The War Lover

by John Hersey

  “Handown, what the f— is this all about?” Marrow shouted.

  “I gave Junior a loan of my lucky dice couple days ago,” Handown calmly said. “He thought maybe I’d want ’em today. Gave ’em back.”

  I had no idea whether that was the truth or whether Neg was covering for the Little Brother.

  6/

  As we approached the coast of East Anglia the broken and scattered cumulus clouds, far beneath us, lay like scraps of lint on the floor of a careless home. The sky above us was clear. We could see for fifteen miles all around. The sun was already behind us, and ahead, low in the sky, a slender moon was rising, and the Channel beneath had the cold blue-gray cast of finished steel.

  We went over Orfordness at twenty-six minutes after one, at fourteen thousand feet. From the coast onward our briefed cruising speed was one hundred sixty miles per hour, indicated air speed, and, as Colonel Bins adjusted to that rate, Marrow followed suit. We were still climbing.

  About five minutes out Marrow told me to fly awhile, and I took the controls. There were no problems now; just a matter of keeping hooked snugly underneath the first element. This kind of flying had at long last become second nature to me. About fifty miles out over the Channel I remembered to remind Butcher Lamb to cut off the IFF. Erector Set overhead was the first ship I could see test-firing her guns, flinging out momentary puffs of smoke, pale blue against the deeper blue above; then our ship began to shiver, and through my earphones and the engines’ roar I could hear the crackle of short bursts as our men shook out their barrels and then left their guns cocked and on fire against the danger we were so soon to face.

  Prien barked off an oxygen check, and afterwards Haverstraw sang out, “On flight plan,” stretching out the pla–a–a–n, like an echo among hills. That meant that we were on course and on time; the report rang in my ears like the “All’s well” of a watchman in the night, a cry of defiance against would-be thieves, murderers, disturbers of the peace.

  There came back to me, then, a warning I had indirectly taken, the day before, from something Daphne had said—that men with Marrow’s taint might, in an extremity of facing defeat of some kind or other, try to destroy everyone around them, along with themselves. She had not put it so explicitly, of course. She had been talking about an R.A.F. pilot she had once loved—a man much like Marrow, she had said; the warning I had inferred myself. I thought there was some analogy between the tale of the last hours of her R.A.F. boyfriend and the legend of Samson’s death, and I was not sure that the fact that Samson was surrounded by enemies when he brought the roof of the temple down deprived the analogy of its force. I felt, at any rate, a sort of chill of bracing myself for whatever my pilot might pull.

  My eyes drew me away from these thoughts. For a few minutes, as we climbed through the eighteen-thousand-foot mark over the Channel, all the planes of the great attack began to give off short, non-persistent trails of condensation. Each ship was like a huge brush leaving a stroke of whitewash on the ceiling of the afternoon. Fortunately—for beautiful though the contrails were, they were a menace to planes in formation and a cover for enemy fighters—they faded quickly away, and as we ascended they no longer formed.

  Far ahead, over the enemy-held land, higher than we yet were, I could see a thin plate of cirrus clouds, and it briefly crossed my mind that that cover might cause us trouble. Directly under it, like an indistinct shadow, I could just make out the dark line of the enemy coast. What was ahead was like a huge mouth, the upper lip of vapor, the lower lip of earth. In between, on our course that would lead us to be swallowed in that maw, there was only a misty vagueness, a gray uncertainty, an atmosphere almost opaque.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE TOUR

  April 17 to May 18

  1/

  Sleep is a mystery. That was a night I should have spent going round and round on a barbecue spit, but not at all. I dived asleep before Marrow even came in the room, and I was in a black void from then until nine thirty in the morning, when Sully wakened me, shaking my shoulder, saying, “Breakfast at ten. Briefing at ten thirty. Out, you slug.”

  No. Not again. Not three days in a row.

  It was not a dream. Sully persisted. “I mean it, stupid. Get up. And get your fat-ass pilot up while you’re at it.”

  When Marrow finally came to, he was so furious at Wing he seemed to have forgotten all about the night before and Daphne.

