by John Hersey
I began to dress. I threw my pajamas on the floor of my metal locker. I had taken a shower before turning in, and now I powdered myself and put on some long G.I.’s, and a pair of silk socks and woolen ones over them, and light coveralls, and a pair of ancient, cracked, stretched patent-leather dancing pumps that I’d bought in a moment of insanity in Denver, when we’d been at Lowry, which now were as light on my feet as old slippers; I’d worn them ever since that gruesome Meaulte mission, back in May, when my feet nearly froze and Buzz ate me out because of my putrid formation flying. He said I flew according to poop—no imagination. Actually I flew according to having a couple of blocks of ice for extremities, but I wouldn’t tell him that. Oh, no. Proud Charley Boman. Not your typical sassy shorty. Not me. Grin and bear. Band music by Sousa.
Where the deuce was Sully? Two-oh-nine in the morning. And if he wasn’t coming, what was I doing getting up? Must be a postponement. I went right on tying up my shoelaces, with a prickling sensation in my buttocks that I’d understood from tenth-grade Hygiene to be the preparation of the body by the adrenals for an act of self-preservation but that I’d learned in my post-graduate course at Obscenity University was really something called chicken s—. I began to speculate as to what was being postponed. Where did they plan to send us today? For a week, since the tenth, we’d been expecting the bad one they’d briefed us for that morning; they sent us out to the dispersals to our planes, and then scrubbed the mission because of a foul sky. Schweinfurt. That city was too far away. We knew we’d get it sooner or later; they always gave us the ones they set up and briefed and scrubbed. We’d tried to get Kassel started three or four times before we finally got there and wished we hadn’t. I began to flub my shoelaces. My heart was taking off and my palms were beginning to spout like Old Faithful. I began to think about not thinking about the mission they would give us.
4/
I heaved myself over to my locker and got my shaving gear and went down the corridor to the latrine. The guy I saw coming around the corner into the mirror was myself but I hardly recognized him, because he looked like some gazabo in a Halloween mask, one of those clammy rubber face-masks, of a guy about twenty years older than I, and I was supposed to be twenty-two; forty-two counting the mask; a middle-aged mask of some tired businessman whose business was…well, let’s say, unsavory. Both to him and to his customers. This unshaven middle-aged businessman in the mirror was a shorty, but you could tell from one look at him that he was not your typical cocky shorty. No would-be Napoleon he. No Little Corporal. No, sir. Maybe he was a ruin, but he was tall in all but stature.
And skinny. I had lost fifteen pounds since March. March, April, May, June, July, August. I talked funny; I’d noticed lately that I talked funny, even to myself. Slow, and like an obstacle race.
At the end of the row of basins a shoulder-high window was open, and I shuffled over to it in my dancing shoes and looked out and saw a fog with which you could have packed chinaware in a barrel.
Straight ahead as I peered out would be the Admin block, and I thought of the lights burning in Ops and Intelligence over there behind blackout curtains, beyond the fog, and I decided: I’ll mosey over there after I shave and ask them what gives, where are we going to bomb, what’s the dope about the postponement?
I’d ask Stormy Peters, the Group Meteorologist; he was a good joe, he might give.
So I turned on the hot-water faucet and let about a mile of water run, but it never got warm enough for a proper shave, considering that an oxygen mask was so tight that the least bit of beard would itch and chafe under it till you thought you were going to jump.
I cut myself. I had no styptic pencil. I made several little blotters of toilet paper and stuck them one by one on the bleeding spot. I looked in the mirror and saw: blue eyes, intense and direct, the whites not very white; dark brown eyebrows that went straight across the whole face without a break over the nose; a high forehead with a soft vein running indirectly down the middle like an aimless trickle of water on a windowpane; a pair of thick lips, which before the mirror I twisted and tensed in an effort to persuade myself that I had the mouth of a lieutenant general, which I was, all except for the last part; a fair chin, with its little scarlet-hearted blossom of toilet paper; brown hair in a military, or frigid-ears, haircut; and, at the center of everything, a shame of a nose, narrow-ridged and bulging at the end like a swiftly oncoming auto-hood flanked by two dented fenders for nostrils. It was not a face to make shaving a pleasure the first thing every morning, even in peacetime.
For pleasure I tried to think of Daphne’s face. I couldn’t. The sore spot was too raw.
So I thought of my other girl, my so-called former fiancée, for Christ’s sake, back home, Janet. I thought of the little dark thing that she was, on a bicycle, that summer between junior and senior years, when we got a little tight one night and were riding bikes up over the beach road among the pines, with the house lights on the Vineyard and Naushon winking at us across the way, and she steered into a ditch and fell sprawling on a sandy place and accused me between giggles of having pushed her over, though I’d been squarely on the white line, up on the middle of the crown, seeing if I could ride the line, a sobriety test, and I dropped my bike on the macadam and ran to her, and she lay with her brown legs all showing on a spread-out fan of light linen, laughing, and brother, I thought she was the cat’s pajamas. I was working as assistant head-waiter—big title, much skidding of thumbs in hollandaise on used plates—at the Sea Breeze that summer, and Janet had a job in Tuckers’ in Falmouth, and life was so promising, so easy, so in our hands. And then—oof, the drop! like a hole in a cold front—I thought of what a teaser she was. That girl could really douse a fire.
