The War Lover

by John Hersey

  From behind the baffle we heard Marrow, as he finished stumbling through his reading, slap the script down on the table.

  At the end of the session we could hear the rank crowding around Marrow and the poor semi-literate sergeant and congratulating them for the wonderful work they were doing to win the war.

  We heard Marrow say, “Where’d you hide those three aviators?”

  We came out from behind the baffle board.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Buzz said. “I got to get drunk.”

  But they weren’t going to let him off that easily. There was to be a reception for Major Marrow and the retarded sergeant in the Gondoliers’ Suite of the Savoy. The brass was eager to meet them.

  “Christ Almighty,” Marrow said, “you got more brass than this”—waving his hands at the majors, lieutenant colonels, and full colonels clustered around him—“at your headquarters?”

  They had. We met brigadier generals, major generals, and a lieutenant general. Chicken colonels were fawning around the Gondoliers’ Suite like real-life corporals. It turned out that the brass wasn’t actually dying to meet Marrow, and it certainly had no desire to touch palms with three raunchy lieutenants who smelled like damp Army blankets and happened to be named Haverstraw, Brindt, and Boman; the brass was dying to meet the bartender. This gave Marrow and the three odoriferous lieutenants plenty of time to stand in one corner of the room and get drunk.

  “Your mother sure would be proud of you,” Brindt said to Marrow.

  “My mother,” Haverstraw said, “was a religious fanatic. She used to beat the hell out of me. You little basket, whomp whomp. I want you to live by the Golden Rule, you hear me? Whomp, whomp, whomp.”

  They finally liberated us, and we went to a toney place called Manetta’s for chow, and Marrow just about paralyzed his right cheek winking at dames in fur coats.

  5/

  The light little British weapons carrier we were riding was one of several our Group had swiped or chivvied from the R.A.F. to be, more or less, mascots to our heavier American transport, and the vehicle seemed, like so many British machines, to have been put together over a period of years by a watchmaker. It ran fast and bounced to beat the band. Marrow leaned forward over the wheel, holding it, as he held that of our Fort, in his finger tips, with his pinkies lifted, as if it were a bouillon cup, and the reflected light of the headlamps and of the dashboard instruments came up like the glow of dim footlights, picking out his magnificent hulk from in front and below. When we got out into the country Buzz flew the little lorry. There was an ecstatic look on his face, and the rest of us thought, with creeping scalps, that we were on our last merry ride on this earth. The highways were blacked out; Buzz was determined to get to Pike Rilling, “in time,” he said, “to get a drink at the club and forget that s— they made me say.”

  Along the road we passed an English soldier thumbing a ride. Buzz slammed on the brakes so that Max and Clint, on the plank seats in the back, were thrown forward against the cab.

  “Let’s give the poor bastard a ride,” Marrow said.

  “Let’s ask him where he’s going,” Brindt said from the back.

  “He didn’t ask us where we’re going, did he?” Marrow said. “Tell him to hop in the back and shout when he wants to get out.”

  It was misty now, and trucks ahead of us made the fog swirl and flee and thicken, yet Buzz got up speed again and passed whatever blocked him with a rush and a long bleat of the genteel British horn.

  We passed three trucks in quick succession. Each truck seemed to spew out a cloud of roiled fog, and when we got into the worst of the opacity the first time, Buzz put his head down and looked at the dashboard, and then he jerked his head up again and said, “Christ, I went to get on instruments.”

  We skidded and nicked something, a culvert, perhaps, with a hub cap.

  I said, “Easy, fella.”

  “The ancient Greeks,” Buzz said, “used to believe in moderation in all things, that’s what they told me in school. But not me. I’m no Greek. I won’t stand for anything mediocre.”

  Caution was mediocrity.

  “I like to drive a thing with wheels,” Marrow said. “It gives you a kind of a change. Only thing I don’t like, these British cars, they put you on the co-pilot’s side.”

  The tiny engine emitted its steady, high-pitched whine, like that of an electric cake-mixer.

