This book literally changed my life.
In the eleventh grade in Greenville, South Carolina, i had an English teacher
who designated Thursday as "Free Reading Day" and encouraged the entire class
to read anything they wanted to (well, within limits -- "Playboy" would have
been Right Out, i'm sure) -- and, in case you had nothing of your own, she
laid out an assortment of magazines and books on a table at the front of
the room.
On that table, one Thursday, was a copy of "The Cruel Sea". Since i've always
been at least a bit interested in sea stories, and it looked interesting,
i picked it up. From the first i was hooked solidly.
In the next three or so years, i reread it twice at least, possibly more
than that.
And then i joined the Navy -- and i am sure that it was because of what i
read in this book, and what i sensed behind it, in what Monsarrat -- who,
like his viewpoint character, Lockhart, was there from the beginning, working
his way up to command his own ship before the end of the war -- didn't so
much say as assume about the sea and the Navy -- any Navy.
Monsarrat presents us here with a brotherhood of the sea, corny as that idea
may sound. Sailors, more than the other Armed Forces, tend to regard other
sailors -- even enemy sailors -- as brothers in arms, and, as Monsarrat says,
the only true enemy is the cruel sea itself.
As he shows us here, the sailor who was your enemy five minutes ago, who
was trying to kill you as you tried to kill him, is merely another survivor
to be rescued from the cruel sea once you've sunk his ship.
And, even more so, as Monsarrat portrays it, there is a kind of brotherhood
that binds sailors in the same Navy together in very much a family manner
-- you may not like your cousin, but you want to know what's happening to
him and, when all is said and done, he IS your relative.
The best summation of this sort of attitude (which i felt to some extent
myself during my time in the US Navy) comes when Ericson, the Captain, is
touring his new ship as she stands under construction in a Glasgow shipyard;
he meets one of his future officers, and mentions the name of his previous
ship, which was lost with over three-quarters of her crew, and realises that
"He's heard about Compass
Rose, he probably remembers the exact details--that she went down in
seven minutes, that we lost eighty men out of ninety-one. He knows all about
it, like everyone else in the Navy, whether they're in destroyers in the
Mediterranean or attached to the base at Scapa Flow: it's part of the linked
feeling, part of the fact of family bereavement. Thousands of sailors felt
personally sad when they read about her loss; Johnson was one of them, though
he'd never been within a thousand miles of Compass Rose and had never
heard her name before."
To be part of a band of brothers like that is a proud
thing, and Monsarrat captures it perfectly.
He also captures the terrified boredom of being in enemy territory with nothing
happening as you wait for the enemy to make the first move, and the shock,
confusion and horror of combat (particularly sea combat, in which the battlefield
itself is the deadly, patient enemy of both sides).
And he captures the glories and rewards of life at sea, the beauty of a glorious
clear dawn at sea, the stars and the moon and the wake at night and so much
more.
This is the book that made a sailor out of me.
It will tell you what it is to be a sailor. |
