by John Hersey
Lynch, too, had upset me. The Fourth of July Picnic had really been an outstanding attack, as reconnaissance had proved, for of the sixty-one ships that had gone over the target, the S.N.C.A. de l’Ouest aircraft factory at Nantes, eighteen had made direct hits from twenty-five thousand feet on a single building only six hundred fifty feet square—a real pickle-barrel job, for once. Yet after the raid Lynch had had nothing but beefs: Our Group had started its take-offs late, and there’d been confusion on the climb, you couldn’t tell which group was which, and our formation had been endangered by a cloud-bank over the Channel, and apparently the altimeter settings of the various groups hadn’t jibed because the high squadron of the low group and the low squadron of the high group had gotten all mishmashed together, and at the initial point the high group swung in on a collision course with the low group and had to turn off at the last moment and its bombs fell wide, and there was trouble with the VHF—and it just seemed as if he couldn’t do enough to take the steam out of the best job we’d done. At that point I was too fussed to take into account the fact that Lynch was wearing the horns that his wife had so thoughtfully sent him, and I came out of the session with a feeling that we were booting the war, just getting ourselves killed fumbling around with expensive equipment. But there was more to it than that. My friend Lynch, whose acuteness and speed I admired, and whose dominance of his pilot, Bessemer, I envied, had begun to hand out free advice to me about how to conduct myself in relation to Marrow—something that was none of his business.
Then I told Daph what was really on my mind.
On the Nantes raid we’d received a mild fighter attack over the target, and I had seen a German pilot bail out, far ahead of us, and a little above, and I had watched his yellow parachute open out, and I’d felt pronounced relief at his safety, but then I’d seen, before he had, that his chute was on fire, and then he had seen it, and he had begun clawing at his shrouds, and that was the last I had seen. The picture had given me, worse than ever, the feeling I had often experienced, of helplessness. Seeing death—on the beach at Pamonassett, or of a waxen Nelson in a make-believe ship, or in a crater near Pike Rilling—was disturbing enough; to see a live man doomed was far worse. I suffered in two ways: imagining myself him and his killer.
Daphne comforted me—how thoroughly! Just to purge myself of these accounts would have made me sounder, but she with her gift of losing herself in me, and with words, and with actions of her body, lulled my fears and doubts and made me feel all new.
I walked back to the base exulting in the knowledge that thenceforth I could be refreshed by Daphne nearly every day.
8/
At ten the next morning I learned that our whole crew had been ordered to rest homes, the officers to one, the enlisted men to another, for a week. We were to leave on July tenth.
The news threw me into a panic, and I hurried, without telling Marrow, to sick quarters, to protest the order to Doc Randall. We didn’t need rest! We were at our peak!
Doc leaned back in his swivel chair and pulled at his pipe and looked out the window. Most men, he said, couldn’t wait to get to a rest home.
This, I knew, was true. The combat crews who had gone and come back had not had to mention the element of reprieve in their stays at the rest homes; they had simply ticked off a few symbols—beds with sheets, steaks, cold beer, movies, softball games. There hadn’t even been much talk of women. Most fliers, as Doc said, couldn’t wait to go.
I began to talk about Marrow. I said he was one of the best pilots in the Group, if not the best. After fifteen missions he was at the top of his efficiency. He was a major now. He was about to get a decoration. He might be promoted any day to be squadron or even group commander, as it was obvious that Trummer wouldn’t last. How could the Doc jeopardize Marrow’s chances this way?
Doc Randall looked straight at me with those well-diggers he used for eyes and asked me if Major Marrow had sent me on this errand.
No, he hadn’t.
“I have reason to think,” Doc said, with a finality that lifted me to my feet, as if I were being dismissed, “that this would be a good time for your pilot to have a rest.”
I made to leave, but Doc said, “Wait a minute, Boman. What itches thee?”
