The War Lover

by John Hersey

  I stood up for Marrow: said he wasn’t like that.

  26/

  Doc Randall, his huge hands flailing, conducted a class on venereal diseases. They had scrubbed Le Mans in the morning, and now in the afternoon they had assembled all the officers in the Number One Mess. Doc seemed embarrassed, and we guessed that Loony-bug Whelan had put him up to it. Doc showed us a movie on how to catch a dose. We got cheering for the microbes, as if they were the Good Guys.

  Lynch and Marrow and I walked back across “the campus,” as Lynch, after our lecture, called the living area of the base.

  Marrow said, “Any of you guys know how to dip a sheep?”

  From a farmer near Bartleck, Marrow had acquired some sheep-dip, so he could free his ever-scratching pup of vermin.

  Lynch, who seemed to know everything, instructed Buzz. “It’ll be quite an experience for both of you,” he said.

  When we got to our room Marrow took one look at his pup, really a sad apple, and said, “Watch out, fleas, here I come!”

  Lynch and I decided we were not obliged to witness the slaughter, and we went for a walk. In the clear weather the day of the Wilhelmshaven raid, a dry and sparkling turn which had promised to hold two or three days, farmers had come out with horse-drawn sickle bars and had mowed the great golden expanse of grass within the triangle of the runways, and now, as Lynch and I strolled out across the airdrome we saw men with wagons taking in the dried hay and kerchiefed women gleaning behind them. It was a warm, sunstruck hour, and shadows on the stubble were sharp and nervous, like scavenging crows and grackles.

  “Think of it,” Lynch said. “People who can’t afford to waste a few blades of grass.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Out of the blue Lynch made a prediction. “Listen,” he said, “you may not think so, but you’re going to outlast that tough guy you have for a pilot.”

  “I don’t want to outlast him,” I said. “I just want him and me to last exactly the same amount—fourteen more missions.”

  “Sure, sure,” Lynch said. Then after a moment he said, “It’s the man with imagination who suffers during a war. To imagine is to suffer. Really, it’s very painful, but you get used to it. The man without imagination takes a lot, he doesn’t even bat an eye. But when he does break, goodbye! He’s gone and you can’t salvage him.”

  I said, “That poem you read the other day, about not hating the people you fight and not loving the ones you guard—how do you get away with that stuff?”

  “Oh, that!” Lynch said. “I told Whelan that was by an Irishman, and it was about an Irish flier, and Whelan thinks everything Irish originally came from Boston and must be O.K.”

  That was why I had thought of my mother when I heard the poem. “My mother used to recite Yeats to me,” I said, and I had a flood of feeling, remembering my childhood, my brother Jim, my father in his summer mood, my mother brushing her hair.

  Lynch and I were in a turnip field beyond the end of the north-south runway, and the dirt was fragrant when we kicked it. In the woods around Pike Rilling Hall, beyond the wire fence, we could hear an argument of sparrows.

  “Why did you get into this?” I asked. I would never have dreamed of asking Marrow such a question, and even with Lynch I was afraid he might razz me to death on account of it.

  “Well,” he slowly said, “it strikes me that in this century something awful has been let loose among the so-called civilized peoples, something primitive and barbaric. I don’t say the Germans have a monopoly on this…this regression. But I figure I’m here to help put down the Nazis because right at the moment they’re the most dangerous representatives of this sort of throwback we’re liable to. If I can do my part in keeping this worst side of mankind in hand, I’ll be satisfied, whatever happens to me.”

  Lynch had spoken with such unaffected sincerity, such simplicity—very quietly, and answering as if he had given the question much thought—that I was deeply stirred by his words, but I think he was unaware of their effect on me.

  27/

  The Le Mans mission on June fifteenth was a fiasco. It was an early one, with a take-off at five fifteen, in bad weather. The field order had stipulated a climb at six hundred feet a minute—too much for the Forts carrying their maximum bomb load of three tons. Nine of our twenty-three ships that took off couldn’t find the formation in the mealy-mush sky, and they aborted. At altitude the temperature was minus fifty-five degrees Centigrade, and thick contrails formed that made formation flying dangerous. There was a solid cloud cover over the continent, and finally, when we were about ten miles inside the French coast, I heard on liaison a recall order from Wing.

  I told Marrow.

  At first he wouldn’t believe me. He had started the day with a tirade at Wing, because an answer to the Group’s request for permission to install twin-fifties had come down: Nix. Now, when he heard that we had been recalled, he took both hands off the wheel and formed fists and shook them over his head. He was apparently beyond speech with anger.

