by John Hersey
One day every time you went into our hutment you could see Marrow throwing darts into our room, with the board propped up on the head of his bed diagonally across from the door, and Buzz toeing the sill of the door, his sleeves rolled up and his shirt wet with sweat, alone, playing without an opponent in order to master a game he had just discovered, shouting when he made a good hit and laughing at himself when he missed the board altogether. Whenever a new game came along, in those early days, Buzz took it up with violent enthusiasm and did not drop it until he got bored with winning: gin rummy, backgammon, acey-deucy, canasta, darts—he collared men to teach him and then made victims of them and won their money at the game they had taught him. Buzz threw darts ten hours that first day, and the next morning he went up and down the whole base groaning about his stiff arm, and he made a medic give him a rubdown. No one ever beat Marrow at darts after that, except when he was very drunk.
Then I was on my feet, really mad, thinking of things that Daphne had helped me to see. I had a five-pound note in my wallet that Buzz had loaned me a week before, because I wanted to get Daphne a better electric hot plate for her room in Bartleck, and I don’t know just why, I’d been short on cash. That note of Buzz’s began to feel bad in my wallet. I didn’t want his God-damn money.
I opened my electric suit and pulled my wallet out of a pocket in my coverall, and I took the huge thin crackling white English bill out and opened it up, and I asked Bragnani, who was nearest me of the men then talking on the edge of the grass, if he had a match, and he, thinking I wanted to light a cigarette, produced a Zippo and with a flourish snapped up a flame, and I put a corner of the bill on the lighter’s tongue, and the white paper caught fire.
Bragnani popped his lighter shut and drew his hand back as if he had lit a firecracker. “Jug, you see what the man did?” he asked Farr nearby.
“That ain’t money, idiot,” Farr said. “That’s just this lousy limey bumwad. Leave him be. He maybe had a chill.”
Bragnani laughed loudly. “Chill, my ass,” he said. “Firebugs we got.”
“Douse that!” Handown sharply shouted from near the ship, and I came to my senses and dropped the flaming paper and stamped on it.
I hated Marrow through and through. Finding out what he was really like had been a shock; I had been stupid and blind. And it came over me, thinking of the two Marrows, one that I’d imagined and one that was real, that there were two kinds of courage: the courage that comes from turning fear outward on behalf of others, that wants company and life; and the courage that wants to be alone, that really wants death for all. The two kinds often looked alike but were opposites; they often dwelt side by side in the same man, but one was bound to predominate. And now, thanks to Daphne, I knew that in Marrow the upper courage was that of the annihilator.
12/
It was nearly eight fifteen, the new stations time. For something to occupy my mind, I was checking my personal gear—my escape kit in the knee pocket of my flying suit, my sheath knife (as if I expected to meet cougars or savages in the jungles of the clouds) strapped inside my left flying boot. A jeep drove up, its two amber foglights, close together, swerving off the perimeter track at the mouth of our hardstand, and a voice called out, “Ninety-minute postponement. Do you hear me, pilot?”
And Buzz: “Again? What in Christ’s name goes on around here?”
And the crackling voice in the jeep of some leather-larynxed old sergeant who had seen many a Marrow come and go: “You got complaints, sir, lodge ’em at Operations.”
And Buzz: “You can tell Ops to go f— itself.”
And the voice of disenchantment: “Thank you, sir. Operations don’t like to f— itself so early in the morning.”
So we had an hour and half more to kill. The fog was beginning to thin out now, but visibility was still borderline, five hundred yards at most. Buzz was sore at Wing, and he said they’d keep us waiting all morning and then scrub the f—ing mission. I said I didn’t think that would happen. Marrow turned on me as if I were Wing Headquarters. What the hell did I know about anything? I only knew, and I certainly had no intention of repeating, what Stormy Peters had said. I stood silent, staring at Buzz.
Then Marrow came close up to me, over me, his big face squashed down toward mine, and he said between his teeth, very softly, making sure that no ears but mine would hear him, “You little son of a bitch, you think you’re so f—ing smart.”