  They briefed us, and we went out to the ships, and we taxied, and we had three postponements, and then they scrubbed the strike.

  In our weeks at Pike Rilling, before we’d flown a mission ourselves, we had seen many a scrubbing, but this was our first direct knowledge of how pernicious these cancellations were. They had got us believing we really were going on our third in a row. They’d worked us up to the pitch of reluctant willingness known as slight cramps in the bowels, and they’d made us wait two hours, missing lunch, and then, like puppeteers grown tired of the weights on their fingers, they’d let us down.

  In the truck, going back in, Marrow was pleasant to me. I was amazed. He seemed to have no hard feelings whatsoever about Daphne. Didn’t say a word. It was four thirty when we got to our room.

  I washed up and changed into O.D.’s and went to the PX and asked the tech behind the barred window for a box of three condoms.

  For once I almost had to agree with Marrow about sergeants: always a razz. “Officers’ dance last night, sir?” this tech said, with his enamel hanging out most agreeably, a first-class ad for some miracle ingredient. “Congrats.” On the speedy work, he must have meant.

  I wasn’t a great hand at this particular transaction, and I could feel a blush start at the back of my skull and push out around my hairline, so that my face felt sheathed with blotting paper, but I’d picked up enough of wising to say, “They’re a present for those bastards up at Wing, so the Situation won’t get pregnant.”

  “Have a nice ride,” the tech said. “Sir.”

  I drew a pass and caught the liberty run to Cambridge at, as they said, eighteen hundred hours—appropriate that day, because it had seemed at least that many from Sully’s fracture of my peace in the morning until now, six o’clock, when with a snarl of poorly maintained gears our grown-toy R.A.F. bus took off into a haze-softened sunset. I had been in a strange fluctuating mood all day, even during Wing’s interminable hoax, for I had felt as a firefly must, aglow and luminous at times, cold and dark between. In the periods when the coils were lit I had rehearsed Daphne as a presence: the swift rushes of eagerness to please in her expression as she sat and talked with the big ox, Braddock; her left hand trembling around her compact, as if holding a living bird; her sincerely hospitable face as it met its twin in the small round mirror, almost saying, “Oh, it’s you! Delighted to see you, my dear.” Above all her straight look into my eyes. Again and again. I had a sense of wonder at her subtle favoring of me, as if I had been given some least-expected honor—been made Mayor of Donkentown just because people trusted my phizz. Then the intervening chill. I wondered how much I had kidded myself about her election of me, for Daphne had, to be honest, made every man look as if he felt chosen. Maybe the reason Marrow wasn’t sore today was that he thought he was in the driver’s seat. My imbecility—not getting her address, her name, even. Had I been drunk? No good could come of my challenging Marrow in the very hearth and parlor of his conceit. What in the world was I doing on this bus?

  The men in the bus were meanly silent, like released criminals, men pale from living in the shadow of prison walls, oppressed with a feeling of the immensity of the world, yet eager to be in it again, to prove themselves or get revenge. I heard them murmur, one to another, plans for their rehabilitation: Let’s have a beer first, or, Why’n’t we wait and see they got a movie house.

  As for me, I was just going to walk around the streets looking for a face.

  The square bus ran along at about twenty
miles an hour with a whine of a hurtling Spitfire. I saw glimpses in the dusk of the East Anglian farmlands, gently breathing contours under a blanket of mist; then, as it darkened, the Gog-Magog Hills off to the right, two-hundred-foot bumps looming in that flat land like noble distant sierras. Then suddenly we were being dumped out on Trumpington Street.

  I began with a semblance of system—by looking for bright lights, but there were none. My eyes were so wide open I saw nothing. Past a small church into a market square. Faces blank in the caverns of the night. Under a street lamp some students in idiotic truncated academic gowns, not even as long as their suit coats, with mortar caps under their arms. A sound of military boots against a wall. Bicycles, singly and in packs, dangerous as wild dogs.

