The War Lover

by John Hersey

  I shook the rest of them at King’s Cross Station and headed for Leicester Square Underground, where I had a date to meet Daphne at ten o’clock.

  She was there ahead of me, by the news kiosk where we had said we’d rendezvous, and at the sight of her I took a deep breath and felt as if I were diving into a cool pond of peace.

  We decided to ride around, having nothing but time to kill, and we mounted the stairs of a shiny red double-decker bus, to the upper level, and it felt to me as if I were seeing London for the first time—a beleaguered place long after the worst of the siege, with vast stretches of barbed wire and barriers of cheveaux-de-frise and pillboxes with menacing black gun slits, and boarded-up houses, and sandbag walls with the burlap rotting and weeds growing out of the sand, and Anderson shelters, and signs pointing to refuge in the tubes, whose stations were still lined with triple-decker bunks. We passed a troop of soldiers singing as they marched, and I reckoned myself fairly cynical by then, but those full throats and jaunty exaggerated hand swings made my scalp tingle, and I held Daphne’s hand, thinking of her father killed in a night raid.

  We had hardly touched each other since that first night I’d gone out with her in Cambridge, and when she squeezed my arm between hers and her side, I had a flood of ideas.

  “Would you like to go up the Thames?” she said. “It’s such a wizard day.”

  “Does time go slow up the Thames?” I asked. “I’ll go, but don’t rush me.”

  I wanted a big stretch-out; I wanted the day to drag. I wanted to be with Daphne for a long, long time.

  “Let’s take a look at Big Ben,” I said. “A clock that big ought to have real enormous hours.”

  So we did, but I could see the minute hand moving, and I said, “Uhn-uhn, baby, that clock gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

  We went to a dock where there was a big flat steam barge with an awning and seats like park benches, and I thought I’d bust a gut when I said through the purser’s grille, “Two tickets for Maidenhead,” with Daph poking me in the ribs.

  It was Saturday, and sunny, and mobs were out on the river. The only thing that spoiled the day was uniforms—Britishers, Canadians, Australians, Poles, Czechs, Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, and far too many Yanks. The river water was dirty, but under the open sky it tried its best to be blue. The river diminished and became just a stream, narrower than the Shaushohobogen at Donkentown. It was hard to take that in, because the whole world had heard of the Thames, and a couple of my own crewmates didn’t believe, to that day, that there was a grand, wide watercourse in the U.S.A. called the Shaushohobogen.

  The barge docked, and the passengers filed ashore, and Daphne and I sat on the grass in a kind of park beside the river and watched the boating parties, some in small launches which glided silently along, propelled by storage batteries. “Petrol shortage,” Daphne explained. I thought of Marrow joy-riding in a B-17 with three nurses, and I estimated that he’d burned enough gasoline on that self-indulgent mission to keep boating parties going at Maidenhead till the war was squeezed into history books. Waste. I thought of the rows and rows of garbage cans, outside our messes on the base, full of leftover mashed potatoes and half-finished hunks of meat and jillions of slices of perfectly good white bread.

  “Hungry, Daph?”

  She gave me that melted-eye look and said, “For you.”

  For the second time in my life I lay down and put my head in Daphne’s lap, but this time I didn’t sleep. She stroked my temple and sang old music-hall songs in a furry, droopy voice.

  It is not surprising that my foremost memory of that hour—and it was an hour that I called up often for review in the subsequent weeks—was of the absolute peace of lying on my back, looking up at Daphne’s bosom and at the underside of her face as she dreamily stared out across the river, and concentrating my entire being into the few square inches of my skin that Daphne’s finger tips caressed.

  Thinking back more painstakingly, however, I realize that during that time we talked quite a lot about Marrow.

  To begin with, I said, “Daph, do you remember I told you how I lost one of my big illusions on that Lorient raid—I mean, that you can always get out of a Fort? Well, I lost another, going to Kiel the other day.”