A man can hide a lot from himself, but even I knew my real worry. I had had very bad luck in timing Daphne’s move. For her, a week alone in Bartleck, or even a week idle in Cambridge, might mean…I could not think what it might mean, but I had a feeling of dread.
“I just don’t think I need it,” I said, and then I felt such a stab of fear that I knew I needed something.
Doc Randall stared at me for a long paragraph’s worth, but then all he said was, “Major Marrow needs it. And when a first pilot goes to the flak house, his crew goes, too. That’s the way things are in this crazy Air Force.”
I guess if I could lie to Doc, he could spoof me as well. Anyway, he got me wondering why Marrow needed a rest, and what he had said allowed me to blame my bad fortune on Buzz.
I went back to our hutment and started vomiting.
That evening, with a queasy midsection, I walked out to Daph’s and told her the news. It seemed there was nothing that girl wouldn’t accept for my sake. After having given me a deeply moving gift, which even in my weakened condition I was able to appreciate, she quietly packed her bag and took a bus to Cambridge.
9/
Marrow, Brindt, Haverstraw, and I, and the officers from Torch Carrier and Ten Naughty Boys, flew next day in a bucket-seated DC-3 up to Lancashire, and by early afternoon we were installed, along with about a hundred and fifty other fliers, in what had been a luxury hotel in the seaside resort of Southport, outlooking on the Irish Sea.
We had a fine American supper at six o’clock. I was in bed at eight fifteen, and I slept until four thirty the next afternoon. That was Sunday. I had six drinks after supper and went to bed at ten and slept until Monday afternoon at two. Marrow slept longer than I.
By Tuesday I was all slept out.
I had to admit I liked it. There was nobody to tell you what to do. Every day, when I waked up, there was an earth-shaking problem, and I had to roll over on my back and grapple with it: What amusement am I going to pursue until it’s time to get some more sack time in this sack that is like the womb that Mother used to make? Ping-pong? Acey-deucy? Tennis? Movies? Radio? Books? Swim? Walk? It was hard to decide, and sometimes I had to lie on my back as much as two hours making up my mind.
On Thursday a bad thing happened.
We had had so much shut-eye that I was wakened by the complaints of a sea gull at ten o’clock in the morning. Marrow, who would never get enough sleep, was still breathing like a hippo. There were no rules about eating meals, so I decided to skip breakfast. I read a Nero Wolfe mystery from beginning to end, and then thought about the day for a while.
Marrow finally roused himself, and we went out to look for dames, and incidentally to take a swim, on the beach in front of the town promenade, and the water was cold, and the few girls we saw were made of dough that was lumpy because it was still rising, so we went back to the hotel for a big late lunch, and Marrow saw a notice that there would be a horseshoe-throwing tournament the following day, and he signed up with a flourish and talked me into a practice session with him.
I beat him three games running. I couldn’t miss. I got five ringers and seven or eight leaners.
Marrow said that he could only throw real horseshoes; these fake, rubber-covered ones that were made for men, and not horses, gave him a pain in the ass.
Later in the day I noticed he had scratched his name off the tournament list, and I, who had not signed up in the first place, felt smug, and I called Marrow on his loss of enthusiasm for that fine American test of skill, and he became cranky—and this made what happened later even worse than it would otherwise have been.
I wanted to cheer him up, so I suggested
sampling the cure at one of the baths in town; maybe the baths in Lancashire would be like those in Japan, men and women together.
This expedition, too, turned out badly. The place we chose was a grim hydropathic institution, not for laughs, where the only other customers were a few wrinkled old crocks trying to purge themselves of despair and decay. The dressing rooms were filthy; the cockroaches were as bold as sergeants.
We got out as fast as we could and went for a walk in a park where there was an observatory, and I said observatories always made me think of the helmets of Roman soldiers, and Marrow said, “Boman, you’re too educated for your own good. You’re like a limey.” I didn’t need to answer that I could, nevertheless, trounce him at horseshoes, because that was all too obviously on his mind.
