by John Hersey
The thing he’d said so often, that he was part of it and it was part of him, seemed true.
Marrow gave a signal out of his window, and Red Black yanked the chocks out from under the wheels. Buzz and I closed our windows. I checked the tail-wheel warning lamp to make sure the wheel was unlocked. We were ready to roll.
15/
At a corner of the perimeter track, down the line from us, we saw Angel Tread, Colonel Bins’ ship, lumber slowly out from his hardstand and swing to lead the procession of taxiing ships. As she passed their dispersal points, Gruesome Twosome and Erector Set heaved out behind her. We waited. We were to be fourth in line.
Two big English meat wagons stood waiting at the end of the runway; I hated to look at ambulances.
The sun came out from behind a low cloud, and three or four of the ships in the distance turned from gray to silver, and the great meadow inside the triangle of runways was drenched with yellow-green light. Despite its patches of camouflage the control tower stood starkly rectangular against the dark of the forest where we lived, and the distant alleys of lime trees and great elms and the woods of oak and ash near Pike Rilling Hall were still under cloud.
Starting and stopping, her brakes screeching above the roar of her engines and ours, Angel Tread went by us, and the other two followed, and then Marrow, with the throttles of the inboard engines locked, swinging his big right paw on the throttles of one and four in subtle, sinuous moves, gunning our tail around first and then easing our huge weight forward, pulled us out into line. Now our own brakes joined in the outcry, as we started and stopped while each plane stepped out and tacked on.
Taxi time was hard for me. We knew from experience that from the time Angel Tread made her first move to the time when all the ships of our group—twenty-four this morning, including stand-bys—would be stacked up at the head of the runway, taking into account the five long miles of the track and the usual hitches, but not allowing time, as we often had to do, for some idiot to run a wheel off the edge of the paved way and get stuck hubdeep in mud, so a cleat track would have to clank out and haul him free, more than an hour would have passed. There was nothing for me to do but move my eyes from gauge to gauge: be sure that fuel pressure didn’t go above sixteen pounds per square inch, cylinder-head temperature didn’t go above two hundred and five degrees Centigrade…oil pressure…oil temperature…
We went slowly along, and I, being on the outside of the great perimeter, saw each ship on her hardstand, her props whirling—one caught the sunlight in all of hers and stood holding up four beautiful golden dishes of light for me to see—and to some I waved an ambiguous wave that might be a nonchalant top-o’-the-mornin’ or might be, might prove to have been before nightfall, a farewell, for good and all.
The ships, waiting to fall in line, were like old friends. Finah Than Dinah, Hoor’s Dream, Chug Bug, Howzat Again, Round Trip Ticket, Baggy Maggie, Expendable VI, She Can’t Help It, Flak Sack, Eager Virgin, Big Bum Bird, Miss Take, Friggon Falcon, Ten Naughty Boys, Heavenly Hooker, Rats Wouldn’t Stay, Torch Carrier, Betty Grable, Alabama Whammer, Lady Be Good—one by one they joined us, and we knew how many lives Chug Bug had taken, and the extraordinary escapes of Heavenly Hooker; each one was a personality. Some were ancient crocks, camouflaged a dun green above and sky blue on the underside, patched and oil-stained, and some were slick new ships that had been left unpainted except for the huge identification letters they all carried on the upright tail surfaces.
When we had picked up the whole parade Angel Tread turned in at the head of the east-west concrete runway, which some of the early pilots had named Crunch Alley because of a series of accidents on it; we would take off into the west wind. We began to close up tight. Marrow spotted The Body no more than twenty feet behind Erector Set, and I locked the tail wheel for the take-off.
We had another long wait, while the twenty ships behind us closed in and spotted themselves, and then we had to burn up some time Wing Ops had left as leeway.
This was almost the worst wait of all—strapped in with nothing to do.
There was practically no ground haze; the clouds a thousand feet up were scattering, though there was still about six-tenths cover.
