The Voyage of the Bismarck
I wrote this in 1971
The Voyage of the Bismarck Carriage of the Spirits
We passed from Poland, stong and bold
Young midshipmen and other sailors old.
We manned the guns to sirens clapping in the wind and rain ;
We were a giant sleek in the sun to seek
The ponderous enemy every one
And blow him all to glory with our knives and sliding keel,
Their small destroyers, heavy cruisers, little packs of guns
And merchant ships as well.
So waited, hooting eagerly, for some brave David when
This time the myth would sigh in pain.
We manned, remanned, well-practiced, smooth and oiled
While all around our giant form the massive ocean boiled ;
Wet and smooth as a seal she slipped through thirty knots of sea
Her long black hull and roaring bowels below
Her mainmast chapped by the breeze, like heavy winters howled
Her mountain funnel pouring oily smoke like fissures out to lea.
Masts. Steel plates. They slice across the sea against the wind
To rhythm kin to dockyards where the hammers muse
These nails, these screws, these rivets staring at the sun alone
Are thousandfold to flare and fuse
To crash green fountains up the sky, across a path to home.
In Norway crosstrees skipped among the cliffs.
On either side the fiords greenly rose like dolphins in the wet sun
With wet backs and fins that glisten
Slack-backed fish which listen, listen
For the heavy rolling, rolling, rolling thunder of the guns.
And like the lips of giants they were and rose
Warmly waving to the summer sun
And that smile and with those eyes is how they froze ;
And how they look now, tired and sickly
Now the sluggish steamers crawl and browse.
Games we played on deck to clangs and clangour
Shouts and bouts of argument and sweat
Prinz Eugen quietly dozed in the heat
Though down below she got on fuel like packs of hungry wolves
For meat.
Sailors singing on to home in letters
Warm as sweet meadows or the grassy slopes about us
Telling of the great steel ship built to enfetter leaps of ocean
Swiftly pacing, racing through the choppy clutter
Moaning with our motion.
And sailors walking the slopes
And pictures taken quietly
As if serene the storm blew up in mountain huts
To tell us of this last-on-land for most of us.
We sailed and smiled to chapped wet shores
And once more, once more again our whistling struts and wires
Were sweet, sweet music
Were poignant music evermore,
Were music rippling through our core.
Down under now the hull once more exploded with the turbine pink
While sternward waves of sullen grey, caught
Chopped and cut about, whirled silent out across the mist
As we began to plot new courses, many-feelered
And with each change, to list
One side to starboard or to port
Off Iceland yellow mists enclose the sun.
Thats where we were when crackled hints came running
Out on radio and reports flew to the Captain, to Admiral Lutjens.
And from him back to Berlin. To impatient
Germany over harsh snow mountains, long walls
Away from home
Where Our Fuehrer worked like all the myriad demons
In his halls.
Engage!
We waited. We went to our bunks
and we waited.
When it grew time to come up the sky was dark
And the heavy black sea finned through the wind like a shark.
Battle Stations!
Spray whipped at our grave, silent, fearful faces.
We watched. We waited.. We stared at the slow turrets
Whining their guns across the low sky.
The guns went out to the night and watched. They waited.
Two shapes
. Two heavy shapes formed off from the spars.
Sighting!
. Range fifty thousand yards .. closing.
We come to maximum range in seven minutes.
This is the Captain speaking. Attention crew! .. Attention!
Enemy sighted. Believed force of two Battleships or one Battleship
And one Battlecruiser. Have this moment received a telegram from the Fuehrer
Himself. Orders are to engage with the spirit of the German people
Behind us. Good luck!
Range-reader .. Captain here. Call out your numbers.
Forty-five thousand
forty thousand yards
thirty-five
Battlecruiser Hood, pomp dictating every action,
Sees the contest, charges in, spins, drifting round and round ;
Thus experience took a stance and watched appalled
The swing of Bismarcks guns. Her rocklike calm. quick movement
The elusive youth who, her freedom won, with flawless guile
Will in a second improvise and win a style.
Twenty-five thousand yards
..
Shoot!
All at once our ears and scalps were torn from our heads.
The sea shuddered thickly careened around the sky.
The ocean in shreds jjumped ffrom gun to gun
And rolled out on the miles in zigzag momentum.
Up and down up and down the great giant guns flew along our side
Ripping into the night. One by one and back
Up and down again. Up and down and silent. Silent
Up and down across the ship they came
White-hot then slack. Then up and back again.
Short!
Short!
All short!
