by John Hersey
Going down through that small trapdoor was easier thought than done. We were making about a hundred and thirty miles an hour through the air, with the front end splayed out and wide open, funneling the air as if through a Venturi tube so that the blast in the trapdoor was tremendously powerful and concentrated, besides being thirty-four degrees below zero. It took all the strength I had, on top of all the courage I had, to force myself down through it. I had to ease myself past the revolting form of Max. The escape hatch on the left was open and looked very void and vacant, and a lot of the wind was being driven out through it, so the hatch opening was like the mouth of a vacuum-cleaner tube; once in a while something would pull loose and fly out through it, and you felt you might, too. The front end of the ship was pretty much as I had imagined it, with all the plexiglass gone and some of the metal bent outward, and Max’s seat and Clint’s desk and chair in a tangle, and wires flapping, and equipment all mashed and confused. And suddenly, like a blow in the chest, the thought hit me that I had no parachute.
Worst of all, there was Max, his eyes open, begging me to do something.
I tried to remember all those lectures on first aid, in large, warm auditoriums, often with a quite satisfactory and unhurt WAC modeling the slings or handing the bandage rolls to the fat, bald major who was demonstrating, on a stage, what one should do for every sort of imaginary injury. I had a moment’s flash of anger at the image of one steak eater of a medical major, because I remembered his saying that the best thing you could do for a wounded man in a plane was to leave him alone. “Cold conditions, flying clothing, harness, and limited fuselage space render the giving of effective first aid to such a man during flight a matter of extreme difficulty, and the less he is disturbed, generally, until the skilled assistance of a trained physician is available, the better.” What did that fat slob know about kneeling in a murderous gale of cutting, boreal wind on a sheet of ice made of your crewmate’s blood and seeing his eyes, looking out at you from a bundle of bloody trouser material, saying, “We’ve been through very much together, Bo, we took a walk together just the other day, so please, for the love of the God I didn’t know till a minute ago I believed in, please, please, Bo, please, please, please.” Suddenly there was a marked degree of love in the eyes, and though I had always, until this moment, considered that I despised Max and assumed that he despised me, here I was, struck to the very seat of my soul with horror and receiving messages of brotherly love from him. I believe this tender begging look increased my sense of terror by many fold, because I hated Max, I really did hate his deep aggressive drives, the love of dropping bombs that made him jump on his seat, after bombs-away, like a baby on a kiddy-car. I think he was one of them, one of the men with the taint Marrow had, a war lover—not so poisoned, maybe, as Marrow, but one of them. And his eyes were saying, “My dear Bo, my dear fellow man, my brother, sharer with me of life, do you understand what I am trying to say with my eyes?”
I began to attempt to order my thoughts. First aid. I took off one glove and crammed the glove between my knees and lifted the lid of the kit; my skin stuck to the metal, it was so cold. A small blue bandage box flew from the kit and out through the escape-hatch opening without even touching the floor. I turned with my back more to the wind and hunched way over and opened the lid again. I saw a morphine ampule. Morphine, pain, Max. Brother in life. I took the ampule out and crammed the first-aid box into a safe vee between an oxygen bottle and the wall of the plane, and I banged Haverstraw on the arm, to bring him out of a trance he seemed to be in, and he, without taking his gloves off, bared some of the leg above the stump, and I held the ampule in front of Max’s eyes, and then he looked into mine with more love than ever, and I stuck him, and Max winced at that pin prick—goodness knows how Max felt it through the torment of his leg—and I believe the pricking sensation itself gave Max relief, because he closed his eyes (which gave me immeasurable relief) and looked contented; in spite of the fact that I had not succeeded in getting much, if any, of the morphine into him, because it had seemed thickened by the cold, or, at any rate, had oozed out on his skin and had not gone in him. I put my mitt back on.