Well, it seemed to be a meaningless flash of impatience, as much at the world as at me, so like Buzz lately, cranky before missions, but suddenly I turned away, for I was suffering as I’d suffered in the briefing; I felt a pang like those I’d experienced in the equipment room and on the kit line. I had to face it: I wanted Buzz Marrow to be dead, dead, dead.
As dead as the body on the beach at Pamonassett. The curve of the bay at Pamonassett was gentle, a big easy bite of a sated sea, and we would run along the clean yellow beach and across the sandbar out to Tiger Rock at low tide when the bar broke water, and we’d dash through the sand pools in the lee of the Tiger, with water clear as the magnifying glass on Father’s desk in the summer house which smelled of damp wicker and damp straw matting, and we would chase the schools of minnows, throwing crystal splashes into the sunlight as we sped through the safe shallows, and we caught puffers off the head of the rock, fish that always made us laugh at their audacity if they thought they could frighten us by blowing out their bellies like ridiculous little pigeons of the sea, yet when it came time to get them off the hooks it was strange how we lost interest in fishing. Then we’d dive in the hole there off the head, a deep, ominous, dark, round place with a couple of light shadows, undersea ghosts of round rocks which we could feel with our outstretched hands when we dived down, the roundness hairy and slimy with weed. We thrilled at the danger of the hole every time we saw it, and diving into it took a lot of vaunting and double-daring, and we did it seldom enough. That lowering cloudy morning, oppressive, hot, and damp, a day so still that it must have been readying some horrible thunderclaps for its evening sky, Rod and Vinny and I went out on the rock just because there wasn’t anything else to do, and there was the body, bobbing in the hole, held from the foamy reaching of the sea by the paws of the Tiger. We ran to the village, our scalps crawling as if with ants, and they came and got it out and stretched it, flecked with dirty spindrift, on the beach, the end of a man in working clothes, a stranger; the feet were bare. One man said he’d seen the fellow drunk along the Old Post Road. The face was purple and puffed out so that I never could bear to go fishing again, and the eyes of the first death I’d ever seen stared into a distance such as I could not imagine then. I wondered what they saw so far away.
13/
Marrow had lost interest in me. With scarcely time for a transition in mood—and how like him this was; he was mercurial—he got into an argument the men were having about the difference between a lady and a woman. They had spread out a couple of engine tarps and were sprawled on them. Farr and Bragnani sat hugging their knees. Prien was curled up pretending to be asleep. Negrocus Han down, in a black knitted skullcap, drops of moisture on his prominent blond eyebrows, sat working with a rag and a can of metal polish on a crank handle he had removed from his beloved top turret. “A lady,” he said in his calm Southern voice, shaking the can of polish and pouring some out on the rag, “is when you don’t want to fool around, like your own mother.”
“Aaah, Neg,” Farr growled, “you God-damn mother lover.”
Little Junior Sailen, standing by the tarps, lit a butt and blew a deep inhale onto his match, and spoke up. “It’s a question of money,” he said.
“Ladies are frigid, and women aren’t,” Marrow suddenly barked. He threw himself down on the oily canvas. The men were respectfully silent. “I knew a real lady once,” Buzz said, and he was off on one of his tales of his swordsmanship….
Just as Buzz finished his story, a recon car rolled in a
longside The Body. The mist was definitely burning off now, and a thin sun could be seen swimming through it toward the west, moving fast through the wreathing, luminous material. A voice called Buzz from the car, and I recognized it as that of Curly Jonas, the Operations Officer of the Group, an ally of Buzz against Old Man Bins. “Come over here a sec,” the voice said when Marrow answered. Marrow stood up, surveyed his audience with satisfaction, like a glutton looking at an empty plate after a meal, and then bounced over the hardstand, going up at each pace onto the balls of his feet. Jonas had opened the door of the car, and we could see Marrow standing with one foot up on the steel step. For a while we couldn’t hear their murmuring, then suddenly we heard a shrill protest from our pilot: “What’re they trying to do, kill us all?”
