The War Lover

by John Hersey

  “I’m taking my time,” Marrow said.

  “You dumb bastard,” Benning said, “the good ones’ll all be snapped up.” And Benning drilled off to see what he could appropriate.

  We sat and drank. It was a slow party. Many of our fliers had lost their companions, and there was a shadow across the evening. Maltitz left us to find a dame. Marrow talked about what he believed, and what I, too, then believed, had kept us alive that afternoon.

  “I’m ass deep in luck,” he said. “I can’t lose, seems I can’t lose. Braddock owes me twenty bucks. Church owes me twenty-seven. Handown owes me eleven. Benny Chong owes me thirty. I used to know a guy at Spanner Field, I owed him money all the time, because, the thing was, he had a bad inferiority complex, so I used to make a point of borrowing a few bucks from him every week to give him confidence….”

  That was when I first saw her. I was facing the bar, and I saw her over Marrow’s shoulder. She had paused for a moment near the bar, because some unattractive character was trying to get her to drink with him, and she was squinting, letting her eyes get used to the half light at our end of the big room. She was blessedly short; shorter than I. Yet she was slender, fine-boned, and her neck was a stem, and she held herself as if she were tall, like some delicate weed grown fast in a summertime field. She was wearing a navy-blue dress trimmed with a narrow standing edge of white piqué around her fragile neck, and she stood with one arm on the bar and began to survey herself, looking down at her arm; then her glance ran up over her shoulder and across her bosom. Her skin glowed. She was openly happy at what she saw of herself.

  Marrow, evidently sensing that my attention was vagrant, talked louder. “You know Apollo Holdreth collects coins? F—that! That’s something I can’t see, collecting old jack—foreign jack. Money’s to spend! The other night over at the club Martin Foley, you know Foley, he came in there with two old silver coins and he told Apollo he’d sell ’em to him. Foley said he’d bought ’em in Panama, they just looked like silver dollars with this Spic writing on ’em you could barely make out, but he said they were Pieces of Eight. So I said to him, ‘Eight what?’ and he couldn’t answer me, so I said, ‘When I get to be President of the United States, we’re going to mint nothing but twenty-dollar gold pieces, and that’s what I’m going to collect. I’m going to be a coin collector, like F. D. R. collects stamps.’ S—, he has his Postmaster General print ’em up specially for him.”

  I didn’t dare look at her too steadily, for fear Marrow would turn around and see her, and that, I figured, would be that.

  Marrow seemed gloomy. “We lost a lot of dumb jerks out there today,” he said, as if to stress that it was a man’s own damn-fool fault if he died. “I don’t care when I lose. I guess that’s why I win so much. I just don’t care. Another thing. I don’t believe in the law of probability. I just say to myself, ‘Maybe the f—ing law’s not working right this minute.’ Like I always play the winner in roulette. The hell with statistics. By the law of probability I’m probably going to get killed in this war, but I say the hell with that, maybe the law’s on vacation. I don’t like these guys that add up how much back pay they got stored up. What they think they are, squirrels? I like to spend my money. I budget my cash very careful, so as I can be sure and spend every cent.”

  You couldn’t tell whether he wanted to live forever or be ready to die any minute.

  He was getting kind of sore at me for not saying, “Yup, yup, sure, I agree,” every ten seconds, so he looked around and saw her, and he said to me, in a voice that had conceit in it, and ruthlessness, “Brother Boman, follow me. We got work to do.” He started over toward her.

  I tagged along as usual. At that time I thought Marrow had hung the moon.

  25/

  It happened that as we moved toward the bar the girl got up and started to walk away, maybe to go to the can.

  The way she walked took my breath away. There was a straightness about her, not of a small person trying to be big, but of someone serene, and though I wasn’t crazy about cats I admired her catlike control, tense-relaxed, in balance like a spring, and she had an odd way of putting her legs forward, setting her feet down pigeon-toed, toe first and then heel, it seemed, like a ballet dancer, but not affected, simply answering the demands of a certain kind of pelvis and faintly suggesting superior fruits in that basin of bone—a provocative walk, believe me, her head turning with hooded eyes that seemed not to look at, but certainly saw, men.

