The War Lover

by John Hersey

  19/

  The bus from Cambridge stopped across the way from Barclay’s Bank, in a square, at the center of which a stone horse trough encircled a well. I held my ground, and Daph ran across the cobbled street and stood in front of me, with her head on one side.

  I said, “Mind walking?”

  She said, “Not with you. Never.”

  “Might have to run a bit,” I said.

  “All right, darling,” she said. “Let’s hurry.”

  We got to Stanley Crescent pretty fast, and big Mrs. Porlock took one look at my Daph and nodded her head at me, in approval. She said she’d been expecting us. I liked her. She fixed us a pot of tea and brought it up to the room and said, using a minimum number of words, that she had to visit an ailing friend and would be gone until six o’clock and hoped we wouldn’t mind an empty house. Slight smile gripping her dry lips. “She’s a lamb,” Daphne said after she had left. I said I was sorry the room wasn’t fancier, and I started to tell Daph about Mrs. Porlock’s husband and sons, but halfway through the catalogue of their deaths I found myself in Daphne’s arms.

  Archie and Willie Porlock, rest their souls, had slept alive in lumpy beds; we sampled both that afternoon, and we found that we were deeply, joyfully, unreservedly given to each other. In quiet interludes we laughed hard over nothings. I had never in my life been so free, so proud, so quick. Daphne was offering me a woman’s innermost gift: identification. She seemed to renounce all former convictions and poses and quite sincerely to take on, as hers, my opinions, my prejudices, even many of my mannerisms and turns of speech. All this was profoundly flattering to me, for it gave me a sense of my own worth that I hadn’t had before.

  We had only to touch, finger tip to finger tip, for us both to be consumed with our need for each other.

  “Why did you let me make love to you that first night?” I asked, because it seemed that a single kiss now gave more reward than that whole first importunate grabbing had given.

  Daphne ran a finger, at her own risk, down my nose, over my lips, and back and forth across my chin. “Because,” she said, “I’m the sort who finds it hard to give up today’s pleasure for tomorrow’s much greater pleasure.” That seemed to me a sufficient answer, and a pleasing one. But she added, “Besides, I thought you might leave me.” I had just begun to revolve that in my mind when she further said, “Why should a man do anything he wants and a woman have to wait for…for…” I laughed, because her feminism was so weak. She laughed, too, but perhaps, in the outcome, something about this was to cause her pain and me bewilderment. Giving too much of herself to me had to lead to her trying to save some of herself, I guess.

  I tried to tell Daphne of my new feeling about flak. “I want to live,” I said, holding her close to me. But as I said that, I knew that it was not as simple as that; all my crewmates shared my feeling about flak, but they didn’t share Daphne, my particular reason for loving life. I realized that our new attitude toward anti-aircraft fire must have been part of our growing up together in combat; we were wiser in the lore of survival—wiser, perhaps, in knowing that survival in aerial combat was largely out of our hands.

  These thoughts got me started pouring stuff out to Daphne about some of my crewmates. I found myself unable to say enough in Neg Handown’s praise, for this thirty-six-year-old boy, who behaved so peculiarly in London, was in the air as substantial and immovable as the Dover cliffs we loved so much to see on coming home from danger. During the previous day’s mission Neg’s massive solidity had really come to the front. Max Brindt had talked so much in early days about being hit by flak (Max, who delighted so in hitting with bombs) that we had all come to believe that such a thing might happen—all of us save Handown, who just seemed to go about his business. How he loved his small corner of the plane! He treated his guns, his delicate automatic gunsight, and his complicated turret as he might have treated children of his own. His preflight inspections of his gear were models of meticulousness; on missions his guns ran like sewing machines, and he kept checking the harmonization of his sight, and he constantly moved his turret to keep the hydraulic fluid warm and so have a lively turret. He had great stamina and a burning sense of responsibility, and it was he who called in by far the greatest number of enemy fighters first, many of them far outside his sector of search. And in the midst of our fear of the flak on the way to St. Nazaire he had struck in on interphone singing, “There’ll be no promotion this side of the ocean.” I had shut him up, but his steady, firm voice had bucked up my courage.

