The War Lover

by John Hersey

  “All right,” Marrow said. “Let’s keep our eyes peeled.”

  4/

  In battle, under attack, I was supposed to be in charge of fire control and interphone discipline, though of course no one man could really be in charge because no one man could see all the sectors of possible attack; and there was the added fact that Marrow could not stand letting anyone else be truly in charge of anything. Each gunner was assigned a definite segment of the sky, corresponding to the zone of fire of his gun or guns, and he was supposed to cut that piece of sky into small sections in his mind and to search those sections systematically for enemy planes. Neg Handown in the top turret searched ahead and above—from ten o’clock to two o’clock, high; Junior Sailen in the ball turret searched ten to two, low; Butcher Lamb searched (if he could tear his eyes from his book) four to eight, high; and Prien, in the tail, four to eight, low; Farr, at the right waist window, searched two to four, high and low, and Bragnani, on the left, eight to ten, high and low. From time to time each man might take a look outside his sector; Neg Handown and Junior Sailen, for instance, intermittently made. three-hundred-sixty-degree sweeps with their turrets. The officers, having other duties, were not assigned definite sectors to watch, but of course we scanned the sky as much as we could. When a man sighted an enemy fighter in his sector, he was supposed to call it in at once, and generally speaking I was supposed to co-ordinate our firing, but in practice Buzz often jumped in ahead of me, and in the heat of action the gunners often called directly to each other, the man who sighted a fighter in his sector alerting another who was apt to get a good crack at the attacker as he passed. The greatest menace to our efficiency was everyone’s talking at once, and here I was supposed to ride herd; though, again, Marrow couldn’t keep his big mouth shut for long. Since our mutual safety was at stake in all this, no one stood on ceremony. We were eager to help each other and were not jealous for rank or duty, and occasionally, singing out at the sight of the enemy, calling back and forth to save our skins, we had (or at least I know I did, and I believe the others did) a feeling of the close brotherhood of crewmates, so that we who were so diverse, gentle Sailen, thug-like Farr, tidy and compulsive Haverstraw, cold-fish Prien, and the others, all of us, who got along rather badly as human beings, some of us bearing deep hatreds for others—all were drawn together under attack by what, for most of us, was the second strongest love on earth, second only to self-love: the love of those upon whom our lives depended.

  Now, passing beyond the coastline, our searching began in earnest. All we had seen up to this point had been a few black puffs of flak—the erratic, inaccurate anti-aircraft firing we always seemed to catch at the rim of Europe, where the batteries either had had insufficient alert or were not of the quality of those ringing many of our targets.

  At any moment enemy fighters might come up. We had no way of knowing to what extent, if at all, the Regensburg strike had disorganized or exhausted the German defenses. Nor could we know when they would jump us, for sometimes they held back and concentrated on trying to break up our bombing runs on targets, while on other days they began to ride us a few minutes beyond the coast.

  “Anybody see anything?” I said.

  “I see the sun and the moon,” Negrocus Handown said.

  5/

  As I searched, as I monitored the bands of sound and scanned the dials in front of me, I was trying also to work out in my mind whether what Daphne had told me the day before about Marrow was as much a revelation as it had seemed at the time of her telling. It had come to me that I had dimly seen the real Marrow all along, that I must have, and now I was trying to place a turning point, if there had been one, in my attitude toward him. I realized that such a turning point, if there had been one, had come not from anything Marrow did that was new in him but rather from a growth in me, an enlargement of my understanding, and undoubtedly this was something Daphne had helped me to achieve, along with Kid Lynch; this must have come some time in June, about halfway through our tour, before Marrow became a hero. I now had glimpses of him in that period: at the throttle of that railway engine rolling to a stop in King’s Cross Station, his ugly face creased with his delight over our amazement at him; his homicidal eye as he roared his disapproval of John L. Lewis in a London bar, and his sentimental expression standing in the review formation listening to the vainglorious Senator Tamalty rant about “the blood of arr Amarrcan boys”; the clench of his jaw during that split-second nightmare thundering up the alley of noble beeches leading to Pike Rilling Hall at a hundred and seventy miles an hour, when Buzz took his pass at Them; his tenderness with his pet dog; the tumbling of his wit, and his happy grimaces, at that squadron party at Lady Minsdale’s castle; furious expressions on his face on several occasions—when he found the bicycle he had ridden to the Blue Anchor in Motford Sage missing, and when he got the news of Wheatley Bins’ having been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and when he started that near riot between the active pilots and the Happy Warriors, the men who had completed their tours and were hanging around, dangerously idle, waiting for new orders; the telltale hesitancy of his head and hand as he turned The Body toward the act of courage (so it was considered) that made him a hero among us. I saw him as shrewd, adaptable, moody; a natural aviator; bellicose and noisy; growing wiser and more exhausted, like all of us. But did I see deeper, and more? In retrospect I thought I could mark the gradual change in him, and I knew I could follow the gradual change in myself. At some point the two curves must have crossed, and at that point, it seemed to me, my attitude toward Buzz must have changed.

