The War Lover

by John Hersey

  I thought once more of my session with Daphne the day before, and of what I now knew of Marrow, and how this waking was different from every one that had gone before it, and I had a bitter sense of regret and loss—loss of that other Marrow I had admired so much; or loss, perhaps, of the other Charles Boman, the other me, who had done the admiring, who had been so naive.

  Finally Marrow heaved himself out of bed and into his clothes, as if all in one motion, and sleep-walked out of the room. He didn’t notice me, his eyes probably weren’t even open, but then, he never noticed anyone, except once in a while, for effect.

  I followed him.

  On the days of missions we ate in the senior officers’ mess, the Number One Mess. It was exactly like the Number Two Mess, only it was ordinarily for field officers and visiting muck-a-mucks. I guess they thought they could make us captains and looeys feel important the mornings we were to risk our iddy-biddy lives, except that all it did, most times, was to burn us up to see all the top-heavy brass among the ground-grippers eating there, who, if breakfast was at two thirty, say, were all on hand, to a man, because they’d stayed up, they’d had a duplicate-bridge party, or a tatting and needlework evening, or some God-damn old maid’s affair, and usually some of them were squiffed and much too breezy. Jokes from the bicycle squad. Awful.

  On account of the postponement this morning breakfast was so late that the joint was a mausoleum, and the only desk-fliers present were some of the working boys from Ops and S-2. Stormy was there, looking like an occluded front with occasional drizzle.

  Perkins thumped down onto the bench beside me; his eyes were puffy. “I see,” he said, sourly, “as how the rank is all gassing in the sack.”

  “Couldn’t stay up this late,” I said. “Simply teddible for the bally old team spiddit, you know.”

  “The sons of bitches,” Perkins said.

  Toward the very end of the influx I saw Marrow drift in. I guess he’d washed his face in the senior officers’ latrine off their lounge, because he looked as fresh as the day he was born. He was making some crack, and I saw Stedman wince and glower as Buzz thumped him on the back.

  They brought in heaping pans of bacon which looked like oily rags, and of yellow mush, with water oozing around it: scrambled powdered eggs. And pancakes and toast and chipped beef and also beans (just the thing for high altitudes; ask Prien, our tail gunner!). I held my nose when they put those water-logged eggs down.

  “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” Perkins said.

  I poured a cup of coffee, and another, and another. I knew I was supposed to eat, but I just couldn’t, no matter what Doc Randall had told me.

  Some days of missions I didn’t eat anything at all. Coffee for breakfast, then four, six, eight hours in the air, and of course I was too busy in the plane (let’s put it that way) to eat the delicious K-rations supplied by Uncle Sam for his fighting boys, and then by the time we got through interrogation and other post-raid chores it was too late for evening chow, anything but cold leftovers, and I figured I’d sleep better on an empty stomach anyway.

  I’d seen Doc just a week before. He had sat in his bare office, at his desk beside some olive-green metal files, his indomitable eyes wandering from the touched-up studio portrait of his field-mouse wife; to my sallow face; to his fingernails, each of which was chewed halfway to the moon, and you couldn’t blame him, because Doc carried about fifty pooped aviators around on his back day and night; and now and again to a pile of case histories of aviators’ deterioration stacked on the desk before him, like so many reproaches against psychiatry and patriotism; to his pipe; to the wall; to the sky outside which carried all his many troubled men to the enemy and sometimes back again—and he had told me to eat in the mornings. All about calories. Sitting under tension in a plane without nourishment. Reserves. All that.

  I had told him I just couldn’t eat breakfast, ever.

  He had said I’d simply have to force it down, the mornings there were missions.

  “Doesn’t this world ever make you want to throw up, Doc?”

  At that question of mine he’d looked at me, and his purple-rimmed eyes had said, “Constantly.” But the flesh around his mouth had moved in convulsive waves, and soon a sunny smile sat on his lips, and he told me a fable which I think he made up as he went along.

