The War Lover

by John Hersey

Her underclothing was shabby and frequently mended. As we dressed I handled some of it, passing it to her, and she gave me the look of the poor, called pride, which is hard to distinguish from resentment.

  Yet she spoke with a generous voice. “Leftenant Boman,” she said, with a comical look in her eyes, when we were half dressed, “don’t you think it’s time you told me your first name?”

  “Charles,” I said. “Some people call me Bo.”

  “Bo,” she said, cocking her head to one side as if listening with a thoughtful ear. “Yes, I like that. Bo.” Then she took me in her arms and pulled me to her. “My dear Bo,” she feelingly said. I was as gentle as I could be. I saw that I had much work to do, to fathom the surely marvelous depths of Daphne.

  8/

  We were checking over the plane after a practice flight, and Marrow told Red Black that he might pass as a mechanic but that he looked like a chimneysweep—couldn’t he neaten up? His whole ground crew, Buzz said, was filthy.

  Black then had a temper tantrum, shouting at Marrow that the mechanics had been issued exactly two suits of coveralls apiece, and that the return of their last batch of laundry had now been delayed for over a week; he strode off, quite audibly calling Captain Marrow a f—ing Captain Bligh.

  Marrow said to me, “This is on those bastardly desk pilots up at Wing.” Wing had long since become our favorite target for gripes. “Come on, Boman, let’s get our bikes and go on up there to Wing right now and blast ’em about this.” Sergeants in clean clothes were bad enough.

  We rode out through the Wing gate to Pike Rilling Hall. Wing Headquarters was in a placid Georgian house set in a formal park designed (Lynch told me much later) by André Lenôtre. From wide parterres the vistas extended down avenues cut through woodlands of towering beeches, and at the end of the principal one, running toward the eastward, there was a Temple of Love sheltering a marble figure of Aphrodite. “Great climate to be bare-ass in all year round.” In one of the reception rooms of the house, where Marrow and I were kept waiting for half an hour, there was an early eighteenth-century print of the house, and out the window we saw that certain trees in the print were still living—notably one linden, which, after two hundred years, had become a noble giant overvaulting one whole end of the house. Lynch observed, when I later spoke to him about the great tree, that the house was now occupied by men whose country was younger than the tree.

  Marrow, of course, had asked to see the General, and it goes without saying that we saw, instead, his aide, a Major Hunert, who was notorious for riding to hunt foxes in a pink coat with a local pack. He led us through the Wing Operations Room—the Bubu Factory, as it was known to us fliers—a high-windowed parlor with a huge celotex sheeting over one wall, on which there was a vast 1:500,000 situation map of most of Europe, under talc, splotched with red measles representing flak areas, decorated with toy airplanes showing where the Hun fighters were based, webbed with lines and circles marking the locations of radar channels and splasher beacons, and dew-dropped with bright-headed pushpins. There were blackboards and desks with WACs at them, and Marrow’s eyes rolled in lightning flirtations.

  Major Hunert sat us down, and he was polite to us, in the way a man of the world is polite to waiters, and he got rid of us quickly, and nothing ever happened about the laundry. But something happened in Marrow.

  On our way back to the base, as we rode near the Temple of Love, Marrow stopped, dismounted, examined the alley of enormous beeches that lined the vista, and, after a brief calculation, said, “You know, Boman, I bet a Fort could fly up this split in the woods. You could fly lower than the treetops—straight at those windows up there. Bet you something else, too. If that Major Hunert was standing in the window, he’d really p— in his pants.”

  9/

  We met after Daphne’s office hours in the lobby of the Bull on Trumpington Street. It was pouring outside. The morning—it was Wednesday, the fifth of May—had broken cold and disagreeable. A huge truckload of mail had arrived at the base; we had been starved for mail for three weeks, and it turned out that this whole shipment was a month old and had been dispatched by mistake to the Twelfth Air Force in North Africa. Situation normal: all f—ed up. No letter from Janet. I was actually glad. I had taken off for Cambridge on the afternoon liberty bus, carrying with me some candy bars I had saved from a scrubbing and a mission we’d had in preceding days. I handed Daphne the candy, and she kissed me on the cheek, to thank me, and said, “How you Yanks must eat!”

