The War Lover

by John Hersey

  “I knew a dame once that was wired for sound from her c— to her throat.”

  Marrow paused for the idea to soak in. “Thing was,” he went on, “I was catching this commercial plane from Newark on to Denver, see, and by the ticket counter…”

  I had heard the story several times before. It was impressive, quite funny. The story happened, in passing, to reflect handsomely on Marrow’s prowess. The old hands enjoyed it. Marrow was shrewd. He shut up after that.

  From out of doors there suddenly came—I nearly jumped out of my seat—a huge, crackling, deep, doom-heavy voice, sounding like our common Pilots’ Fate calling to us out of a cloud. It announced that the base was on alert: mission in the morning. Not for us in Marrow’s crew, of course. I watched closely the faces of the men who would have to go, but all I could see was a slight deepening of the weariness they all shared. The bar closed. We broke it up. On the way out one of the guys told me that the spooky voice was called the Tannoy, some kind of English public-address hooter that was hung in trees and on poles all over the base.

  I couldn’t go to sleep for a long time, thinking of that booming voice, and of the men who’d been in the club with us who were going to die the next day.

  2/

  I could have spared myself that anxious charity. Marrow slept hard and late, but I got up early and heard the briefing and eventually climbed the tower to watch the mission take off. The planes began to taxi at nine forty-five, and just before the last of the Forts had positioned itself at the end of the runway, Wing scrubbed the strike. Gave no reason. It was a frightful letdown for the pilots, and I felt the first stab of an anger that was to be my frequent companion in the coming months, at the capricious authority of Wing Headquarters.

  It didn’t take them long to deflate our egos; they sent us to school. Our self-esteem got quite a knock that morning, when some desk pilot told us that our training in the States might have made good kiddy-car drivers out of us but that we weren’t combat aviators by a long shot—for we had a month of rugged training ahead of us before we could be trusted on a mission.

  Marrow was wild. As I’ve told you, he was quite old, twenty-six and a few months, and he had racked up a lot of hours as a pilot, even if they weren’t in the heavies, and he had figured he was going to win the war and get home by Christmas.

  So he went over to squawk to Colonel Whelan, the minute they had sprung us from a class on British code. The C.O. had been up since four thirty, and had run a briefing, and had gone out to his ship, and had sat in her for nearly two hours, right up to the verge of take-off, and then Wing had canceled, and he must have been fit to be tied; and here Buzz stumps in and announces he’s not going to sit on his ass and listen to schoolmarms for a month, he’s come over here to fight, he wants to bomb squareheads.

  Buzz never told us what the Colonel said, but I can imagine; it was six weeks before we took off on a mission.

  By nightfall Marrow had that impulsive visit to Whelan all rationalized. On account of it he, Marrow, was going to be known, among the higher-ups, as a scrapper, and he’d be marked for command. That was what he figured.

  Marrow hacked all the way through ground school; lipped the instructors, doodled big goggle-eyed beetles and spiders in his notebooks with bold heavy strokes of his pencil, and stared out the window presumably revisiting triumphs between the sheets. I, on the other hand, ahem, a sincere and capable young man, if somewhat on the short side, was conscientious to a fault. I memorized and stuck my hand up in class and manifested a clean-cut willingness to learn. Stars and Stripes Forever. I was shocked at Marrow’s indifference to the classes, and once told him so; said he might be jeopardizing the lives of his crew some day.

  “Boman,” he said, for he always called me by my last name, never “Bo” or “sonny,” or anything else, whereas he often used nicknames for the others in our ship, and this used to puzzle and sometimes enrage me; “Boman,” he said. “You study your books, I’ll fly.”

  When we were finished with ground school he knew ten times more about everything we’d studied—or that I’d studied and he hadn’t—than I did.