Negrocus Handown was standing behind me, and having him there, solid as the Alleghenies, was a big help on this of all mornings. After all, Neg was a grown man, thirty-six years old. He had his problems, all right—that business of supervising the education of the young in London was very odd—but of one thing I was sure: Handown was not one of those I knew I must hate to the end of my life, he was no war lover.
Just as I thought again of that streak in Marrow, Buzz turned slowly toward me, and his face was weirdly close to the face I had seen in my dream the night before—broad, swollen, pallid, and distorted by a ferocious look of disapproval.
“You God-damn smart aleck,” he shouted over the roar of the engines.
He must have known Handown could hear him.
“What the hell did I do?” I screamed back.
“Never mind,” he said, waving me away with a slab of a hand.
I shrugged, I guess for Handown’s benefit. I had no idea what had brought on this curious temper flaw, but I had begun to understand, this morning for the first time, the underlying fury that had long been there—fury at the whole f—ing world, and even at himself, and especially at me. Daphne had given me a great deal to ponder, and now, after Buzz’s outburst, I felt an urgency about thinking him through, or perhaps it was thinking myself through, because I was sure that this mission on which we were about to launch ourselves was going to test him, and test me, to the very heart of our hearts, and that while my life might be at stake against the Germans, something more important than my life might be at stake against my own pilot and best friend: I mean my self-respect, my honor, my faith in human beings.
A flare popped up from the center of the airdrome meadow. Marrow hung his left hand at the top of his wheel and began to follow the second hand of his wrist watch. We heard the thunder of Angel Tread under full power. Gruesome Twosome. Erector Set. Forty-five-second intervals. We could see the great curl of condensation off Erector Set’s props as she rolled away from us, like streams of fluid from the lips of four great pitchers.
Marrow flipped the generator switch. On interphone: “Clear, Max?”
Brindt must have looked around from the greenhouse. “Roger,” he said. “Skiddoo.”
Then the tower came in. “Go ahead, six one four.”
Marrow on liaison: “Roger.” And he began to ease the throttles forward.
The plane moved, and I felt the great push of acceleration on my shoulder blades and spine and buttocks. We gathered speed; the tail lifted…. Again I remembered the day I was left behind—the sudden cracking open of thunder when the props of The Body were right in front of me on the tower, my trying to lift the plane bodily off the ground by rising up on my tiptoes.
Now The Body was on her own tiptoes. We were well above air speed. And I said in my mind, “Bye, Daph. Goodbye, Daphne. Goodbye, goodbye, my darling.”
We were airborne. Buzz gave me a mechanical nod, and I reached out to the central panel for the landing-gear control switch, to pull up our wheels. I saw the black tire marks at the end of the concrete runway, twenty feet down.
CHAPTER TWO
THE TOUR
March 1 to April 17
1/
As we eased down out of some low clouds the color of soft-coal smoke and saw England, after the strain, boredom, and cold of those many hours over the ocean, it was not haycocks and hedgerows and heydownderry that attracted my eyes, but rather the black streaks at the end of a long concrete runway where rubber had burned from the wheels of other men’s ships as they touched back to earth.
Tired as he was, Marrow put us down among those beautiful stripes so gently that we could not have left much mark. We taxied, to the music of the thump
ing of our tail wheel on solid ground, behind a jeep with FOLLO ME painted in big yellow letters on a high backboard. We parked at a dispersal point and opened a hatch and went out to stand on English soil under the wing. It had begun to rain.
“Filthy place,” Haverstraw said.
“S—!” Marrow said. “This is nothing.”
The rain slanted under the wing on a raw northeast wind. Of Cambridgeshire we had only an impression screened through the deluge—somber flatness, and mud; mud oozing up over the edge of the asphalt circle where we were parked; mud in the tread of the jeep, which rolled away on twin tracks of ocher, leaving us marooned; a vast plain, or lake, of mud stretching off toward a cluster of barely visible buildings.
A recon car drove up, and we officers ran to it through the downpour, and to our surprise we found the Group C.O. at the wheel, himself. We wrestled our valpacs aboard, and the Colonel said, “Boy, are we ever glad to see you guys!”