We walked back to the hotel along a wide boulevard, Lord Street, where stiff-legged working people on vacation from Liverpool strolled in the late afternoon sunlight, and where there were many men in the uniforms of several nations. I remembered something Marrow had said on one of our leaves in London: “Too God-damn many foreigners on our side.”
We met Max and Clint for a drink before dinner. There was a tacit understanding among us that we would seek no new friendships in the rest home. In general, all the aviators there stayed with their own. These men, and we ourselves, had seen too many friends go down to want to make new ones to lose.
Lynch! Was Lynch all right? Would he get through this week?
In spite of our determination to keep to ourselves, we were drawn by curiosity into talking with some new arrivals from the—th Group. We were sitting in a big parlor that was full of creaking white-painted rattan furniture with soggy chintz-covered cushions.
What had been going on since last Saturday?
Two missions and two scrubbings. The newcomers thought our Group had been involved in both missions, and probably in both cancellations, too.
Say! Had we heard about Silg and Goering?
We knew, of course, that Walter Silg, one of our squadron commanders—the big, mild-mannered fellow who had tried a lowdown approach to Daph at one of the dances when she had been Pitt’s girl—had been shot down on the Hüls raid. What about Goering?
It had come over the German radio—Lord Haw-Haw—that this Silg had parachuted and been captured, one of the men said, and in prison camp he had taunted Goering, said our Forts were going to shoot down all that fat idiot’s toy planes, and Goering had taken a vow to avenge himself on Silg’s Group of Flying Fortresses.
That was us.
Had any of these fellows heard this program themselves?
No, but they knew a guy who’d heard about it from a guy who had.
Someone brought up the news of the Allied landings in Sicily, and there was not a man among us who could bring himself to say that these might help end the war; we could only gripe about the drain the new Mediterranean campaign would put on replacements and reinforcements for us.
This was getting too depressing, and I had just suggested going in for chow when one of the new arrivals said, “What do you guys think of your new C.O.?”
Very quickly Marrow said, “You mean Trummer?”
“No. No. The real throttle-jockey that just took his place. What was his name, Ed?”
“Short name,” the man addressed as Ed replied. “They say he’s a real good joe.”
“Yeah,” the first one said, “it was a short name. Kind of like Silg, really.”
“Would it,” Marrow said between his teeth, “be a name like Bins?”
“That’s it! Bins. Huh, Ed?”
Marrow got up and said to me, “Well, Boman, I guess we know now why we needed a rest,” and he walked out of the hotel and didn’t come back in until four in the morning, when he waked me up in our room. He was crazily cheerful, said he’d had it from a hoor who weighed three hundred pounds, said being on her was like swimming in Great Salt Lake. He laughed himself to sleep.
10/
I got up early next morning and kept to myself all day. I went to a small zoo they had in the town, and watched the monkeys behave like happy people, and I felt listless, apathetic, indifferent to everything that had seemed, a few days before, to matter.
Pike Rilling, finishing my tour, Daphne—all that seemed far away, unreal. I realized that I had spent surprisingly little time here in Southport thinking about Daphne. Now, when she came into my mind, I had an automatic reaction of warmth and gratitude, but it seemed to me that she was not so much part of my real life as part of what I had just characterized as “all that.” I was not in a position to choose my company and the steps of my destiny. Daphne could as easily be ordered out of my life as I out of our Group—or as Marrow out of his hopes. I did not hate those I fought, and I did not love those I guarded. I was overwhelmed by a feeling that was becoming familiar to me, one which resting did not dispel—of helplessness, of utter helplessness, like that of a pilot suspended from a burning chute.