  I said, “No, listen! We have a guy named Prien in our ship, our tail gunner, he gets gas on his stomach, you ought to hear him bitch about the food they sling us.” Monotony. Powdered eggs. Grease and starch. Pancakes just before take-off—in the face of the law of gravity. Beans and cabbage just before an evening alert—a bellyache and morale all shot. I told her Prien’s whole song and dance. “I want milk. I need milk.” Filthy mess halls. KPs shoving the food off spatulas with dirty thumbs, black fingernails. What a way to start off a date with a girl!

  “You poor dear,” Daphne said, as if Prien’s complaints had been my own, seeming to know exactly what had made me talk that way, seeming to take such talk for granted. “I’m going to fix you a high tea in my room, but we’ll have to get some buns. Do you have some of that famous money?”

  “Cash is my middle name,” I said.

  We went shopping. She had an umbrella. She scolded me for not wearing a raincoat.

  The first thing she did in her room, again, was to lock the door.

  “Why do you lock up?” I asked. “Snoopers? Mrs. Thingumbob check up on you?”

  “No,” she said, and she shrugged. “I guess I just like secrets.”

  Her room was our secret place; the rain tapped at the window. Everything was different from the last time. We wanted to please each other, and I felt happy, and I wanted Daphne to know that. She brewed some tea that would have flown a Fort, and she put out some cakes, and we talked about our childhoods.

  She had had diphtheria, she told me, when she was four or five. She remembered that she was supposed to be taken to the hospital, her father had been summoned from his office to carry her there, but he was delayed, and he didn’t come and didn’t come. He was a civil servant of some minor kind, she said, a versatile man, humorous, kindly, and well read, but not born or educated a gentleman; he’d come of working-class people in the Midlands, so despite his evident talents there had been a ceiling to his career. This had not, however, by Daphne’s account, embittered him, but had turned him to a life of the mind, and to his children. Anyway, the day she fell sick, it got later and later, and her mother was upset, and finally her father came—and why was he late? Because he had been to Regent Street, to a shop much above his budget, and he had bought her a nightgown, and a bed jacket, and a comb, for her visit away from home.

  “He sounds like a kind man,” I said.

  She told me he was dead. She said she remembered being led by his hand to art galleries; she spoke of her vivid response, when she was about thirteen, to Bouchers and Fragonards in the Wallace Collection, and she spoke of the “burning Turner sunsets” that her father loved in the Tate.

  “I’d like to see those,” I said. “Anything to do with the sky.”

  “I’ll take you one day,” she said, as if an understanding had been reached between us that we would have a great deal of time together.

  I tried to tell her about the sunrise we’d seen flying out on the Antwerp raid the day before—a clear, lemon-yellow sky ahead, and behind us the dim blue of the part of the heavens still in the earth’s shadow, and far below us an upside-down sky—a vast sheet of cirrocumulus with its tidy mackerel pattern seen from above.

  “I like to look at the sea,” she said, and she told me about a childhood trip to the beaches of Devon.

  “I love the sky,” I said. “I remember a mackerel sky, when I was maybe twelve, as if it were yesterday, out of
my window in Donkentown.” I remembered it so vividly! There was a foretaste of dry days—a few sweeping mare’s tails off to the northwest. They made me think of Apollo; I thought he must have had huge horses, and I began to daydream, looking out the window, about chariot races, and I was a driver, and I hooked the wheel of the copper-sheathed chariot of the Hun villain, on a skidding turn, and his wheel came off ten feet before the torches of the finish line, and I looked up at the Emperor, and the crowd was roaring, and overhead—I saw it so clearly in my memory!—overhead, above the Circus Maximus, there was a mackerel sky, tinged with the first pink undertouches of the end of the day.

  “Did you ever have cambric tea?” Daphne asked me.

  “No, what’s that?”

  “It’s really only hot milk and water and sugar with the least suggestion of tea….” Daphne pictured to me a tiny summer-house in a tiny garden, and something about her brother, who was meticulous, had a model railway outdoors, the L.M.S., a perfect replica….