  Buzz hurried and blocked her way, standing nearly on tiptoe, blowing like a porpoise, with his overseas cap flipping in his hands in front of him and then beating on his leg, and with a big Don Juan simper all over his massive face; while I posted myself like a docile footman behind him and somewhat to his right. My heart was beating hard, considering that Buzz was leading the charge.

  “Par’ me, madam,” Marrow said. “Can you direct me to the Dorchester Bar?”

  “Mademoiselle,” the girl corrected him, with dead eyes.

  “Apologies.”

  Buzz’s shoulders were stooped forward, as if he had a public grab in mind, and I saw the girl look up at him in perfect calm, neither accepting nor rejecting his winks and lip-licking.

  “Will you join my pal and me in a cup of tea?” His reference to me was on a deploring note, hinting that it would be a cinch to ditch me later.

  The girl looked around Marrow at me, and my heart nearly cut loose its moorings and came sailing out my ear, because there was a distinct change of expression on her face, for the better, and she said, with a simple directness that I later came to think of as Daphne’s trade mark, “Yes. Love it.”

  So we went back to our table, it being evident that she had not been going to the loo but only unloading a problem man, and all three of us ordered gin, not tea, and Buzz went through his routines, like an acrobat, flexing his jokes, posing proud and poised as if hearing a drumroll of danger at the edge of certain stale compliments and premature suggestions he always plunged into. And I, in the meanwhile, suffered a most extraordinary shyness, hardly daring to look at the girl. My heart was still racing and tripping, and most of the time I kept my eyes on my glass of warm gin and soda, which I kept revolving, like a troublesome thought, on a ring of moisture on the table top. It seemed that each time I raised my glance to the girl’s face, her gaze was fastened to mine.

  Was her man m.i.a.? Marrow asked the question as off-handedly as if being lost on a mission was like having a hacking cough.

  He was.

  Who had he been?

  Pitt. The girl spoke the name with ease, with what might have seemed too ready acceptance of her loss.

  I vaguely remembered Pitt, a navigator in Houdini’s Trunk, a mild and undistinguished gent, so far as I knew. But this girl. He must have had something.

  “Sure,” Buzz said, who had apparently run a check on every woman in Cambridgeshire and all East Anglia. “I heard Pitt had a classy steady, and no one could figure it out.” It was thick-skinned of Marrow to run Pitt down, but the girl didn’t seem to mind. “A navigator!” he exclaimed, as if she’d thrown herself away on a pickpocket.

  “He was a dear man,” she said, without emphasis; Pitt might have been a fellow she’d met for a minute at a party, but her coolness itself was enough to stop Marrow’s mouth.

  Various men dropped by our table, each for a drink at a time, because the word seemed to have spread that the Pitt Special was on the loose, Pitt being regrettably absent. I watched the girl. Daphne. She had the knack of sizing men up before they opened their big mouths, and she knew exactly which side of herself to show a man in order to make him feel like the whole cheese. With one she’d make herself scarce and small; with another she’d be taciturn, a deep well; with a third she’d make common-housefly wings of her eyelashes. As for me, she looked straight at me, into me. She patted her hair and fluffed it up a lot, and she constantly worked over the Pitt legac
y of lipstick, compact, gold-plated Zippo. I don’t mean to give an impression of her as a winsome flirt. She was a grown woman. In the mirror of her compact she was great: dealt with herself as her own best friend. It was obvious that the admiration of men, of which she was getting a heap, stirred up unaffected joy in her. Wooing by heels was not ruled out, so long as it was spirited. She was in love—not with poor Pitt any more, but with everyone, herself, life. She poured out warmth to a lot of men who were chilled to the bone. I had the illusion, however—and whether or not I was justified, I clung to it, a lamppost in my reeling world—that the only person to whom she communicated real feeling was me.

  I didn’t dare ask her to dance: the risk of losing her was too great out there where, by now, the band having reached altitude and having cut in the supercharger, feet were flying and hands across the sea were in some cases also across the seats. Calais glide, jitterbug, big apple. But a dozen others did ask Daphne for a turn. She declined, never saying, but somehow the men got an idea, that it was in deference to the departed. But I had a different idea, because each time she turned one down she got in a look at me.

