by John Hersey
It was already nearly six o’clock. I followed the perimeter track around to the Bartleck gate and struck out along some back country roads. The sky had a silken texture, the pale color of certain off-white hollyhocks we had had in Donkentown. Warm sunlight lit the hedges and fields of crops. I was fed to the teeth with everything. I rode back and threw myself onto my spine in one of the beer-smelling leather chairs in the officers’ club and listened to Frances Langford and Ginny Sims and Connie Boswell on an American Forces Network program, and that just made me want to break up the place.
So I called Daphne at her lodgings, and I said, “Baby, you’ve got to rig up some emergency yarn so we can get together when they spring a last-minute stand-down on us.”
“I’ll think of something, Bo,” she said.
I didn’t sleep a wink that night, and they gave us a tedious Group practice mission next morning, to break in some replacements. And when we got back down there was this notice that Loony Whelan had posted. Bicycle regulations. Lights after dark. Left side of road, with traffic…And then wham! No individual to ride bicycle more than fifteen miles from the station. That put Cambridge out of bounds.
I went straight to a booth and called Daph at her office: “Listen, Daph,” I said, “first chance I get I’m going to rent a room in Motford Sage.” So she and I could have some privacy once in a while. Easy bike distance from the base. She could bus it.
“That sounds wizard, darling,” she said.
My boiler pressure was getting mighty high.
14/
Marrow came rushing into the room. Panting, he told me they’d announced a blanket invitation to officers of our Group from a certain Lady Minsdale, who had a big country place the other side of Bartleck, to come to a joint R.A.F.-U.S.A.A.F. tea party that afternoon. Marrow talked me into going with him. He said this Lady Minsdale was probably a dark-eyed nymphomaniac like lots of British noblewomen whose husbands were in the desert, and there were bound to be bevies of local female gentry to entertain the troops. There would be sherry—famous aphrodisiac used by English lady enthusiasts. I was so knocked out I went. We rode in a convoy of weapons carriers, about forty horny fliers and I with Daph on my mind. Snaking up Lady M.’s long driveway we saw a troop of the Home Guard, the sorriest collection of lopchicks and wheelchair reprieves you ever saw, out for their Thursday tactical problem, on a stalk across Lady M.’s magnificent lawns after imaginary Huns with a lot of rabbit guns and crow irons. Truly it was very touching, but our fliers laughed at the old boys and yoo-hooed as if those earnest defenders of the realm were a gaggle of high-school girls. When we got to the house it turned out that Lady M. was seventy-three, and that she had a sister sixty-nine. “That one’s the nympho, Buzz,” I said, and he gave me a sock on the upper arm. Not a single girl had been invited, just a lot of chaps from the Stirling base near Motford Sage. The two nice old duckies treated us like schoolboys. Games we had. Tug of war. Lady M. and sister Agatha sat nine limeys and nine Yanks in two rows facing each other on the polished parquet, each man with his legs spread holding the one in front of him around the belly, the lead man in each line holding one end of a mop handle, then at a cry from Agatha the two lines began to tug, the men inching and squirming and straining backwards on their behinds, grunting, yelling like wahoos. The R.A.F. won once; our team, with Marrow holding, won once. There was a treasure hunt. Then the R.A.F. fellows introduced a game called, “Are You There, Moriarty?,” played by two blind-folded men on their knees, each grasping the other by the left hand and holding in his right a rolled-up magazine for a cudgel, the purpose being to outguess the opponent’s evasive maneuvers and blam him on the head. The dear old girls shrewdly saw violence brewing, and they trotted out the tea. We snatched and gulped like wolves.
Toward the end, Lady M. stood in a chair and in a sweet, fruity voice said, “I find I have just one biscuit left. What shall I do? Which of you nice officers can tell me what to do with this one last biscuit?”
Marrow spoke up in a marvelous imitation of Old Man Whelan on his severe note. “First man,” he said, “who tells the lady what she can do with the biscuit gets thirty days in the guardhouse.”
15/
The next day Marrow was away down in the dumps. They had alerted us for a mission to the ship-building installations at Bremen, and Sully wakened us at two thirty in the morning, and we went through all the preparations, and then they scrubbed us, and of course we were sore as cats in the rain, and we went back to our sacks. In mid-afternoon they mustered all the crews over in front of the Admin building for a lecture by old Whelan—it really seemed that Marrow was right, that the Colonel was losing his mind—on security, not talking while intoxicated, not giving briefings to Piccadilly commandos, but the thing I remembered of that assembly was being conscious of Lynch, on account of the bogus crew he had set up for Stormy Peters.
