The War Lover

by John Hersey

  Daphne, obviously having sensed the intensity of my question, nodded and searched my eyes with hers.

  “This morning…” I began, and then the bottle of my feelings broke, and I put my forehead down on the edge of the table and cried.

  “Steady, steady,” I heard Daphne say. In the midst of my dramatics I felt a startling sharp amusement that she had fallen back on a standard English response to a public show of emotion. Stiff upper lip. Must dress. Pip pip. I had to laugh. The realization that I was on the edge of hysteria quieted me at once, and I sat up. “Good man,” Daphne said.

  “What the hell’s it all about?” I feelingly said. “Why do we do it?”

  At that Daphne said, “I just try to get from day to day without too much fuss.” As if to say: she was a girl, she had nothing to do with war except to endure it.

  I had a feeling of utter helplessness, almost like what I had felt in the nose of the ship that time on our first raid, when Marrow had suddenly pushed over and I had hung weightlessly floating in mid-air along with some inanimate objects. I was being carried along toward death through a life over which I had no control.

  I remembered experiencing at the dance the previous Saturday, if not happiness, at least an approach to it, through close attention to momentary impressions: seeing small things with a clear eye. I now tried to recapture that observant and receptive state, but all I saw this time was banality: a glass of warm and soapy stout; a half-eaten and anyway barely edible piece of cold kidney pie; the owner of the bar, savoring his triumph over the blonde, muttering out loud and flicking a dirty napkin at bits of lint and bread crumbs that seemed in his mind to be aging prostitutes trying to trump up trade on his decent premises. And even Daphne: her sleeve was shiny at its cuff; from an American point of view there was something shabby about her.

  “Bo,” she said. “Dear Bo. You don’t like me very much just at this minute, do you?”

  Startled at her perceptiveness, I said, “It’s not you, Daph.”

  She took me to her room and sat me down on the edge of her bed and urged me to tell her about what had happened that morning, and I did. She made no attempt to comment, but I had a curious impression of a deep satisfaction she had from listening to me. What I said was less important to her than the fact of my saying it. I was spewing out bitterness, retching; she seemed profoundly happy. What a way to court a girl! Yet it was, I think, exactly appropriate to that place and time, and to her and to me. And, gradually, hearing me out with big reflective eyes, she instilled in me a feeling, not exactly of strength, but at least of resiliency; a hide in tanning grows flexible.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE RAID

  1356–1404 hours

  1/

  We crossed the Dutch islands at 51°35’N–03°40’E, at four minutes before two o’clock, flying at twenty-one thousand feet, and of course Marrow had taken back control of the ship before our penetration of the enemy zone. My rage at him, over what Clint had blurted to me of his lying tale of having mounted my Daphne, had ebbed away, but I was still aware of him, across from me, as a kind of adversary, along with the German, on this long day’s flight which was now entering its dangerous phase.

  Yes, Marrow was my enemy, just as surely as the Nazis were. One contest was a matter of life and death; the other, against Marrow, whose life was bound with mine to our common ship, was one of inner tensions, of all those personal values the survival or loss of which would make the rest of life, if life remained, worth or not worth living. For Daphne had shown me the truth about Marrow. He was a destroyer. He was in love with war. I could have no peace—the world could have none—if men like him were indulged in their passion.

  Being now convinced that Marrow, whom the Group considered my closest friend, was in fact my most intimate enemy, I became alert for signs of vulnerability in him, and here, as we crossed over the huge islands of man-made land at the edge of Europe, I began thinking there had been indications all through the morning of something which in many men would have seemed to be strength but in Marrow could only have been weakness. I mean caution. In a superb flier like Marrow a certain carefulness was inbuilt and natural, and his indifference to inspections and checks, during the period when he had become a hero and had gotten his D.F.C., was abnormal for him; but an excess of caution in Marrow was bound to be a danger signal, and this morning he had been checking up on things too much.

