The War Lover

by John Hersey

  “Nah, he’s a blowhard sergeant. Max is an officer, a gent, and Max likes his work; he likes to bomb ’em. I guess the reason he’s so good is he’s a Hun, he’s a Wisconsin Heinie. Those Germans know how to fight better than anyone.”

  “They’re murderers.” Her father.

  Daphne said that Marrow looked at her pityingly, as if she were unutterably small and weak, and he said, “Listen, kid, what do you think soldiering’s all about?” Marrow spoke with such benign good humor, she told me, and was so tolerant of her womanish ignorance of the world of men, that he seemed radiant and irresistible. He spoke of what a good sport the German fighter was; the old wheels-down, respect-for-chutes routine.

  “Now you take your boy friend, Bo. He’s a nice guy, I’m not going to run him down, don’t worry, but the point is, he’s just not made for fighting. Not real gutsy, sojery fighting. He’s too educated or something.”

  “Wait a minute, Daph,” I said. “How did you say he referred to me?”

  She said, surprised at my question, that he’d used my nickname; her tone said, “…of course.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. He never called you anything else all evening. Bo Bo Bo.”

  “All I can say is, that’s mighty odd.” I told her that he had never, that I could remember, used my nickname to my face.

  Daphne said Marrow had gone on, cheerfully and bluntly, to belittle me. He wasn’t going to run me down—much. “Why do you suppose he’s a co-pilot?” And he said, “Him and his pal Lynch! The only thing Lynch ever said that I like was once he was talking about our engines, and he said we had more horses in one B-17 than all the horses Julius Caesar brought along in his invasion of Britain. Now, that’s power.”

  He was drinking his whiskey in gulps, Daphne said, in a way, she added, that any girl with experience would have recognized as preparatory.

  He began to tell her—and he seemed to her to be getting larger and larger; his chest looked as if it would burst, and he had discarded his tunic and his upper arms bulged through his thin shirt—about how he had always loved to fight. “Once when I was just a kid, me and my best pal…” A friendly argument about cars—the Overland versus the Chevrolet; in the right angle of a wooden fence, a corner of an empty lot, covered with sour dock and pepperweed; Chuck, subject to temper and hay fever, both bad. “I darn near killed him.” Marrow laughed at the picture of Chuckie with just enough life left in him to sneeze.

  And when he got to high school, Marrow said, he asked to be taught how to fight. “We had this coach”—Daph said she’d forgotten his name—“he called it ‘The Manly Art of Self-Defense,’ but…defense! It was how to get rid of the other guy. How, if it was going bad, the knee in the b—s…” He was beginning, Daphne said, to use language that was, like his drinking, part of what he apparently considered the ritual of preparation; as if filth were an aphrodisiac.

  I broke in then, I guess because her talk of Marrow’s belittling had reached the self-blaming part of me. “You know,” I said, “I think Buzz may have been right about me as a fighter. You remember I told you once about my boxing. I’m a congenital runner-up, a co-pilot. The thing I remember best about my whole boxing career is the nightmare of not remembering, being amnesic, once, about what had happened in the last round of a match. Guess it was nice to forget.”

  It came back vividly: lying on the rubbing table, the gray nowhereness gradually giving way at the center, and then a flickering of images, as when a movie film flaps free of the sprockets in a projector, and finally unblurred sight and a clear orientation to everything in the rubdown room: Moose Moohan, the trainer, with his hairy arms and his great expanse of belly under a sorely stretched T-shirt, and the smell of eucalyptus ointment and of the armpits of the mighty, and the glass cylinder containing Moose’s sparkling bandage scissors with the duckbill at the end of the blade to slide under gauze—everything clear and familiar in the rubdown room, yes, but what was beyond the door? That room was my world. I could remember not one single thing in the whole world outside that room. There was no otherwhere. My whole life would be spent on that table in that room….

  The memory of non-memory, at that moment, in the context of Daph’s account of the blustering boasts of my pilot, was important to me, because I had often thought of that knockout as my first death, and I knew now that I was not afraid of the process of dying or of what lay beyond it, but only of cessation—of the possibility of forgetting the marvels of the big world of life; and besides, Daphne now said, replying to my words, “But, Bo, you’re strong, you’re truly strong.”

