lay under fire from the heights beyond. They were blistered and flayed by the midday sun, but in the bitter winds at night their teeth would be chattering and their fingers white with cold.

  There was no water on the ridge. Every pint of water and every bandolier of ammunition had to be carried, by the men themselves, over the rocks from the valley below.

  So the battle went on. The Camerons were relieved by the Fusiliers, then they returned and made an attack on Sanchil. It was not easy. They had to go through a barrage of mortar-bombs, climbing that steep rock, and the machine-gun fire was like a hailstorm in the cliffs. But then you saw, coming through the storm with their heads up, little groups of men. Six men — there was a young officer, a quartermaster, and a cook among them — were all that was left of one Company. There were seventeen out of another Company, and about a dozen from two Companies that had started together. They gathered near the top of Sanchil, as if it were under the forehead of the mountain. They held a crevice here, a cranny there, and all the rock was as hot as a frying-pan under the sun. Then they attacked the very crown of the rock. But there were too few of them and the Italians beat them back, throwing little bombs that burst at their feet.

  But about ten days later the West Yorks took the mountain called Dologorodoc, over the gorge, and then it was easy to capture Sanchil. And our men, who went there, found on the very top of Sanchil the bodies of three Cameron Highlanders.

  It was a good Battalion.

  LIEUTENANT

  That, I think, is what one calls an understatement.

  PASSENGER

  But how do you know all this?

  GUNNER

  I saw it. No, I was not there. I was at sea. But I saw it all very clearly because of what happened to my cousin Andrew.

  PASSENGER

  What did happen?

  GUNNER

  He was in the battle till the last day. But all the time the noise of the guns put such fear into him that his body was trembling, and his jaw loosened and shook like a broken shutter in the wind. He could not grow used to the noise, like the other men, who were indifferent when the sky seemed to gather its breath and cough like thunder under the cliffs.

  There was an officer who knew Andrew, and was sorry for him. He said that Andrew must be ill, and told him to go and see the doctor. So presently, in a quiet hour, Andrew went down the hill. But very soon he returned and told a story about some medicine the doctor had given him, that would be good for his fear and keep his jaw still when the guns opened fire.

  He went back to his duty, to a rifleman’s post in a cleft of the rock. And very soon the guns of the enemy let fly a salvo. The air was full of screaming, then the shells burst and the echo of the din of them was repeated four or five times, and Andrew’s jaw hung loose with his fear and shook like a bill-board caught in the wind. But he lay by his rifle and made no move to escape.

  He had never gone near the doctor. He knew that no doctor could cure him, and he would not waste the man’s time. He just made up his mind that he would endure his fear, and not put the Battalion to shame. So he stayed on Cameron Ridge all those days, and suffered the agony of fear that loosened and shook his jaw like something adrift in a gale. — Even when he was a little boy he had never liked hearing a loud noise. — But fear never got the bett
er of him. He did nothing that would make the Cameron Highlanders ashamed of him. He went forward in their last attack, and he was killed under the forehead of Sanchil. There were some good men in that Battalion.

  PASSENGER

  If there were any better than your cousin Andrew, they were truly remarkable.

  GUNNER

  He was a quiet, well-spoken fellow, and I was very fond of him.

  LIEUTENANT

  But why — this is the question — why did he make that resolution to endure his fear?

  SECOND MATE

  I don’t see any mystery there. He was a soldier in a good regiment, and he had to behave like a soldier.