  “I’ve had a slew of cars,” Marrow said. “You know, I left my last car in the parking lot at Bennett the day we flew over here.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said with weary emphasis, for I’d heard this boast a dozen times.

  “The key’s in it and everything. I just drove up and got out and left the key in it and got on the plane. Hell’s bells, only cost me two hundred thirty smackers. But it sure ran smooth.”

  Vehicles were going by in the opposite direction now and were crowding us on the road. Buzz said, “Looks to me like we only got one headlight.”

  I leaned out and told him I could only see the glow of one light in the mist, on my side.

  Buzz fumbled on the floor and picked up a flashlight he must have seen earlier. “I got to get me some road,” he said. He held the lit flashlight out to his right at arm’s length, and the next car that approached gave us plenty of room. “Ah, there’s my road,” he said.

  A big brown American eight-by-eight passed us, lurching and swerving, and Buzz shouted, “Why, you son of a bitch.” The truck cut close in front of us, slowed down abruptly, let us pass, then hurtled by us again. Leap frog. This time a soldier leaned out and whooped at us as the truck passed. “It’s a shame the way some people abuse Government property,” Marrow said. The truck swayed away from us into the mist ahead.

  Less than a mile further along the road we came to a British soldier standing in the middle of the road waving a lantern. We stopped, and he said to Marrow, “If you please, sir, I ’appened on ’em ’ere. They was precisely as you see. I didn’t ’ave nothing to do wiv it. I just ’appened onto ’em, so ’elp me.”

  The open truck was on its side on the shoulder of the road. One of the two soldiers was behind the truck vomiting and gasping for breath. The other was out in front, lying still on his side, with blood trickling out of his mouth.

  The soldier who had thumbed a ride with us disappeared; I guess he figured he’d get away while he still had his life. He’d told Brindt he’d been at Tobruk.

  Soon other trucks and some cars had stopped. Marrow took charge. He felt the motionless man’s pulse and found that he was alive. “All right,” Buzz shouted. “Let’s have eight pair of hands here. This man’s back may be broken, carry him careful, that’s it, right in there, easy, all right now…”

  We asked our way to the nearest American general hospital, and found it, at last, in a big country house in a park a few miles off the main road. The conscious man cried out in pain as we drove. Marrow shouted back from the cab, “Shut up, you stupid son of a bitch, we’re getting you there as fast as we can. It’s your own f—ing fault to begin with.”

  Marrow made a report to a colonel. There was a lot of palaver about whether the hospital could admit men from a service unit, and while this was going on the unconscious man died in the back of our truck. Marrow raged at “the horse-doctors they have in this mother-f—ing sergeants’ army” as we left the hospital, and when he reached the main road he drove even faster than before. “Christ, what a waste of manpower!” he exclaimed. “You can’t be too careful in a war.”

  We reached the Bartleck gate of the airdrome in an hour and three quarters from Manetta’s. “That’s not bad time,” Marrow said, “considering the delay for those stupid jerks.”

  6/

  The first of July was a calm blue day, and we were free, and I waked up early and called Daphne before she got away to her office, and she agreed to meet me.

  She asked wha
t I wanted to do.

  “Let’s go see something old.”

  “Why old?”

  “To see that things don’t end.”

  She suggested Hampton Court, and I asked what that was, and she said it was a country house on the Thames where kings used to live; we had passed it that day on the way to Maidenhead. I didn’t remember it, but it sounded fine to me, and we met in London and went by Tube to Richmond Park, whose huge overhanging trees enclosed us in such a mysterious darkness that I began to think of Daphne as Rima; then we took a river steamer a few miles along the Thames, and I recognized the buildings when I saw them.

  We walked first in the gardens of the palace, through an orangery, and a wilderness, and a maze. The air was heavy with a scent of flowers and breathing leaves that lay like a fogbank around us. Daphne had an infected finger. She seemed preoccupied; perhaps her finger throbbed. I was still haunted by the image of her as a wild, Rima-like creature, for her cheeks were flushed and her hair seemed insubstantial.

  “You think I’m weak, don’t you?” she said.

  “On the contrary,” I said.

  “You think I’m easily influenced.”