Tourniquet. My thoughts, like the pain-relieving fluid, were thickened and sluggish, on account of the very, very cold atmosphere of man’s madness with which that cavern in the war plane was invested, but at last two thoughts—bleeding, tourniquet—came slowly together, and I reached for the box, and took out materials marked for a tourniquet and saw that a loop had to be formed of the cord that was provided.
Kid Lynch came into my mind, and I guess that, at that, I had had enough of war, really enough, because I simply had to leave.
I carefully stowed the first-aid kit by the oxygen bottle and handed the tourniquet cord to Clint and made a circle with my hands to show how big it should be, and I started to go up to the flight deck. Unfortunately as I was going across above Max he dreamily opened his eyes and a look of such gentle surprise came into them, mixed still with that other look, of trusting family love, that I did something I had least expected to do. I straightened up my head, shoulders, and arms through the trapdoor, turned my head to glimpse at Marrow, who was driving woodenly along as if mushing down Broadway with nothing but a few taxis to worry about, and then I reached for my parachute, which was under my seat and on top of my flak suit, and was not stuck, and I backed down again, pulling my chute pack after me.
Max’s affectionate eyes took one look at the parachute and rolled to the left and saw Clint’s chute on his chest, and the love fled from them, as he must have concluded that the whole crew was about to bail out. He began to flutter and roll from side to side. I’ve never seen a human being who affected me more with abject fright than Max reacting to the idea that we were going to leave him, in his condition, alone in a ship gliding down the sky on automatic pilot.
I pulled my mask loose and leaned over and yanked the bloody pants material aside and shouted in Max’s ear, “Don’t worry, chum, we’re not going to leave you.”
That worked better even than the prick of the ampule needle. It seemed to me that tears of joy came into Max’s eyes.
Chum? Since when was Max Brindt my “chum”? The word was one of many commonplaces used around the base, expressive of a rough, sometimes sarcastic affection: chum, pal, friend, son, doc, bud, buddy, old man, brother. But not as between Boman and Brindt! I despised him with his “Banzai!” at the dropping of bombs. I really did not like him.
Clint had the loop made and handed it to me, and now came the job of getting it over the leg, and it was then, and only then—I’d been so shocked and braked by the whole deal, especially by the brotherly love in that man’s eyes, that I hadn’t realized it until then: that there was a shoe, with a foot in it, beating, or kicking, Max in the face, and it was his own right foot, and it was still attached to him.
I had a flash memory of Mrs. Krille, in something like seventh grade, telling us about Achilles, brave and generous warrior, slayer of Hector, who died when Paris struck with an arrow the Peleid’s one vulnerable spot, the tendon above the heel, vulnerable because his mother, dipping him in the Styx as a baby to make him wound-proof, had held him by the heel, and Mrs. Krille (I could remember of her face only the sweet mouth, the warm eyes behind shell-rimmed glass, the astonishingly long black hairs in her nostrils) saying that this tendon had an extraordinary strength. “In animals,” she said, “it is called the hamstring.”
The bone was gone, flesh and pants were mostly gone, the flying boot had been blown off the shod foot, yet a ragged, tenacious length of tendon and muscle and back-of-the-knee sinews and more muscle, a living rope, in places an inch thick, had held firm, and in the terrible wind the foot had blown back and now was banging against Max.
I hadn’t noticed it, and indeed I hoped it had just started blowing that way, and my idea was to try to keep him from realizing that his leg was cut mostly off and that his foot was striking him, so I grabbed the s
hoe and pulled it forward, and I forgot the knife in my boot with which I might have severed the tendon, and finally, being very heavy-handed, very slow, my fingers stiff, my heart and mind sick, I laboriously worked the tourniquet cord over the foot, and threaded it up the tendon.
While I was doing that, I noticed that Marrow was executing some exceedingly rough and even crude maneuvers. They seemed not like his.
I concentrated as best I could on getting the loop of the tourniquet in position, but we seemed to be bouncing as if in a front.