  There was a simple reason: Marrow was a genius. At least, he was a genius in one narrow sphere—that of handling an airplane. I later had spurts of wanting to be a command pilot and to have my own plane. Kid Lynch told me before he was killed that when he took the controls on missions, he changed seats with his pilot, he took command in every way. Marrow let me spell him, but only in the co-pilot’s seat, and this made me sore after what the Kid had told me; I hated being an assistant, a tourist, it made me boil—until I thought of having to land my own ship as a command pilot and then thought of Marrow’s landings in The Body. Genius in flying, as in the performance of music, lies not in precision, not in being exactly on pitch and in time, but rather in the ability to perform with absolute accuracy and then to break the rules by inspiration for the sake of a higher perfection. Genius rearranges old materials in a new way never seen on earth before, and Buzz handled the plane with constant shimmering variations of standard techniques; especially in his landings. Each time Marrow let me land the plane, what one saw was simply an effort to get down alive. Each of Buzz’s landings was an experiment, a delicate search for a new and better way to find that breathtaking split moment when all those tons of metal ceased being carried by the wind and were accepted back by the mother ground. He held the wheel of the column in his finger tips and seemed to be feeling, with the sensitivity of a blind man reading Braille, for the very very very end of flight.

  3/

  In the late afternoon of our fourth day at the base, which was also the fourth day of March, Marrow and I stood with others out on the oil-blackened apron in front of the control tower to watch the ships of our Group come in from a mission to railroad yards at Hamm, in Germany. The meat wagons were drawn up at the far end of the runway. The day was clear and mild; our shadows were long. There was a shout from the tower, and we heard a rumble, like the one I had often heard out my bedroom window at Donkentown, of a distant freight train on a foggy summer night when the air seemed to carry most easily the deepest sounds. As the formation came around and began to form a traffic pattern, men of experience near us began to count. They could not believe their tally, and they checked again and again. Five planes missing out of the nineteen that had gone! Gloom settled on the base with the planes. We hung wide-eyed around the edges of the interrogation. Pilots talked excitedly, gesturing with their two hands, palms down, to demonstrate the maneuvers of ships “…came in from twelve o’clock…down from three o’clock high…a four-o’clock attack…” I thought: That clock in the sky must whirl at a terrifying clip, in combat, because those men are the same age as I, more or less, yet their faces show that they’ve grown far older than I; time hasn’t run at the same speed for them and for me. The fliers spoke of the fearless enemy fighters, who used co-ordinated attacks of half a dozen planes at a time, with pairs attacking simultaneously from both sides and from above; but mostly they came from the nose. I tried to picture it all. We went to supper. There were many empty seats. For an instant I saw myself as an empty seat, and I shakily wondered: What would be lost, if I were lost? But at once I rejected that possibility. I was too young. I hadn’t lived my life. I couldn’t be lost. I had many agonizing thoughts alone in my room after supper, for Marrow had disappeared.

  He came in late, looking sheepish.

  The next morning he and I passed the bulletin board outside our mess together, and there was a notice signed by Colonel Whelan, saying, “It has become necessary for me to call attention again to paragraph 4, VIII AF memorandum 50–8a, dated 18 September 1942, which prohibits fraternization between officers of the VIII Air Force and other ranks or enlisted members of the WAAF and the ATS.”

  Marrow began to whistle This Can’t Be Love, off key.

  “They catch you?” I asked him.

  He nodded and looked eager be
aver.

  “Where?”

  “In the village.”

  “Didn’t take you long,” I said.

  And he said with glittering eyes, “Try and stop me, either. Your enlisted English servicewoman really throws herself into the war effort. Who am I to discourage her? Know what I mean?”

