The War Lover

by John Hersey

  When we congratulated Chan Charles, he said the painting was a piece of s—.

  16/

  That evening, in the officers’ club, we heard on B.B.C. that the Belgian ambassador to Washington had protested against the inaccurate bombing done by the United States Army Air Force on Antwerp three days before, which had caused heavy civilian casualties. Max Brindt, our bombardier, usually so mild, took off in a rage about that; without ever having flown a mission he was hipped on pickle-barrel bombing. Once before, we’d heard in a broadcast that the French had complained about a bombing on rail yards at Rennes which had left three hundred French civilian casualties; the French had thought this a high price to pay for “un si court délai et ralentissement du trafic.” Brindt was sore at the French because they liked the R.A.F.: “une arme de précision remarquable,” compared with the Yanks.

  Marrow laughed at Brindt’s excitement and began calling him “G.E.,” for Gross Error. “Why don’t those Frogs go jump in the lake?” Buzz asked. To Marrow, war was a simple matter. It concerned his potency, his destructiveness. That there might be human beings with him or against him scarcely entered his head.

  17/

  By the eleventh, five days after we’d been cleared, Marrow was nearly off his rocker with impatience, and he took us up in the rain on a practice flight. In talking us into going up, he’d said, “It’s too tough here on the ground. I got to take that thing up and beat it around and then I’ll be all right.”

  They announced a stand-down that night, and we decided, as a crew, to take our first trip to London.

  18/

  That whole visit to London was a search. We were looking for something, only we didn’t know what. A moment of tender love? A fight? A world’s record hangover? It wasn’t anything so exact. We were looking for something fugitive, a receding oasis, a something perfect that was beyond our reach.

  We raced through the city looking for it, taking a drink here and there along the way. We must have been looking for something, else how account for my standing with Marrow, of all people, both of us bareheaded, in the Poets’ Corner? The great white words in Picadilly Circus jumped at us, and whirled: guinness is good for you gives you strength votrix vermouth the merchant navy comfort service comes to town odeon bile beans we’ve got to keep on saving. We saw the white tower and the bloody tower and Marrow pinged the knights in armor with his fingernail and said, “What those guys needed was a good five-cent can opener.” Marrow decided to collect squares. He started with Trafalgar, and we collected Berkeley, St. James, Russell, Grosvenor, Belgrave, Chester, Gordon, Brunswick, Mecklenburgh; until we realized we were blitzed—I mean overcome, each in his way, by the accumulation of gaps, fallen walls, boarded-up windows, memories, regrets, endings. I see now that I was overcome with sadness and fear, Marrow with excitement. I thought we were together, but we were at poles.

  Next thing, we were standing side by side, Marrow was guffawing, we were staring at Henry the Eighth and his wives in Mme. Tussaud’s. The monarch appeared surprised, the women wore calm expressions.

  “Quite a guy,” Marrow said. “Those dames look satisfied.”

  “He wasn’t married to them all at once,” I said.

  Then we had an eerie feeling, maybe we felt as if we were coming close to what we were looking for, because we were witnessing the death of Nelson. Nelson was lying on his back. There was a basin at his side. Four men, with anxious thoughts for England, were leaning over him, tensely peering. One held a lantern. Its light picked out the sturdy beams of the ship.

  I said, “Let’s get out of here,” for I could no more abide the idea of death in a waxen Nelson than in a charred young German flier.

  After that we walked a long time in silence. We were at a gate of St. James’s. Two enormous Coldstream Guards—only we didn’t know they were any such thing till later when we asked a geezer in a pub, because they were wearing ordinary British battle dress—seemed to jump out at us from ambush, and they began the damnedest ceremony. They slapped their rifles and stamped their hobnailed boots on the flagstone path and shifted and banged—went through a unison drill that seemed to last a whole minute and ended with a present arms as rigid as bronze. Well, I looked at Marrow, and Marrow looked at me. Then Buzz ripped off his hat, pitched it in the air, yipped, and did a breakdown stomp. It was a good American answer, but the Guards stood there like statues until we left them, shrugging our shoulders.

