The War Lover

by John Hersey

  “Can we wait till the coffee’s ready?” she said.

  I went to the window and saw the back of a row of houses. The one directly opposite was made of brick with rough stone quoins down the corners; one of its chimney pots was askew. The bubbling began at last. I turned toward Daphne. She had such a pale and tired look!

  “Sugar?…Oh darling, I’m sorry. I know you take three lumps.”

  Into that word, darling, to which in our weeks we had brought such renovation, she put, I felt, her whole heart, and that heart, if I knew it, was beating exactly as fast as mine was.

  We were seated, and I scalded my lips on the first sip, and Daphne said, “Now, Bo, do you want to hear about your pilot?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE RAID

  1604–1656 hours

  1/

  Marrow had one miraculous reflex left which pulled us out of that incipient spin, but I, still bellied down over my seat with my feet in the opening of the trapdoor, was so busy trying to put together in my mind what was happening that I think I lagged by several seconds in my realization that we were not, after all, falling. I was aware of a powerful, buffeting column of frozen air shooting up past my feet like a twister of prop wash forced through a funnel, and it seemed to me that we must have developed exactly that: a funnel, with the nose of the ship opened out as the outer cone, and the narrow passageway coming up between Marrow’s seat and mine, the constriction of the trapdoor, serving as the spout; and out of the neck came this little directed hurricane at thirty-four degrees below zero. When my ears recovered from the crack of the first explosion, which like nearby thunder had been at a much higher pitch than one associated with its cause, I began to react to another unpleasant noise—a distinct sound of an engine running rough, if not altogether away. There seemed also to be sprinkles of air coming from my left, and I assumed there must be some holes in the instrument panel, but I was keeping my head down and holding on, and I had no desire to look. I was experiencing, within, a rush of feelings as swift and cold as the wind at my feet. I had been fearful before, when I had seen the Messerschmidts begin their dive at us, for it had seemed as if I knew that this pass, of all the enemy waves we had shouldered during the day, was the one that would cause us trouble, and I had been gripped by the paralyzing, numbing fear that had made my tussle with my flak suit so absurdly futile. The explosion had in an instant converted my terror to rage. It was not a noble anger at the Hun, but rather a fury of incredulity that this shame—yes, my first thought was of infamy—could be mine. I did not admit into my mind the possibility of being killed, but lying on my belly I had a picture of the boys in the hutment talking about the dope, Boman, getting himself shot down and having to spend the rest of the war in a prison camp, and I hammered with blind fury at the thought that this was happening to me. All this, of course, flickered through me in an instant, and was mixed together with my sensory reactions to our plight. It was only then that I realized, through a long habit of feeling with my body the relation of forces in flight, that we were more or less level; we were flying, not plummeting.

  I pulled myself up in my seat, and before plugging myself in, I took one look at Marrow and saw that aside from a tiny cut in his right cheek he seemed not to have been wounded. Then, with a wonderful selective speed that was the fruit of experience, I turned my eyes to the manifold-pressure gauges, and I saw that the arrow for the number-two engine was jumping around like the needle of an oscilloscope, and, not wanting this time to cut an engine without Marrow’s knowing, because on only two we would lose a lot of air speed and drop out of the formation, yet wanting to hurry because the unit was shaking enough to tear itself out of the wing, I tapped Marrow’s shoulder, pointed at the number-two engine, beyond him, with a whole mitt, and then turned the glove in a flipping motion that simulated turning off a key. Marrow shrugged. How eloquent, in its indifference, that lift of the huge shoulders was! I killed the engine, and this time, in spite of all the vibration, the prop feathered in an orderly way. Our indicated air speed dropped at once to about a hundred and thirty, which was twenty-five miles per hour slower than the formation.

  I looked out and saw that we were directly beneath our own squadron, perhaps three hundred feet down, and I had a vivid feeling of thankfulness that we had a good deal of formation, two whole task forces, in fact, to drift back through before we would be alone, straggling.