It was two twenty-seven when I stashed my shaving things and put on my flying boots and scuffed out into the fog. Talk about flying blind. It took me about ten minutes to do a one-minute walk over to the Admin block, feeling my way along the asphalt path with those heavy sloggers. I’d get off in the mud once in a while—though actually it was less soupy than usual, as we had had five days of good weather—and then feel my way back onto the hardtop; and poking along that way I got there.
The burst of light nearly blinded me when I first pushed my way into the concrete building, inherited from the R.A.F., that served as our center of command. I went down the hall to the door marked METEOROLOGIST, and pushed in, and there was Stormy on the phone to Wing H.Q., giving the higher-ups some stuff about altitudes of undercast tops that he’d picked up from our weather ship above the mess. You could see he was exhausted, but he was unruffled and polite, even to Wing.
Stormy Peters struck me as the healthiest guy in the Group, for he had the look you see on the faces of those who cope with elements, that you see on the faces of most men who work in the soil, even when times are hard, and sailors, fishermen have it; a look of unhurry, of deep respect for Nature even where there’s hatred, too, a look perhaps of resignation. Anyway, on Stormy it was indistinguishable from one of calm, peace. He was simply a nut about weather, and knowing that I’d always watched the sky, and dreamed about it, and read stories about it, ever since I’d been a kid, he gave me more time than he gave most throttle-jockeys.
He hung up. “Aren’t you a little early for the ball, Cinderella?” he said.
“Cut the crap.” I was testy, and he respected the mood, as if it were some kind of a disturbance of the upper air. “What’s the story?”
Stormy stood up and walked over to his map. He raised a hand toward it, with fingers spread, and it was like a Michelangelo hand, as if he were giving weather to the land outspread on the map, and he said, “Up here, over the —th Wing Bases, there’s advective North Sea stratus, and it’s going to stay that way. But here, over the —th Wing, our clouds are dissipating, and the cold front is weaker than expected, so we’ll get some fog…”
“Will get some. Christ’s sake, Stormy, don’t you ever look out the wi
ndow?”
“…well beyond the take-off time in the field order…”
“So there’ll be a slight postponement.”
“…so there’ll be a slight postponement.”
“How much?”
“Three and a half hours. Briefing at six.”
I shuddered at that. “Then they scare the s— out of us, then they scrub. Huh?”
“No scrubbing today.”
Stormy was uncanny, he was more dependable than the whole U.S. Weather Bureau put together; if he said we’d go, we’d go.
“How come you’re up?” he asked me.
“Because of a dweadful old big nasty dweam. Come on, Stormy, be a pal, where are they sending us?”
“Briefing at six,” he said. Then he must have seen the look on my face. “I can’t, Bo,” he said. “They got me under lock and key. You ought to know that.”
“Big friend,” I said.
“Why don’t you go get some sleep?”
“J–o–k–e,” I said. I spelled it out for him to save the trouble of laughing.
So I went back to my hutment, skiing along on the asphalt the way I’d come, and when I got inside I looked at my watch and saw that I had two hours and a quarter before they even wakened the others, one hundred and thirty-five minutes hanging around my neck like a mariner’s curse.
5/
I sat down in the can—the only place with decent light at that hour—with The Good Soldier, one of Kid Lynch’s books that I’d copped from his room after he was killed, and I must say the book had me completely flummoxed; I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t have told you who was who. My eye lit on a sentence: “As I see it, at least with regard to man,” the narrator said, “a love affair, a love for any definite woman, is something in the nature of a widening of the experience. With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer characteristic gesture—all these things, and it is these things that cause to arise the passion of love—all these things are like so many objects on the horizon of the landscape that tempt a man to walk beyond the horizon, to explore….” Explore! New territory! Jesus Christ! I thought that I had lost a continent, a land of fable named Daphne. I threw the book across the latrine, and it hit the tin paper-towel receptacle and made a hell of a noise. I was in bad shape and I knew it. And just at that moment, as if through an aural hallucination, there was a roar of an airplane engine in my ears.
I stood up and hurried to the window, and then with a rush of relief I realized that the sound really was there: some contraption-loving crew chief giving a final roll to an engine that had been running rough on a recent mission—for he wanted his million-dollar baby to come home again when next she went out, because she had so many hours of his life’s work, like gallons of his seminal fluid, in her parts.