  At safe altitude Marrow ripped off his mask, and he looked very odd. I recalled at that moment an exchange that had taken place while we had loafed around on the hardstand waiting for stations time before one of our early raids. The enlisted men were discussing their pilot, who was in the ship and out of earshot. Junior Sailen, meaning to praise, said that Marrow ought to have been a fighter pilot. “Yeah,” Farr growled. “I agree. No crew.” From there on in, that June day, Marrow behaved as if he were alone at the controls of a P-47. We peeled off the formation and entered the landing circle as usual, but at the last moment, instead of swinging in and leveling off for the east-west runway, Marrow jerked us to the right out of our slow banking turn, poured on coal, and got us tearing along about fifty feet above the deck. The next thing I knew there were enormous trees flicking by on both sides, and I had just time to think that the crazy bastard was going to fly right in one of the windows of Pike Rilling Hall, and to hear Max scream on CALL, “Marrow! Have you lost your mind?,” when I saw a slate roof loom up and then one of those fancy-brick fluted Georgian chimneys go past, close enough for me to have counted the bricks. As soon as Marrow had passed the house, he whipped us into a turn that was so tight you could hear the rivets squeak, and down we charged again on the slate roof, and we flew right back between the rows of stately trees. We were well beneath the treetops. Aphrodite had no pants to p— in, but I bet something squeezed out of the stone. Whew! But Buzz wasn’t satisfied. He took a vicious pass at the tower, shouldered into the traffic pattern, and landed.

  First thing Marrow said in the interrogation, his chin jutting out like East Anglia, was, “Do I get a sortie credit from you f—ers for that one?”

  I guess the interrogating officer, our tanned friend, Merchant, hadn’t heard about The Body’s passes. Very dryly he said, “All planes that got as far as the French coast get credit for a mission in spite of the recall.”

  “Well, that’s very God-damn charitable,” Marrow said.

  28/

  Later that afternoon there was a wild hailstorm with so much white in it that a whole crowd of officers and men ran out on the line and had a snowball fight, and Marrow was among them, laughing like a schoolboy.

  But in the evening, when the sun’s lemon-yellow rays were tangent to the earth, I saw Marrow walking out toward the dispersal areas with the chaplain. His head was bent, his shoulders rounded, and from a distance he looked old.

  29/

  Daphne was already in our room at Mrs. Porlock’s when I arrived there the next Sunday morning, June the twentieth. She was sitting on the edge of the late Archie Porlock’s bed, and she was fiddling with a long bead necklace; couldn’t rush to greet me because she had half the beads unstrung and in her lap. I sat beside her and offered to help her thread them back on, but she said she could do it easier alone. As she worked she put one end of the string in her mouth, and whenever I s
aid anything, all she said was, “Mmm.” I watched, with enjoyment, the swift, dainty movements of her fingers as they handled the pieces of glass like tiny, dark, faceted grapes, bits of cherry jello, fragments of sky. Her face was so intense! No time for me.

  I moved across on Willie Porlock’s bed and set myself to entertain her—told her, of course, about Marrow’s pass at Pike Rilling Hall. Mmm. Marrow taught his dog to beg and took him in the mess hall at mealtime, and the C.O. happened in and threw the dog out. Marrow was badly hacked; acted as if his spirit had been broken. Mmm. Squadron practice flight last Wednesday. Boring. Mmm.

  Fist-fight on Friday. There were still about thirty Happy Warriors—men who had completed their tours—hanging around the station with nothing to do, and since heroes are soon forgotten, especially where there is a surfeit of them, we regarded them as a nuisance. Marrow, who believed that flying and potency were equivalent, said, “Poor guys, they’ve had their b—s cut off.” Sitting in the officers’ club one night Tex Miller, a retired co-pilot, began to rail about having seen a Negro sergeant in a pub with a blonde English girl. “They’ll try to lay a blonde ever’ time,” Tex said. Marrow let go—not because of Tex’s ideas, I thought, but just because these castrated graduate students were getting on his nerves. He said in a loud voice, “I’m sick of this Texas bull s—.”

  They wound up outside: Marrow, a cut lip; Tex, six stitches on the forehead, a shiner the color of that bed right there.

  Mmm.

  I was getting fed up with the mmm routine. Life was too short. I didn’t say so, but I thought Daphne could have fixed the God-damn wampum on her own time.