  Now, out of the blue, he came up on interphone to the engineer. “Listen, Handown,” he said. “Did that son of a bitch Black say anything to you about changing the hydraulic fluid?”

  “Negative,” Handown said.

  “He was supposed to change it,” Marrow said.

  “Didn’t say anything about it,” Handown said.

  “I forgot to ask him,” Marrow said. “Meant to ask him.”

  “The pressure was O.K. this morning,” I said. “I checked it in the preflight. Both accumulators were O.K.”

  “It was O.K., huh?” Marrow said. “He was going to put new fluid in.”

  I knew all about that kind of worrying. During the July Blitz, when we had flown so many missions so close together, I had done plenty of it. I used to begin at the beginning—wondered if the designers had known what they were doing. I wondered if they’d figured all the stresses correctly, if the wingloading was right; and I’d heard somewhere that if you dived a Fort at more than three hundred miles per hour the de-icing boots on the leading edge of the wing would begin to rise slightly, and then more and more, and would begin to flap and then tear and then…And when I’d finished with the designers, I’d wonder about the people who put The Body together. Workers in a factory had meat rationing and gas rationing to worry about, poor bastards, and after dozens and dozens of planes, performing the same operation, they could have gotten careless, wondering where their next sirloin was coming from. I used to think there might have been an inspector whose wife was having a baby the day he inspected The Body, and he wasn’t concentrating the way he ought to, and he missed a whole seam that was supposed to have been riveted but hadn’t. Once, during the first Le Mans mission, the day Farr and Bragnani had called me “teacher” because I had been so finicky about inspections, I actually went back in the plane, on some excuse or other, and began looking for places where the rivets weren’t right…. Then, when I got through with the workers at the plant, I’d start in on the ground crew. There was so much they could go wrong on! Four motors, each with a million parts. A hydraulic system as complicated as the water-main system of Donkentown. A wiring system like that of a big building. Radios. Tires. Brakes. Cables. They couldn’t check everything. What had they forgotten? What had they skipped? What had they got in the habit of skipping? If Red Black had worked twenty-four hours a day, he couldn’t have begun to check The Body. I used to spend hours up there cataloguing the things he might have missed.

  That obsessive concern for details of The Body’s health was all very well for me, because I had been conscientious to begin with. That was my way. But when it began cropping up in Marrow, it was time to stop fussing about the plane and start watching him.

  2/

  Ahead of us, now, the layer of cirrus that I had seen from over the Channel was building up, and its base at the edge of the cloud, which was perhaps ten miles away, was no higher than we. The formation therefore had to make one of two choices, neither good. The first was to trust that deep into Europe this was only a thin sheet of mackerel cloud, as it seemed at first to be, and so to rise above it; the risk in this alternative was that the cloud might thicken and tower too high for us, and that the whole formation might be forced to plunge into it and inevitably scatter—or that the target might be obscured. The second possibility was to abandon our briefed base altitudes, between twenty-three thousand and twenty-six thousand five hundred feet, and duck below the cloud mass; here the risks lay in our becoming sharply silhouetted targets against the clouds for flak and
fighters, our providing the fighters with cover above our heads, and our possibly having to descend ever lower, to altitudes unsafe for our special sort of work.

  I spoke of the cloud to Marrow on interphone, partly, I suppose, to probe him, partly to seek reassurance. “How about that cirrus ahead?”

  “Keep your pants on,” he said, giving me no comfort at all.

  3/

  “Check in,” said Prien from the tail, and he began to count us off, and as he did I visualized our plane, and the men in it, and this gave me comfort, for I worried about The Body and loved her, not in Marrow’s erotic way, but because she was familiar, and reliable, and her interior walls curved about me, cupping me as I took life-giving nourishment from her oxygen tubes; perhaps because I had entrusted my existence to her so many times.

  “One!”

  “O.K.,” Max said.