“Who you mean, ‘boy’?” Marrow asked, craning around. “No boys around here I know of.”
Colonel Whelan did not react; he had no ear for bumptiousness. “And look at that!” he said.
The plane. It wasn’t any great shakes, a B-17E with war camouflage on her that had been used awhile for training. But badly needed, it appeared.
Marrow started right in giving his first-person pronoun its daily constitutional. “I didn’t have any trouble,” he said. “Haverstraw here tried to miss Iceland; he can carry figures in his noggin but he can’t use ’em…. I didn’t hardly stop at all at Goose Bay, just a cup of coffee…. I…I…”
The Colonel looked shot, a man of perhaps twenty-eight or -nine with an overlay of false age—deep lines in a stubbled face. He was sloppy, and to my eyes, unschooled in pain, his sloppiness was as glamorous as grease paint. He was the sort of man I had trained all these months to become.
A weapons carrier came up, and our sergeants piled in.
Marrow said, “Somebody be out to give my ship a rubdown?”
A bleat of sound that might have been laughter burst from the Colonel’s lips. “Your ship? That Fort’s going in the hangar for modifications, and as soon as she’s ready, she’ll fly missions, and who’s going to drive her is me. Your ship? Ha!”
Marrow shrugged. “I don’t give a s—, I’ll fly a f—ing trundle bed if I have to.”
A trundle bed sounded good to me; I was pooped. I remembered a part of the trip that I’d spent lying curled up in the bombardier’s greenhouse on a pile of valpacs and duffel bags, under a brown blanket, shivering, trying to read an old copy of Night Flight that I’d borrowed years before from the Donkentown Free Library and never returned, which I’d picked up at home on my last leave, and I plugged away at it until the shaking of those four Wright Cyclones got into my eyes, and my retinas became like oscillatory sanders wearing away the images of the words into a finely finished blur. Bleak, it had been bleak up there over the horizonless sea actually going to a war that had, during training, seemed remote and imaginary, like a legend.
But Marrow was so full of bounce that you’d have thought we had just taken a routine training flight in the sky as blue and light as a jay’s wing over Lowry Field. His vitality and his boasts were invigorating and restorative. He made you want to forget you were dogged; laugh and sit up straight.
Colonel Whelan started off on the two-mile drive to the Administration block, and suddenly, as we went along the mud-decked concrete track, the rain stopped, and the clouds broke up like a crowd at the end of a game, and in no time we saw snatches of blue overhead, and the wide panorama of Pike Rilling Aerodrome opened up.
How moved I was by that sight!
Within the great irregular five-mile loop of the single-laned perimeter track there lay a triangle of concrete landing strips, each one a mile long, and except for the outer ring of mud on which we traveled the whole area was a great meadow, and even at the beginning of March a vivid, hopeful green carpeted the ground. To our north, near where our ship had been spotted, we could see a forest of bare-limbed trees, and what seemed to be a cultivated park, and a visible shoulder of a country house, where Wing was set up “like a bunch of God-damn noblemen,” the Colonel told us, communicating to us in a flash the hatred of the combat unit for the next higher echelon. Ahead of us, south of the runways, was our objective, a camouflaged box-like building with a glass-windowed penthouse on it and, atop that, a dark cubic water tank, on which an enormous number, 79, was painted in figures that must have been eight feet high. Several Nissen huts lay like old discarded beer cans around the control tower, and beyond the tower crouched a row of factory-like buildings which housed, the Colonel said, repair facilities and armament shops and the service organization.
The view from a distance of all these ominous low-lying buildings, which, like the Colonel, looked tired and experienced, filled me with a kind of tension—an eagerness to know what combat would be like, and a desire to acquit myself decently, yet also an apprehension, a wondering about unknown dangers, altogether a vague sadness of which I could not have named the cause.