At the last moment, just as the roll was about to be called, Stormy and Doc Randall and some of the S-2 boys came tumbling out of the building, all in a heap, and formed up with us a crew; their mythical plane had been named the Blue-Ass Baboon a few days before, and Lynch had gotten Chan Charles to make a drawing of a monstrous ship, half airplane, half ape, and he had had postcard-sized photographs made of the drawing and had put them up among the recognition silhouettes and drawings in various offices all over the base. A ribald folklore was growing up around the Blue-Ass Baboon, and we all knew that Lynch was the instigator of most of it. After we had been dismissed I began talking about “this Lynch character,” and Marrow cut me off really with a snarl.
16/
I rode my bike to Motford Sage and rented a room. It was easy to do. I inquired of the bartender at the Blue Anchor about rooming houses in the town, and he asked some townsmen who were having late afternoon beers, and they told me of a Mrs. Porlock, on Stanley Crescent; this turned out to be a curving street of stucco houses behind stucco walls at the edge of town, a pathetic caricature of London pretentiousness, and Mrs. P. was a fat, stoical woman who, having been cleaned out of a husband and four sons (two men drowned on the Repulse, one dead in the desert, one killed at Narvik, one missing at Dunkirk), had nothing but room and memories, and for a weekly stipend that was less than the price of a steak and French fries in Donkentown she let me have an upstairs back room, with substantial privacy, that had been shared by two of her boys—still contained their civilian working-class youths’ chattels: clothes of iron cloth, cleated soccer shoes, a box of spanners, a drawer full of marbles, cheap lead soldiers, a brass gyroscope, a wooden foot-rule, treasures of Mrs. Porlock’s heart, which she took out for me, one by one. She understood perfectly the situation. She asked me, “Will she be livin’ in constant, or intermittent?”
When I got back to the station, after dark, Marrow was tight and surly, and an alert was announced, and he said, “Come on and walk me, Boman. I got to sober up.”
We struck out along the perimeter track under a quarter moon, and Marrow said in a disgusted tone, “I want to go to that God-damn track where they’re trying to grow yellow corn.”
We walked to the station agricultural project, and we saw that in the English drizzle and mugginess the corn, ten thousand stalks of which had been transplanted out in recent days, had poorly started, and only came to our ankle bones, and was puny-stalked, and this made Marrow, a Nebraska cornland boy, absolutely furious. “Muddle-headed bastards!” he shouted, and before I could stop him he was wildly running directly down the rows, kicking and trampling the tiny stalks. He had destroyed nearly three rows’ worth of those seedlings before I could catch up and throw him down with a football tackle. “Crazy f—ing Whelan idiot,” he was shouting, and he seemed to be whimpering, as he lay on the ground, and he said once, “They should’ve known there wouldn’t be enough sun,” and another time, “What ever made them think that Bins can fly an airplane?” Poor guy. Drunk as a coot. I was sorry for him.
17/
Riding out t
o the ship in a weapons carrier on May twenty-ninth, we had a brand-new crew with us, and it might have been a college football team just before the first game of the season. The boys were chatty, eager, not sure they remembered all the plays. I thought: How innocent they are!
I was going on my ninth raid.
On the whole the crews were happy, for the briefing hadn’t been until eight thirty, and the take-off was to be at five minutes to two in the afternoon. We in The Body worked up some apprehension about flak before the take-off, discussing that day’s innovation—for our formations were to be joined that afternoon for the first time by a handful of YB-40s, Forts that had been converted from bombers to super-fighters by the addition of five extra fifty-caliber guns and some armor plate around the engines. These air destroyers were supposed to beef us up defensively. The only trouble was that their extra weight made them slow, and to keep them socked in we could only go at an indicated air speed of one hundred and fifty—and this, good old number-brained Haverstraw had remarked, would make the problem of the German anti-aircraft trackers simpler than usual. Furthermore, St. Nazaire was known as “Flak City,” for the Germans had brought more than a hundred of their famous dual-purpose eighty-eight-millimeter guns and ringed the city’s submarine installations around with them, and their crews were obviously superior gunners.
On top of all this, we saw, as we approached the initial point, that the Heinies had a JU-88 sitting up over St. Nazaire as a flak observer. On the bombing run I think every one of us on the ship, with the exception of Max, who was happily busy getting ready to “take a crap,” as he called toggling the bombs—except for him we were all frozen at our stations waiting to get ours. There were no fighters yet. After spotting the JU-88, Junior Sailen said, “They must be using a predicted barrage.” We all had flak on our minds.