  On VHF I heard Colonel Ewing, the commander of the strike, say, “Windbag Red to all Windbags. Dropping altitude two thousand. Repeat, dropping altitude two thousand.”

  So we were going under the cloud cover. I indicated this to Marrow with a gesture.

  “The son of a bitch,” he said.

  “What gives?” Handown asked, his curiosity aroused by Marrow’s curse.

  “Mind your beeswax, sonny,” Marrow said. Then apparently he relented, for he added, “Colonel Chicken S— is going to tuck us under that cloud.”

  “That’s ducky,” Handown said; he understood the dangers in going close under the cirrus.

  I supposed that my getting to know Kid Lynch had been the turning point—the unself-conscious prattler, so naïve and unformed; yet serious, too, always groping, between wisecracks, for some reason for all this we were doing. He provided the foil to Marrow that I guess I had needed. But of course it was Daphne who had brought me to the stage of needing a dose of Lynch’s curious blend of skepticism and idealism, to offset Marrow’s repeated assertions that we had never had it so good. It was Daphne who had opened my eyes, had made me love my life and want some purpose for it. I remembered sitting on the ground, one June afternoon, under the huge elms of the Backs across from King’s and Clare in Cambridge, while a cluster of students spiced the bland air of a good day with bouncing madrigals. “You call that music?” Marrow said. He got the giggles, like a child. But I remembered Daphne’s calm. She looked at me and filled me with it. We were sitting near the Clare bridge, whose pale gray stone seemed alive in the moving, dappled shadows, and the slow Cam reflected the bridge and the sky, and I leaned close to Daphne and saw the delicate down on her cheek and the sweep of shining light-brown hair back over her ear. She was leaning back on her elbows, and I saw her breast pressing the soft cloth of her dress, and in a moment of wanting to touch her, with my life force stirring and swelling, I had very strongly a curious yearning—for idealism. My physical want soon drowned that out, but I remembered it. The singers stood on the far bank of the stream, young men frowning as they opened the wet caverns of their mouths and reached for high notes, then ducked their heads to the low; and beyond them was the silvered rectilinear repose of the Clare courtyard, and beside it, as if Clare had been built to set it off, the breathtaking note of optimism, hope, and yes, stolid idealism of King’s Cha
pel, which Daphne had told me was the most beautiful building in England, and I believed her. Then that yearning, which was a kind of dissatisfaction, passed, and I wanted to be alone with Daphne, I wanted to hold her—she had a way of turning her head on the pillow, looking at me each time as if she had never seen my true value before—and I glanced at my watch, and it was fighters at four o’clock low, fighters at four o’clock low…and crackling.

  Marrow was bolt upright, gesticulating. He was craning over toward my side, and I started up. Earphones, it had been in my earphones. Four o’clock. I turned my head around as far as I could to the right and looked downward and saw them. The yellow up-sniffing noses. Farr came up on interphone, “Sweet Jesus! Here they come.” Marrow was pounding my left arm. I slowly pivoted back toward my pilot and raised my gloved hands as fists, then stretched out my fingers, then clenched again, then stretched: ten, twenty. There seemed to be about twenty.

