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against all the men in the water. Not for a moment had they ceased being the enemy, brothers of men trying to kill his son at the very moment. The death of their ship did not absolve them. The oily water through which they swam toward the Brigadier did not wash away the crimes memorialized in the white ships on the conning tower. They werestill Germans, still the enemy, and yet their helplessness erased the difference between them and every sailor who had ever lost his ship. In the absence of that distinction, he could not find it in himself to damn them.
    At this point, Conrad had been so engrossed that he was not certain when Fox-Bourne and Scorsby had returned to the bridge. He remembered seeing them out of the corner of his eye heading back from the bow, the doctor remaining with Whelan, but the death of the U-boat and the frantic, terrified sailors had seized his attention so completely that all of this hardly registered. Now, Fox-Bourne was at the window, eyes red, swollen, the vein in his forehead standing out, looking as if he were on the verge of collapse. Conrad would not have been surprised if he had. There is a sorrow so deep no one can touch it but the man or woman it affects, he told me somberly, and in all his years he had never seen anyone so alone in his grief as Fox-Bourne. The warmth he had remarked on between the captain and Whelan, deep as it was, hardly seemed enough to have affected Fox-Bourne so profoundly. In any case, the man’s sorrow dominated the bridge from wall to wall and floor to roof. It seemed to have driven out the possibility of speech until Scorsby took a few steps toward him and quietly said that he would check on the lifeboats. Fox-Bourne heard him, there was no question of that, but he neither acknowledged Scorsby’s words nor looked at him before he left.
    The yellow cylinder of light had narrowed at the top and was now collapsing, its transparent walls of light breached by billowy fog that was blowing over the Germans, erasing them one after the other. The sun came in and out of the rifts, disappeared for longer and longer periods until it was gone. Now the fog obscured the deck from bow to midships. Conrad turned to watch it take the gallows of the sweeping gear. Minutes later a cry for help in German rang out, the words perfectly articulated even at that distance. Fox-Bourneblinked but did not move. Someone else shouted and his call was followed by several more, as if they were singing a round. A man shouted, “Help! Stop!” in English. Waiting for more voices to swell the chorus, appalled but fascinated, Conrad heard instead the chime of the engine telegraph, its sound a universal code to sailors, immediately readable, the duration of chimes and pauses in this case signaling a change from neutral to slow reverse.
    Fox-Bourne’s left hand was on the telegraph lever, his right on the wheel.
    â€œThere may be debris,” he said. “Shouldn’t want to foul our screws.”
    It seemed reasonable, even prudent, though the rescue crews would have to row blindly in the fog. Conrad expected Fox-Bourne to ring the engines back to neutral at any moment. They had retreated at least a hundred meters when Scorsby came up the ladder, his voice uneasy and tentative when he said the lifeboats could be lowered.
    â€œPut Whelan in the wardroom,” the captain told him. “I want his personal effects taken to my cabin.”
    Scorsby stood there flatfooted.
    â€œSir,” he said, “shouldn’t we launch the lifeboats first?”
    â€œNo, William, we should not.”
    â€œBut, sir—”
    â€œDamn you!” Fox-Bourne said, turning, glaring. “Do it now or I’ll have you up on charges. Do you understand?”
    He did not. No one did. The issues had nothing to do with each other. Lowering the boats was a matter of universal protocol, transferring Whelan belowdecks purely personal. What Scorsby did understand was that the sequence