  But I was not listening to her too carefully, for I was thinking of what I could tell her next to impress her with my sensitivity, my kindness, my warmth, the ideality of my parents, my high regard for everything fine. Daphne was trying to impress me in the same way, I guess, and probably she was not really listening to me, either. But strangely enough, each of us, so concerned with our own excellent qualities, came through that conversation to appreciate each other more than before, even though we took in little of what was said.

  This feeling of self-love, the first step toward the love of someone else, was a source of inner strength for me, and I wanted to let Daphne know that ever since I had been in this room with her the last time, I had felt stronger, more sufficient to my tasks. I told her that, thanks to having been with her, I’d been, ever since, a friend to all mankind. I told her we’d lost our radioman, Kowalski, to frostbite, and that I’d gone to call on him in sick quarters, and I’d cheered him up a lot.

  Now, through my exultation in my own goodness, I was paying a tribute to Daphne, so what I was saying was partly about her, and she therefore had begun to listen attentively to me, with her head a little on one side and her eyes looking at me with profound understanding and approval.

  I was quite off-hand about a raid we’d flown to Antwerp the day before. It was a funny war, one joke after another. Our new radioman, Lamb, on his first mission, had begun by talking volubly over the interphone, but later we hadn’t heard a word from him, and he was supposed to be firing a gun on a sliding bracket mount in a slot back of the top turret, so Handown had gone back in the radio room and had found the guy sound asleep. Thought he’d passed out but he was just taking a nap! I laughed, and Daphne laughed, too.

  I even grew magnanimous about Marrow. “He’s amazing,” I said; “flies by intuition.” An FW-190 had dive-bombed us, air to air, from about four thousand feet above us, and Buzz had waited to the very last moment, and then…

  “I’ll bring him along the next time I come to see you.” I was so dazzled with myself that I’d lost my mind.

  “All right,” she said.

  The hours fled from our happiness, and the time came to leave. “I don’t know,” I said, “you’ve sort of given me a whole new slant on things.” I kissed her once, and that was all.

  On the liberty bus going back to the base, I looked at the faces of our fliers, and I thought, What decent men! How fortunate I am to be one of them!

  10/

  On Saturday, May eighth, I called Daphne and arranged to meet her the next day for lunch in the town of Motford Sage, which was about halfway between Cambridge and Bartleck. She could take a bus there. I asked Marrow later if he wanted to go with me.

  “Hey, neat,” he said, like a kid. “We can ride bikes.”

  And that was what we did, though it was a sad, drizzling day. Part of the time we rode side by side. Willows lined the highway for a stretch. Buzz began talking about after the war. According to Haverstraw’s Law of Probabilities, there wasn’t going to be much chance of surviving the war for any of us, but Buzz, I guess, believed that the law couldn’t be proven without some exceptions, among which he planned to be one of the most prominent. He said, “Jesus, I got a stack of back pay just rotting. It’s rotting till it stinks.” It hurt his feelings to think he’d have to wait until after the war to spend it. A few minutes later he said, “You know something? After this war they’re going to retire me to stud. I’ll populate a whole new heavy-bombardment group for ’em.” He pumped some more and said, “No, I guess I want to be a padre after the war. Those f—ing chaplains lead a nice life—not too much work, just listening to a bunch of guys spilling their guts about their troubles, same as a bartender, you know? Only a padre can sit down while he listens and a bartender can’t. And then he picks out some hymns and thinks up a sermon and maybe cleans up five bucks marrying somebody: ‘We are gathered together, brethren and sistern, to unite this man and this woman in holy matrimony…. Will the fellows from the glue factory please take the back pews, near the windows?…’ Jesus Christ, Boman, now, you know, that’s a good life. That’s for me.”

  We met Daphne in time for lunch, or maybe it was tiffin, at the Old Abbott Inn in Motford Sage, and I watched her operate with Marrow over breaded veal and brussels sprouts and boiled potatoes.

  It seemed to me that Daphne was one of those women who keep a close eye on themselves, who think hard about why they do things, and so have a powerful apparatus for understanding other people’s actions and motives. Daphne appeared to have Marrow absolutely taped. It was as if his inner mind and feelings were her own. She gave a striking impression of warmth and sympathy toward him, because of this capacity of hers.