I felt a rage at Marrow. All this, Max’s anguish, the insane work I was doing, all this was somehow Marrow’s fault. He was the one whose natural climate was war.
Clint—having something to do was nourishing him wonderfully, and he was growing more and more alert—handed me the turning stick, and I inserted it and turned it, and the flow of blood stopped. I tucked the stick into the loop.
Then (I think because I saw a bundle of spare interphone wire stowed next to the oxygen bottles, back underneath the upper deck, beyond Max’s head, and also because we were bouncing around in such a peculiar way) I got the brainy idea of trying to make Max more secure, so Clint and I dragged him back farther and we made the intercom wire fast to the back of Max’s harness and lashed that to the foot of one of the top-turret stanchions. We had to stop and put our gloves on and whiff our oxygen every few seconds. We finally finished that absurd work. We gave Max another shot of morphine, and he seemed to be resting all right, and I was about to go back to my seat when he spoke again with his eyes—a piercing, questioning stare into mine.
I loosened my mask again and leaned down and shouted into the rags around his head, “Don’t you worry, Maxie boy, we’re going to get you back to England. England’s in sight right now.” How I wished that were true!
And the eyes, in the watery, bluish light of that recessed place, were flooded then with love, more and more of it, love of his friends, I guess, and of England, of home, of an uncertain, abstract, marvelous everything. Above the mask the eyes were so full of love that the emotion seemed intolerable, overwhelming, and then all that feeling drained out very quickly and the pupils rolled upward.
5/
As I started, empty and numbed, up to my seat, I beckoned to Clint to follow me above to the flight deck, where he could be out of the worst of the wind and could be plugged into the permanent oxygen system. He climbed up after me and went back to the radio room.
Marrow was flying very badly. He was like a beginner, over-correcting, and jolting the controls.
I sat down and hooked myself up and looked at my watch. It was four thirty-nine. We must be past Eupen. We were supposed to get P-47s at Eupen.
The Body was now definitely a straggler. The last of the formation was three quarters of a mile ahead of us and six or seven hundred feet above us, in a sea-blue sky, and there were German fighters plunging into the squadrons of Forts, but for the moment they were leaving us alone. We were having some of what Marrow would have branded in the early days as his luck. They could have sent up a Fiesler Storch, a tiny single-engined scout plane like a Piper Cub, and armed it with a twelve-gauge shotgun, or maybe a slingshot, and they could have potted us with it.
I saw no P-47s, but I thought we might as well put up a straggler’s signal just in case they were somewhere around but out of my sight, and besides, this would be something for Junior or Clint to do, and since there was a spare jackbox in the radio compartment, I called on interphone, “Haverstraw? You on there?”
The answer came back clear as a bell. Lamb must have shot the trouble, whatever it had been. Clint was on and asked what I wanted.
I told him there was a flare canister at the forward end of the ball-turret compartment; he should get out a green-green flare and fire it. There should be a pistol in a clip-rack next to the canister. He could fire it out of Butcher’s slot.
“Roger,” he said, and there was that old ironical lilt in his voice; doubtless he was delighted to have something to do.
“Wait a sec,” I said. “Do you remember what time we were supposed to get fighter support?”
“Sixteen sixteen hours,” Clint said, “same time as course change at fifty degrees thirty-eight minutes north dash oh six degrees oh three minutes east.” That number-dogged mind of his was clicking; he could have told me the number of Jenny in Minneapolis or of Peggylou in Biloxi, if I had asked, I’m sure.
Then Prien came on and said, “What’s green-green, Lieutenant?”
I said, “It means, ‘My ass is dragging, friendly fighters take note.’ ”
Next it was Bragnani; brave, bully-boy Bragnani. “We going to make it, sir?”
