The War Lover

by John Hersey

  How did he know about Daphne?

  Doc said he kept pretty close tabs on people; he’d known about my girl for a long time. “What’s more,” he said, “you’ll excuse my saying so, but I was pretty well acquainted with Pitt before he was shot down. I know about that girl. I’d say you’ve been lucky. I’d say I could wish the Pentagon would issue us medics a therapy for general use like the one you’ve had.”

  How did he get her number?

  From Marrow.

  Who’d got it, no doubt, from Haverstraw. The sly bastard! And what, if it wasn’t privileged material, had my girl said?

  “To my surprise,” Doc said, “she wept quite a lot. I hadn’t thought she was very much the crying kind. She said something very interesting. I took the liberty of asking her if she really loves you. She said she loves you more than any man she’s ever known, but apparently, she said, you don’t love her.”

  I didn’t say anything. What does an aviator say to a military doctor who tells him stuff like that?

  There was lots more. How Miss Poole had said she’d seldom been badly wrong in her estimate of a man, and she had considered me exceptionally capable of love as she understood the word. “It’s a tricky word, all right,” Doc said. And how she made allowances for the war. And how…But I was in a daze, and the next thing I knew Doc was staring at one thing after another and had begun to talk about eating in the mornings, calories, stamina, and then he came out with that crazy fable about the crow.

  I don’t know why, but I felt new when I left. I tried to call Daph, but she was out.

  15/

  They were beginning to pack the morale to us in the Air Force, and that night we had a U.S.O. show called Fun Marches On, and I swear, I thought I’d have a hernia from laughing. What a crazy life!—the agony of stomach cramps waiting to go to Schweinfurt in the morning, and stomach muscles in another kind of pain—from mirth—in the evening; and queer thoughts of death and love all day. Was I sane? Were any of us then?

  I tried to call Daph again before I went to bed, but all I got was an icy blast from Mrs. Coffin. Still out.

  Not by so much as a flicker of an eyebrow did I betray to Marrow, either that day or the next, that I knew he’d ratted on me to Doc Randall. I was hurt and amazed, but I saw no point in confronting him.

  In the morning, however, I was given one sort of vengeful satisfaction. A batch of mail came, and Marrow got a letter from an uncle, the first he had had from this uncle in more than three months. After reading it, Buzz was in a rage. “Your people at home,” he said, “they’re just like the Army, they try to do the right thing, but they tee you off.”

  I bided my time till he was cool, then I asked him what his uncle had done that made him so sore.

  “He sold my car.”

  “What car was that?”

  “The Olds. The convertible.”

  “Wasn’t that the one you left at Floyd Bennett with the key in it? Only cost two hundred and thirty bucks? That you could have lost in a crap game and not missed it?”

  “Oh, s—!” Marrow said, so taken up with his anger that he didn’t seem to realize what a house of cards was falling down. “I cabled my uncle about that right after we got over here, so he picked it up. Uncle Ben. He’s in the East all the time. So he drove the car home, the car was out home. He had no right to sell it without orders from me.”

  16/

  What happened on the mission of August twelfth showed the condition we were all in.

  One of the troubles, to begin with, was the earliness of the starting hour. Sully wakened us at one, and the briefing, for a benzol plant we’d never heard of, at Gelsenkirchen, was at one thirty.

  Out at the dispersal area, in black night, waiting for the take-off, which was scheduled for the first seepage of dawn at four o’clock, everyone was grumpy, but Marrow and Farr were particularly sour.

  The effect on Marrow of his uncle’s letter was amazing; his hurt and peevishness had not worn off, and at breakfast he had looked all squeezed, with a pinched face and rounded shoulders. He complained of having thrown a nightmare during our short sleep.