  She shook her head, then, and said, “He kept shouting, ‘I love to fight…fight!’ ”

  He got onto speed, too. (Daph said she couldn’t remember the order of things exactly, but she was trying to tell me all she could recall.) “Once I drove all the way across Louisiana in a Lincoln Zephyr with a cop on my tail. S—, he couldn’t catch me. A cop’ll very seldom go over eighty on a motorcycle—you know?—and after all, I’m a flier, I’m used to speed. I drove across the country once in a friend’s car in seventy-seven hours’ time, with a stopover at home. I dropped the guy who owned the car in Omaha, so he could get some sleep—we spelled each other at the wheel—and I called this chick in Holand, and told her to wait up for me, and she did, and I screwed her, and the next morning I picked the guy up and we went on and still made it in seventy-seven hours flat, stopover included.”

  He began talking about his various cars, and he had the gall to tell Daph, for the second time, his yarn about leaving his car at Bennett Field with the key in it. This was the very day after Marrow got the letter from his uncle about the car having been sold.

  He showed her the medal—said he’d brought it along to show her the misprint of his name. “A sergeant, they’d have spelt his name right.”

  When he said he liked to fight for fighting’s sake, she said, one of the implications was that he had nothing else for which to fight. Certainly, not on account of his identification with a group. She remembered that he spoke once of our crew as “Boman’s little men’s club.”

  “The Body,” he said, “is my body. And when I fly I’m just pushing along with The Body sticking out in front of me. It’s part of me.”

  He told Daphne about various missions, and of course I had told her all about every one of them. “And I remember them, Bo, I’ve always felt as if I’d been with you on all of them. And Bo, he changed everything around. You never took credit for anything, but I know you, and I know what happened. About the Hamburg raid, when you went around the second time, he told me how he thought everything out and decided…”

  All this time he was expansive, cheerful, and magnificently healthy-looking.

  He reached in the watch-fob pocket of his trousers and pulled out two fifty-dollar bills and threw them on the bed. “My mad money. I’m mad for you, kid. Want ’em? I don’t give a s— for money.”

  “I could use a hundred U.S. dollars,” Daphne told me, “but I was not pleased about the prospect of becoming a ‘hundred-buck hoor,’ as I think your friend would put it.”

  “Prospect?” I said. “You knew it was coming?”

  “I’ve tried to tell you, he was making that kind of man’s preparations all along.”

  “But I mean, you knew you were going to submit?” I was trembling.

  “Wait, Bo,” she said. “We’ll come to that.”

  “Better come to it now,” I said.

  “I’ve tried to tell you, Bo. You’re the only one.”

  “Who’re you trying to kid?”

  “I have a side, too. There are two sides to this.”

  Anyway, she began to tell me the story of it. Marrow was talking about his contempt for his commanders, and he paid a special tribute of scorn to Wheatley Bins, calling him yellow and “not a man.” Then he said, “To hell with leadership! I get my bang out of fl
ying.”

  “Bang?”

  “Bang’s the word. Listen, baby, I get a…” Then, Daphne said, he broke off, and his eyes gave her a signal. He was ready. She thought the word “man” might have triggered him. Marrow made no attempt to court, to charm, except that he said, “You sure must have something, you sure put roses in Boman’s cheeks.” He laughed. He stood up, and Daphne told me she had the impression his head was bumping the ceiling, and his arms were tensed and huge, and he said, “O.K., baby, take your clothes off.”

  Daphne did, and he undressed.

  She was trying to tell it quickly, get it over with, but I began to beat my fist on the metal bedstead.

  “Nothing came of it, Bo,” she said. “Please listen. Nothing came of it. Not that he couldn’t. He was able. He wasn’t as much of a man as he imagined—I mean, not as big as a Flying Fortress, as he seemed to think. He was able, though, and quite eager on the surface, but as soon as he touched me, I knew he was exactly like Dugger, disgusting, wanting to use me to make love to himself. I drew back, got off the bed and put my slip on, and he said, ‘Because of Bo?’ and I said, ‘No, because you don’t want me. You don’t want anyone but yourself. You want to be the manliest man this side of Casanova, but you only want that in your own head.’

  “He was furious, and he began to argue with me, as if he could seduce me by talking me down, but by this time I knew all about him, he was so much like Dugger, and I could see the hint of relief under his bullying talk.