  Then I stood opposite the great gate of Trinity College, like a huge, upside-down, four-legged butcher’s chopping block; what it really was I did not then know. An iron grille was locked. Indeed I had again and again at what must have been college gates an impression of being shut out.

  I entered lobbies and restaurants and stared in corners; told headwaiters I was expecting someone. The Lion. The Bull. The Hoop. I had the honor to be thrown out of a gentlemen’s club called, I was given to understand, The Pitt. Daphne had been Pitt’s girl; I remembered, in a game of hidden treasures in a strange living room, a woman playing the piano very loudly when I got “warm,” near the object of the quest but still unable to see it.

  I squinted to make out, on plaques on the faces of houses on street corners, the names of streets, as if the deficiency of not having an address could be overcome by close concentration. Maid’s Causeway. Petty Cury. Many. I scowled at the doors on Paradise Street, for surely…

  On King’s Parade I saw a middle-aged gentleman, with a face shut tight, jaw shadowy, looking like an F.B.I. man wearing a silk top hat, a cutaway, and striped pants, running headlong down the middle of the street in pursuit of three clearly drunken students in those crazy short gowns like black shoulder-wings, and I felt relief at the sight of their eccentricity. For me it was a consolation. We were all in this world together.

  Long since I should have given up, but I see now that my desire to be near Daphne Whatshername was very, very great.

  Like a gloomy voyeur I stared in rare un-blacked-out windows for a chance sight of her face. I seemed to hurry faster and faster the more absurd my search became. I saw none of the great sights of the ancient seat of learning, and late, once, in a disturbing open place, I cried out to ask a distant walking man where I was, and he shouted, Jesus College Cricket Ground.

  I caught the Pike Rilling liberty bus at the Bull on Trumpington Street at eleven o’clock, twenty-three hundred hours—uncountable hours since I’d seen the girl who had said her name was Daphne. I slept hard in the bus, with my head fallen forward and, I guess, bouncing on the bus window; I had a stiff neck for a week. The station was on alert when I got there, for a mission the next morning, and Marrow was still up, and keyed up.

  “I been looking all over for you,” he said. “Where the hell you been?”

  “Bike ride,” I said.

  “Where the hell you go, Cincinnati?”

  “Just around,” I said. “Stopped for a bottle of stout.”

  “Some bottle,” he said. “You look bushed.”

  Buzz was really revved up. He said he’d been investigating “that dish of yours last night.” I was too tired to give a whoop; he’d calmly surrendered her to me. Said to be a great piece. Lucky bastard. Something about some sort of tragedy—lost an R.A.F. fiancé, or some such, no one knew exactly what. Was known to have had several relationships, here and there, Pitt having been the last, but during each one was absolutely monogamous. “Boman, you really hit it lucky if you can effect a tie-up there.” Marrow was actually glad for me—either that, or he was wiring up a booby trap.

  2/

  The next few days were a bad dream—exhausting activity and frustration. The morning after I went to Cambridge they scrubbed a mission for the marshaling yards at Amiens; the morning after that we had wind, rain, and what the English newspapers call bright intervals, and Colonel Whelan sent us up on a Group practice mission, to tighten up our formation flying, but all we did was dodge the intervals that weren’t bright; the following day he’d scheduled another practice mission, but someone slipped a cog, and Sully didn’t wake any of the fliers in time for the take-off, and Whelan was infuriated and restricted all personnel to the base, pending an investigation of what he deemed to be sabotage of his will. The next day after that they sent us on a prolonged low-level practice mission.

  That was the morning it came to me that maybe Marrow knew Daphne’s last name, or her telephone number, for he collected such things for their own sakes, and he could have found out that night while I’d gone to the boys’ room. Only I couldn’t figure out how to ask him without giving away too much.

  The practice mission had Marrow in a tizzy. He had connected two things: our being sent on a hedge-hopping practice flight, and an order from Wing, that very morning, that all combat crews were to be given new lectures on security, and he was convinced that they were planning to send us on sneak strikes against heavily defended targets at zero altitude. He was furious. He said Fortresses had been designed in every particular for extreme high-altitude attacks; they weren’t mosquitoes, they hadn’t the maneuverability or stamina for grasscutting missions. It was true that weather interfered with our usefulness high in the air, but…how could a man tiptoe in hip boots?