  Farr was either hung over or still drunk from the night before—if it could be called that. Nobody counted drinks at Pike Rilling; aviators were presumed, usually with justification, to know what was good for them. A strict rule of our lives was that the moment we had an alert, all drinking stopped. No one had to ram that one into us; it figured. Thumbing your nose at that rule was considered as foolish as cocking your snook at the law of gravity. But this time Farr, who in recent weeks had been drinking rather heavily, had apparently set out to prove that he was bigger than common sense, and he was snarling and bitter. Said he was God-damned if he was going to fly a night bleeding mission—that was for the Royal Bleeding Air Force.

  Marrow finally told him to hang up.

  At that Farr said, “Not you or anybody else is going to force Ronald J. Farr to fly in a airplane in the middle of the night.”

  Bragnani and others did their best to straighten out his feathers, and we managed to push him into the plane at the last minute. “All right! All right!” he shouted. “I’ll show you mother f—ers.”

  He did.

  Our base altitude that morning was unusually high, above thirty thousand, and nine old planes out of our twenty-one had to turn back because they couldn’t get that far up. Farr greeted such aborts as he saw alternately with scandalous abuse and with sarcastic congratulations. At altitude contrails were heavy.

  Farr began to babble; I decided he was getting into the brandy he always carried along.

  About half an hour before the target we began to get vicious attacks from enemy fighters, who came at us straight from the morning sun in waves abreast of as many as twelve.

  I worked at keeping myself cheered with the thought that Daphne was coming back to Bartleck that afternoon, and, with the self-delusion of a man in danger, I managed to restore to our relationship many of its earlier perfections.

  After the third wave Farr called in and said his oxygen was out of order.

  Marrow blew. “I’ve had enought out of you lily-livered sergeants,” he screamed, and he went on to dig that vein deep.

  But Farr insisted, and Bragnani seconded him—said the ball wasn’t bouncing in Farr’s gauge.

  “Get on a walk-around,” Handown—old mister practical—growled.

  “I tried it,” Farr said. “It’s my mask. Get me out of here! For sweet Christ’s sake, help me!” And he began to sound like a wall climber.

  Then he went silent.

  Bragnani burbled, way up high, like a high-school girl; you could piece it out that Farr had fainted.

  Handown was on interphone again before the rest of us. “Drag him in the radio room,” he said. The reason for this suggestion was that we’d been briefed that morning for a temperature, at altitude, of minus thirty-eight degrees (actually, we learned later, it hit minus forty-four), and in the waist compartment, with the two open windows, a man without oxygen had only seconds before he started turning blue. Not that the radio room was warm; but you at least didn’t have a direct blast of wind there.

  As soon as Farr had passed out I had begun unbuckling, but by the time I got back to the radio room quite a lot had happened, which I pieced together later:

  Bragnani had dragged Farr through the ball-turret compartment into Lamb’s room, and Butcher Lamb, seeing that Farr’s mask had frosted up, had got the madly unselfish notion of putting his own mask on Farr. In order to do this he had taken his gloves off, and he had in fact managed to remove Farr’s dead mask and get his own off and crudely applied to Farr’s head when he had begun to feel woozy. Bragnani had interfered then, trying to get the mask fitted to Farr, and Lamb, in a preliminary phase of anoxia, had gone delirious and had undertaken to knock Bragnani’s block off.

  As I entered the radio compart
ment, Farr was limp on the floor and Bragnani and Lamb were wrestling beside him. Lamb passed out. Bragnani went to work on Farr’s mask. I put my own gloves on Lamb, then found his and put them on my own hands. I plugged in my interphone jack and excitedly said to Marrow: “For Christ’s sake, dive the plane. We’ve got to get down. You got men dying back here.”

  A spare mask was stowed on the forward bulkhead of the ball-turret compartment, and while we screamed down through a perfect sky with two fighters riding our tail, and Handown and Prien steadily firing, I climbed uphill on my hands and knees on the deck, got the mask, slid down, put it on Lamb, and plugged it into a bottle.

  I remembered the dive on our first high-level practice mission—it seemed ten years before—when Prien had had his bellyache, and how Marrow had laughed all the way down.