  We joined up with the others at the Dorchester, and Marrow said he thought he’d leave us for a while; thought he’d make out better as a lone wolf.

  “They’re a dime a dozen around Piccadilly,” he said knowingly, “but you’ll find the real class along by Hyde Park, up by Grosvenor House, in there.”

  I was paired with Max Brindt, and we found ourselves, moderately drunk, eating a meager roast-beef dinner with horse radish and Yorkshire pudding in the Ford Hotel, a stuffy little Victorian stage set full of people who looked like drawings by Pont, my favorite artist in Punch—which (I didn’t know it then) Kid Lynch used to smuggle into our officers’ club at Pike Rilling every week.

  After coffee Max said, “I’m horny.”

  I said, “O.K., Max.”

  We walked along Bond Street, where we’d heard there were some French ones, and soon a pair of babes stepped out of the shadows, and Max had one of those little pencil flashlights, he was a systematic bastard, maybe he’d brought it from the States just for this purpose, and he shined it in their faces, and they were crusty old dreadnoughts, and we sniffed and walked on. But we’d had a lot of brandy; libido lived where judgment had vacated. After a few steps, Max said, “Oh well, they prolly need the money.”

  So we went back, and they were Flo and Rose, about as French as kidney pie, and we took them to Covent Garden, a big dance hall that made the whole world smell of cabbage, and Flo and Rose danced like pushcarts, so we had a change of venue, we went to the Captain’s Cabin, to drink, for Christ’s sake, and before long I decided that whatever it was I was looking for, Flo or Rose didn’t have it, so I went back to the Dorchester.

  Marrow was there in our room with Haverstraw and Neg Handown and some other guys, strangers but fliers and so not strange, and he was giving an account of his successes as a lone wolf. Claimed he’d had it four times, twice with a WAVE and once each with a couple of Piccadilly commandos. For several days Marrow had been affecting British slang terms but distorting them to his own ends. “She sure was butt-pranged,” he said of one of his companions of the evening. The three dames had been “laid on,” he said, “by me.” He loved to mimic the British accent, but always kept a Nebraska twang: “Gooseberry tarts…. You’re looking simply wizard….”

  Haverstraw could do lightning calculations in his head, and Marrow began showing him off. “Hey, Clint,” he shouted, “multiply these.” And he’d reel off a couple of big numbers. It was a trick of the mind, and Haverstraw was quite good, and somehow this was endlessly fascinating to Marrow. I couldn’t see it, myself; just a trick.

  I guess we must have been getting pretty loud. The telephone rang. Marrow answered. He covered the mouthpiece and said, “The manager,” and he winked, and then he said into the phone, “The occupants of this room have been staying here four years off and on. They never made a noise yet.” He hung up.

  In a few minutes there was a knock on the door, and it was the manager, polite, stiff, genteel. Marrow stood up; his jaw was sticking out. “We’re not making a noise,” he said. “This is just a conversation. Maybe you want to make some noise? If you want to make some noise, why don’t you kick the door down?” And he slammed the door in the manager’s face.

  Later two Aussie infantrymen came in, one belligerent and one not. They began telling us that night bombing made better sense than our kind, and you’d have thought Marrow had been on twenty missions. It got hot, and after a while Marrow said to Handown, real sore, “Neg, pour me a drink.”r />
  One of the Aussies, who seemed to want trouble, said, “I always understood, when you called a Southern gentleman a nigger, he would fight.”

  We didn’t call Handown nigger, his nickname was Negrocus. Where that came from I’ll never know, and maybe it amounted to the same thing. We regarded the Aussie’s crack as especially offensive because Handown wasn’t an officer. He was, however, thirty-six years old, solid as an anvil, and able to take care of himself.

  He shuffled over to the Aussie. “Foot sojer,” he said, “I fight m’own fights.” Then he jerked his thumb at Marrow and said, “Fight his, too.”

  The Aussie said, “If you like to be called that, it’s all right with me.”