  Max Brindt would be in the bombardier’s seat in the very nose, leaning forward in his tense way in the air, bathed in greenish light. Before him, source of that light, was a conical plexiglass windshield with a lozenge-shaped panel in the middle of its lower part, through which the concentrated sightings for bombardment, the aim and point of our missions, were made. There were also low windows in the plane’s walls on both sides of Max. Just now Max would be ready at the handle of a hand-held fifty-caliber machine gun with a post-and-ring sight which was poked out through a kind of nipple up near the center of the nose; in action he might also have to jump to another gun farther back in the left side of the nose. To Max’s right, on the side wall, were his oxygen regulator, suit-heater outlet, interphone jackbox, and brackets to stow the nose gun. To his left were his instrument panel and bomb controls: a round-knobbed handle which, along with a switch, worked the bomb-bay doors; another handle, which could either lock or salvo the bombs, or set them to be toggled out at electrically controlled intervals; and a release switch, covered by a protective guard, for this toggling. Fastened to the curving wall above these controls was a goose-neck lamp that might have been on an office desk in some peaceful place. The bombsight was still stowed, for freedom of action, back in the navigator’s space.

  The navigator’s area was directly behind Max’s at a somewhat lower level, but with no physical barrier between the two so-called compartments. Clint Haverstraw’s province was lit by two pairs of windows in the sidewalls, by the navigator’s astrodome overhead, and indirectly by the plexiglass nose. Clint’s desk, with a dial of the radio compass recessed in its right side, stretched across the back of the bombardier’s seat and ran to the right side wall; on the left was Max’s passageway forward. Along the side wall to Clint’s right were a bulbous driftmeter, a storage box for the bombsight, an aperiodic compass, and Clint’s suit-heater and oxygen outlets. On his left, beyond the narrow passageway, were the radio compass and its control panel, Clint’s map case, his interphone jackbox, and another oxygen regulator. Everything was neat as a pin; Clint had even installed a set of grip holders on the wall over his desk to hold a comb. Just now Clint was manning, doubtless with distaste, a fifty-caliber gun that poked out of a large covered window on the right side of the nose, at the forward end of his compartment. A corresponding gun on the left side was Max Brindt’s alternative weapon.

  Aft of the navigator’s compartment was a section of the plane that was divided into two levels. The upper one was the pilots’ cockpit, and to reach it, one had to climb up through a trapdoor between Buzz’s seat and mine. The space of the lower level, which was only about four feet high, was in part for the storage of large oxygen bottles, but it also provided access to the forward escape hatch of the plane, in the bottom of the ship.

  Buzz and I sat at the top of the plane, looking out through a windshield which ran across over the nose; we had side windows, too. We were, it seemed, embedded in instruments. The main panel spread like a swollen dashboard before us, while the power-plant controls—throttles, turbo levers, mixture levers, and propeller-pitch handles—were in a central stand between the two flight columns; below that stand, forward of the trapdoor on the floor between us, was another block containing the automatic pilot with its many knobs and switches; each of us had a pair of side control panels, on the wall and floor beside him; radio-tuning apparatus was on the ceiling above us. Altogether there were more than a hundred and fifty dials, switches, levers, indicators, handles, cranks, knobs, buttons—any one of which might, at a moment of crisis, save or lose the plane and all of us.

  Directly in back of the cockpit was the engineer’s working space; Negrocus Handown’s. Now Neg was in the upper turret, above it. This was a ribbed plexiglass dome, shaped something like the gun turret of a tank, with room for Handown’s head and shoulders in it. From it extruded a pair of fifty-caliber guns; the whole dome could revolve, under power, on a cogged track, while the guns, which Neg fired through an automatic computing sight, could be elevated and depressed by an electrical mechanism. It was a pity Neg had only two hands. There were two handles with which to charge the guns with ammunition; a pair of hand grips to control the azimuth and elevation of the guns; triggers on them; a range knob between them; and the usual gadgets for heat and oxygen and communication, as well as hand cranks in case the power failed—all to be manipulated at once, it seemed, in response to lightning reactions under the threat of death from an attacker.