To me it was a bloodcurdling cry, because it seemed to me to have in it the sound of delight ill-concealed. Again, though, I realized that this might have been all in my mind—what I thought I should be hearing in the voice of the Marrow whom Daphne had exposed to me, the voice of a lonely courage, of a war lover.
Soon enough Jonas had left and Marrow came back to us. The men stirred, stiffened, at his approach, because they knew Marrow wouldn’t hold out on them.
It was Clint Haverstraw, the navigator, Marrow’s pet pup, who dared to say, “What have they dreamed up now?”
They were always inventing something to torture us with. They knew what They could do with Their war.
Marrow stood with his feet wide apart looking down at us. He was a fine figure. He was courageous, but he stood apart, his courage was selfish, pale, deathly.
“They’ve sent the Regensburg strike on ahead,” he said. “They sent it out at eight o’clock.”
14/
It was stations time, a quarter to ten, and we went into The Body. The pearly ground fog had lifted; low clouds were running down to the eastward like suds in a rocky river bed. From my seat in the cockpit I could see the cubical control tower in the far distance, and I could even make out some tiny figures—members of the operational staff—on the iron-railed balcony of the tower. Eight or ten Forts were visible, scattered at their hardstands along the perimeter track, dark and squat, imponderable, rooted to the ground by their tail wheels. A big camouflaged R.A.F. gasoline lorry and trailer moved slowly along the main road toward the hangars. Jeeps busy-bodied up and down the perimeter track.
A two-pronged red flare arched over the center of the field. Start engines!
Our ritual began. While Buzz supervised the turning over of the props by hand, I ordered Negrocus Handown, who as aerial engineer and top-turret gunner manned the area right behind Marrow and me, to go back in the bomb bay and open the manual shut-off valve of the hydraulic system and set the selective check valve to servicing position, so I could check the hydraulic pressures; seven hundred pounds, more or less, in both accumulators, O.K., so I got Negrocus to reset the valves. Then Marrow and I each had both hands flying. I opened the cowl flaps and locked their valves; made sure the fuel-transfer valves and pump switch were off; set the fire-extinguisher selector valve to the number-one engine, which I’d start first; moved the intercooler controls to cold; opened the carburetor air filters after Buzz cracked the throttles…. In his temper Marrow was slamming things around and spoiling this passage, our partnership in bringing to life the power of the ship, a process which had used to thrill me even when I was in extremities of fear at the beginning of the early missions; had thrilled me partly because it was I, in the end, who actually started the engines, and partly because I had always been staggered by the beautiful complexity of these great fortresses of the sky—by the myriad dials, switches, knobs, handles, and warning lamps; nerve-ends leading to the great vitals and muscles of the plane. Marrow and I were the twin-lobed brain of the ship, and the starting was the awakening of the huge creature before its miraculous act of flight.
Had been. This time I had to force myself through the steps.
Marrow was carrying on a furious subversive monologue against Wing. He saw better than the rest of us what the decision to let the Regensburg strike go ahead meant to us. He had gathered from Curly Jonas that the decision had been based on the idea that the Regensburg force could not be delayed, lest its planes should reach the unfamiliar North African airdromes to which they were destined after nightfall. But the whole point of the two-pronged attack had been that the heavily escorted Regensburg strike would attract and exhaust the German fighter defenses so that our strike, following in train, would be spared. Jonas had said that our take-off had been delayed three hours in order that the friendly fighters with the Regensburg force could return, refuel, and go out again with us. But so could the Germans land and refresh themselves.
Buzz got all this out, and much more, in incoherent sputters seasoned with profanity. He was so mad I was afraid he’d goof off on something important, fuel valves or prop controls or some such.
But finally he gave me the nod, and I pressed the starter button for number one, and I could hear the whine of the inertia starter in the wing. I unlocked the primer and set it to number one and pumped up a solid charge of fuel. Buzz was counting off the seconds, and he nodded again—still yammering about those murderers in Wing—and I flipped the switch to mesh and craned and saw the momentary burst of blue smoke sweep out into the prop wash as number one caught and we heard the roar and felt the shaking of all that energy. We went to work on number two.