  “Then something happened that was almost funny. Bo! I hope you can see that it was funny. There was a knock on the door, and I wish you could have seen the big hero’s face! He must have thought you’d found some way to get off duty and had come to me, and that you were right outside the door, and, darling, he grabbed up his clothes and jumped behind the curtain of my closet door. I whispered, ‘Major Marrow, you left a sock at the foot of the bed,’ and he pranced out in his underdrawers and did a double bend for his sock and tip-toed back again. Then I opened the door. It was the telegram from you.”

  2/

  “When he came out of the closet there was a definite change in his mood. He was smaller. The boastful ring was gone out of his voice. But he was more dangerous; I was warier than I had been before. I got fully dressed, first thing, and I said I thought he’d better, too, but he lay on the bed in his drawers. He asked me who that had been at the door, and I told him it had been the girl from the post office who delivers telegrams—hadn’t he heard her voice? But he was suspicious. ‘You can’t kid me. Come clean, baby.’ I’d put the telegram down on my dressing table, and now I picked it up and I waved it, to show him. He wanted to know who had sent it, and when I said it was from you, Bo, he narrowed his eyes and said, ‘You’re a clever little bitch,’ and he got up and came over and reached out a hand for me to give it to him. I handed it over, because it wouldn’t have taken much of his strength to get it away from me, and he read it and crumpled it up and threw it on the floor. He began to praise you. ‘Son of a bitch Bo. Time and again we wouldn’t have gotten back, wasn’t for him.’ He poured himself another teacupful of whiskey and got back on the bed, and thoughtfully he said, ‘You know, Bo would have made a p— cutter of a squadron commander, group commander—and they didn’t even let him be a first pilot. He’s got guts and brains, that boy.’ He had a canny look; I didn’t trust him. Those remarks were to show that he was better than you—he was a first pilot. I said he was talking in a very odd way, considering the fact that he had gone to Major Randall to try to get you grounded. He said, ‘You know everything, don’t you, you smart little hoor?’ Then he laughed. ‘That was a hot one! Bo was in good shape, as good as me.’ But his laughter was brittle, and he asked me how I knew about his having gone to Doc. I said Major Randall had telephoned me. Marrow blushed. Really! Red as a beet. But I saw, all too well, that he was angry. He didn’t stir on the bed. He said, ‘You and Boman and that horse doctor been discussing me all along?’ And I thought, Oh, yes, Marrow, you are like Dugger—because one of the things Dugger couldn’t stand was the idea of exposure, of having people know anything about him except that he was the best flier in the R.A.F. I said you hadn’t ever said a word about him that wasn’t nice, and he got up from the bed, and he said, ‘That’s a lot of bull s—.’ Then he began to be quite nasty about you, Bo. I was becoming more and more apprehensive, because I felt that he was smoldering. He paced back and forth now like something trapped. ‘I suppose you talked with that son of a bitch Bins about me, too?’ he said. You see, it was getting unreal. He said, ‘They rigged that whole thing up, for Bins to get it instead of me. That God-damn Doc was in on it.’ Then he looked at me, and he said, ‘You better skin those clothes off again, baby. If you think you can refuse me a f—, you got another think coming.’ I sat there not moving. I just tried to be as still as I could. Sure enough he tacked again—went off in a completely new direction. ‘I clobbered the bastards at Hamburg. Just like flies. They’ll never take that away from me.’ If you hadn’t looked at him closely, you’d have thought he was smiling; his lips were pulled back in a set way, almost prim. He was marching up and down like a sentinel. He began all over again at the very beginning: Who was that at the door? Then: Boman hadn’t made first pilot; Boman and Doc and I had been whispering about him; he knew all about the plot to install Bins in command while he, Marrow, was away at a rest home; he was going to get me back in that bed, no woman could…It went around and around. But it got worse and worse, too. You’ve told me, Bo, about his tirades on sergeants. He got filthier and meaner and louder. Finally he stopped in front of me and said, ‘You want to know something, baby?’ He had a vile look in his eyes, and his teeth were clenched. He was very dangerous, creeping down into the slimy place in himself where things begin—snakes, toads, spiders, mud. I thought, He’s Dugger…. He’s going to say he used to bomb beetles, on the cart tracks on the farms, dung beetles, to see them squash. Or, he had a canary, he…I kept saying to myself, ‘He’s just like Dugger, I know what to do.’