11/
The entire personnel of the base was gathered for the presentation of decorations in a hollow square on the apron in front of the tower. On one side of the square was a cluster of Army nurses drawn around four men in wheelchairs and one lying flat on a high hospital cot on wheels. The formation as a whole was ragged, for we in the Air Force were notoriously sloppy in ceremony and drill of any kind; we were arranged by crews. I watched Marrow’s face, and he watched the nurses. A big C-54 transport, which looked fat and awkward compared with our slender Forts, chewed its way around the approach circle and came in and shot a beautiful landing, and a staff car hurried out to meet it, and pretty soon one side of our square opened its mouth and admitted our new C.O., Wheatley Bins, talking a mile a minute and chopping with his hands, and, beside him, General Eaker, and some other officers of his suite. They passed closed to us, and I saw the General’s hat with its wire ring taken out, just like a lowdown flier’s, and his pale skin, but Bins and some clean-shaven staff men were between the General and me, and my view of the great man was brief. I hated him because he represented the cold, dead hand of military authority, yet I was thrilled to be near him and craned to see him, but Bins was in the way.
I recognize now that I was sharply torn about Colonel Bins. We had been back from the rest home for a week—this was July twenty-third—and, though we had had no action except a scrubbing and a Group practice mission, we had had ample time to see that the fliers were well satisfied to have Bins as C.O. Marrow detested him, and I wanted to be loyal to my pilot, but I was drawn to Bins. He was a tall, thin man of twenty-nine, with a blood-drained face and prominent eyes over whose rolling orbs heavy lids drooped down, cutting across the gray irises just above the pupils; his dark hair was cropped short and flat on top, and his mouth, even when relaxed, curled up at the corners in what looked like a bitter smile. Wheatley Bins was an ascetic—didn’t smoke or drink and had nothing to do with women. “Whole Wheat” Bins, the boys at the bar called him. When he was off guard his face looked haunted, almost anguished, and he habitually sat hunched forward, with his arms crossed, his hands pressed against his ribs, squeezing himself, as if suffering from cold, or fear. Though curt and anti-social, he had always had a circle of close adherents—what Marrow had contemptuously called “Bins’ clique.” With his pallor and his brooding eyes he looked like a scholar, or even a poet, but among the fliers he was known to be the hottest of the hot pilots. “Bins? Why, man, I seen him do a perfect chandelle in a B-17 out at MacDill Field—like to scared me to death.”
Bins had done one fine thing in recent days. We had returned from the rest home to find the Group’s morale sour. Trummer had been a bust. The story of Silg’s taunt of Goering had spread like a virus, and the men believed it. Goering was out for us. Though Bins—the Great Granite Jaw—was too inarticulate to speak to the aviators about the worries that were galling us, he had gathered us in the briefing room one afternoon earlier in this week, and had awkw
ardly said that he felt men could fight better with their eyes open than closed, and he’d let Steve Murika loose on us with an analysis—the first I had heard in all this time of risking my life—of what we were trying to do. Steve told us that the missions we flew were not, as we might have imagined, capricious and uncoordinated but were part of a plan, then about a month old—the Combined Bomber Offensive—under which the American Forts, Liberators, and Mediums, by day, and the R.A.F., by night, were going after carefully selected targets in order to prepare for an invasion of Europe. Though we would still occasionally hit submarine installations, the primary objectives henceforth were to be German aircraft manufacture, beginning with fighters, and certain bottleneck industries, such as ball bearings, oil, synthetic rubber, and military motor transport.
At the end of Murika’s talk Whole Wheat got up and uttered one sentence, a triumph, one could see, of thought and rehearsal: “In addition to the information you have heard, gentlemen,” he said, “you will appreciate that our associates who were unfortunate in parachuting into the hands of the enemy, these associates, now incarcerated, would certainly not appreciate our inactivity at the present juncture, inasmuch as each effort, of course, it may be small, nevertheless each effort shortens their restriction.”
He fell back exhausted by the delivery of so many Latin-derivated words, which he must have considered fitting for an appeal to our emotions, and we marched out of the hall silent, calm, and rather fierce.