  Daphne’s fingers seemed to hesitate; I think perhaps there was a delicate tremor in them. “What this time?” she asked.

  “That nothing can happen to Marrow’s ship. I wanted to believe it. Seemed better than having insurance to believe it. But I got shed of that idea.”

  I told her the story.

  2/

  “I’m afraid that mission didn’t do much to win the war, or to reflect credit, as your military chaps say, to our branch of arms. I don’t know, it seemed to have a deliberate plan of chaos and error about it. They got us up at two forty-five, but there was a bad ground haze, and we had two postponements, and by ten o’clock we were so sure the strike would be scrubbed that we were mentally relaxed and let down—and then they sent us off, at ten fifteen, in the wrong frame of mind.

  “There was a period of about ninety seconds on the bombing run, Daph—it was just a distillation of confusion. There was a heavy smoke screen around the target, and nobody up ahead seemed to know where the aiming point was, and a formation of twin-engine German fighters was in the act of bombing us from twenty-seven thousand feet, and about forty single-engine jobs were coming in, head on, at our level, and you could have walked on the flak. Any jerk could have told that the lead group was so far off its course that it couldn’t have bombed accurately without a three-hundred-sixty-degree turn, but it let go anyway. Listen. We later learned that not a single bomb of the five attacking groups landed within four thousand feet of the aiming point; in other words, the bomb closest to the target was four fifths of a mile away from it.

  “But let me tell you, darling, some brilliant lug in the planning section at Wing had worked out a nice little surprise for us.

  “The group going in on the target immediately ahead of us, and higher than we—they’d been loaded with a considerable quantity of five-hundred-pound clusters of incendiary bombs, and when they toggled, a lot of the clusters opened at once, and the individual incendiaries—each one was fused to splash flame on anything it touched at the instant of contact—these things floated slowly down directly in our path. Marrow really has remarkable reflexes; he saw this and he knew in a flash what had happened, and what might happen, and he took evasive action as if his finger had touched a hot stove.

  “The trouble was, some other pilots in our Group were alert, too, and they dodged, every which way, and wham! We hit prop wash.

  “The Body wung up onto her right ear, and I was sure we were going into a spin. Handown, who’d been operating the upper turret, came sprawling down out of it and somehow landed against the right-hand wall of the cockpit above my head….” I closed my eyes. It made me dizzy even to think of those moments. Being in prop wash is like being in the water in the wake of a ship; the turbulence has an elemental ferocity, and in the air only the long fang of a tornadic squall can match it. “I couldn’t have told which end was up, tail or teakettle. But Marrow righted us within seconds—only the prop wash had thrown us right into the mess of incendiaries; they were as thick as a flock of starlings.

  “I heard Marrow holler to Max Brindt to toggle, and I guess Max whacked his bomb-release handle—and that was our ship’s contribution that day to what is known as high-level precision, or pin-point, bombing. Rather large pickle barrel.

  “Anyway, I looked out the right-hand window and saw a flame going like a big match-head on the leading edge of the wing close against the nacelle of number three.

  “I rapped Buzz on the shoulder and pointed out my window.

  “By the time Marrow had stretched his neck enough to look out my side there was a nasty streak of black smoke pouring out behind the number-three engine. I had one thought: Bradd
ock. Otherwise I was blank.

  “Somehow Handown had got on his feet and was plugged in on interphone, and he growled at me, ‘Cowl flaps.’

  “But Marrow said, ‘No, wait a minute.’ He wanted to run the r.p.m. up on that engine first, to see if he could blow the fire out. At the same time, incidentally, he was pouring on the coal to catch up and hook back onto the formation, because if there’s anything lonely in this world it’s a straggler just after the bombing run. He really was on the ball. I was really impressed by his presence of mind, and Handown’s, too. I couldn’t have scratched fleas, myself, at that moment.

  “Nothing happened when Buzz ran up the engine, so he nodded to me, and I closed the cowl flaps: that’s like closing the damper on a stove. I was really just reacting to Neg’s growl. I saw Marrow close the fuel shut-off valve to number three, so as not to feed the fire. But though the smoke thinned out, it persisted.