  There were ten minutes, toward the end, when she and Marrow and I were alone at the table again, and during that time Buzz, under the impression that he was, as usual, sweeping the field to victory, incessantly talked, and I asked one unobtrusive question: Did I have her permission to see her sometime? This she gave so quietly that I think Buzz, going off like a pinwheel, never even noticed the exchange.

  The party was getting rough. Some throttle-jockeys from the—th Group had crashed the dance, and during a fist-fight on the floor we had a soulful bass-viol solo, very drunk, by Major Walter M. Silg, commanding officer of the —th Squadron in our Group, who had had four ships torn from his flanks during the day. Then some damn fool blew taps, and everybody stood up and cried. Daphne’s eyes were dry, but they had a half-covered look, as of a Moslem woman’s face withdrawn behind cloth in unassailable privacy. I couldn’t tell anything about what she felt.

  That was the end. There was a scramble for buses in the blackout outside, and suddenly, to my amazement, there we were in the darkness, Daphne and I, hand in hand, groping from bus to bus to see which was Cambridge Number Four. We found the right one, and she boarded it, and she touched me lightly on the shoulder to thank me and was gone.

  Ten minutes later, undressing, not wanting to face Marrow because in the end he, not I, had been ditched, I came to my senses.

  I didn’t have her address. Didn’t even know her last name. Where she worked. All I knew was: girl named Daphne, lived in Cambridge. Sure, she’d be glad to see me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE RAID

  1119–1337 hours

  1/

  We flew in a low, wide circle around the airdrome and formed our element, a slanting vee of three, with The Body at the apex, and Stebbins in Finah Than Dinah on one wing, and Schuman in Expendable VI on the other. Those two had taken off after we had, and they caught up by flying slightly tighter radii than ours. My job on the climb was to watch the temperatures and pressures and keep an eye peeled for maniacs flying collision courses, and I had to close down the cowl flaps little by little to maintain the proper cylinder-head temperatures, as Marrow gradually eased the manifold pressures and reduced the r.p.m.’s. We had more than an hour ahead of us of climbing and forming up. By the time we’d taken a turn around the field, Finah Than Dinah was packed in on our left wing, about fifty feet astern and fifty feet lower than we; and Expendable VI was in a corresponding slot on my side, but fifty feet higher. We settled down to the work of our long ascent at three hundred feet a minute, riding out on our first long northeastward leg over the mysterious, steamy fens, where soft white pads of the morning fog were still to be seen alternating with flats of grain rippling in the westerly breeze like patches of golden sea. I saw dark fields of sugar beets and strawberries, and some of the broad dikes of the Dutch reclaimers of English swamp, shadowed ridges on the plain, and the Ouse and the Cam, which I thought of as Daphne’s and my river; and then—familiar landmark from many raids—the great hundred-foot-high dike, the straightest line in all England, I think, thirty miles from Erith to Downham Market. I had come to have vivid, powerful feelings about all that damp green plate of landscape, seen in many lights. It had meant, so often, departure toward danger and then arrival back to safety; parting from Daphne, perhaps for the last time, and then prospect of reunion, relieved and weary, glad to be alive for her sake.

  Our group was to proceed to splasher beacon number two for assembly. I was listening on VHF for a call from Croquet Red, Colonel Bins’ call signal in Angel Tread, and scanning the sky for planes of our Group. Marrow was unusually glum and quiet, speaking to us in short, choppy queries.

  “Anybody see any flares?”

  The sky was full of Forts and shrinking clouds. We watched for flares from Angel Tread and from other group and squadron leaders, but so far there was only confusion.

  “Hear anything, Bowman?”

  “Not yet.”

  The sound of Marrow’s voice acted on me as some sort of warning. I looked quickly at him, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him if he felt all right, but I checked myself, for I wouldn’t have wanted to give a man I hated the satisfaction of scorning my solicitude—and besides, I was not ready to undermine Marrow with the crew. But his voice was certainly strange—unsure, absent-minded, edged with strain.