  So I stretched myself out full length on the bed of Willie Porlock, who went down with the Repulse, and I just shut my big mouth and waited. I had made the mistake of doing some very fancy daydreaming about love-making—astonishing prolongations, and modulations of gentleness and strength—that I had been going to enjoy with Daphne that day, for our relationship had been building and building; the pain of separation had been sharp but strangely sweet—sweetened by the certainty that our pleasure in reunion would be even greater than last time. But now all I was getting was this clack clack clack, mmm, nervous fiddling. I found I had a headache, just a malaise at first but gradually it grew into a real rock-crusher. It passed through my mind that I was about to have some sort of stroke. I was going to die. Humiliating. In bed with my shoes on.

  At last she got that horrible string out of her mouth.

  “Listen, Daph,” I said, “is anything the matter?”

  “No, darling,” she said, “I just fell off the roof.”

  I sat up. “You what?” I was so used to assuming that people were crazy in those days that I really wasn’t surprised or alarmed to find that Daph was, too. All that was happening, in truth, was that Daphne was talking to me in code, but I hadn’t the key; my old fiancée, Janet, had been a secretive one. I pushed out a “Hunh?”

  “My period,” she said.

  My headache vanished with one heartbeat; I felt gentle and unselfish. We found a set of checkers that had belonged to the Porlock brothers, and we began a game.

  I told Daphne about my new friend Lynch, and when I came to the part about Yeats I was revisited by powerful feelings about my childhood, and soon I was pouring out my heart about my mother and father and brother. My mother, I said, was mild and gullible. She firmly believed, and indoctrinated me with the faith, that everyone was Nice. My father did some mean things to my mother, but she insisted that he was all Heart. Two of my mother’s closest women friends were malicious, gossipy bitches, but my mother said they were True Christians. She had a simple recipe for sugar cookies; they were white, with a raisin pushed in the middle. I took the raisin out first and ate round and round the cookie’s belly button. Mother had long hair, which she brushed by the hour, holding a handmirror to reflect her profile in the mirror of her chiffonier; but I believe she was homely. She used to recite verse to me when I was a grown boy, at the stage when I was counter-rubbing the fuzz on my face in the belief that this would firm it up into shavable material. “Near to the silver Trent Sirena dwelleth….” And, “…All day the same our postures were, And we said nothing, all the day.” And she was crazy about Yeats. I used to scratch and want out (scudding cirrus, west-northwest wind, glass rising), but some of it stayed with me—not just the words and the taste, but also the emotion, the aspiration.

  She had got me onto music, too. At first, when I was too young for it, she gave me lessons herself, and during them I, monopolizing her sweet and patient attention, banged at the keyboard, whined, miscounted time, and sulked, with exuberant, really ecstatic badness. Later she sent me to a Mr. Florian, who sat beside me on the piano bench, baring his yellow irregular teeth, like kernels of mutated feed corn, as he reacted with horror to my dirty, long fingernails, and he’d go off and get some manicure scissors so I wouldn’t “chop up the keyboard,” and I was convinced that one day he would plunge the curved blades into my rib basket because I hated practicing and him so much. But I think because of those hours my mother had given me, I kept a love of the sounds of the piano, though I gave up playing myself in college. I spent much of my time with Janet listening to records. My favorites were Teddy Wilson and Jess Stacey.

  Daphne had never heard of them.

  “I’ll play them for you sometime.”

  I loved my father. He was a kind-hearted man who couldn’t help being stern with my brother and me—and mean to Mother. It was supposed to be for our own good—and hers, I guess. There was a place across the street from our house where Sheehan, the builder, had scooped out a foundation and then quit, for some reason, and Jim and I played there; he, being older, took the lead. Jim was made for engineering projects. We had assembled an array of dead light bulbs, dead Christmas-tree bulbs, dead flashlight bulbs, and dead radio tubes—together with some light bulbs which were, I’m afraid, not yet dead—and we’d built ramps and banks, and we’d broken the bulbs and stuck their screw ends in the ground, with their filaments sticking up like radio masts, and we’d arranged cigar boxes and mud shapes, and the whole thing looked like a futuristic seat of big doings. It was muddy there, and we always got dirty. One Sunday afternoon (stratus overhead, the gray overcast sky a sopped sponge ready to be squeezed by the slightest wind, a day for mistakes, sorrow) we’d played there awhile and then wandered off, and we found in Partson’s woods an abandoned, honest-to-goodness log cabin with a caved-in roof and one collapsed wall, probably some Boy Scout project but we were convinced it was a Colonial fort. We tried to repair the fallen wall, and Jim lost his balance, and a log fell on his hand and split a fingernail, and the blood was something awful, all over Jim. He cried. I gently sucked the place, to prevent fungus poisoning, a danger we had just invented, and we decided Jim had better not face Father, bloody and muddy as he was. We lay out in the woods till after dark and sneaked in by the slanting cellarway door, and Father caught us as we went up the kitchen stairs. He spanked me on the assumption I had hurt Jim, and he made us stay indoors two whole Sunday afternoons.

