The War Lover

by John Hersey

  Junior Sailen, with a shrillness unusual in him, said Hamburg had had enough from the R.A.F. and from us. “I don’t believe in spite bombings,” Junior cried out.

  “Aw, s—, Junior,” Farr disgustedly said, “that’s up to S-2. They know what has to be knocked out.”

  Bragnani, with his inverse way of speaking, seconded Farr by saying, “Farr, you sure are full of crap.” That meant Farr knew what he was talking about.

  Neg took Junior’s side. “What’s the use of bombing sub factories? I thought they told us we were going after German airplane factories now—synthetic rubber, oil—all that stuff old Tinhead told us.” I had never heard the enlisted men’s nickname for Murika—evidently given him on account of his metallic-looking forehead.

  I didn’t care. My skull pounded. My arms and legs felt heavy.

  We flew up through and over a six-thousand-foot layer of haze which made us seem, at altitude, nearer the earth than usual.

  This was the mission on which Max failed to fuse his bombs, and on the way to the rally point Marrow gave Max a short lecture over interphone. All he had to do on a mission was three things. Arm. Open. Toggle. Marrow really cut into Max about wanting to lose the war.

  Then I saw The House of Usher hit.

  Just after the rally point, when our formation was pulling together, I looked out and down to the right, to check up on Lynch’s plane, as I had done many times on the flight, for we were in the lead squadron, and he and Bessemer were in the first element of the low squadron, about two hundred yards from us, visible most of the time just aft of the trailing edge of our right wing but tucked out of sight under it part of the time. Although fighter opposition had not been too strong on this raid, our Group was flying last again, and this time Jerry concentrated on us, and when I turned my head I saw The House of Usher chugging along in fine shape, well back of The Body’s wing, as the formation pulled around on the turn for home. But I also saw, out of the corner of my eye, an ME-109 flick past on the right, and, looking down a second time, I distinctly saw a flash in the face of Lynch’s plane.

  Junior Sailen saw it, too. “Lieutenant Boman!” he said on interphone. “Lieutenant Lynch’s plane just took a shell or something.” It was like Junior to know, and to speak up, when a man’s friend was in trouble.

  “Keep your eye on it,” I said. “Give me a call if they fall out.”

  I couldn’t watch.

  All that interminable way home I sat there, with my throbbing temples clamped in a vise, unable to turn my head and look again at The House of Usher, depending on brief bulletins from Junior Sailen, to the effect that the ship was slipping back a bit—and I knew that once a plane straggled it was extremely vulnerable to concentrated attacks by enemy fighters—but then, no, it didn’t seem to have lost more than one engine, it was coming in and holding formation, it was erratic, would lag and then pull up, it was catching some fighter attacks, but it was still with us, it was tucked in, it was coming along.

  We lost two planes, Alamo and This’ll Slay You, over Germany, and Loony Bin ditched in the Channel, and Royal Straight split off and landed at Scolthorp, and Torch Carrier broke off for Polebrook, but The House of Usher stayed with us all the way.

  She dropped into a slot opposite us in the landing circle, and at last, just as we were banking for our approach to the field, I was able to look at her, and at that instant out came red-red flares: wounded or dead aboard, give way for an emergency landing, get the meat wagons ready.

  I said to Marrow on interphone, “Bessemer’s put up flares. Let’s get out of the way and let him land.”

  Marrow glanced at the planes in the circle. “Which ship?” he said.

  I pointed out The House of Usher.

  “He’ll take two, three minutes to come around,” Marrow said. “I’m going in.”

  Then I said something the boldness of which, flying in the face of Marrow’s mulishness and of all regulations, surprised even me. “Let me out at the end of the runway.”

  “O.K.,” Marrow said, with complete indifference.

  With an icy lump of fear in my belly, I fumblingly did my part of the work of getting down: watched the pressures and temperatures, dropped the wheels and saw the green signal light under the tachometers flash on, checked that the tail wheel was locked, made sure the cowl-flap valves were locked, and began calling the decreasing air speeds off for Marrow. I heard him cut through me to ask Junior if he was all set in the ball turret—with guns horizontal and pointing to the rear.