  Vivid, I say. My senses, reactions, thoughts, and emotions had developed that remarkable post-critical fleetness and intensity which I had experienced once before, on the Kiel raid, the day the plane caught fire.

  We were washing around, and Marrow, holding with bulldog jaws till the last moment to the one skill that was the essence of his narrow genius, his marvelous reactive skill as the manipulator of an aircraft, was fiddling with trim-tab wheels and throttles, to steady our line of flight. Our yawing, and the wind through the trapdoor, and the holes in the instrument panel, and Marrow’s having shrugged, and the fact that some of our instruments had gone dead—everything I could observe made me think it was inevitable that we would bail out. I refrained from buckling on my chute just out of a rather morbid curiosity, mixed with admiration, I admit, for Marrow’s smooth, automatic response to what was happening. I believe that Marrow had already broken down in every way but the one that mattered. Like a frog’s leg that will kick, or a lizard’s tail that will lash, after amputation, the essential force in Marrow—the flying touch—was holding onto its vitality, when all the rest was gone, and was keeping us aloft. I assumed, though, that we would bail out soon, and I was planning the steps—hand Marrow his chute from under his seat, pass one back to Negrocus, strap my own to my chest and click it on, right and left, and then move—when something happened that made me realize we couldn’t do that. We couldn’t leave.

  I looked down through the trapdoor, and I knew the front end was blown out, and I knew I had just come back up from the front end, and my relief, my personal, self-interested relief at getting out of the greenhouse was so strong that I really had forgotten those other two up there, from the moment of the shock, and now I saw a hand. A left hand. It groped out, and then I saw the head, Max’s, and he was dragging himself; the reaching hand and arm pulled him along, and the other arm was limp. I saw, as he moved rearward through my frame of vision, that his right leg was blown off right up to mid-thigh, pruned clean off, it appeared, though he was trailing tatters of flying clothes and was bleeding, and the furious wind made everything seem confused. He crawled into the lower level under the trapdoor. I knew we couldn’t push Max out for a jump in his condition, and we couldn’t leave him, so we couldn’t bail out.

  Right behind him came Clint, on his hands and knees, dragging his parachute, and he looked to be in one piece, and he crawled back, and slowly but methodically he took off his gloves and jettisoned the escape hatch, and he kneeled at the edge of the hole, perhaps praying, and he put his parachute on and then put his gloves back on and remained there, kneeling, looking down through the opening into the clear afternoon, with his hand on his rip cord.

  Just when he was about to go out, as I supposed, I had a sudden idea, an impulse, “Well, now, I shouldn’t let him do that.” Since the lower compartment was confined and shallow, I could reach down and touch him easily from my seat, to dissuade him from what he planned, but then I thought, “The lucky bum, getting out of this thing before it goes to pieces,” so I didn’t reach out, for a moment. It seemed he would be blown out by the wind, or slide out, because of the fluid of poor Max that was spreading and freezing. And quickly I did reach down and touch him. That was all it took. Clint gave up the idea. He didn’t even look up at me.

  But I, as I leaned down, saw Max, lying on his back, writhing, and he was still conscious, that was the worst of it, and I saw that whatever had blown his leg off had also blown his oxygen mask off, and his goggles, and his helmet; his face wasn’t th
e least bit scratched. Max was rational, and I saw him raise his left hand and, with a pathetic begging expression, point to his mouth, so there wasn’t but one thing to do, the idea of which terrified me more than anything I’d ever known, and that was, recognizing that Max was going to die of anoxia and cold before he could get down to a hospital bed with white sheets—I had lost that wonderful clarity of thought—I hadn’t listened to all those lectures you’re supposed to listen to in training—I was going to have to go down there in the wind and give him my mask. Butcher Lamb, mild Butcher Lamb, the radio bug, who liked to read Westerns on missions, had pointed my way on that the day Jug Farr passed out.