  “I think you’re the most accommodating person I ever met.”

  “Yes, but I have a mind of my own.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.” But perhaps she did. Perhaps I should have listened more carefully. Perhaps I was drugged by the warm sunlight and the fresh smell on the air, and by Daphne’s marvelous soft look.

  “I can take a stand,” she said, and then she blurted out the story of having broken off her relationship with her R.A.F. ace, her Dugger, because he could only love himself. She said she had been powerfully attracted to him. As she talked I remembered how she had once told me not to ask her about other men, and I had an uneasy feeling she was trying now to tell me something, warn me, put me on guard, but I was lazy-minded and charmed, and I listened without thinking, until she said, “He was like your Major Marrow in many ways.”

  At that I began to feel grouchy, and I said, “Listen, you’re getting gloomy. Let’s talk about something else. I told you I didn’t want to think about endings today.”

  I clumsily tried to take her hand, having forgotten about her finger. She drew back. I felt hurt.

  But at once her agreeableness to my wishes came out, and she forced herself to be light. We went into the palace buildings. She showed herself to be mine, and I felt a wave of gratitude. She told me that Cardinal Wolsey had given the palace to Henry the Eighth, and we went through Anne Boleyn’s gateway into the Clock court and saw the colonnade and the staircase built by Christopher Wren, and in the huge hall I pictured Charles Laughton as Henry the Eighth, an obese tyrant gnawing on lambkins’ drumsticks and tossing the bones over his shoulder to a pack of great Danes.

  She hooked my arm with her good hand and pulled me against her and murmured, “My monarch! You’re my king.”

  My chest expanded. I felt the weight of the crown on my head. “Listen, baby,” I said, “we’d better get moving.”

  “Darling,” she said, and gave me another of those provocative squeezes.

  I said, “Wow-wee!” and shook my head and grinned.

  We were famished, and we had a huge tea in the garden of the Mitre. Chewing a heavy sesame cake I told Daphne that a pilot had gone up on the Le Mans mission drunk; many of us knew that he was carrying a bottle, but no one had stopped him, and his plane had been shot down. I told her that when Marrow had heard about the loss of the plane, he had said, with what seemed a lack of feeling, “That’s just tough titty. Any aviator who’ll take intoxicating liquor up in the sky just isn’t an aviator. Why, Christ, man, the sky’s intoxicating itself. What does he want?” And I told Daphne that one of our crew, Jughead Farr, often took a pint of brandy along with him in the inside pocket of his flying suit; I knew that but Marrow didn’t. Farr said it was in case of loss of blood, but I also knew that he’d taken more than one practice infusion from the bottle on missions.

  But then I said, “Don’t let me talk about flying.”

  Daph said, “But it’s your life. Can’t you see that I want to be part of your life?”

  Then without a transition Daphne was talking about her earlier relationships again. Her first deep love, she said, was for a married man. She had been less than twenty, he had been in his late thirties. He was bald. She said she had never minded his baldness, had never noticed it. He had sensitive eyes. He had courted her with tragic ferocity, and he had seemed to take his only nourishment from her growing love, yet he could not break his tie with a wife he professed to hate. His wife dominated him, and to Daphne he complained about her tyranny, yet he kept going back to it. The passion had lasted two years. Somehow the image of his painful yearning for Daphne and for freedom, and her own suffering, her uncertainties, her suspenseful absences from him, her terror of being found out—all that had provided a more profound joy for her, she knew, than the fulfillment of their love could have.

  She looked at me, as she told this story, with, at first, merely a kind of trustfulness, but as she went on, and as the stirring of her emotions brought its usual train of exuberance and quickness in her, she began to gaze at me with passionate longing, and finally she said, “With you, Bo, it’s different, it’s different.”

  With me, it seemed, she wanted the full fruition of our love, and at once I took her up on what she seemed to be saying—but my response, alas, was narrow and self-serving, and it missed her point altogether. “I’ve been thinking,” I eagerly said. “I want to get you a room in Bartleck, and you can quit your job and come and live there all the time, and we can be together constantly. I’ve got back pay just rotting”—Marrow’s phrase, I now realize, which he had uttered that day when we cycled together to Motford Sage—“just rotting until it stinks, and there’s no reason in the world why we can’t do it.”