  “One fifty-one. One forty-nine. One forty-eight. One forty-six.”

  “All right,” Marrow said. “Flaps.”

  I lowered them, and Marrow, with gentle touches, adjusted the trim tabs. I kept giving him the speeds. I had a moment’s flickering impression of the black tire streaks at the head of the runway. I didn’t even feel us touch, but then the tail was down, and the tail wheel was bouncing. I raised the wing flaps. Our brakes were screeching. We rolled to taxiing speed, and I raised the lever on the floor to the left of my seat to unlock the tail wheel. I was already unhooking my belt. Marrow pulled off onto the taxiing strip and stopped, and I dodged down through to the forward escape hatch and dropped to the ground in the fierce wind of our four idling props. I ran out to one side, and then forward, to wave Marrow on.

  Planes were coming in, but I had lost track of which The House of Usher was. I saw the ambulances and a fire truck on the other side of the runway, and between ships, after Chug Bug turned off to follow The Body, I broke every rule in the book by tearing across the runway to join those who were waiting to help. Among them, like a monster from the outer regions, was a fire fighter in a white asbestos suit topped by a tube head with a mica window in it. The sight of him reinforced a feeling that I had of being in a dream.

  The House of Usher rolled to a stop at the extreme end of the runway, beyond the taxiing exists, and I could see she’d had bad trouble. There was one hole in the skin, near the astrodome, that you could have shoved a sheep through, and there were a couple of big holes back in the waist through which two gunners had stuck their heads; they were grinning like monkeys, and heaven knew what suffering there was inside their plane.

  I was the first aboard. I had fought for the right to enter first. I had kept saying, “A guy I take care of is on that ship.” Doc Randall was the one who let me climb up first, and he was right behind me.

  They had dragged him into the radio room. I cannot describe what vomitous horrors I saw in there, or the trail of my friend leading aft from the cockpit.

  You can re-create for yourself what I saw by reading, as I did that night, the Flight Surgeon’s diagnosis, which, out of a sorrow of the sort I know Doc Randall felt, started with the least of it:

  “1. Fracture, compound, 1st and 2nd metacarpals, left hand,

  “2. Wound, penetrating, of chest, right.

  “3. Fracture, compound, cominuted, of skull, caused by large piece of 20 mm. penetrating skull ½ in. above right orbital ridge; complete evisceration of brain.”

  It was that last which was unbearable. I thought of the Kid’s sad humor—those marvelously improbable connections this brain had made, as fast as the switchboard of a great city’s dial phone system; and of how this mind must have struggled in the dark of bedtime to understand the letter he had got from his unfaithful wife; and of its remarkable memory for verse—“Just a trick,” he’d said once. “Anyone can do it.” But how many did?

  “Let’s get this out of here,” Doc said, throwing a leather jacket over what was left of the head, and I was so shocked at his speaking of the remains of my friend Lynch as a “this,” an object, that I looked, frowning, at the doctor’s eyes, and I saw, to my surprise, a grief that challenged my own on that deep-lined face with its warts and flourishing mustache. It was clear to me, then, why the men trusted Doc Randall. A man can’t mimic accessibility.

 
“Come on, Boman, grab ahold,” Doc said. He wouldn’t let any of the men on Lynch’s crew touch the remains.

  Slowly there was growing in me a sickness—not simply nausea—of feeling that I was responsible for my friend’s death. I had meant to speak to Doc about Lynch. I should have. It was my fault, my fault, my fault. I had killed him.

  We had got the leather-hooded “this” out the main hatchway, and we started across the grass toward the ambulances. I began to tremble.

  “Not far,” Doc said. “Keep going.”

  I tried to tell the Doc I’d killed my friend, but all I could say was, “If you only knew.”

  “I know,” Doc said. “I know very well.”

  But he didn’t know. I was the only one who knew. I dropped the dead legs and ran sobbing across the open field toward my room.