  “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a crow with the appetite of a condor, or perhaps a goat. It didn’t care how things tasted, but only how they looked. It liked bright objects, silver and shining blue things, and one day it ate a lady’s ring, a nickel a child had lost by the roadside, a priest’s collar button, a sequin, a violinist’s mute, a juke-box slug, and a lot of other junk like that. In the afternoon the crow began to feel nauseated, and he said to himself, ‘Must be something I ate.’ His crop got more and more uncomfortable, and finally he oopsed everything. The morsels he had thrown up looked so pretty that he wanted to eat them all over again, but believing that one of them had made him sick he decided not to eat any of them at all, and he flew away with a sense of forfeited pleasure. Do you know what the moral of this fable is?”

  “Don’t eat breakfast before going on a mission,” I said.

  “Wrong,” Doc said. “The moral is: People don’t know what’s bad for them until after the fun’s gone out of it.”

  “Doc,” I said, “you’re the God-damnedest man I ever met.”

  “Sometimes I think I’m plumb crazy,” he said, grinning.

  And maybe he was. What the hell did that crow have to do with me? Nothing. Only I came out of there feeling great. Doc’s eyes just kind of poured willingness into you.

  7/

  I was among the first to reach the briefing room—an outsize Nissen hut with enough folding chairs for about two hundred fifty men arranged in rows on a concrete floor facing a low platform. A blackboard rested on one easel on this stage, and a big map with a black cloth draped over it was on another. Clamped to an overhead steel beam, about a third of the way back, were several theatrical spotlights, which made the platform end of the room dazzlingly bright. The crews, both officers and sergeants, were beginning to wander in, and they were a raunchy bunch, in coveralls or leather jackets, the officers wearing hard caps or leather flying helmets with the earflaps turned up, and the gunners wearing fatigue caps or flying hats or black woolen skullcaps—each to his own taste, a ragtag mob altogether, sleepy, bad-tempered, curious but not zestful-curious, mumbling, elbowing, with no sense of drama at all, just a dull ache of wishing the whole f—ing world-wide mess was over.

  Even on this clammy August Cambridgeshire morning the room was stiflingly hot before all the men had arrived, like a railroad car in which the thermostat has gone blooey, and soon the passengers’ tongues will become dry, and their collars will swim, and the children will draw cross-eyed faces in the steam on the windows. Those bright lights had something to do with it. We called the place the sweatbox; of course the actual heat wasn’t to blame for all the perspiration.

  I jostled my way up to the front of the room. Before they’d covered the map they had stretched a length of red twine out on pins over the course to the target and back, and the spare twine at the end was rolled on a bobbin, which hung down and kept the line on the map under tension, and we’d figured out that if there was a lot of twine left on the bobbin there couldn’t be much on the map, and we’d have a milk run to one of the sub bases or maybe Holland or at most a shallow penetration of France; but if the bobbin was almost empty…

  Some bastard had got wise to us and had tucked the bobbin around back, and I couldn’t see it, even with one foot up on the platform and craning my neck. I heard a croaking voice say, “Tut-tut, teacher spank.” I whirled and saw that of course it was Merchant, our flak officer, who was batty about sunbathing, and though he’d come to the wrong country for it, was deeply tanned; every time the sun peeped out you’d see Merch flat on his back out on the grass in his draw
ers. He often had the sniffles because of sunbathing under clouds. He’d caw, “You really get a burn through this stuff; ’s like a billion little magnifying glasses.” Then he’d have to run like stink because there’d be a cloudburst. Still, he was pretty black, maybe from a secret sunlamp. Out from his larynx that sounded full of BB shot came a rattle: “Curiosity killed the cat.”

  “Don’t say that!” I snarled. Merchant represented flak, and I didn’t want death at his hands, or at curiosity’s either. Since the end of July, since Kid Lynch had his beautiful brains eviscerated, and Daphne had opened my eyes, and I’d made my separate peace with the enemy, I’d wanted as much of life as I could grasp in my hands. No mention even of the end of life. Merchant’s bronze lips twisted in a friendly grin which I didn’t trust.

  I drifted five or six rows back, and there Marrow grabbed the cloth of my coverall on my right shoulder and hauled me into a row of seats and sat me down beside him.

  “Morning,” I said. “Hope you were able to sleep last night.”

  Buzz, ignoring my sarcasm, began prattling about some Red Cross doughnut girl he wanted to get his hooks into, and suddenly I had to go to the latrine.