To our left, as we drove down the line, we passed an area of roofless walls draped with camouflage nets and a series of mounds which evidently covered underground vaults—the bomb dump, the Colonel said, a treasury of explosives, incendiaries, flares, ammunition, protected by pillboxes, and by a brier patch of barbed wire, and by sentries hugging themselves to keep warm. I felt a slight chill of a different sort from theirs.
Across the field to the west, abutting the concrete emplacements and striped sentry boxes of the entrance to the base, we could see the village of Bartleck, a couple of rows of gray stone houses with thatched roofs and chimneys capped with pots—the first proof I had seen that we really were in England.
Through Bartleck, the Colonel told us, ran the main road to Motford Sage, six miles away, and to Cambridge, fourteen miles distant. London was an hour off by train, he said.
I heard some shooting. Rather sharply I said, “What’s that?” and then wondered if I’d sounded jumpy.
“Some gunners shaking out their guns,” the Colonel said. “We got a clay bank over there as big as an Alp that they can just barely hit…. We got a skeet shoot, too. Pike Rilling Huntin’ and Shootin’ Club for Gents—you know?”
Buzz wasn’t going to let me off that lightly. “Boman thought it was the f—ing Krauts sneaking up on us.”
Everyone laughed but the Colonel.
At the Admin block Colonel Whelan turned us over to the Ground Exec, a captain named Blair, who smelled of Vaseline hair tonic, and after checking our orders he drove us south of the flying line, where the land sloped upward into wooded groves in which, widely dispersed and well hidden, were the living quarters of the men. The enlisted men lived in prefab Nissen huts, officers in slightly more elaborate hutments with single and double rooms. Here, too, were sick quarters, the motor pool, the officers’ club, the Red Cross Aero Club for the men, two officers’ messes, a shed for movies, and the big enlisted men’s mess.
It began to rain again as we drove.
Marrow said, “Chawming climate out heah in the tropics, old chap.”
Captain Blair said, “You don’t like it, just wait fifteen minutes.”
“What’s that mean? It get better or worse?”
“It gets different, only the same.”
“S—, that doesn’t make sense.”
“You’ll see.”
After fifteen minutes it was teeming harder than ever.
Blair took Marrow and me to a room about halfway along the north side of a hut in a grove of oaks and scrubby hawthorns. The Captain pointed to one of the beds and said it was jinxed—eight pilots had slept in it in twelve weeks, all eight missing in action.
Marrow said, “I’ll sleep in that sack, you can’t flak me up with that kind of crap.”
“The other sack, the guy finished his
tour. Ready to go home—Happy Warrior,” Blair said. “Hope you sleep good,” he said to Marrow.
“Go s— in your hat and call it curls,” Marrow said, and he flopped on the bed and was sound asleep before I could get my shoes off.
We got up in time for supper and afterwards ran in the rain to the king-sized Nissen hut they called the officers’ club. Club? It was a slophouse. Once, later on, when I was low on things to do, I counted forty-seven stuffed armchairs, covered with cracked brown leather, which looked as if they’d been scavenged from a bankrupt old folks’ home. A plywood bar stood at one end, and some low round oaken tables were scattered among the heavy chairs.
A big iron stove in the middle of the room had a sign over it saying not to spit on it, but that notice worked like a fresh-paint sign; newcomers couldn’t resist doing it once to see their spittle bounce, and then they understood the reason for the sign when they took a whiff of their own personal steam. Oof!
Brindt and Haverstraw and I sat back and watched Marrow go to work. Ordinarily he talked loud; he was afraid of nothing. That evening he seemed to hold back, pulling on a cigar, waiting for his opening. Fliers were sitting around rolling horses for drinks and flipping half-heartedly through limp magazines, and gradually a group formed, and one of the aviators, a mechanical nut, was telling how he’d converted a silent movie projector into a sound machine, making a photo-electric cell somehow out of a tube socket and using a dime-store pocket telescope to focus the exciter light on the photo-electric cell; I couldn’t follow it. But Marrow followed it like a bird dog, and when the guy was finished and there was a momentary lull, Buzz cleared his throat and spoke up with a ringing voice.