  So Handown said, “All right. Mind y’r business.”

  There was some more shouting, and the manager returned and asked who was responsible for all the noise, and Marrow said, “This Austreyelian,” pointing to the belligerent one, and the manager politely asked the Aussies to leave, and they did.

  We were glad to be rid of them, for we were full of the feeling of separateness, of the unity of those who flew against those who did not. We had the illusion that between aviators there was a mysterious bond, that we were sharers of a secret, that only in the sky could that secret manifest itself, for only in the sky could we men of this special and separate stamp fulfill ourselves. It was much later, with Daphne’s help, that I realized that all that was shared between Marrow and me was a certain free play of the mind in the sky; but his dream in the sky and mine were far apart in kind. I did not know that then.

  Toward sunup, when all the others had left, Marrow sat on the edge of the hotel bed and began to cry and to beat a big fist into a big hand. “I’d like to kill ’em all,” he sobbed. I thought he meant Them. Wing and all authority. I thought I understood, that I was tied to him by a close bond. But now, after Daphne’s insight, I supposed he meant people, humanity, really all of us. I should have been horror-struck. He blubbered like a baby.

  19/

  If a famous hangover had been what we’d been looking for, we’d have been satisfied travelers, because we really caught one that next morning. We went back to the base on the train; it was like riding inside a dentist’s drill. Handown and Prien sat in the compartment with us four officers, and it developed that Negrocus had taken Prien out to educate him the night before, but after Neg had picked up a dame for Prien and had taken a room for all three of them in a fleabag, Prien, said Handown, got hoity-toity.

  “Thinks hoors are naughty,” Handown said. “In fact,” he went on, “he thinks women are nasty. Take advantage of a fella. Want money, clothes, a good time. Don’t want to cook. Fake a man out all the time.”

  Prien sat there like a dummy, and finally he got out a sentence. Thought he’d change the subject. “For Englishmen,” he said, “those people in London speak the brokest English I ever did hear.”

  “Always bellyachin’,” Marrow said to Prien, and then Marrow rocked with laughter, because mere mention of Prien’s stomach made Buzz roar.

  20/

  Back at Pike Rilling the sky was a soft linen blue, and by mid-afternoon, after a nap in my own sack, I was feeling human again, and Stormy Peters came by and asked me if I wanted to take a bike ride.

  “We could pedal up to Ely,” he said, “and see the Cathedral.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Not too far with this following wind.”

  “How about coming back?”

  “Oh-oh,” he said. “Didn’t think of that. This wind is going to hold. Might be rugged coming back.”

  So we just rode out through some turnip fields along a lane that farmers must have used, and we came to a field where infant barley was up, glistening in the sunlight, and suddenly overcome with spring fever we stopped and lay on our backs on the almost-daffodil-covered new growth and looked up at the empty sky, and naturally we began talking about the sky and fliers in it. I wanted to know what a comet looked like close to, and Peters told me, and I’d read, and I told him, about the remarkable navigational powers of the honeybee, and we discussed the false peace, which seems like the peace that nations make, in the eye of a hurricane. I told Stormy that I’d had curiosity about the sky and flying since I’d been a kid—and so, I remembered, as I lay there, had Marrow, and I felt for a moment that this fascination and study, this primitive curiosity, was the simplest common denominator in the community of aviators; I thought then that Stormy was not quite in it with Buzz and me.

  Now, my eyes having been opened by Daphne, I can see that Peters was closer to my way of thinking and feeling than Marrow, for Marrow’s passion deep down was for engines that pull, power, speed, some wild exhilaration and defiance in the air, while Stormy, drawn to a life force, was satisfied with the clouds, the rain, and the sunshine that fed the growth on which we lay. If Stormy talked of flights he liked to talk of fabulous ones—of Icarus, Cyrano, Rasselas; he was content to imagine the Blanchard balloon, with its curious feather-like oars, drifting slowly over the English Channel. With Buzz it had to be speed, daring, records, accidents, death, self. For Marrow the vault of heaven was only a mirror; while I think that Peters gazed into the sky as into a living forest.