  Now in wartime my brother Jim had a desk job in the Navy at Key West, with a wife, baby, small house, new refrigerator on installments; a tough war. Hard time about gas rationing. Sometimes actually had to walk to the beach. Got his wife to write me letters about it. “Bastard Roosevelt,” I could hear him.

  Father smelled of tobacco and occasionally of something I once, at the age of six or so, called medicine. “I can smell the medicine in your nose,” I said, when he was kissing me good night. Maybe he was using it for medicinal purposes, but I doubt it. I could remember him best, when I was very small, on the beach at Pamonassett, to which he always walked from the summer house. Father had a floppy white cotton hat, like the one President Hoover wore fishing, and he took me by the hand, and we strolled along the lip of the tide, and he let me run around him like a sandpiper, and I believed that he was truly happy in my c
ompany, and whether he was or not, all that mattered was the belief….

  I guess that talking on like this was the only way I could find of telling Daphne about that obscure sense of decency.

  We played several games of checkers, and Daphne went out of her way to let me win. We were closer than we had ever been, and more peaceful. This was surely the opposite, the ultimate opposite, of war.

  “It’s almost as if we were married,” Daphne said at one point.

  Only long afterwards, looking back, could I realize the intensity, the yearning, the beseeching appeal in that remark which seemed so casual and so apt at the time.

  In wartime all the settled ways of peace seemed make-believe. Had I given the matter serious thought I would probably have told myself that a man whose daily concern was death could not think of life—of giving life, making life—in serious, responsible terms. And I lacked the understanding then to realize that for Daphne, nothing else could be serious. Had I possessed that understanding, I would not have been taken aback, and nearly crushed, by what Daphne chose to do, in the end, with Marrow.

  30/

  On June twenty-second they sent us to Hüls. The raid provided a serious setback to the Group’s morale. The enemy aircraft seemed to concentrate on our formations, and after the initial point there was a foul combination of flak—both a curtain barrage and continuous following fire—and altogether the Germans shot down four of our planes, Pizza Pie, Lucky Lulu, Miss Manookie, and Kilroy Wasn’t Here, and a fifth, Straight Flush, ditched in the Channel, and four men drowned. We, in The Body, had some special, rather tricky feelings. Before Hüls we had had Bremen, when we had thought we were finally coalesced as a crew, and the recall from Le Mans, when Marrow had taken that hair-raising run at Pike Rilling Hall. Hüls was our thirteenth mission—the halfway mark on our way to twenty-five. Haverstraw, the number boy, whose life was getting more and more routinized—he never entered the plane without his little ritual of tapping the sides of the hatch opening with his swagger stick and then kissing the skin of the ship—and who wanted everything to be orderly, was absolutely insistent that we refer to the mission as “Twelve B” and there be not so much as a whisper of the number thirteen. We could call the mission “going over the hump” if we wanted. Marrow seemed in pretty good shape, except that he kept jumping Prien, and after the mission he said to me, “You got to have a good tail gunner. That Prien’s chicken. You can tell from the sound of his voice on the interphone. Him and his stomach. He tries to give the impression he’s rugged, what you might call antagonistic, but I can tell his kind, he’s got apron strings coming out his ears. Remember how he used to joke about ships going down? Now he knows the Heinies are playing for keeps. He’s scared.” And perhaps he wasn’t the only one. Over Hüls there had been pink shell bursts of flak, apparently signaling the fighters that there would be a lull and they could take a run on us, then black bursts; a lot of us had that flakky feeling again. Our people were very depressed after that raid, for they believed, rightly or wrongly, that the Germans had had advance information of the target we were to hit. This conviction, which was bolstered by our having had a scrubbing of Hüls just the day before, swept the base like an October meadow fire.