  And off there to the right, on a level with the bombers, well out of range, was their guide plane, the one we called Coach, throttled back and idling along like a fox terrier at the same speed as the Forts. And lower down, there they came! They were swinging out in a wide, climbing arc, to rise as usual outside the reach of our guns and go up to a kind of dumping point where they would break off to come in at us. They liked to come from the sun. They were flying smart formation. How beautiful the day was! The school of yellow-heads swam up in a long curve, and beneath them the peaceful farmland spread out and out to a place where, in thin haze and smoke, earth gave way to sky, not so much with a horizon as with a kind of emptiness, or uncertainty, and now the school of enemy planes was crossing that indefinite zone in the line of my sight. They flew much faster than Forts, and their angle of climb was astounding.

  While still struck by the beauty of what I saw, I felt my heart begin to hurry. For a moment, in a corner of my mind, I saw a flicker of a picture—reclining on the bank of the Cam near the bridge, Daphne stirred, turned toward me, so the far breast rose and moved and the near one leaned my way. I could hear the chorus of students in full outcry. I wanted her; my heart was pounding.

  On the interphone Marrow began to shout reminders. For a moment he was like his old self on the early missions, meddlesome yet keen, quick, happy—only now did I know how grotesquely happy. “All right! Let’s not forget they might split ass and pull up ahead of us, or either push on under and loop back up for a traverse shot from under. So Junior, you be ready to open the second they get under, if they go under. Max, you be ready to tell us soon as they break. Say, ‘Down,’ or, ‘Up,’ whichever. And Boman, I want you to watch the…”

  Boman, it was always Boman. Nicknames for the others.

  And Daphne wanted me, too. Her melting eyes, cloud-pale eyelids.

  What was it Marrow had wanted me to watch? I realized I hadn’t listened at all. My belly muscles began to shake.

  The Messerschmidts were rising against the blue, now, abeam, a close march of them, twenty or thirty planes. Now and then a whole cluster of the fighters’ props would catch the sun just right, and there would be a sudden constellation of silvery yellow-centered roundels; then the shining shields would fade.

  I recoiled as a shout rattled in my earphone. It was Marrow, upon catching his first view of the enemy procession off to the right. “Hot spit!”

  Slowly I turned my head and looked at my pilot. Behind the flat glass parabolas of Marrow’s goggles I saw a frightful sight: the green pupils of his eyes completely surrounded by porcelain laced with lightning-shaped veins. The eyes of cattle with the lids pulled back, unripe grapes being forced out of thin skins; the eyeballs might pop right out and splatter against the glass.

  Almost choking in a resurgence of my rage against Marrow, I tore my eyes, with a convulsion of my will, from Marrow’s eyes and looked at dials.

  “Tighten up, people. Tighten up. Pack it in.” In the phones it was Colonel Ewing, commander of the attack, in the lead plane, wanting to get the poisonous bristles of the huge formation as compact as possible. I did not need to relay the word. Colonel Bins ahead of us was already chopping the speed down so the long files behind could push in closer, and Marrow, responding automatically, had eased the throttles back ever so slightly. I looked out at the Germans. Their small swarm was up at ten o’clock and perhaps five hundred feet above the level of the Forts. It would be only a matter of seconds now.

  I tried not to let go of the memory of Daphne in the shifting filtered sunlight. Her dress was pale yellow. Why did I cling to the memory of desire, when I could have thought of a passage of fulfillment? Deepest peace of all…

  I started to hum a tune that I guess I considered protective, a kind of armor-plate spell I had often used in the air. A slow melodic line from There’s Nothing in This World, the way I’d heard Kenny Sargent treat it once with the Casa Loma band, slow, souped up. I’d make a string of pearls out of the dew…Over the highways and over the seas…It had come to me once, for some reason, on a raid, as the music of safety, magic music that would keep me out of trouble. Marrow was shouting something; I didn’t get it. I looked up into the sky ahead. Suddenly four German planes skidded up and over out of the chunky parade in a beautiful simultaneous peel, and in no time they were coming down four abreast. Then Marrow began his customary war whoop at the first joining, a guttural scream, not words at all, a howl of defiance of death and delight in killing, a kind of primitive elated expulsion of a chestful of breath of a spear-thrower, and I hummed as loud as I could, because the vibration of the hum, with that of the plane, blocked my ears somewhat and helped me not to hear that familiar nightmare shriek of Marrow’s. I gripped my knees. I had for an instant a feeling that everything had stopped—the Fort, the oncoming fighters, my heart, my humming, our war; only the scream persisted.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE TOUR