  Marrow fumed away till we got in the air, then suddenly he was transformed, because he saw what our low-lying thunder did to the countryside. Flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, the myriad specks of barnyard fowl in their open runs—all were thrown into panic at our approach. Marrow’s chest expanded. The calm smile of a powerful man spread on his face. The flight gave me curious new sensations, I must admit. When we went across woodlands, treetops whipped past my ears, it seemed, and looking out my side window I saw the intricate patterns of bare branches, like the ordered barbs, barbules, and barbicels of great feathers, and I saw a wagon in a stone-fenced yard, a car in a road, a clutch of thatched roofs like the backs of huddled badgers—all in instantaneous camera-shutter glimpses. That was what made the mission eerie for me: the flickering sensation, sizes and shapes confused in my bewildered eyes.

  But for Marrow the thrill of power grew and grew, and finally he said, “You take her, Boman, I got to see this closer.” He unstrapped himself and crawled down in the greenhouse and he plugged in on Brindt’s interphone and began giving the crew a running account, as of a radio announcer, of the impact of our roaring threat on all living beings below. He cackled as he talked, the swift laugh of seeing pie thrown into faces. “Listen, you guys…” He told of a farm crew, spreading manure from a wagon, cringing, one or two running blindly nowhere, at the sound of our hundred engines. Then he almost killed himself laughing—“you should’ve seen this”—when the driver of a tractor threw a gear to halt his machine and tumbled off and sought shelter under his slender vehicle.

  Out of nowhere, as I strained to stay in formation and maintain minimal altitude, I had a thought. I would ask Clint Haverstraw about Daphne’s number.

  Haverstraw, the math demon, had a trick system for remembering phone numbers, and during the phases, back at home, at first in fun and then for ready reference, Marrow had filed in Haverstraw’s head several score, maybe a couple of hundred, telephone numbers of various women he claimed as his all over the United States; now the United Kingdom was also beginning to figure in the catalogue. Sometimes, to show Haverstraw off, Marrow would just give a first name.

  “Margie.”

  “Which one?”

  “That’s right! S—, I forgot, there are three of ’em. The blonde.”

  “Denver. Decatur six, four four oh nine.”

  “You see?” Marrow would say, looking around at the audience. “The son of a b
itch has a f—ing machine in his head. Too bad he can’t put it to some good use. Like, say, navigating a ship.”

  The only number Haverstraw couldn’t remember was that of his own best girl. Marrow had found that out somehow, and always announced it to the audience, and you’d just be thinking that this was a gag when Clint would blush.

  I couldn’t wait for the mission to be over. We flew north over soft heathery hills and turned back before we reached the Scottish border, lest, as Max said later, we bump into a stuffed cloud, up there where they had real hills. I was very busy flying and began to have cramps in the right cheek of my fanny. We finally got home, and of course Marrow came up and took the controls away from his idiot co-pilot to be in charge of the landing. That was all right with me. I was drenched with sweat.

  They had an interrogation which was also a sort of critique, and on the way out I managed to catch Haverstraw for a minute. Clint wouldn’t have seen Daphne, because he hadn’t been to the dance; he was soldering the connections of a homemade radio receiver in his room that night. I asked him if Marrow had registered with him the number of a dame called Daphne from Cambridge.

  Haverstraw said, “The Marrow Meat File is not open to unauthorized personnel.”

  Sometimes I have a hard time taking a joke, especially when it’s on me. I didn’t want to sound too eager, but I barked out like a kid who can’t take a slash, “Cut the crap. I got to know.”

  Clint saw that he had me on the ropes. “I can’t remember any of that stuff only when Marrow asks me. It’s like he’s got me hypnotized.”

  I was afraid that if I pushed any harder Clint would tell Marrow how riled up I was about someone named Daphne, so I dropped it.