  The can of the briefing room was hair-raising; the buckets hadn’t been emptied or limed since the battle of Hastings, and of course there wasn’t any paper except some formation blanks from the Abbeville-Drucat mission.

  When I went back the arched room was filled. Marrow had saved my seat, and pretty soon Old Man Bins came out and said, “All right,” and the place was like church.

  The Old Man was twenty-nine, a tall, wasted figure, and he stood there grinding his teeth, and we thought him a passable C.O. Had guts, was firm. This morning, after what Daphne had made me see yesterday about Marrow’s “courage,” I looked at our famous Colonel Bins with new and more skeptical eyes. I remembered Marrow’s reaction when we came back from the rest home in mid-July and Bins had just been promoted over Marrow’s head (Marrow thought), and in his absence, and the two men were just like a pair of roosters, on tiptoe trying to look down each other’s gullet. And now I wondered if Bins, too, was like Marrow. I squirmed in my seat. I wanted my tour to be over.

  Colonel Bins didn’t stand on his prerogatives, the way most Group C.O.’s did, outlining missions themselves at briefings. Bins knew that he read out loud like a first-grader, haltingly and stupidly, and he said a few rapid words and turned things over to Steve Murika, our S-2, who was an articulate man. This practice didn’t diminish Bins’ grip on the fliers; they admired him, called him the Great Granite Jaw.

  Murika stepped up with his black loose-leaf notebook in one hand and his pointer stuck under his arm like a swagger stick. He stood straight and pressed his lips primly together, and his hair, what little he had, was greased, and his forehead glistened in a startling way, as if coated with aluminum foil. We examined his face for a sign, like boys in an examination room searching the teacher’s face as he comes in with the test in his hands, trying to make out from his expression whether the paper is going to be stiff or a gut; but Murika never showed anything. Mystery man. All day and most of the night he sat in what seemed to be a locked wire cage in Intelligence, with a teletype machine clacking in a corner, and he was always writing. He was bald, and there were liver spots on his bare dome. He was well built and worked with his collar open and his sleeves rolled up, and Marrow, who claimed he could spot a fairy from a city block away, said that Murika wasn’t one in spite of being “an intelleckshul,” and Buzz considered Murika’s information reliable on the sole ground that it was delivered in what Buzz deemed a manly wise.

  Murika didn’t keep us in suspense. He poked his pointer up under the black cloth and lifted it off the map.

  8/

  In a flash I remembered the briefing on Schweinfurt the week before—the portentous way in which Murika had responded to the wave of horror that went over his audience when the men saw that stretch of twine across Belgium, past the Ruhr, deep, deep, across Germany into Bavaria, to a place they’d never heard of and didn’t want to see. “Yes,” Steve had said, as the gasps and whistles died out, “you will have the honor today to make the deepest penetration of enemy territory in the history of American aerial warfare.” Steve Murika was the only person on the base who used words like “honor” and “courage” and “loyalty” and “morale” out loud. He had flown as an observer on two missions and knew miles of Conrad by heart.

  And I remember how Buzz, beside me then as he was now, had shouted, “Hot diggety! This one’ll separate the men from the boys.” Buzz was forever talking about men and boys. He called us on his crew, “son,” “sonny,” “junior.”

  Murika, with his superb sense of showmanship, and with his expression that seemed to say that he had more stored away under that shiny forehead of his than any of us would ever learn and forget, had worked up a fair amount of enthusiasm among us, telling us why Schweinfurt had been selected as a target: ball bearings, a potential bottleneck, stocking impractical, Schweinfurt complex one half total Axis production, pervasive effect, all high-speed equipment….

  We saw what he was driving at: If we did a good job on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plants, soon there’d be less Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmidts and Dorniers and Heinkels, less of all the bees that swarmed to torment us. And some of us exclaimed with sounds oddly like those of pleasure, and I could see men rubbing their hands, eager to go—for a moment….

  Marrow stirred; I think he sighed.

  I thought of him in the corridor, on his way to Daphne, the previous Thursday night, and I tried to recall the exact shade of slyness on his face as he lied about going over for a beer; the subtle print on his face of his enjoyment of deceiving his co-pilot and closest friend. But I drew a blank, I saw in my memory only the open, honest face of a thirsty Nebraska youth.