  “And then he gave me my chance. When he reached the point on his circle that concerned Doc Randall, he said, ‘Want to know why I went to Doc? Because…’ He went to my dressing table, where the medal was lying in its box; he picked it up. ‘You know something?’ His voice broke into a kind of petulant scream, and he shook the box and said, ‘That p—, Boman. This is his! He won it. It’s his, his, his.’ His voice rose higher with each word, and he turned and threw the box at the wall with his great powerful arm. A very violent thrust. The box was crushed and fell open, and the little bronze propeller shot across the floor, dragging its red, white, and blue ribbon after it. ‘Oh, I hate the pint-sized son of a bitch.’

  “I stood up. I kept the bed between him and me, and I asked him, ‘Is the reason you hate him that you can’t bully him?’

  “And he said, ‘He’s strong, all right, the little p—.’ ”

  I was simply astounded at what Daphne was saying, and I saw that many of my thoughts during the tour, the stands I believed I had taken, were based on cockeyed premises, and I was amazed at how little I really knew about my pilot after these months of intimacy. How much less I must have known about myself! Well, I was twenty-two; I was a blind kid—old enough, though, to be asked to lay down my youthful life in a war. It was crazy, crazy.

  “Marrow,” Daphne said, “turned on me then—I still had the bed between us—and he said, ‘If you tell that little s— I’ve been here tonight, I’ll…I’ll bomb the bejeezus out of you…. I’ll…’

  “I was absolutely still.

  “Then he said, ‘Don’t you make the mistake he did. Don’t you get it in your head that the reason I didn’t want to go around the second time was because I was chicken s—. Oh no, baby. The only reason was, I didn’t care where the f— we dropped those bombs, as long as it was on a city. You can’t win a war being squeamish. Chicken s— doesn’t win wars. You have to kill somebody….’
<
br />   “Suddenly I grasped, thank heavens, how to manage him. I understood, then. It was from Dugger that I understood. I said, ‘I know all about you.’

  “ ‘What do you mean?’ He halted, like a soldier challenged by a guard at night.

  “I said, ‘That feeling when the plane shudders because the bombs are falling out.’

  “Yes! It was going to work. I saw already a subtle change on his face. It was as if he was fighting back one of those grins that aren’t about anything funny.

  “So I went on. ‘The feeling you have—you have that stirring down there, don’t you, Major?—when you start the bombing run.’

  “Now he looked astonished. And you could see creeping into his face the first sign of caving in, the first realization that the world knew all about him. Six billion pairs of eyes staring at him. He was trembling.

  “Those lines about his feelings had come from things Dugger had told me; now I remembered, Bo, your having told me about the shout when you first meet fighters each time, and I said, ‘And when the Hun takes his first pass at you, and you can feel the trembling of the ship when your own guns begin to shoot…’

  “He sat down. All the flame was out. He hung his head and squeezed his hands between his knees.

  “ ‘You little bitch,’ he said. Then he put his hands over his face and began to shake out dry sobs. He’s much farther gone than Dugger ever was. In a minute I asked him if he didn’t think he’d better put his clothes on, and he did; he was docile and quiet.”

  3/

  “There it was, Bo. What I’d come, through agony, to know about Dugger, and what I’d thought all along about your pilot. The stuffing came right out of him.” Daphne stood up, and she was angry in a way I’d never seen her. “Why do you men have a conspiracy of silence about this part of war, about the pleasure of it?” She was unusually disturbed. She said men pretended that battle was all tragedy—separation, terrible living conditions, fear of death, diarrhea, lost friends, wounds bravely borne, sacrifice, patriotism. “Why do you keep silent about the reason for war? At least, what I think is the reason for war: that some men enjoy it, some men enjoy it too much.” She said she didn’t mean just the life of campaigns, getting away from everything humdrum, from responsibilities, from having to take care of others. “More than that,” she said, “I mean, the pleasure your pilot gets.” She said something about the gratification that wells up out of “the dark slimy place of toads and snakes and hairy men”—from deep, deep down. At one point she said, “I think we ought to worry less about the future life, in peacetime, of the ones who break down in battle, and more about what’s going to come of those who enjoy it too much. They’re going to inflict their curse on the rest of us in peacetime…. Knives, billies; all that…They’re going to pass it on to their children. We’ll have other wars. Oh, Bo, I don’t know what we can do about these men, how you can educate this thing out of them, or stamp it out, or heal it out—or whether you can get rid of it at all.” She just had a feeling, a woman’s feeling, that this was where all the trouble came from. We couldn’t have a real peace while these men still had that drive in them. “Diplomacy won’t make peace; diplomacy’s just a mask.” And she said, “Economic systems, ideologies—excuses.”