Hansen stirred and withdrew his gaze from the darkly white world beyond the canteen windows.

"Dr. Carpenter is not on trial for his life," he said mildly. "The counsel for the prosecution will kindly shut up."

This air of easy familiarity between officer and men, the easy camaraderie, the mutually tolerant disparagement with the deceptively misleading overtones of music-hall comedy, was something very rare in my experience but not unique. I'd seen it before, in first-line R.A.F. bomber crews, a relationship found only among a close-knit, close-living group of superbly trained experts, each of whom is keenly aware of his complete interdependence on the others. The casually informal and familiar attitude was a token not of the lack of discipline but the complete reverse, it was the badge of a very high degree of self-discipline, of the regard one man held for another not only as a highly skilled technician in his own field but also as a human being. It was clear, too, that a list of unwritten rules governed their conduct. Offhand and frequently completely lacking in outward respect though Rawlings and Zabrinski were in their attitude toward Lieutenant Hansen, there was an invisible line of propriety over which it was inconceivable that they would ever step: for Hansen's part, he scrupulously avoided any use of his authority when making disparaging remarks at the expense of the two enlisted men. It was also clear, as now, who was boss.

Rawlings and Zabrinski had stopped questioning me and had just embarked upon an enthusiastic discussion of the demerits of the Holy Loch in particular and Scotland in general as a submarine base, when a jeep swept past the canteen windows, the snow whirling whitely, thickly, through the swathe of the headlights. Rawlings jumped to his feet in mid-sentence, then subsided slowly and thoughtfully into his chair.

"The plot," he announced, "thickens."