  4/

  We flew our first practice mission over England just a week after our arrival. Over the patchwork we made our way down to Land’s End, then around to starboard on the second leg, at two thousand feet. I looked out to sea across the Bay of St. Ives and out over the Atlantic. It was three thirty; in Donkentown it would be ten thirty, mid-morning. Janet would be at her office, at her typewriter, but not writing me a letter, if I knew her. We flew over the tin mines of Cornwall, with their white hills of tailings and pools of vivid copperas-colored water, and then we were over fields being turned for planting, and I saw many cyclists on aimless roads, and some pigeons flying, and in open meadows flocks of sheep with their heads down, and everywhere crooked lanes and trees at random—no ruled lines at all. We soared over a moated castle, and suddenly I thought of my schoolroom England and my bedtime England—the Fish Footman, Hotspur, and Long John Silver, and knights’ tents, and a sword plunged in stone. For a moment I felt intense longing for the pleasures of my childhood days; I remembered a shield cut from plywood, with crate-strap handles, on which my father had painted for me a lion rampant, gules, on field azure. We went up Salisbury Plain and the Downs. We saw some flights of the R.A.F., Stirlings, Halifaxes, and Bostons, and in the midst of nostalgic daydreams I suddenly imagined an enemy attack, which I built on the basis of an orientation lecture we’d had from Colonel Whelan: “To attack, the FWs fly out about two thousand yards ahead and get all lined up and figure their deflection and so forth and come in to about eight hundred yards, roll over on their backs and start firing. They can hold the ship right in there. The FW is a well balanced airplane and can fly like a brick s— house. After it rolls in at eight hundred yards it keeps firing and does a split ass at a hundred yards. I’d say about a third of them are good pilots and that presents quite a problem to us, because it’s pretty hard to bring a gun to bear on ’em….” Marrow asked me on interphone if I’d take a look around the ship, so I got up and went toward the rear, and when I opened the aft door of the ball-turret compartment and, with head down, pushed through into the forepart of the waist, I got the shock of my life. There were Farr and Bragnani, our waist gunners, having stowed their machine guns on their brackets, inside the ship, crouching on their respective firing platforms, aiming pistols—at me. Both of them. They were snarling and shouting to each other, and I could see Farr’s mouth fall open and his Adam’s apple bounce as he made in his throat the rattling sound of shots. The pupils of their eyes were ringed with white. The illusion, for a moment, of their sincerity was overpowering. The weapons they threatened me with were flare pistols. I suppose that Farr and Bragnani, too, were trying to recover childhood raptures of some kind, just playing a game of guns, but they were so convincing! I long retained the idea that those two were linked in hostility against all of us.

  5/

  On March the ninth, the Special Events Officer staged a screwy athletic meet for our amusement, and the big event was an obstacle race in full field equipment. Amusement? That one was straight out of the manuals on basic training. Marrow, out to prove that he was as much of a man as anyone, entered the thing, and he didn’t do very well, but at least he finished, and he was walking back from the finish line with me, panting like a dog and saying he’d be screwed if he’d ever do anything like that again just to entertain a lot of lazy flat-footed sergeants—and he darted a furious look at the crowd of spectators standing along the edge of the course.

  A crippled German fighter, caught on a solo sneak raid, smoked in a slant across the sky, and we heard a terrible ground-shaking clatter as it plowed into a beet field about a mile down the line.

  The R.A.F. boy who’d got him came down and made a pass and gave us goose pimples with a victorious slow roll over the remains of his fallen adversary.

  That broke up the field day. We all got on bikes and rode out to see the junk heap. It happened we’d had an orientation lecture on German equipment a couple of days earlier, and they’d displayed several German uniforms, and for the first time I’d had a sense of the enemy as a human being. It had bothered me, because up to that time I’d thought of the enemy as a pickle barrel. Viewed from extreme altitude. And soon I stood on the lip of the crater that an ME-109 had exploded in a field of beets, and I saw what was left of a young man. Fire had obviously killed him before the impact. I stepped back, for I was engulfed by a wave of deep pity for our race, which for all its progress and civilization was so barbarous. It seemed to me that like some of the lower creatures, moths or salmon or lemmings, we were launched on a process of purposeful self-destruction—for all of us.

  “Come on,” I said to Marrow, for I was unable to stare at the dead German.

  As we stepped away Marrow started talking cheerfully about his father. A sergeant in the First World War—a man’s man. Took great care of his mother. But away from home a lot.

