The Ice Ship

Pyke, from his Massachusetts madhouse, envisioned it as a divine craft, an Ark impervious to torpedoes. ICE is with us, ICE will win this war, he wrote Mountbatten. With a draft of one hundred and fifty feet, two million tons displacement, it could carry one hundred twin-engine planes, three thousand men, and required no steel to assemble, only water and pulp. Onboard, the men lived in cork-paneled cabins, skated down corridors to deliver urgent messages. A miracle ship, organically arisen from the element it moved in, indistinguishable from its medium, formed by Nature’s design, not the Royal Navy’s. Even her weaponry resembled God’s own: “brine guns” which would encase the enemy in ice like straw in glass, or block his harbor will a flotilla of icebergs. Churchill himself approved draining White Bay for its construction and ordered all cork immediately diverted to Canada, where a prototype built by conscientious objectors lasted through the summer disguised as a boathouse. By then Allies had landed in France, and the project was scrapped— Mountbatten threatened to lock him up again, paying no attention to a new plan for smuggling assassins into Berlin in boxes marked “Officers Only” on the grounds that the Germans were an obedient race. Love and duty stir men to action, but war makes us dream: before his suicide he shaved his beard, head. Outside, wet snow fell hard against the city, as though to clear it for another world.