  This time Buzz went right down to the deck and headed for home. The Jerries dropped us. Lamb had come to at about nine thousand, Farr at six. By some miracle there were no frostbitten extremities.

  I went back to my seat.

  We were headed for home. I wish I could describe the elation I felt. Far stronger than relief, it was a positive joy, such as I had not felt since swinging out of the front door of Donken Elementary, back home, on the last day of school, in my eleventh year. I remember the slap of the door, the rattle of the brass door bars, and the whoop forcing itself up out of my neck.

  Soon I noticed that everyone in the plane was in the same mood. Marrow, who had started the morning so surly, began to be chipper, and he joshed Lamb, and then I heard him do something he’d never done before—praise a crewman. Grudgingly, to be sure. “For a sergeant,” he said, “you got guts, kid, giving your mask away.” We had a deal of narrative conversation on the interphone, and Handown, who sang like a sick dog, tried a snatch from It’s Delovely.

  We’d never flown at zero altitude over Europe before, and in Holland Marrow began a sightseeing-bus routine, on your left, ladies and gents, a windmill; on your right, a nice fat Dutch blonde in wooden shoes.

  But over the Channel, where the sea was brown and the rollers broke with a hungry snapping of dirty wet white jaws, our wild mood cooled. We had to face it: This was an abortion. You could feel the shame oozing into the plane.

  By the time we landed, our feeling of disgrace had turned to anger; we were all furious at Jug Farr.

  Red Black was sitting on his tool box by the hardstand. He could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw The Body roll in. His face showed us the full horror of what we had done.

  Farr was defiant. “I told you bastards. You wouldn’t listen to a guy.”

  We had to face an interrogation. Haverstraw said to me, on the side, “I’ve had it. I want a desk job. I had a terrible time coming back today at low altitude. It works on me, always wondering where we are, whether I’m on or off in my navigation. I’m going to get grounded, I tell you, I thought I’d go off my rocker over the water. Down there in the front its different from where you are. Did you see the color it was?”

  I reminded Clint that he only had three more to go, but that was a poor line of argument for that moment, because we weren’t going to get sortie credit for this one. All our work and fear had gone to no account.

  Haverstraw put a better face on things later in the day, but my own mood worsened. I found that I was scheduled for duty that evening. When the mission got in I tried to find someone to swap with, but no one would take it. Everyone was vindictive about our abortion—seemed viciously pleased that this discredit had fallen to the loud-mouthed Marrow, who got back some of the obloquy he had so nastily thrown at fliers who had aborted on other days. And some of this vengeful unpleasantness spilled over on me. At any rate, no one would take my duty. I had no way of calling Daph, for there was no phone at all in our rooming house, so I sent her a lame British telegram.

  At about eight, as I was heading for work at the Admin block, Marrow went bouncing down the corridor of our hutment, rather sportively, it seemed to me, for a man who’d gotten a putrid razz all day, and he said he was just going to have one lousy beer at the club and then turn in, and I believed him. But he didn’t get in till two. It wasn’t till two days later that I began to suspect he had been with Daphne, my Daphne, once my only own.

  17/

  On Saturday I went to Daphne, and it was in the first moments of seeing her, as I stood in the doorway of the room and she ran to me, with her head on one side, and said I was beautiful—it was then that I began to sense the difference. That was the afternoon when we went to the exhibition cricket match at Lishton. Marrow was there, and he avoided us most of the afternoon, but once he came over and said he liked cricket, except it was slow, but you could change some of the rules and put some pezazz into it. There was something about the way Daphne happened not to look him in the eye…. Later, when we walked in the village, Daphne tenderly took my arm, but there was a difference, there surely was a difference, and I began to suspect what it was.

  And that was the night when, returning to our quarters, I shook Marrow’s shoulder and accused him of having been with Daphne, and he denied it, but I felt that he was lying.