  By contrast Farr was getting more and more sour. Though he had often said he liked the open waist window because firing through it was like shooting skeet, he had now shifted his unending torrent of complaint to the poor provision of armor plate for waist gunners. Whereas most men managed to utter their gripes and then master their feelings, Farr went on and on, gnawing his bitter bones, until at last he concluded he was being discriminated against, and he began to fume about grocery clerks who’d become ninety-day wonders in order to push him around. “I’d like to stand some of those so-called officers up against a wall and plug ’em.” Farr was perfect firing-squad material.

  Yet Marrow lumped all the enlisted crewmen, Handown as well as Farr, together for condemnation, not only in his crazy tirades against sergeants but also in his more reasoned talk. The career gunners, he said, were under-educated, and anyway, as infants they hadn’t been fed enough cod-liver oil, or whatever it was that gave you the I.Q. to tell your ass from your ear. The only thinking they did was to figure out how to goof off, and the only reason they looked ahead was to see whether they could get out of a stint. “Boman,” he said, as if it were a compliment, “I could make you a better gunner than any man on my ship.”

  Not our ship. “My” ship.

  Yes, I see now that I was getting riled, that sunny afternoon in the squalid room of dead brothers with my only known love, about my pilot, Marrow. Daphne listened to me, in her quiet way, still and deep as that pool under the osiers along the road. She did not comment then, but she silently stored up, to be able to give it to me some day, her treasure of understanding.

  20/

  During the inactivity of the first days of June, some of the more enterprising combat crews, including our own, inspired perhaps by the beefed-up YB-40s, designed and built gun-mounts for twin instead of single fifty-caliber machine guns at the waist-window positions. Farr and Brangnani had all but finished installing their new mounts when, on Memorial Day, an order came down from Wing ordering all such twin-fifties removed. Our crews were enraged. Wing, as usual, gave no reason for the command. Perhaps they thought we’d overload our planes and slow them down. Anyway, Marrow ran around trumpeting to everyone in sight about the twin-fifties, and after a few days he had worked up enough of a storm so that Group finally put in a formal application to Wing for permission to modify the mounts. Nothing happened, and nothing happened.

  21/

  I was lying on my sack after lunch, one Tuesday, bored silly, reading a funny piece in a copy of Stars and Stripes that I’d scrounged from the trash drum at the end of the hut—only it wasn’t funny—about how hard it was for this jerk of a 4-F who was making $65 a week just out of high school to get home from a vacation in Florida, when Buzz came in and said, “I got to move. Let’s go for a ride.”

  I pointed out that it was drizzling.

  “So when did it ever not?” he said.

  We had had a spell of weather which made us think that someone had acted upon the standard G.I. query about the island on which we were stationed: “Why don’t they cut the God-damn thing loose and sink it?” We felt as if we were sunk. The days had gone like this: May thirty-first, cold, wet, and windy; June first, beautiful clear dawn, cloudy by eight thirty, rain by noon, wind in afternoon, stoves going by evening to drive away the chill; June second, nine separate fronts, some bearing hailstones, and more to come; June third, electrical disturbances
. And so on, day after day. We had begun to abuse Stormy Peters, as if the inclemency were his fault. By that Tuesday, June eighth, we were all three-quarters crazy. We hadn’t had a raid since what we had come to think of as Flak Day, May twenty-ninth; I hadn’t seen Daph since the thirtieth. All the excitement we’d had was one scrubbing (Caen), a visit from a Senator, and Farr getting blotto the day he was finally supposed to receive a promotion.

  “I’m on,” I said.

  Marrow had no registered bicycle of his own at that time, because he had wrecked the front wheel of one machine, by wrenching it sidewise out of a bike rack, and he hadn’t bothered to put in for another. Before we started out on our ride he hooked the best-looking wheel he could find in the racks at the Admin building.