  May to June 25

  1/

  Enough of us to fill two ordinary locals horsed around on the platform of the tiny railroad station at Bartleck, with three days ahead of assured life, and of freedom from being bulldozed by Them. It was May twenty-second and fine. Our crew stuck together. The station was a wrinkled wooden building which put me in mind of the Toonerville trolley in the funnies of my childhood, and under its wide eaves on a notice board was an advice of change of fare, thenceforth to London the first-class tariff rising to ten and threepence, with a faded date underneath, of my thirteenth year. The fare was still the same. The platform was raised and fenced and it swayed under our stamping feet. More men were arriving on bikes from the base, and the old biddy in a ragged sweater who took sixpence to keep the wheels in a stall was growing muddled and had begun to whine at the fellows’ crude jokes with her. A narrow, curving alley came up a slope to the station, and across from the city-bound platform two ancient men, twisted like old storm-broken willow trees, were unloading lumber from a dilapidated lorry; the planks must have been heavy for them, and Benny Chong said, “What say we help the old goats?”

  The two toothless grandpas never knew what happened to them. There was a rush of perhaps thirty of us Yank fliers, and a lot of whooping and clattering ensued, and in a jiffy the whole load was neatly stacked at the side of the street.

  It surprised me to see that Marrow had not joined us, and when we got back to the platform he said, “You do-gooders really got those old f—ers confused. They planned to spend all day unloading that crap. Look at ’em. Never pays to meddle in other people’s lives. Just makes ’em sore at you.”

  The old men were puttering around the tidy stack. They would lift a plank, and put it down just where it had been, and look testily across at us, and lift another plank, and put it down. They went round and round the stack with little senile steps, wringing their palsied hands.

  “Come on, Haverstraw,” Marrow said, “let’s have a catch.”

  There was a chipped and rusted enamel cup for thirsty wayfarers hanging from a tap against th
e station wall, and Marrow grabbed it and pegged it to Clint, and then Buzz ripped one of the half-rotten pales off the platform fence, and assuming a batter’s stance he called, “Come on, son, see if you can get it over.”

  Haverstraw threw the cup. Marrow swung and missed, and derisive shouts went up—shouts, I believed, with such an edge to them of vindictive glee over my loud pilot’s having whiffed that I felt a bristling defensive anger. The cup went back to Clint, and he took a big caricatured windup and threw it again, and this time Marrow connected, and the picket dustily broke, and the bottom fell out of the cup, and everyone, including Buzz, laughed.

  Then the train came in, a tiny soprano engine with two cylindrical bumpers like “a nice pair of boopers,” as Marrow said, pulling a line of old-fashioned four-wheeled cars along whose sides ran rows of metal-handled doors.

  Marrow latched onto one of the handles, and he shouted, “My crew rides first class, by Jesus,” and he brushed all comers aside, and he shouted, “Come on, Boman, drag your ass over here. Haverstraw! Farr! Come on, get the lead out of your pants.”

  The ten of us pried ourselves into the compartment along with an elderly dominie in a backwards collar who had already been sitting inside by the window, facing forward. Marrow, seating himself opposite the preacher, was subdued into a Sunday-school docility by him, and he chatted politely and quietly with the old man while the rest of us silently stared out the window at fields of turnips and wheat and rye, and at hoardings in praise of Bovril and Bile Beans, and at the towns along the way—Royston, Hitchin, Knebworth. Marrow and the curate got friendly over Marrow’s appalling lies about our life, and I noticed that my pilot had the gall to eat half of the old boy’s picnic lunch. “Just did it to please him,” Buzz said later.