  They sent us, late in the afternoon on Sunday, the fifteenth, to bomb a German fighter field at Poix, in France, and everything about the preparatory phases of the mission seemed to go, as Handown put it, “according to somebody else’s plan.” At ten in the morning a priority message came down from Pike Rilling Hall ordering each aircraft loaded with sixteen three-hundred-pound fragmentation bombs. The ordnance crews had these bombs partially installed when another priority message said there’d been an error, the bombs should be general-purpose. The original target message was supplemented at one fifteen by some corrections which appeared to be inaccurate, and after deducing the straight dope Group Ops and Intelligence called Wing, at two, and confirmed their guesses, only to receive still a fourth teletyped order with further conflicting data and numerous garbled co-ordinates. Not until two forty-five was the briefing information solid. Take-off had been set for four thirty. When we arrived at The Body she was still being loaded with big yellow bombs. Marrow was all on edge on account of the day’s snafu, which Curly Jonas had described to him. Our departure was postponed till five fifteen.

  The mission turned out to be a milk run, and the bombing was superb—even from my point of view, because it was directed at a runway and at fighter planes, not at human lives.

  I hated Marrow. I sat there knowing that I hated him, whether or not he had gone to Daphne, and that knowledge made me miserable, for if a self-forgetting love was to be the guiding force of my life, then it should encompass everyone I knew; certainly it should be big enough to include a man to whom I had entrusted my life so often, whom I knew so well, and who was, in so many ways, vigorous, alive, magnificent. I hated him. I would never get over hating him.

  We got back in the half-light of England’s long day-fading time, and Marrow rode in at once, leaving everything in a mess in the plane for the rest of us to straighten out. Negrocus and I agreed that the number-three engine had been running extremely roughly on the way home, and we told Red Black about it.

  In the interrogation the crew of Miss Take said they’d received fifty-caliber fire from the direction of The Body‘s right waist window. It was awfully hard for gunners intently tracking enemy planes in the heat of battle to make absolutely sure that their line of fire did not swing into the paths of friends, but this accusation, being so explicit, had a nasty ring, and Marrow hotly defended Farr. He went to bed furious.

  And he arose furious. The fliers were awakened, but he and I were not, by Sully at one forty-five. The noises of the men getting up roused me, and I got up and dressed and went to Operations and learned that The Body had been grounded for engine overhaul: a tiny fragment of flak had found a way into her number three. Being up, I went to the briefing, to pass the time, and learned that the Group was going to the Abbeville-Drucat airfield, and
I was dismayed, for this would surely be another milk run. As the briefing was being time-ticked, at about three fifteen, Marrow came in, raising the roof about being left in bed. It was interesting to me to see how quickly, and how far, he subsided when he learned that I had told Red Black to check the number-three engine, and that Red had found a fragment in it.

  Late in the morning, just before the mission was due back, I went to see Daphne. She was reading in bed when I got to the room, with her hair turned up in curlers and her face covered with grease, and she was chagrined to be seen, as it were, half fabricated, and she sent me walking in the streets for fifteen minutes while she completed the product. She was dressed, and her bed was made, and her face looked morning-proof, when I returned. I had braced myself to work into the Marrow business gradually, in an off-hand way, perhaps in mid-afternoon, but in fact I had not been there for five minutes when, sitting on the clanking bed with Daph opposite me in her straight-backed chair, demure and placid, I asked her if she had received Marrow in this our room.

  She gave me a deep valedictory look and nodded, and as her head went down she said, “But wait!”

  Wait? I stood up, and my chest like a bellows drove out one long-held word, “Why?”

  Daphne did not answer then, but went to her closet, pushed aside the cloth that hung in the doorway, and disappeared. Soon she came out with a dented percolator and a can of American coffee I had brought her, and trying to hush the clatter of metal on metal as if any undue noise might awaken the reality that was sleeping somewhere in the room, she measured out the grounds and poured in water and set the pot to heat on an electric coil. She sat in the chair again and did not speak. I felt that something had come loose in my heart. Daphne lit a cigarette.