  As I started down Clint peeled his mask off, and I don’t know whether Clint had any thought that he himself might not be conscious much longer without a mask at that altitude, and I doubt whether he had any feeling that he was performing an act of truly selfless love, which he was, even when, having slipped the mask over Max’s face, he got his reward from Max—a deeply moving look of contentment, for Max, using his good hand to hold the rubber against his face, settled back like a baby with a bottle; you could see him ease down and relax.

  The only trouble was, the tube of the mask wasn’t plugged into anything. I reached a walk-around bottle down to Clint, and he hooked Max into it. Clint ripped a big piece of flying suit from what was left of Max’s pants and wrapped it and tied it, bloody as it was, around Max’s head for warmth.

  I thought of the spare mask back on the bulkhead of the lower turret compartment, and I decided to tell Butcher Lamb to bring it forward for Clint. I realized then that I wasn’t connected with the interphone system, and I pushed my headset wire into the jackbox and heard a man screaming.

  It was Junior Sailen, in the ball turret, screaming, really screaming, and a man screaming makes a horrifying sound. He was trapped in his ball turret. Knowing that we had two engines out, for he could see them from his post, and not having a parachute with him, and not being able to get out even if he had it, unless he were exploded out, which he may have expected to be, Junior had reached a pitch of helplessness that a dependent man could not bear. At times distinct messages came through his screaming, “I’m trapped…. Come help me…. Get me out,” with some of the words drawn out into held notes. Everybody who was on interphone was forced to hear him, as he had turned his jackbox to CALL, which cut through all other talk. A piece of shell had come through the plexiglass of his turret and had knocked out the electric motor that made the turret gyrate and revolve, but also another piece, or perhaps the same one, had sheared off the handle which would have enabled him to turn himself up and get out. Fortunately our ball turrets were supplied with a second, external crank for elevation, so that a man outside the turret could move it.

  Urged by the need for the mask for Clint and by Junior’s cries I skinned back, as fast as I could, through the empty bomb bay and the radio compartment, where Lamb was at his gun, to the lower turret compartment, and I found that Negrocus Handown had been way ahead of me; he had already cranked the turret into line, and he opened the hatch, and Junior almost squirted out, and the two men embraced like brothers in a myth who had been separated as children and were seeing each other again as men.

  I ran forward with the spare mask and two walk-around bottles and handed them down to Clint, who was already looking blue around the lips.

  2/

  When I was plugged in again, I asked Marrow if he was getting on all right. He didn’t answer. I thought perhaps the interphone was knocked out, so I called Prien and he did respond, though his voice sounded farther away than the tail of The Body. Then I ran a check all around, and I got a sassy answer from Farr; an echo of it from Bragnani; an absent-minded response from Lamb, who sounded as if he weren’t on this trip but were sashaying down to Florida by Eastern Air Lines; no word from Junior Sailen, who had been removed to the radio room; the usual stout and reassuring boom from Handown, who was back up in his turret; no answer, again, from Marrow; and of course I didn’t even try Clint and Max.

  For a second I wondered whether Marrow had lost the power of speech. I couldn’t get anything out of him. He just flew along, and his control was still subtle and smooth, but otherwise he was a huge, leather-clad robot. I supposed that his jackbox might have been ruptured.

  Some of our guns were firing.

  A brief glance outside the plane showed me that we had fallen back underneath part of the lead group, but we still had an umbrella. The air battle was continuing. I saw two new German Staffeln coming up, and (no credit to myself; just the astonishing persistence of the human mind in its habitual patterns of association and rambling, even during a cataclysm) I began ruminating about the efficiency of the Germans, and the obvious co-ordination of their attacks. One could suppose that they must have assembled, to meet both the Regensburg strike and ours, fighter squadrons all the way down from Jever and Oldenburg—we knew those units from our battles with them over Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg, and Kiel—and up from airports we knew in France, such as Laon, Florennes, and Eyreux, and since the planes had limited range they must have set them down for refueling along the way to us, somewhere near our expected line of flight but far ahead of us, and then got them up not only in time to meet us but also just in time to replace other squadrons who were having to retire. Such ingenuity put to the service of killing!