Whitehot water sprouted at our staring eyes.
Thump and crash and lifting to the heavens near our sides.
Thump and crash the ordered salvos came to us .. up and up
Till down and down and onto decks they crashed.
Short!
Straddle!
Short!
Vessels jockey round
As archers fit each arrow, carefully.
Heavy charges follow yet the bowman at his stake
Seems bent on middle-distance, lifts and pulls
.
The scream of arrows dies,
One more arrow takes.
The cling of bells of panel lights a sudden wink
A pause before the thunderous crash resounds
Throughout the ship. On and on and on again
Until a general madness hammers in our brain,
No time to feel no time to think.
( They say that to await four fifteen inch shells from across
twenty-five thousand yards of water is a matter of thirty-five seconds)
Twining throughout head and brain well placed
To straddle us again
Hooting playfully but nearer whining, moaning
Tearing the sky till fit to burst, again, again, again
Sudden on our decks wild orange flame.
Extinguishers !
And so it was : the Hood and the Bismarck together entangled.
Two navies champions in their little war waged at the Worlds Heart .. in the Middle,
In the vast wide Centre-Stage at sea ..
Countless times from both the heavy thunder rolled along the waves
To nestle in the sea..
Titannic silver runnels, higher than both funnels,
House-high heaved and fanned against the wind
To spread across the acrid brine
Muzzles heavynodding, blasting the sprayswept crowing seawinds spine,
Prodding roaring crosstrees, finding the sea full thousand yards behind.
Hit! .. Over! Hit!
Good God above!
And then the cap, the lid, the top of the world roared skyward.
Flash after flash from Hood but not from her guns,
Reared starkly blazing thundering to the clouds
To rocket out of sight.
Pitifully the flame played along her superstructure
Settled low in the water and sighed and hissed in agony.
A babble spreads ; shouts roars and cheers
And men begin to sway and show delight
Or boo and hiss.
But thousands who have rocked the stands
May instantly be silent ;
All players turn, dismayed.
The audience watch
The players watch
Each at his callous fear appalled and deeply shocked.
The fight had disengaged, heart lost,
We travelled slower, damaged, flaked our gloss.
Hunted, silent, set for southern gales
With thousand chanting shades clinging fiercely to our tail.
With her gone and cap-in-hand for extra cigarettes, our crew,
Wide-eyed and open-mouthed like boyish Indian braves
As when they stood and watched the myriad foe alight and
Journey to their grave :
As when she settled in the sea, blew the sailors from her decks,
Abruptly shook and rolled and then was gone
with all her crew
Save three
..
So Hood is gone. Tribute to her soul my Germany
That though she sank like tin she fired repeatedly.
How like the singer to embark on hymns so strong
To lift out mystery of how hes ever master of his song.
For now we limp amidst the gloom
Now, oh now, how little, very little room
We find to shadow our activity
To save us from a similar doom.
These swordfish plague us
Throw tin fishes at our hull and more enrage us.
We throw stores of shells up to their sky
And wonder why they shower in front of them and die !
Then we realised speed of shellburst, timed in port
To shock a faster plane than this who dives uncaught,
Is missynchronised, mistimes
.. ironic thought !
Crippled further with our rudder gone,
Caught at ten degrees consistently to port,
We wallow feeling whalelike in some shallows
And gathered up for sport.
Ship unmanouevrable. Shall fight to the last shell
Long live the Fuhrer !
Once more the wait. We await our death this time.
All the huge guns freeze like quivering mice.
Like bull elephants the roar will roll across the ship like dice
Just as before ; before this stain of lady-luck
Arrives to shiver in our beards and shake out devil-angry tears of pain
They know the roll of thunder gone
Is merely heralding the onset of a final deafening dawn.
Dawn comes on
The bite of a soft music reins inside the sea.
We bucked steadily, rolled in the troughs in endless agony
While those guns, those our great silent guns
Played like gods to give us sight beyond this sea
We settled softly to a widening spin ; one drunken mast with flashing cord
The whole frame trembled turning with the wind.
Ah, Prinz Eugen, friend, dear friend, where are you in this waste
.?
Silence clings to the lapping stars. Alone and friendless we,
Far from home, hear the clear strain of a thousand
Woodwind in the pipes and bends within the ship.
We knew, that just as we piped aboard our hopes at home
And whistled carelessly
Now as death comes on in minute hands
Now chants in crosstrees where our sailor-singing skipped
So now we stand with heads bowed low
Quite soon in death to dip.