  “My heart, Daph, it seemed to be going with a double thump: Braddock Braddock Braddock Braddock Braddock.

  “Handown said, ‘Set your fire-extinguisher selector valve.’

  “I was gazing at the smoke, you know, like somebody puzzling out the flames of a fireplace fire on a winter evening.

  “Handown kind of sang, ‘Lieutenant Bo-o-oman.’

  “At that his message about the selector got through to me, and I jumped to it, feeling like a jackass.

  “ ‘All right,’ Marrow said, ‘pull the God-damn charge.’

  “I pulled it. The fire went out. I felt as if I’d done something important, as if I’d been a resourceful fellow. Like I thought you’d be proud of me, Daph.

  “Marrow nipped this by saying—and he said it as if he’d been ordering some step of familiar routine, ‘All right, let’s feather.’

  “By this time I was fairly rational, and I moved the mixture control of number three, above the throttles, to engine-off, and I flicked a little bar like a metal light switch on the central control panel which cut three’s booster pump, and then I reached over below the bank-and-turn indicator and gave the feathering button for number three a good thorough mashing.

  “All this seems like nothing to tell, Daph, but to me it was impressive. My heart was going Brad-Brad-Brad-Brad, and what seemed like six billion switches and buttons and levers were bristling all around me—and I reached out and eased the right lever, flipped the right switch, pushed the right button. It really wasn’t bad.

  “Now that the crisis was over, the fire out, the prop standing up stiff and cutting the wind, the fog in my head finally blew away, and my mind became unbelievably quick and clear….”

  I remembered it, too, with utmost clarity: For a few minutes, as I had worked with Handown, this time on my initiative, to transfer fuel from the tank of the dead engine, no extraneous thought had intruded, and in the command centers of my mind all had been swept away in favor of action and reaction. Thanks to Marrow’s steady hand, we had held our place in the formation on three engines as rigidly as if we had been attached to the Group by struts, bolts, and rivets. When we had got down to twelve thousand, Marrow peeled off his mask, and he threw a look my way that seemed to say, “Well, you jerk, you thought we were in trouble, but I got you out of it.”

  But I was thinking, The Body could be hit. There was nothing sacrosanct about Marrow’s ship. I wanted to puke. I decided to move around a bit, so I said I was going to use the relief tube, and I got unstrapped and went back in the ship. In the radio room, Butcher Lamb was pretending there wasn’t a war, for he had his mask off and, using a clipboard and a Form One, he was writing a letter to his mother.

  “What are you thinking?” Daphne asked me.

  I was thinking, The Body was not inviolate after all. “Nothing,” I said. “I was just thinking that Marrow isn’t magic. I really guess I’d thought he was.”

  3/

  “All the same,” I said, “he’s grown in my estimation, too.”

  I told Daphne that his coolness in moments of stress, and his ability during those moments to keep track of many complex threads of action—these were truly remarkable. Whereas for me there was a dangerous gap in time, of a kind of stunned amazement, between the shock of an untoward happening and the wonderful clarity of mind and speed of reaction that finally supervened, in Buzz’s case this turnover was instantaneous; the same was apparently true for Neg Handown. I told Daph that to achieve combat efficiency I must narrow that time gap. But I realized, too, that this narrowing was not something I could accomplish as an act of will, or by autosuggestion, by repeating, as in prayer, “I’m getting braver and braver.”

  “The day after the fire,” I said, “I did get a hint of how the gap could be closed, and of course I got it from Marrow.

  “No mission was scheduled that day, but Marrow was up early, and he went to Operations and arranged to borrow a ship, Betty Grable, since ours was on the line having her dead engine hoisted out, and he rounded up our crew, and he took us up high, so we were on oxygen, and he sounded a mock alarm—fire in the number-one engine! Then he re-enacted with us everything that had happened the previous day, and he had us all rehearse, not once, but several times, exactly what to do if such a thing ever happened again. And while he was at it, he started imaginary fires in other parts of the ship, and we practiced putting them out.”