  The engineer’s compartment ended at a bulkhead, in the center of which was a door leading into the bomb bay: a windowless cavern containing a big vee of racks for the bombs. One had to step down two steps from the doorway to reach a narrow catwalk to the rest of the ship; I had gone in there one day—it was on the Hüls mission, on June twenty-second—when the bomb-bay doors, like great longitudinal jaws, had been jammed open by a wedge of flak, to help Neg crank them shut by hand, and we had nothing between us and the good earth but twenty thousand feet of air. It took us an hour to fix it. Another time, over Kassel, Max had leaned way down off the catwalk into space to fuse some of his bombs by hand when the arming mechanism had failed.

  Next, going back, was the radio compartment, Butcher Lamb’s place. This was the only self-contained room-like space on the ship, a kind of cabin, where Butcher, at a table on the left side, operated, as needed, the main controls for the VHF and liaison sets, interphone, marker-beacon equipment, radio altimeter, radio-compass recorder, and homing set. The receivers and transmitters were disposed around the room; in one corner there was a stack of five transmitters which looked something like a high layered office file. Besides Lamb’s seat, there were two others, where Bragnani and Farr, the waist gunners, commonly sat on take-offs and landings. Behind one of them was lashed a portable emergency transmitter, for use in case of a ditching in the sea. At the end of a mission Butcher’s compartment was littered with pencil stubs, butts, scraps of paper, and, above all, Westerns and comic books in which he immersed himself at crucial moments, sometimes reading while supposedly manning his hand-held gun which pointed rearward out of a slot at the top of the cabin. Handown caught him doing that once—firing when a fighter took a pass at us, then reading a few sentences, then firing again, absent-minded, dreamy-eyed, like a certain kind of man fussing with a pipe he is smoking while he reads.

  Moving aft out of the radioman’s room one came next to the ball turret, set like a knuckle in its socket in the bottom of the plane. The ball turret differed from the upper turret in one vital way: Junior Sailen had to let himself down into it and sit in it, hunched up like an embryo, firing between his spread legs, with a door locked above him, and with the whole turret revolving not only in azimuth, as did the upper turret, but also in elevation, as the upper turret did not. In other words, Sailen, locked into the ball, spun and tilted with the motion of the ball, which he controlled himself by power as he aimed at the enemy. His mechanisms were even more complicated than Neg Handown’s; in order to adjust the reticles of his gunsight for range he had to use a left-foot pedal, and to press the talk switch of his interphone he
had to use his right foot, while he tracked the target with hand grips and fired with switches on top of the grip handles. The door of the turret could only be unlocked if the ball was properly upright. It was no wonder that Junior had repeatedly made his crewmates swear that they would get him out of the turret if it ever got stuck.

  Abaft the ball turret was the waist gunners’ post. Here one was in the long tube of the naked fuselage, its walls honeycombed with ribs and frames. Farr on the right and Bragnani on the left would be standing with their guns on brackets pointing out the two large open waist-high windows; the main entrance door of the plane was to Farr’s right, and beyond that a chemical toilet, which was the center of much kidding of Prien with his bad stomach.

  Prien himself was beyond a doorway in a final bulkhead; his station was in the narrow wedge of the very tail of the plane. He sat perched on an oversized bicycle seat, and when he was actually firing he heaved his body further to the rear and kneeled on a pair of knee pads. He fired twin-fifties hung on pulleys and cables, with a ring-and-post sight.

  Now Prien completed his oxygen check with Farr, and switching to VHF I heard some chatter among the command pilots of the first Schweinfurt task force, up ahead. Various ones of them were calling “Croquet”—trying to get in touch with the Spits that had been supposed to rendezvous with our leading force over the Dutch coast. The fighters’ radio channel was jammed by the Germans; the answers were unintelligible.

  “Sounds like the Spits didn’t show,” I said to Marrow, having cut back to interphone.

  “We weren’t supposed to have any,” he curtly said.

  “I mean up ahead,” I said.