  How different these tones were from those in which the Marrow of the early days shouted in the plane! He had been ebullient then, and I had thought him full to bursting with life. I remembered how he would curl up for a catnap on one of the sofas in the lounge outside our mess, after lunch, in those days, and how, after a deep sigh, he would give an attribution to Keats and then ballocks up the quote: “The art of living is a joy forever!” But now Daphne had helped me see that he had always been in love with something quite different from what I had thought; not with living at all. I could picture him, just before curling up on that sofa, in front of the officers’-mess bulletin board, the day after a mission, gazing at the strike photos of the first bursts, the smoke heads rising, the chaos of dust and ruin; and at the P.R.V. photos, taken later, of the carcasses of buildings and the pockmarks of our bombs. He would stand there for a very long time with squinting eyes and a set jaw; a grim face. This morning, after what Daphne had told me the day before, I knew that it was not at all an expression of horror and regret, but rather the grimace of a man who has just taken a big slug of strong booze, when the throat burns and the first relaxing ecstasy shoots through the chest—with the difference that he seemed to be able to savor that first stab, prolong it, hold onto it.

  Then I remembered the first time he had let out his battle whoop on joining with enemy fighters, a cry which had grown, through successive missions, into his prolonged, hair-raising shriek that I hated, I believe, more than anything else in all our work of these later days. And that first shout, come to think of it, had been early in the tour—on the mission to Meaulte, our fifth, on May thirteenth, and I barely noticed it at the time, because that was the day I wore the shrunken socks and my feet were nearly frozen. Yet I remembered it vividly: It came just after Handown called in an attack from eleven o’clock, and Buzz and I could see the fighters swing over and begin their run on us, and they got within range, and The Body trembled as our guns began to fire, and Marrow shouted, a long “Oo-oo-oo-oo!,” happy, fierce, and oblivious, a shout like that of a certain kind of kid going down the first dip of a giant roller coaster.

  Now we flew through a cloud, and I must say that while there may have been a signal of distress in Marrow’s voice, there was absolutely nothing yet in his handling of the ship that was not steady, firm, the touch of the master. Flying through a cloud in formation during assembly was pure nightmare for me; he had always thought it a lark. You had no horizon on which to orient yourself; your wingmen had to tuck i
n so close that you expected one of them to chew off your tail section any moment; and the sky was full of madmen flying every which way trying to find their formations. But Marrow was on course for splasher two; he had no idea of dodging a piddling cloud, so through it we went. It was small, thank goodness.

  Marrow kept riding Haverstraw for our position. Buzz was on the pilot’s controls of the radio compass himself half the time picking up the bearings of splashers, yet he expected Clint to have everything in his head as well. Finally Haverstraw did something he never had done before: raised his voice in protest. “If you want me to keep track of these bearings,” he said, “then get the hell off the tuning crank.”

  I remembered the way Marrow had meekly scuttled himself down the passageway to the navigator’s compartment when I’d let loose a similar blast during the preflight check, and I wondered whether he’d pull another docile retreat in the face of Haverstraw’s surprising anger. Not at all. “Keep your shirt on, junior,” he quickly said. And he raised his arm and began tuning again.

  “Red-green flare at two o’clock,” Handown said from the upper turret.

  “I see it,” Marrow said. “Keep your eye on that ship, son.” Marrow even called Handown, who was thirty-six years old, “son.”

  We were climbing all the while, and as we rose in the sky I saw, lit by the thin sun which was near its zenith, the many wriggling rivers of that haunch of England: the Nene, the Ouse, the Lark, the Rhee, the Granta, the Pant, the Stour, the Wissey, the Wensum, the Nar, the Yare. It was Kid Lynch who had put me onto all those beautiful names from the warehouse of ancient time. “Lynch,” Marrow said once, when the Kid got on the subject of English place names, “you’re a God-damn limey lover.” Really he was mainly a lover of sounds in his mouth. You’d hear him reel words off with dazzling speed: “Whelk yak joke clink udder under mood purl ousel osprey loam dome dimity stoat notch niggard noodle dump.” Good names for watercourses, he said. Some you’d call rivers, some not. Yak Creek. Purl Pond. The Upper Dimity River…For a moment I saw Kid Lynch sprawled in the radio compartment of The House of Usher, the brain with those filaments of outlandish association quite lost, all smashed, and I felt a thrust of bitter sadness.