There is a mimic that lives in all of us, whose job is to hide our true selves from the world by pushing masks out onto our faces and sneaking others’ gestures into our hands, and I was on the point of saying, “Listen, son, you fire your gun,” but I paused a second, over the thought that the boys in the back didn’t know what was going on, not a thing, and I said, instead, “The nose is opened up. Two and three are feathered. We’re losing altitude, about seventy-five a minute now, but we’re holding one-thirty i.a.s…. They got Lieutenant Brindt.” I thought I might as well tell them that.
Then, clear and strong, almost like a vivid memory, we all heard Marrow’s voice, “Lamb? You awake? Give me a fix, kid.”
“Yes, sir,” Butcher said.
There was a silence, a long one, and then Marrow, “Come on, come on, come on.”
Lamb must have been trying to get cross bearings on the radio compass.
A floodgate of abuse broke open. That monotonous, whining voice which made you cringe. In the middle of it, on CALL, there was an unintelligible phrase in Farr’s voice. More of Marrow’s cursing. Then Farr, “Aw, f— this, I’m through with this crap.” Farr clicked out and Marrow was still going. Lamb tried to cut in with the fix, but Buzz didn’t want it any more. Marrow was flying now with really dangerous want of co-ordination—washing all over the sky, careening, flirting with death and shouting at it. That is surely what some deep part of him was doing. Not only with his own but with ours.
Farr pushed his button and rasped, “For Christ’s sake, do something, even if it’s wrong…. Ah, s—! I can fly till I’m sixty. I’ll do five hundred missions. They can’t hit me no more than…I’m telling you, you son of a bitch, I’m no rookie. I’ll outlast every mother f—er of you. You can’t knock me off. They tried! The bastards plugged the s— out of me, but they…This is so dumb. I could’ve told those God-damn toidy-seat generals…. How dumb can you get?…Don’t you put a finger on me, you bastards….”
I saw Marrow, across the way, unbuckle his seat belt.
I said, as sharply as I could, on CALL myself, “Farr!”
He paused, and I said, “Bragnani, get that brandy away from him.”
Marrow reached under his seat, pulled his parachute out (I remembered with a start that I had left mine below), and half stood up. As he did so the plane slowly climbed till it was on the edge of a stall. I pushed the column forward, and The Body fell off to one side and after a long, swooping plunge picked up buoyancy again.
Marrow settled back in his seat. He seemed puzzled, undecided, old.
I said, “I’ll fly her awhile, Buzz.”
Marrow grabbed the wheel and tensely held it.
“Give her to me,” I said. “Let me fly some.”
No answer. Marrow was leaning forward toward the column.
Prien said, “Four fighters coming in, six o’clock level.”
I stood up in the aisle, just in back of the trapdoor, and I tapped Marrow on the shoulder, and when he turned his head I jerked my right thumb toward my seat. For what seemed to me a long time nothing happened, then slowly Marrow unplugged his suit-heater cord and his headset jack, and he put his hands on the sides of his seat, pushed himself up, slid out from under his
wheel, straightened up in the aisle, and then in the over-cautious way of a senile man sat down in my place. I moved into the pilot’s seat, and that was all there was to it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE TOUR
August 16
1/
“He came in here,” she said, “uninvited, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a medal in a box in the other.” Daphne looked at me with her head on one side, as if to ask me if I really wanted her to go on. “He’s huge, isn’t he?” she said. She told me that he had paced around the tiny room with his powerful shoulders bent forward, and he swayed and glanced resentfully, like a cooped animal, at the low slanting ceiling and the confining walls. At first he brimmed with vitality; his voice was loud and resonant.
“Bear in mind,” Daphne said, “I hadn’t seen Marrow more than five or six times altogether in these months. But I knew him. It was amazing how well I knew him—through your eyes…and because he’s so like my Dugger…. I’m sorry, dear Bo: I have to try to be honest with you.”
She told me Marrow had poured whiskey in teacups and acted the part of a hero.
“Max Brindt,” he said, at one point, “is the only soldier on my crew.”
Daphne, out of her full intuitive knowledge of what Marrow was like, said, “What about that gunner Bo has told me about—is it Farr?”