  These thoughts, in their dreamlike detachment from our real situation, and in their vividness that was also dreamlike, took only an instant or two.

  Then it occurred to me that we would do well to climb, to hug as closely as we could the remainder of our group, so that The Body could take maximum advantage of the formation’s firepower and not be singled out, yet, as a potential straggler, and I suggested this to Marrow on interphone. I shouted, thinking his headset might not be giving him but a shred of sound.

  No answer.

  Then I tapped his shoulder, to convey by gestures what his ears apparently could not hear, and he turned his face, and my heart froze at what I saw. Behind his goggles, which intensified the horror of the sight, I saw eyes that seemed to aim at me but that were unimaginably far away. It was like being looked at through the wrong end of binoculars, or no—because that’s a game all children have played—it was like being viewed through two infinitely distant telescopes. I hovered off Saturn; I was somewhere out in the black eternity of the universe.

  I went through with the gestures I had planned. The telescopes simply swiveled away.

  I saw then that one of the instruments on the panel in front of us that had not been shot away was the rate-of-climb indicator. It showed that we were descending, almost imperceptibly, at the rate of fifty feet per minute. With my right hand lightly on the wheel, I could feel that Marrow was trying, with all his deep-driven skill, to hold altitude. Our loss of it was not serious yet, but climbing to attain shelter from the formation was out of the question.

  3/

  I heard a faint call on the interphone, and it was for me. “Bo! Listen to me, Bo!” It was Junior Sailen’s voice. It did not even occur to me at that moment that for a sergeant gunner, and of all sergeant gunners formal Junior Sailen, to address his co-pilot by his nickname and not by his rank and surname was an act of unusual effrontery; I believe I may have felt faint relief and gratitude that Sailen had torn away a barrier between us. It was immediately evident why he had done so. Even though the interphone was fading, I could hear the pleading tone of his voice. “Can I get out? I want to jump. I have no gun, Bo. I’m no good any more.”

  I guess he was going batty sitting on a passenger seat in the radio room, doing nothing. Another guess about Junior: He had felt safe at his familiar post, locked into the ball turret, and he found rattling around in the radio room frightening.

  A thought entered my mind which caused a leap of selfish joy in my chest: Junior Sailen had called me, not Marrow; he had asked my permission to bolt.

  I looked at Marrow. He
sat leaning forward, communing with the flight column.

  Just at that moment, as it happened, Prien called in, with a hoarse shout, announcing an attack from the tail, and Marrow, though he had not responded to direct calls on the interphone in recent moments, automatically began to corkscrew The Body with the superb sinuous motions he had devised for self-defense at the height of his skill in the middle of our tour. He must have heard Prien.

  I said on interphone, “Sailen! The answer is no. Repeat: No!” Because what if the others, Bragnani, for instance, heard an able-bodied man get permission to jump?

  Junior could not (he did not want to) hear me. Far, far away I heard Junior shouting, “What? What, Lieutenant? What?” Yet perhaps he had understood me, after all, because now he called me Lieutenant, and, in any case, he stayed aboard, for whatever reason.

  I called Butcher Lamb and tried to tell him the interphone was fading.

  Butch heard me, I realized (some time later) when the interphone came in loud and clear; he must have left his gun and gone down into the radio room and—I can visualize him—begun checking out possible causes of trouble in the systematic, step-by-step way of the born radio ham, concentrating on his work so as to shut out all the rest of the world.

  4/

  Right after calling Lamb—I suppose not more than four or five minutes, at most, had passed since our nose had been opened—I began to worry about Max Brindt. I leaned over and saw through the trapdoor that Haverstraw was not doing anything about Max. Clint was sitting by the big opening of the main hatchway, looking downward in a brooding way, and Max was still conscious, and for a moment the stump was exposed to sight there in that wind, the blood still spurting and coagulating and freezing on him and all over the deck, and I could see that I was going to have to do the most distasteful piece of work I had ever done in my life. I got up and unclipped the first-aid kit from the wiring-diagram box on the back of my seat and started down.