  Off we went in a gentle rain. We stopped first at the Star in Bartleck and had a beer, and I could see that Marrow’s teeth were on edge. Old Whelan had posted a notice a couple of days before directing personnel to wear Class A uniforms when away from the base. But Buzz remembered that weeks earlier Whelan had classified cycling as an athletic sport, so this afternoon he had talked me into leaving my blouse at home and wearing a leather jacket; we were just going out for a “workout” to test the situation. In the Star Buzz developed the theme of Whelan’s insanity, and said he just wished a bloody M.P. would come in and try to start something.

  We moved on. We pedaled along the main road toward Motford Sage, and I thought with an ache in my chest about Daphne, and our sun-filled room at the Porlocks’, and our drawing together there.

  We stopped at the Cat and the Fiddle, at a country crossroads, and at the Old Abbott Inn in Motford Sage, where Daph and Buzz and I had had lunch that day, and that made me miss her all the more; and then at some other public houses in Motford Sage—the Wheat Sheaf, the Bell, the Sceptre, the Blue Anchor. We had one beer in each place, and in the Blue Anchor we had an argument about how many pubs we’d tallied. I think that I was right and Buzz was wrong. Anyway, we lost interest in setting a record and just stayed there, and we both began beefing about the missions Wing had been setting up for us. Publicity raids, Marrow said. Killing sheep, I said. Noball targets. S—ty bombing. Fighter bait. Marrow was furious at Wing, because of Wing’s having put the kibosh on the twin-fifties.

  Buzz railed at the brass for a while, then suddenly he said, “The thing I like about flying—it’s like it used to be out of doors when I was a kid, with your friends. Nobody to jump on your neck. We had the best f—ing time. I remember once we had this firecracker fight. We took big ones, double-enders, you know, bombs: they would go off on the ground and then go off in the air. We had these brick forts, and we made these slanting troughs for the double-enders, and we’d shoot ’em off and they’d go over toward the enemy fort and go off there; and the other guys were shooting at us. It was keen.” As he talked Marrow looked like a small boy.

  But then he was suddenly sore at Jughead Farr. “Stupid bastard, getting soused the day he was going to get his stripe.” Farr had complained for weeks about not having that stripe, which had been twice given and twice removed, after brawls. Took the line that the officers were just trying to keep him down. “You want to know something, Boman? I think Farr’s one of those fake tough babies that all he really wants is a swift kick in the ass. I mean he asks for it. He whines and whines till you give it to him, and then he’s like teacher’s pet.”

  After that I had one of my rare arguments with Marrow. I guess I used to figure that the easiest way to handle him was to keep the peace, give in and agree even when I inwardly disagreed. But when he got going about Senator Tamalty I just had to speak up. On Saturday, June the fifth, the Tannoy had announced in the morning that distinguished visitors were expected on the base that afternoon and that combat crews and base personnel should stand by in quarters in uniform for a parade review at about one o’clock. As always happens, the VIPs were late, and we’d killed an afternoon doing nothing by the time a cortege of black cars pulled in at Admin, and the Tannoy called us out on the double, and they formed us in a three-sided box, in the drizzle, and Whelan introduced a party of Senators and Congressmen, who were touring the battlefields, and presented “for a word or two” the Honorable Francis P. Tamalty of the U.S. Senate, who seemed to be the dean of the group. He was a real man of the gravel pits, a primitive, with bulging veins and a pronounced speech defect—a lisp which he had, so to speak, furiously crushed, so it had become what he must have felt was a manly thickening of words. He stood up before us and talked nearly as long as it took to fly to the Dutch coast. The blood of American boys was as saliva in his mouth. You can’t trust allies; have to be strong enough to stand alone. Nations, like men, had to be practical. “I know the Frenchies. I fought in their mud in the First World War.” (Later research by Kid Lynch developed the information that Private Tamalty never got east of a camp near Fayetteville, South Carolina.) Amarrcan knowhow. As it says in the book of Isaiah. Mothers by their hearth-fires. No man’s brother is as good a watcher at the gates as that man’s self.

  Self. Of course. That was what appealed to Marrow.