  18/

  After suppertime—I ate none, stayed in the room—and after the announcement on the Tannoy of a stand-down for the next day, I was sufficiently in command of myself to go and see Doc Randall. I felt more and more guilty; I had a sensation of slipping. I had a fierce desire to tell Doc Randall what I had not done, and what I had therefore done. To kill a German from twenty-five thousand feet, with a soldier’s sanction for doing it, was one thing; to kill a friend, with reckless carelessness, as I was certain I had done, was another.

  It was still broad daylight. The station sick quarters, three Nissen huts joined by enclosed hallways, stood on a hill away from the flying line, and apart from the huts in which we lived, in a thicket of trees, which stirred now in a dry evening breeze of summertime. At the edge of the grove was a tremulous aspen, its leaves, lighter on one side than the other, turning this way and that in the last sunshine of the day with an agitation not shown by the more phlegmatic oaks and beeches, and I stopped stock still on my way and gazed at the marvelous, delicate, continuous coruscation of the one tree. It calmed me, not because I had any grave or important thoughts as I watched it, but, to the contrary, because the silently vibrating leaves seemed to drive all other pictures and motion out of my mind.

  I walked on. I could not tell the doctor, I would wait and tell Daphne.

  There were many things Doc Randall might have said to me, when he had sat me down in his office: consolations, rebukes for running away from the body, trite salutes to death and deprivation. Instead he sat and waited for me to take the initiative.

  “Who tells his family—his wife?”

  “She’ll get a telegram in due course, after the machinery grinds a bit. Maybe a week. No reason you shouldn’t write her.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then she’ll get the wire.”

  “What about—him?”

  “He’ll be buried in the American military cemetery in Cambridge, probably tomorrow. Why don’t you go?”

  I decided I would; I’d see him lowered, and I’d see Daphne and tell her I’d killed him. Doc had the papers on Lynch on his desk, and he showed me the diagnosis—in order, he said, “to put things in perspective.” Maybe he thought those factual, medical phrases would help wipe out the memory of what I’d seen in the radio room of The House of Usher, but when I came to the part about the brain I began to shake, because I’d blown Lynch’s brains out, I’d done it, I was careless, it was my fault—and I stood up to get out of there.

  “Wait a minute,” Doc said, and he went to a cabinet and got some yellow capsules out of a bottle and reached them out to me. “Take these when you turn in tonight.”

  I was more scared of pills than I was of being shot down in a Fort. “I don’t want to get hooked by those damn things.”

  Doc gave me a short lecture on sedation.

  “All three?” I said.

  “All three,” he said.

  I went to Bessemer’s room and, to my extreme annoyance, found Marrow there. What was he doing, butting in on Lynch’s affairs at this late hour? The possibility that Marrow had gone to talk with Lynch’s jerk of a pilot out of consideration for me never entered my mind—was driven from reaching it, furthermore, by what they were saying. They were arguing about what to do with Lynch’s possessions. Bessemer wanted to bundle them up and send them home; Marrow wanted to divvy them up among his friends. There was, I should say, precedent for both ways of disposing of a dead pilot’s goods, but all I could think was that property was more important to Marrow than human life. He wanted some of Lynch’s things.

  I broke out in anger at Marrow, saying, “You just want to get your filthy hands on that Swiss knife of his, don’t you? You tried to buy it from him.”

  Marrow turned a look on me I’d often seen—his eyebrows raised, his cheeks warming—when he took up some kind of challenge with a bully’s first adrenal bristling. “Why, you low-minded bastard,” he said, “I was just trying to think what would be easiest for his family. They don’t want a lot of personal crap arriving on their doorstep.”

  “How do you know what his wife wants?”

  I was sore at Lynch’s wife, and at Marrow, and at Their war, and—cruelly—at myself, myself.

  I told Bessemer about the probable trip to Cambridge the next day and asked him if he wanted to round up his crew and go, and he said he did. I said I’d check with the padre about time.

  “And what’s more,” I said to Marrow, “you’re not going. If you want to get laid in Cambridge, you can take the liberty run.”