  21/

  For the next two days the weather was still ideal, and we were really itching to go. There was a vending machine for cokes against one wall of the officers’ club, and on the evening of April fifteenth, after dinner, the men crowded around the machine, and Marrow said to me, “I’m buying you a coke.”

  “My turn,” I said, fumbling in my pants pocket. “I already owe you five.”

  “Five! Perl owes me forty-three. I won ’em at gin rummy. Five’s nothing. What’s five? I’m buying you a coke.”

  I discovered that Marrow had a couple of bucks’ worth of nickels in his pocket, which he had got from the PX, done up in paper rolls like Life Savers. He apparently liked having nickels when everyone else was running around saying, “Got the change of a quarter?” and I suspect that he also liked having people indebted to him. Whenever he heard a man asking for change from the bartender, who kept a cigar box full of coins under the bar, Buzz would shout, “Hey, you, I got plenty nickels. Come over here, I’m buying you a coke.”

  In this way Marrow bought audiences for his stories of his valor in the Battle of the Sheets. The one that night began, “The most beautiful body I ever saw was in the moonlight. I just pulled back the covers and there it was….”

  We played bingo later, and Buzz called the numbers. He was on top of the world. “All ready, ladies and gent’men? Now, an honest shake for the little lady with the ceegar in the back row. And the draw. Under the N, thirty-two. You! Get out of here! Hey, White!” He called to a pilot who was trying to read a book off to one side. “There’s a place for aviators over at Flight Control. Out! Here we’re all bingo players and con men. Under the B, fifteen! Anybody like to sell their cards back to the management? All right. Under the O, seventy-five….”

  After a while Stebbins shouted, “Bingo!” and laughed at the boos of the others. Stebbins had won twice the previous night.

  “Ladies and gent’men,” Buzz gravely said, “on behalf of the parish bingo committee, I wish to state that that son of a bitch is lucky.”

  It was during the second game that the fateful booming voice of the Tannoy thrilled us with the announcement we had waited for so long. We were on alert! We went to our rooms and Buzz and I sat down and wrote letters. I lay on my stomach on my bed and wrote to my mother, and I supposed that Buzz, at our desk, was writing to some dame. When he’d undressed and had gone off to the john, his letter was still unfinished and lay on the desk in the cone of light from the hooded lamp over it. Outside a cold wind rustled the dead leaves caught all winter in the spurs of a low hawthorn near our window. I read part of what Buzz had written. The second page was showing. It was to his sister.

  “…and also in your v
ery subtle manner you might let Mother in on the obvious need of things sweet over here. Anything and everything, but soon. Never ate much candy in the States but right now I could use a hardball or even a lollypop. I mean it. I’m getting so old in the service I’m in my second childhood. No, check that. I figure a flier is entitled to three childhoods. One at the regular time, one when he’s on his tour, and one when he gets over eighty the way I’m going to get. Anyway, tell Mother. I’m not brazen enough to throw a hint quite that broad, so please ask Mother, or suggest it, don’t send the stuff yourself…”

  I wished that I had not read it. It upset my stomach to realize that William Siddlecoff Marrow, the mighty hunter, my pilot, was a homesick kid like me.

  22/

  We hit it lucky. They gave us Lorient for our first mission. At that time there was a big buildup going on in North Africa for TORCH, and they had been using the heavies in England to try to hit the submarine pens and ship-building yards on the theory that this would help secure the lifelines. It was disheartening work for our pilots, because the pens were insignificant, to put it mildly, from twenty-one thousand feet, and they were made of concrete twelve feet thick, and trying to pockmark them didn’t seem like a way to win a war by Christmas. Germany was where the enemy lived. Besides, the TORCH buildup meant that our own strength was not being increased, and we felt like—in fact we were, then—the second team. Nevertheless we of the crew of The Body were perfectly satisfied to be going to Lorient on our first day out, because it meant a routine strike, and most of the flying was over the sea rather than over enemy-held land; and in the hours before the mission we were so eager it was funny—looking back on it.