  My accommodating Daphne said, “Ah, Bo, that would be wizard, wouldn’t it?” But there was a want of ecstasy in that answer of hers. It was a sweet accession which she pushed out by main force.

  I, however, was so taken up with the pleasantness of the prospect of being with Daphne almost every day that I managed to brush off, though I heard, the flatness of her voice giving me her consent.

  We rode down the river on a boat that was crowded with children, and their squeaking and impulsive rushes were delightful. I realized how much I had missed the presence of kids. I felt as if I hadn’t seen any for months. The world had seemed not to be renewing itself.

  7/

  On Independence Day we flew a mission to Nantes, and on the fifth I went into Bartleck and rented a room for Daphne. Being so near the base, the village was better set up than the larger town of Motford Sage with lodgings and rentals, and I found quite easily a clean, small room close under a roof, which contained a bed, a chest of drawers, and a tiny closet, in the doorway of which hung a mustard-colored curtain. I wrote Mrs. Porlock to tell her I wouldn’t need her sons’ room any more; I sent her an extra week’s rent. On the sixth Daphne quit her job, and on the eighth she came to Bartleck to live in the room, bringing with her two large suitcases of things. The rest she left in her flat in Cambridge, for which I was now to pay.

  I spent the afternoon and evening of the eighth with her in our new home. The hours of that day and night were, from my point of view, imperfect in only one way: they sped too fast.

  Being kept in this room was not (I know now) what Daphne wanted, but she made it seem her life’s desire, because it seemed to be mine.

  There came over me that afternoon, happy as I was, some precursory signs of the crisis I was to go through later in the month. These took the form of flashes of disgust—with my lot, with myself, and with my closest companions. I guess I was about to come down with a bug, a nasty short-term vomiting-and-diarrhea bug that had hit many of the fliers in the last few days, I suppose because of the
general conditions of filth and carelessness in our kitchens which had bothered clean Clint Haverstraw so long. Prien, our stomach man, had come down with the ailment first, and Marrow had said Prien was sick because he had a yellow streak as wide as a necktie along his spine, and six hours later Marrow came down with it himself, to his chagrin. But I had to tell Daphne about some other things that had thrown me.

  The Nantes mission had been a milk run, “the Fourth of July Picnic,” Marrow called it—though I was to find that his speaking of it in such off-hand terms was partly a cover-up. He was so far gone in his big-shot role as a hero that he had been positively slap-happy, on the fourth, about inspections and checks. “What the f— is a crew for, anyway?” he grandly said, as if we were his servants. I compensated for Buzz’s laxness with what was probably too strict a conscientiousness.

  I reminded Bragnani of something he was supposed to do.

  “Yes, teacher,” Brag said.

  That one walloped me. Teacher. I tried to pass it off with a crack. “A little more military courtesy here, men.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Farr.

  Now that was what you could really call hitting below the belt.

  Another thing I told Daphne: On the fifth, when Prien had begun to be sick from the bug but hadn’t yet realized what it was, he sought me out and mechanically presented, in his cold, matter-of-fact voice, a complaint that Dunk Farmer, the bartender in the officers’ club, apparently a trouble-maker, had told him, that he, Farmer, was going to get Prien’s berth in The Body because Marrow had no confidence in Prien. Prien said to me, in sentences that were like metal strongboxes, so tightly was all emotion locked away in them, “My old lady was against me flying. I was glad to come in the Army and be out of the house, but she wouldn’t sign my papers, or in other words I could’ve been a pilot myself and not take any crap off Marrow, see what I mean? I was scared at first, but I’m not any more, it’s just this God-damn gut of mine. We got a wonderful crew, I want to finish out with them, but I can’t stomach any more of this stuff from Major Marrow.” I responded to this by praising our pilot, and Prien unexpectedly endorsed my views with wooden enthusiasm, and he went off, placated, so far as I could tell.