  “Up yours,” Marrow said. “Listen, Boman, you’re behaving like a God-damn sucking crybaby. This is a man’s racket we’re in. People get killed flying airplanes in a war.”

  At that I really did regress to childhood. “You think you’re pretty tough, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Marrow said, and he stood up, and his chest seemed to swell and swell, “I do.”

  19/

  I made my contact with Preacher Plate about the next day’s plans, and I arranged, through him, to procure a square piece of fabric cut from Lynch’s parachute, which I wore from then on as a scarf.

  Then I called Daphne. I told her about Lynch’s death, and about coming up to Cambridge for the funeral, and I broke down on the telephone.

  Daphne knew me through and through. “You mustn’t blame yourself, Bo,” she said.

  I was too full of emotion just then to respond to her extraordinary understanding, and I said, “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

  We drove to Cambridge next morning in a six-by-six. Preacher Plate, who had gone on this errand many a time, rode in the cab with the driver. I sat on one of the hard benches running along the length of the back, in a dark cavern under a canvas cover, and with me were the nine men in Lynch’s crew, strangers to me, all but Bessemer, and they had obviously been more terrified than saddened by what had happened on the way back from Hamburg, so as we drove they nervously cracked bad jokes; you couldn’t blame them. My friend was laid out on the floor of the truck between the benches in a plain black box which was almost wholly covered by a big American flag.

  The cemetery appalled me by its rawness, its newness, at the edge of a city of antiquities. I thought of Lynch’s having pointed out that the great lime tree overshadowing the bulk of Pike Rilling Hall was older than the nation of the men inside the building. There were so many graves! White crosses, far more orderly than the ranks of life, marked a crowd of Lynches. Many graves were already under close-cropped grass. About a dozen new, open holes stood at one end of a row of officers’ graves, for even here the ranks had separate quarters. A compact backhoe, clattering and roaring, was digging yet another hole beyond. A crew in coveralls slid Lynch’s coffin out of the back of the six-by-six onto a sling suspended from a raised mechanical loader, and this contraption, driven by a jaunty-looking heavy-set sergeant, chugged alongside the first of the empty holes and parked there. The sergeant asked Preacher Plate if he was ready, and the padre nodded.

  “Hey, Wallyo!” the sergeant called to the man o
perating the backhoe, but the engine of the digger drowned out the shout. The sergeant put two fingers in his mouth and gave a piercing whistle, which caught the backhoe operator’s attention. “Knock off!” the sergeant shouted, waving as if to send the operator flying. The roar abruptly stopped. The padre murmured the service. Bessemer stood there with his mouth open. One of the gunners, a tall, thin guy, began crying. The coffin was still suspended over the hole from the loader, on the driver’s seat of which the sergeant sat, holding his floppy workhat in his lap, and although his face was lowered with a practiced look of reverence and grief, his eyes, barely slit, alertly scanned the faces along the rim of the hole. Preacher Plate nodded again to the sergeant. A self-starter ground, and the loader’s engine caught, and the sergeant lowered the sling, and his assistants cut it loose, and the sergeant backed away, and the engine died again. The padre bent over and picked up a handful of damp earth, and with the last words over Ambrose Lynch, speaking in tones that made one think of everlasting loneliness, sprinkled the dirt, and I could hear it hit the box. At once there was a roar of several engines, as the loader pulled away, the backhoe began digging again, and a miniature bulldozer crept up to fill the grave.

  20/

  Daphne was waiting for me in her room. I had held back my feelings at the graveyard, expecting to weep freely in the privacy of her arms, but when I saw her I was dry-eyed. I took her in my embrace and felt a strong thrust of physical desire, and I drew back. I could tell by Daphne’s eyes that she would be willing to accept whatever I felt. I think she had a secret grievance against me; she had given up a valued job for me, only to find herself left high and dry in empty rooms, in Bartleck and in Cambridge, first by my being shipped off to the rest home, and more recently by a series of raids that had taken everything out of me. At the very least, she must have been bored. Yet now all her attention, really all of it, with nothing held back for herself, was given to me.