  “This time there will be two great forces,” Murika was saying, standing very straight, his metallic forehead and bald crown and greased hair effulgent under the floodlights. A better plan than the previous week’s. A huge force of the —th Wing would go in first, its target Regensburg, not far from Schweinfurt; it would fly on over the Mediterranean to North African bases. (Exclamations; a swaying of shoulders in leather jackets.) We of the —th Wing would penetrate enemy territory ten minutes after the first force, go to Schweinfurt, and come back on a reciprocal course. The Regensburg task force would get most of the fighter support because it was thought it would get the preponderance of enemy opposition. (Profanity expressing satisfaction.) Murika raised his pointer with the assurance of a symphony conductor, and he half-turned toward the chart. “Our Schweinfurt force, consisting of two boxes of two combat wings each, will cross the Dutch coast here at zero plus nine and zero plus twenty-one. The gaps in timing are necessary because the Regensburg force will be carrying Tokyo tanks and so will have a slower i.a.s. than we, and also to avoid jamming in the target area….”

  For me the incentive for this mission—to reduce, in due course, the enemy’s fighter strength—had a slight catch. I would fly only one more mission after this one, knock wood, and any effect we might have on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing works couldn’t possibly be felt soon enough to help me.

  Could anything help me?

  Why had I even asked Daphne about her hours with Marrow? I had sat on the edge of her bed and asked the irrevocable question—on her bed in the drab room where she had so often, heartbeat by heartbeat with mine, pushed the sense of finality, of maybe-the-last-time, back out of mind, and no matter how tired I might have been, no matter how danger’s foul breath had been blowing, she had made everything perfect, for she was responsive, so it seemed that what I wanted, she also deeply wanted, and I had only to search my needs in order to serve hers, and we became a single personality in our passion. I sat on the edge of the iron-framed bed and asked her the question, and she looked at me as if we were about to be parted, and she nodded and in the act of nodding said, �
�But wait!” At that a word was shaken out of me, like a cough or a sob, because I only saw the nod and could not listen to the warning that there was much to say, and all I wanted to know was why. She said simply that I was the one she adored. But it was no use. I was deaf. Much later, when she had made me some coffee and I was calm, she told me all about my pilot, too much about him, really. Marrow, the Lover-Boy! About what he really loved.

  Murika was telling us about the diversions they’d set up to help us: Mitchells and Bomphoons and Typhoons were going to hit around Amsterdam, Woensdrecht, and Lille. As to fighters, the Regensburg strike was to get P-47s, Murika said, but there would only be four squadrons of limey Spit-9s with the first box of our force; all this time I was taking automatic notes, but my hand was trembling so that I could scarcely read my own writing. Marrow was sitting on the edge of his seat, like a kid at the circus, responding to the surprises and delights, as he apparently regarded them, of Murika’s show with grunts, sighs, flexes, and little yips like those of a happy fornicator, and my loathing of him was almost beyond bounds. I mean I wanted to do something about it. I had a terrible moment and missed altogether some sentences Murika spoke that might have been keys to survival during the day. Then a thought of Daphne, of the old Daphne, a thought of her such as had calmed me many times in the air, came to me, and I felt better, for Daphne had an influential serenity like that of a pond in the Maine woods, in the evening, its face reflecting the wind-spent sky, when the water-birds are still and the beavers haven’t yet begun to slap and gnaw.

  “But the second box of the Schweinfurt attack”—Murika was suddenly like a stern teacher—“and I remind you that our Group is to lead that box—will have no fighters at all on penetration.”

  Marrow shifted his bulk, whopped out a handkerchief, and swabbed his streaming face. He was known as a great sweater; at meals he showered his food with salt. Now he was driving out fluid by the pint. “Christ!” he exclaimed, in a loud voice that turned faces his way for several rows. “Too God-damn much body heat in here.” Then, with a crazy, cackling cheerfulness, he added, as Murika paused to see what the disturbance was, “Next briefing the place’ll be like a f—ing refrigerator. S—!” And the men around us who had heard both utterances laughed. Good old Buzz! How healthy his jokes about death!