I had a strange lonely feeling. Then I remembered the day I was left behind—a milk run to St. Nazaire on the twenty-eighth of June, when Marrow took Maltitz along as co-pilot to check him out on combat before they let Titty fly first pilot, and I stood gripping the rail at the control tower and I heard, out across the vast spread of the dispersal areas, the first ragged fusillade of the starting engines, and then gradually a powerful roar built up, and I felt as lonely as a solitary climber freezing to death on the slopes of a mountain to the sound of a distant avalanche.
Soon all four engines were going all right, and I had my eyes on the oil temperature and pressure gauges, two meaningful circles for each, on the panel straight ahead of me, and the engines were warming up, when in the one ear that I’d covered with an earphone I heard Marrow rasp out, “Lamb, did you remember your IFF?”
By no means for the first time Butcher Lamb, our radio operator, who could find a thousand ways of pretending there wasn’t a war going on, had forgotten to test the homing device before taxiing time. “Oh-oh,” he said into the interphone.
Then Marrow shouted on the interphone—all ten of us were plugged in, of course—one of his elated, abusive cries which we had all loved so much over the hard months, and which, so far as I knew, the others still loved that morning, but I hated with a taste of rust in my mouth: “I don’t know how any you bastards would ever come home, only for me thinking of these things.”
That had been Buzz’s hold over us. It couldn’t happen to our ship, not with Marrow in there; so he had often said. “See that?” he had shouted the morning Braddock’s ship blew up almost literally in our faces. “That won’t happen to us. Not while I fly this bucket.” And then a burst of indignation: “What’s the matter with that son of a bitch Braddock? Don’t he know evasive tactics?…I got to speak to these bastards”—meaning the other pilots. “They’re all going to get ’emselves killed!” Ours was the one inviolate vessel, and Buzz was our magic charm. “It can’t happen to this bucket, son.” The crew believed it, particularly the enlisted men. Marrow’s ship was famous in the enlisted men’s barracks as the one that didn’t know how to fall down. We’d had our share of troubles—our eighth, May 19, the Kiel strike, those friendly incendiaries!—but it was a fact that ours was a lucky ship. There was such a thing as luck up there. It was one of the things I hated about flying in war. I wanted a world in which a man could be in control of every step on his way.
But I, and only I, on the plane as we trembled on the hardstand, was the custo
dian of a horrible piece of knowledge. Marrow’s personal magic was not there. It was all bluster. His strength, as we had imagined it, outgoing and luck-coated, wasn’t there at all. I had had the word straight from Daphne.
How vulnerable we were!
Yet even now, I found, I still had a hangover of admiration, envy, some feeling of having to hand it to him.
He called Sailen on the interphone and asked if his turret was secure. Junior Sailen—all of us called him Junior, why, he was half my size—was stationed in the ball turret, slung down under the fuselage, where he sat huddled up like an embryo, and if the turret weren’t locked with its guns pointing rearward, when you taxied out, there was liable to be a loud scraping noise, and you’d have a couple of bent barrels on those underbelly guns. Buzz really was a commander; he knew what every crewman was supposed to be thinking at every moment. Junior Sailen hadn’t forgotten. You didn’t have to worry about him; he was a scrapper. Yet Marrow—even though he was probably way below par—made sure.
But it was when he put his hand to the power controls that you really had to give it to Buzz. Maybe this wasn’t good, maybe it was neither good nor bad; anyway, he looked as if the power flowed from him into the ship. With the mixture controls in automatic rich, he tuned the throttles at around fifteen to sixteen hundred, then he checked the propeller governors, moving them to high-pitch position, and then—and this was when it seemed as if some kind of juice flowed through his hands into the fierce motors: he cocked his head and listened, his back was straight, his chest could have been a generator—he ran up each engine at full throttle and twenty-five hundred r.p.m.’s, and with marvelous dexterity and precision and speed, he adjusted the supercharger control stops for forty-six inches of manifold pressure.