  6/

  The weather that awful first month! We were treated to an endless succession of weak cold fronts, and as Blair had told us the day we arrived, there was plenty of variety, but all the changes seemed to be for the worse. We used to watch the take-offs of missions, and one day the Group taxied out in passable weather, and the planes began to roll, and ten ships got off the ground, when bang!—the sun disappeared as fast as if a light switch had been thrown. A ground fog had materialized, so sudden and so thick that a plane that had started its take-off in plenty of visibility was on instruments before it was airborne at the other end of the runway. Our feet were always wet. I had long thought the muck in the bog between my house and the Shaushohobogen was as sticky a mixture as earth and water could make, but the ooze at Pike Rilling was worse. Low shoes were a joke, because the prehensory mud would pull them right off. We were wet and bored and dreary, and we played shove ha’penny in a desultory way in the officers’ club, and read and re-read the months-old magazines on the oaken tables, and dreamed of sunshine.

  Marrow, who was irrespressibly ebullient, took the weather, the wetness, the constant chill, as challenges. It was quite a trick to get a decent fire going in the odd contraptions in our rooms that the British called stoves, and the coke supply was inadequate, so Marrow, having scrounged a bucksaw and a hatchet from somewhere, dragged me out into the woods, and we chopped down small trees and cut them up, but the wood was green and burned poorly. Marrow discovered that shoe polish made fine kindling. He used to smuggle his electrically heated flying suit to the room, in the face of strictest regulations, and he’s sleep in it, while I obeyed the rules and shivered across the room. We bought a hot plate for cooking, and he’d have that going all night. He and a big ox with whom he spent a lot of time, a pilot named Braddock, discovered that the ash piles out back of the enlisted men’s kitchens contained many “big pieces” of unburnt coke, and there were mornings when you could treat yourself to the sight of those two enormous heroes, both of them captains in their country’s defense, poking around like a pair of desperate beggars in the heaps, their bristling chins and broad shoulders frosted with ashes, and they’d fill fire-prevention buckets with this undignified loot and run to their rooms and holler back and forth all day about their marvelous conflagrations.

  In mid-March the entire complement of sergeants attached to our crew came down with bad colds. Marrow attributed this at first to the inborn weakness of the current generation of sergeants, but Negrocus Handown informed him one day that the men had caught cold in their concrete shower rooms. Their latrines, Neg said, weren’t fit for cattle. Paper and dirt were littered everywhere; the toilets were sickening; worst of all, there was no hot water for showers. There was, it seemed, no coal or coke for the hot-water heaters. Marr
ow became furious in an almost comically exaggerated way; at the time, it seemed that he was moved by a touching loyalty to his crew, but now I see that he may simply have sniffed a fight. At any rate, he went to Group Headquarters to protest on behalf of his sick sergeants. He told me later how he had gone over to the Admin block, down a neat white hallway with signs—S-2, S-3, ADJUTANT, AIR EXEC, GROUND EXEC, and, finally, C.O.—and he’d knocked. By this time we had, under the influence of the blooded pilots, come to a somewhat less romantic view of our Group Commander than we had taken on the day of our arrival, and we called him, with everyone else, Grandmaw. At Marrow’s knock, Grandmaw cleared his throat and called to Buzz to enter. Inside, Marrow found the Colonel sitting in an easy chair, in woolen slippers, reading an Agatha Christie paperback, and Buzz could see through the old man’s bedroom into a spic-and-span bathroom, where there was a shower curtain with mermaids on it, and, worst of all, he saw in the living room, toasting Grandmaw’s tootsies, a sparkling grate ablaze with cannel coal. Marrow reported the shocking condition of the enlisted combat crews’ ablution sites. Whelan stood up, nervously rubbing his bristly little mustache, and gave Marrow what-for. The enlisted men, he said, deserved pneumonia. They were lazy, undisciplined, ill-trained babies. I can imagine that Marrow, himself accustomed to speak of the sergeant gunners in that way, must have blinked to hear such words. They took the fight out of him. If the men had no hot showers, Whelan said, it was because they had stolen for their hut stoves eight tons of coke that had been deposited near the ablution-site boilers. Well! Marrow came back to the room and let out a stream of obscenity, not at Grandmaw, but at the sergeants of the world.

  A week later a new large consignment of coke was dumped at the enlisted men’s ablution site. Marrow was among the first to steal from it a very large supply of coke, which he stored under my bed, the space under his own bed being reserved for his pajamas and damp towels.