  Marrow had never seen such a hero. Wanted to run the patriot for President, get rid of Roosevelt, who only knew how to give things away with his eyes closed. Cripple anyhow. Everything from the waist down. When a man was paralyzed there…

  Well, I finally said my say about the Senator. Marrow blinked with amazement at my daring to speak out against both Tamalty and Marrow. At one time Buzz had the gall to say, “Shush, son, you’re surrounded by English ears.”

  And so we were. Some elderly men, laborers of some kind, with limestone faces and fingers beaten out on forges, were sitting at the next table, and they had fallen silent and were listening intently to us.

  Marrow talked louder than ever. Began to pitch in on the Frogs. Suddenly he let out a peal of laughter. Martin Foley, a pilot in our squadron, had announced that he was going to study French in one of the language classes that had been set up on the base by the Special Events Officer. “Imagine, Foley the F—up, trying to parley voo.” Marrow bellowed. The idea of trying to learn a foreign language, and French of all languages, struck Marrow as very funny.

  “He figures he stands a good chance of getting shot down over France,” I said, “and maybe getting to use his parachute.”

  “Let the sons of bitches speak English,” Marrow said with brutal force.

  “Matie.” One of the old Englishmen was tapping Marrow on the shoulder. “Do they put up classes in the King’s English at the Yank aerodrome?”

  Marrow got the point, and I saw the red rise in his face. “Your King stutters,” he said.

  “Aye,” the man said, very benign. He nodded happily, as if stuttering were quite a feat.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Marrow said. “This stuff tastes like P—.”

  “Aye,” the man said.

  “Listen, stupid,” Marrow said, turning his chair full around, “what makes you think you’d be sitting here enjoying yourself at all if the Americans hadn’t come over to fight your war for you?”

  “Henjoying meself?”

  “You’d be browning your nose on some Nazi’s bum.”

  “Never!” the old man said, and he bounced two or three times with an odd laugh that came out of him at the absurdity of the young American’s ideas.

  Suddenly there were three R.A.F. enlisted men behind Marrow’s chair. Marrow saw them out of the corner of his eye, and he turned and said to me, “Silly f—ing night raids, what the f— do they accomplish? Kill civilians, I guess.” He took a sip from his glass. “If that’s what you want to do in a war.”

  One of the R.A.F. men grasped the straight back of Marrow’s chair and gave it a single powerful shake which threw Marrow to his feet. I stood up. Marrow’s jaw was sticking out like an engraved invitation.

  “Hoy!” the old man who had been talking to Marrow now said with his face up to the R.A.F. men.


  “This cheeky bahstit,” the man who had rocked Marrow’s chair said.

  “ ’Ere, ’ere,” the old man said. “Let’s ’ave friendly language.”

  At this the three R.A.F. men turned away from Marrow and started toward the bar.

  “God-damn limey chicken s—,” Marrow said, ostensibly to me but loudly enough to be heard all the way to the bar. “Come on, Boman.”

  You could see the control in those retiring backs. Not one of the heads turned.

  As we went out of the door I heard the old fellow say to his friends, “ ’Omesick, poor miserable bloke.”

  When we got outside to the bicycle racks we found that the bike Marrow had been riding was gone.

  Forgetting altogether that he himself had swiped the machine on the base in the first place, Marrow began screaming about the sneaky British. God-damn limeys stealing an American bike. “Bunch of bloody crooks,” he shouted. He was really teed.

  He wanted to go inside and pick a fight with the three R.A.F. boys, but I managed to persuade him that it was quite unlikely that they had taken the bicycle, inasmuch as they were still in the pub.

  For a while we tried to make our way by riding each other, taking turns at the pedals and on the bar, but we were both beer-logged, and we zigzagged and fell down often. At last we came to a fish-and-chips vender’s horse-drawn van, and we ate some of his freshly cooked wares and persuaded him, a lean fox with a scarf wound round and round his neck, to drive us back to the base for two pounds—more than he could make in several days of selling fish and chips—and we put my bike in the back and rode, all three in the cab, to the clopping of an old gray’s feet. Our heads were wreathed with the acrid smell of hot deep fat. A weather front peeled back the dripping clouds, and there was an apple-green sky over a sparkling landscape.