I thought, as I stood at the window looking out at the drifting mist, which was given substance, like that of new steam, by the bathroom light, that one way I was lucky was in our having a ship that was sound. Our plane, which Marrow had nicknamed The Body, was one of those aircraft that announce, on the first day’s flight, that they are all right, in every response and utterance they are like a Lincoln Continental or a perfect pussy cat. Some ships were lemons, quite unrelated things going wrong one after another, cowl flaps one day, a turbo the next, interphone the next; and little things all haywire, such as juice for heated suits fizzling out—all in the same plane, day after day. Those dud-planes shook, as if scared of their function, or guilty, perhaps, over their defecations. Bad planes. I guess they came back as often as the good ones did, but it took a lot more sweat to get them back, and we were glad to have a peachereeno. We’d missed only one mission—Kiel it was, back in May, and that was when Marrow and our crew chief, Red Black, began feuding—on account of pure engine trouble; the other times, including Abbeville-Drucat just the day before, there’d been a nick of flak or a tiny shell fragment somewhere in the works, and The Body couldn’t help that. And she’d had little enough of that sort of trouble, practically nil. One of our mecks, who had an unspellable name, it sounded like Perzanski but it had about a dozen extra c’s and z’s and y’s in it, so Marrow called him Alphabet Soup, and we all called him Soupie—Soupie actually put in to be shifted to another ground crew because he said it was a f—ing bore to take care of The Body, it was like being a f—ing gas-pump winder at a service station; but the powers-that-be wouldn’t transfer him. “What a way to fight a God-damn war,” Soupie said one day. “In my opinion I avoid all pigs that there’s no risk of the clap if you put it to ’em. Life’s short. S—! You got to gamble.” And he would spit on The Body, she was so perfect, so clean. No clap in her. But the rest of us were satisfied. Oh yes, we were.
Then, with a sudden jolt of the old feeling in my chest, I was able to think about Daphne. I went back and sat on the john, with my pants pulled up, and I saw The Good Soldier, poor Kid’s book, lying butter-side-down on the concrete under the leftmost washbasin, and I put my chin on my fists, and I thought about Daphne at the bar in the officers’ club, the first moment I ever laid eyes on her, hadn’t spoken a single word to her. She was looking down her arm in that self-loving way of hers, and across her bosom, checking everything, just making sure she was as nice as ever. And afterwards I remembered her sitting down at her mirror, the first time she’d locked the door of her room in Cambridge, with me in it, and looking at herself as if to say, “Aren’t I the clever one?”
I went in our room, thinking I’d savor some images like these, and better ones, too, and I lay down on my bed, flying shoes and all. It was a mistake. The minute I stepped in the room I was aware of Marrow—of the Marrow whom Daphne had helped me to see; who was such a fake, such a shallow fake. I knew. I knew about Buzz.
But I knew, too, how magnificent he had been, and could be.
I saw in my mind Braddock’s ship blowing up, and Kid Lynch in the radio room of his plane with the unspeakable smear that a piece of twenty millimeter had made of that beautiful brain of his, and Senator Tamalty, slobbering his cheap patriotism on us out there by the control tower. Let me put it mildly: I had a despairing view of the world and of what men were making of it. War equaled s—, and peace equaled s—. There would never be peace so long as there were men with Marrow’s taint.
Gradually all that became blurred, and I saw a meadow, and a river with couples in punts, and a blue sky, and the fresh green of early spring, and I was flat on my back, and my head was in Daphne’s lap, and her soft hand rubbed and rubbed my temple.
6/
There was an explosion! A brilliant flash of flame.
Then I realized it was Sully. My headclock had screwed up.
Then I understood: no, it hadn’t. I’d fallen asleep again in my clothes. I’d be damned.
“Roll, boy,” Sully was growling, with the light in my face. You never could see flabby Sully in the shadows beyond. “Well, look at old Bo,” he added, “beating the f—ing system.” He must have thought I’d put my flying clothes on the night before. “Briefing at six.”
I batted at the flashlight and said, “Up yours.”
But Sully, who I guess caught more abuse from us glory-boys in any given morning than the Luftwaffe caught in a whole month, was quick, and he’d pulled the torch away before I could have the satisfaction of banging it against the wall to smithereens.
Then Sully went over toward Marrow, and as he walked across the room, Buzz said, clear-tongued as Satchmo’s horn, “O.K., Sully-boy, I’m awake.” Of course it was a lie. He was about as awake as Stonehenge. But his subconscious had managed to keep that third-degree light out of his face.
Being all dressed and ready, literally, to take off, I was able to lie there, as Buzz always did, awhile longer, I listened to the clamor in the hut of the men getting up and shufflin
g to the latrine, metal lockers slamming, johns flushing. I heard Wilson’s off-key voice strike up, “Oh, what a beautiful morning,” missing that haunting, unexpected interval on “morn-” by plenty; he must have peered out of the latrine window and seen the fog. Schuman, a new man with probably only three missions under his belt, but loud, the way Marrow had been at the beginning of our tour, was bitching about the tepid water, and Maltitz, the boy with the mouth full of sugar cane, who was awake in his room in spite of the fact he couldn’t go on this mission because his ship had been beat up on the Abbeville-Drucat raid and was having to get some grafts from the Hangar Queen, bellowed to us all, “Have a nahss trip, chillun’, y’all sen’ me a postcard, heah? And come back real soon, heah?” And then the chorus of abuse: “Aah, go flog y’self.” “Kiss my ass.” “Jag off, Titty.” Maltitz laughed, high-pitched and screeching, as a loon laughs in the dark.
In time the men began to leave the Nissen hut. The door at the center of the arch at the end away from the runway, pulled shut by its strong spring, slammed again and again and seemed to shake the whole building.
