Strachey, John "Ship in Convoy."
A straight forward, documentary-like short story about a Mediterranean convoy, told from the perspective of a British Army public relations officer traveling aboard an older transatlantic liner drafted into troopship service. The story opens in England and follows the ship, the fictitious ILLYRIA, as she travels in armed convoy through the Atlantic to Gibraltar and then across the Mediterranean to an unnamed port that appears to be Britain’s island fortress of Malta. Strachey is particularly good at showing out how one’s rank in the Army determined one’s “quality of life” aboard the troopship. His hero, Squadron Leader Ford, shares a cabin in the liner’s former 1st Class accommodations, while the masses of “other ranks” are packed below. Ford notes that his quarters “were not very different from first-class accommodations in a particularly crowded ship in peacetime.” Though all aboard the ship certainly share in the dangers of a wartime convoy, including aerial bombardment, Squadron Leader Ford does suffer pangs of conscience regarding the treatment that he, and other officers, receive when, after the ship had nearly been sunk, he goes down for his regular breakfast and observes:
“Everything in the first-class dining room was aggressively normal. The stewards served the porridge, coffee (so-called), bacon and eggs, rolls, butter and marmalade which the printed card announced.” War might be raging, but the high service standards of fabled British shipping lines such as The Cunard (as British merchant mariners called Cunard), P&O and others would be preserved, as Squadron Leader Ford learns, at all costs!