  This was the toughening process, which Buzz understood. The threat to his life was not a monolith called Danger; it was a lot of bits and pieces of trouble and potential trouble, and his secret of gaining internal strength was to recognize them, and deal with them, one by one. It had dawned on me that Marrow broke off little fragments of Danger, put them in compartments, and took them out from time to time to dust them off in his mind. He evidently mastered every possible separate minor mishap, and every possible major breakdown, too, by going over it many, many times in imagination, till his defenses were second nature. Thus there seemed to be very little about flying that was unexpected or unknown to him, and when something nasty happened, the event was not just a blank empty wall in his mind, against which cries of vague inner fear echoed; it was rather a familiar-shaped reality, it was itself, and it stirred up in his mind other realities—consequences, remedies, preventions, counter-measures.

  I talked about all these things with Daphne, but I realized something else, too, and this I did not discuss with her—that in our kind of warfare one had to have an almost infinite capacity for toughness. At the beginning we had had an amazingly efficient substitute for strength—ignorance. On our early missions we reacted well to danger because we couldn’t see it. But now, as we were learning how to atomize danger and master its fragments, we were also learning, with giddying rapidity, that there were ever new pieces of peril to be overcome: experience brought both the attrition of danger and its expansion. The race between these two was a race for our lives, and, I must say, Marrow’s intuitive grasp of the way to grow tough was a help to me—something that, ironically, helped me in the end to outlast even him.

  4/

  I began talking then about our all too frequent inaccuracies, gross errors, what they must have meant twenty-odd thousand feet below us, when our bombs, intended for some visceral center of enemy industry, landed instead in housing. I guess I still had Daph’s poor father on the edge of my mind, and all the boarded-up windows and shells of homes we’d seen on our bus ride that morning. I came right out and said I was getting scrupulous about killing people. When it was Germans it was bad enough; with Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, it was even worse. I said I’d been brought up with moderate middle-class strictness, nothing exceptional, for my people were nice but not so nice as to be nasty—and I had had what had seemed to me a more or less average social self, I’d had a sense of decency, much like that of many of our officers and enlisted men upon the inception of their military lives. In the service, in the face of the standardized debasement of all values that went with an army existence, where toughness a
nd self-centered amorality were the popular things, and consideration for others and any form of propriety were considered chicken s—, I had rather easily given up a great deal of what came under the general heading of square behavior, and I took for granted and, along with my associates, indulged freely in obscene language, drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and a certain ruthlessness in looking out for one’s own comforts. But there were some taboos—and killing was foremost among them—that were harder to shake, even under the persuasion of a good cause. With my comrades, I could live and let live; it was not so easy, with my enemies, to live and let die. I hadn’t been truly persuaded, before I’d got into the fight, that the Germans were a threat to my life or my way of life; I’d heard a lot of talk about the threat, and I’d read about it in the papers, but none of that had been real to me, and it still was not—even after touring the wreckage of London that morning. I tried to express some of this to Daphne.

  “You’re lucky,” Daphne said. She had begun again the gentle movements of her hand across my face, and I guess that for a minute I took this massage, as I had taken so many dull, badly organized lectures of indoctrination in the Air Force, to be a deliberate lulling of my qualms, for Daphne, being English, and having lost a father and a lover to the Germans, had a vested urge to keep me in fighting trim.

  “How come ‘lucky’?” I truculently said.

  “You’re not like some of the others,” she said.

  All of a sudden I wanted to make a little argument. “What the hell do you mean by that?” I asked.

  “For some of them war’s a license,” she said.

  “Like a hunting license?” I said, meaning to be ironic.

  But she said, “Exactly. Makes what they want to do legal and even respectable.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Oh, I know them,” she said. “I made the mistake of falling in love with one of them.” At that she stopped rubbing my head.