The terrible thing was the enforced passivity. You could strike back against fighters, and under attack from them we shouted a lot on interphone to work together in our common defense. With flak we just had to sit there and fly through it and hope they’d miss. Before the actual bombing run we took evasive action with turns of ten degrees or so every twenty or thirty seconds; it had all been laid out in the briefing. But on the run we had to fly straight as a pool cue for ninety seconds, and that was when I felt most helpless. Neither Marrow nor I could even help fly then, because we had a gadget called Automatic Flight Control Equipment, which held you as if on railroad tracks, and on the run Max Brindt actually flew us, through his bombsight being tied up with the AFCE. There we sat, strapped down with safety belts, so a near miss wouldn’t knock us out of our seats, and waited.
Max broke our tension after he let the bombs go. You could feel the ship tremble as they vacated her belly, and Max told us they were away, and he gave the controls back to Marrow, who began to swim us all over the sky, which wouldn’t necessarily evade flak but made us feel better, and then, several seconds later, when Max saw the first bombs of the formation explode on the ground, he hollered on the interphone, with his babyish glee: “Voom! Clobbered the bastards! Voom voom voom.”
We all began to chatter then, and enemy fighters hit us, and we felt lots better.
From that day onward, through all the raids leading up to the Schweinfurt strike, I was petrified by the sight and thought of flak, which once had seemed so harmless, so beautiful. And so—I happened to learn from Daphne on the eve of the Schweinfurt raid—was my great pilot, Marrow, who told all comers that he feared no man or thing, and who was soon to be regarded, in the world’s eyes, as a hero.
18/
The following day was Memorial Day, and a Sunday, and the weather was good, but no mission was scheduled, so I called Daphne and arranged to meet her at noon in the street in front of Barclay’s Bank in Motford Sage.
That gave me plenty of time to go to a nine-o’clock service which was held out on the apron in front of the Admin block, in memory of the men who had died in our Group. Now Preacher Plate, as I have said, had been a saxophone player, and I guess he knew the power of a short musical line, and he had promised in his notice advertising the memorial service that at least it would be brief, and it certainly was, for he lined us up (a very large number of men showed), and all he did was to hold up a book and read these words:
“Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them: While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease, because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened: And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low. Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”
He lowered the book and dismissed us, and I rode off on my bike to meet Daphne, thinking of Braddock, who was dead.
Along the road I stopped for a while on a stone bridge over a stream on one of whose banks there was a thicket of gnarled osiers. These trees had often been pollarded, perhaps in order to make baskets out of their shoots; the eleven-o’clock sun was bright on the trembling narrow yellowish leaves of the new growth.
I thought, without regret or fear, that the days of my youth were far behind me. Flying was making me old.
There was a deep pool under the trees, and its water was black and still, and it mirrored the lacework of the osier’s leaves.
Hearing the words from the Bible that the padre had read, and having had in mind the young men who were dead—very young boys, some of them, who had died without having learned a single thing about people or the world—I thought: Religion is of no good to me.
My forebears were Presbyterian; my parents were what I think of as automatic church-goers. I guess they believed. Our minister in Donkentown was a prig and a bore. As soon as I was well launched into years of understanding, I gagged at the notion of predestination, perhaps because of the attitude of some members of our congregation that they were among the absolutely elected, while others in the world were not; they took baths on Saturday night and put on irresistible grace for an hour or so on Sunday morning. Some of them could be pretty un-Christian on weekdays.
I loved the language of the Bible—as literature—but religion was not much use to me.
Some of the men who patronized the Nissen hut on the base that the padre used as a chapel were doubtless devout, but most of them, I wagered, went for the purpose of lining up magic aids to survival; for them church was like tossing a pinch of spilt salt over the left shoulder.
I guess the best I could say for myself was that I had a vague sense of decency. I had tried to tell Daphne about it, a few days before, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, or where it came from.
It wasn’t a natural product of American culture, because the same culture, more or less, had produced some men, whom I intimately knew, who had none of the sense and no very great share of the thing itself: Marrow, Max Brindt, Jughead Farr—though Farr was to surprise me in time.
It was related, though, to a basic American notion, that anything that contained the spark of life should not be pushed around.
There was more to it than that. My time with Daphne had opened up in me a realization that part of what I meant by decency, or dignity, was the one aptitude, aside from higher intellection, that set men apart from animals—the greater faculty o
f self-denying love. I was for that. I doubt if I ever would have said such a thing out loud at the base, because I would have caught an unholy razz. In the face of a distinguished body of literary works to the contrary, however, I had come to think that my belief in the importance of this kind of love was widely, though secretively, shared by many of my colleagues in the military forces, and I think, indeed, that the vociferousness of the razz would have bespoken the depth, the life-saving depth, of the conviction.
This faculty was something Marrow not only did not have, but scorned. Perhaps this was why we came, in the end, to be enemies.
I grew cheerful as I pedaled on, and I waited for Daphne on the sidewalk in Motford Sage in a sunshine that seemed to soak into me.