  She knew, right off the bat, that the only proper subject of conversation with William Siddlecoff Marrow was William Siddlecoff Marrow. He laid it on with a trowel.

  She got Marrow going on the thrill of flying. “Why,” he said, “it’s like nothing can stop you. Sometimes I just want to yell up there. You see,” he said, approaching a serious face close to Daphne’s, “that whole machine is part of you. You’re the most powerful creature that ever was.”

  Daphne seemed to shrink a tiny bit, in deference to the might of which Buzz spoke. This was undoubtedly what gratified him the most.

  “What about death?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Phooey!” Marrow scornfully said. “Do you know the biggest discipline problem among pilots?—I mean pilots that are men. It’s they can’t resist thumbing their noses at death. They take chances that would turn your hair white….” And Buzz showed that he was angry with death. He spoke of death as “that bastard in the sky” and “that God-damn sergeant.”

  “You know what I’d like to do?” he ferociously said at one point. “I’d like to kill death.”

  He banged the table, and the ladle jumped in the soup tureen.

  Marrow was twenty-six—a strange age at which to have given death so very much thought.

  When we had finished the main course Daphne said to Marrow, “Tell me about your life.”

  “My life?” Buzz said. “Hell, I’ve flown thirty-one hundred hours and never cracked up a plane.”

  “No,” Daphne said. “Start at the beginning.”

  “Oh, Christ!” Buzz said.

  But Daphne looked at him with that air of close concentration of hers.

  Marrow lit a cigar.

  11/

  “O.K., I’m twenty-six years old,” he said. “I was born in Holand, Nebraska, and was raised up there. It’s in the corn country sixty-four miles from Omaha and fifty-six from Columbus, between the Elkhorn, Loup, and Platte Rivers. Population nine hundred and three. They have sidewalks but nobody uses ’em.

  “Right away I’ll say my old man was my hero. He did a little of everything and not much of anything—real estate, and a bit of insurance such as there is in a hick town like Holand, and he had the Chevvy
agency for the county for a while. He wanted me to have all the opportunities he missed. His name was Frank, and he was a man’s man. He’s dead now. Sometimes I suspect maybe he was a blowhard, but I loved the old son of a bitch.

  “I’ll never forget the first night I stayed out all night. Me and some other guys took some girls over to Columbus, and you know, one thing led to another, nothing much in a crowd like that, only all of a sudden the sun was coming up. It was the Fourth of July on a Saturday—or had been when we started out. I got home at nine thirty Sunday morning, and I knew the old man was going to get after me with the hammer and tongs. I had a story made up, but I didn’t bank on it to help me much. When I went in the house I didn’t see anyone, so I went in the dining room, and there was the old man, eating breakfast. ‘Why, son,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were up yet. What are you doing up so early Sunday morning? Sit down,’ he said, ‘have some breakfast.’ So I did. I thought I’d split a gut from not laughing.

  “I went two years to Creighton University in Omaha. I was going to take premedical. I wanted to be an obstetrician. I don’t know, women just naturally fascinate me, and”—Buzz turned an ego-maniacal grin on Daphne—“and vice versa. And sister, I mean vice.

  “The first woman I ever went to bed with, I was thirteen years old, and she was so old she had a daughter ten. I don’t know what pleasure she got out of having my little body on top of her, I swear I don’t. But she made me do it. Afterwards she was ashamed and made me promise not to tell anyone. Well, by the time I got to be a sophomore at Creighton, her daughter was seventeen and I was going on for twenty. That girl was stacked, I mean, she had talent. Vacation time, I noticed whenever I used to call on the daughter, her mama would go right upstairs and leave us alone. One night I said to Dottie, “Let’s go to the movies over at Columbus.’ Columbus was an hour’s drive, and our town was strict—you know?—so when a fellow wanted to take a girl to Columbus, the girl needed notice, she had to ask permission, and you always had to double-date. So Dottie said she’d have to ask Mama, and I said, ‘It’ll be all right,’ and she said, ‘Why, Bill’—I was called Bill in those days—‘I couldn’t go all the way to Columbus alone with you, without I even asked Mama.’ So she went over to the stairs and shouted, ‘Mama!’