Reviews of the Week
War in the Atlantic
The Cruel Sea. By Nicholas Monsarrat. (Cassell. .12s. 6d.) THE Battle of the Atlantic has been over more than six years, and Mr. Monsarrat, who fought in it, has now completed the first major account of how the Navy and the Merchant Marine saved us from the U-Boats. He observes ships and men with an eye that misses nothing, and writes like a man with a sense of humour accustomed to the writing of battle reports—economically and well. His book should be read, for the battle he describes was the only one we could never afford to lose, and the men who fought it were the men who saved us.
They lived a strange, unbalanced, interrupted life, and Mr. Monsarrat describes it with deep understanding. While they took their ships to sea, the world they were saving was going on without them.
" Each- leave was different from the last one . . . in this war, the years were passing, eating up not only men and treasure but bearing swiftly onwards the tide of lift as well. . . . The men just had to hope, and trust, and be reassured or betrayed, and take whatever they found when they got back. Distances were too great and the thread sometimes too tenuous for them to play an effective part at home as well as at sea ; and the sea had the priority, whether they liked it or not."
It had priority because the battle was too arduous for a man to fight with anything less than all that he had in him.
In five years and eight months it killed 30,000 seamen. Most of them had time before their luck ran out to discover as much about death at sea as living men can learn. They saw sailors burn on tankers or in the sea beside them ; they heard the watch below, trapped and dying in the messroom; they saw men poison them- selves with furnace oil or freeze to death, in 180 seconds, in the Arctic Ocean. The 30,000 knew what was coming to them, or to someone else in the convoy, every time they sailed from the Mersey or Murmansk or Sydney, Cape Breton or St. John's, Newfoundland. They were competent seamen, young, old, and middle-aged, who knew their business and its hazards and who kept on sailing.
A few of them, including Mr. Monsarrat, have already written honest personal accounts of those sections of the battle that they knew. The Crud Sea is just as honest but more ambitious and much more important as a record and a tribute. It is the Irst comprehen- sive narrative of the whole battle as seen and recorded by a man who endured it all. It is also one of the best novels that have yet been
written about sailors at war. Mr. Monsarrat tells the story of one of the first corvettes, from the day when her crew began to assemble to the night when they had to leave her, and die in the freezing water. Some, including her Captain and his First Lieutenant, lived to sail and fight another ship until the job was done.
Most of Mr. Monsarrat's characters are sailors, or men learning to be sailors and to work together as a crew—the fierce old Admiral who trained them, their weary skilful Captain who " carried them all " at first, the engineers, resigned and competent, the conscientious First Lieutenant, the wise coxswain, the stout-hearted leading hand and the junior officers, young and old, frightened and courageous. Then there are the landlubbers, less admirable but even more familiar—the staff offit'er who longed to go to sea if only he could " shake off this infernal catarrh," the gunnery officer's unfaithful wife, the Captain's nagging mother-in:law, and the man from the Ministry of Information. It is a living assortment of the men who fought the main battle as a team and their private battles as ordinary mortals, twisted sometimes by the strains of war. Mr. Monsarrat shows how training, experience and the elements changed-the assort- ment into the kind of team that could fight and survive and put to sea again without hesitation or questioning. He does not exaggerate their prowess or conceal their weakness. His "Compass Rose " is not much better, in his estimation, than most of her consorts. But she does her job, and he describes it and everything about it, like the weather and the way men die, with insistent and disturbing accuracy.
MARK ARNOLD-FORSTER.
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