The War Lover

by John Hersey

3/

  We had eight days of maddening weather after that—not bad enough to keep us on the ground but not good enough to fly missions. The older hands, particularly those who had nearly completed their tours, began to get fidgety at having no mission scheduled and Marrow took us up a couple of times but really didn’t drill us on anything; he just wanted to fly.

  On the eighth of those mizzling days, the thirtieth of April—I have a good reason for remembering the date—a batch of replacements came in, and although we of The Body had only been on two missions, the sight of their faces in the club that evening made me realize how raw, how childish, we must have looked when we had first arrived.

  After supper we were sitting around, and Marrow said to big Braddock, jerking his head toward a chilled clump of new officers, “What say we flak ’em up a bit?”

  “Why don’t we go over and do it to the new sergeant gunners? That’s more fun.”

  “Let’s warm up here,” Marrow said.

  So we drifted across the room, and Marrow began the hazing in the most natural way in the world, because of course the new boys began asking questions. They got onto the subject of friendly fighter escorts, and Marrow said, “Under eighteen thousand the Spit-5 with the clipped wingtips, that’s a capable ship. It’s given us a lot of support, wouldn’t you say, Brad?”

  “Sure,” Braddock said, “and above twenty-four thousand the Spit-9 is a very good airplane—right?”

  “Check,” Marrow said. “But in between, the Messerschmidt, the 110, seems to be the ideal ship.”

  “Trouble is,” Braddock said, “right in there is where we fly.”

  A few minutes later the Tannoy announced an alert, for the next day, and even I was strangely relieved at the announcement, but I noticed the new cheeks go pale, as my own must have when I had first heard the fateful, hollow, metallic voice from Out There. After the alert Benny Chong, going off to his sack, left the club door ajar, and right away Marrow called out, “Benny! Hey! Close that f—ing door. You think you’re coming back tomorrow or something?”

  Chong poked his head in, said, “Up yours, Marrow,” and slammed the door.

  It got much worse. Braddock and Marrow fed each other horrors to frighten the new men with. The way that gunner (invented) looked with the top of his head blown off by a cannon shell. What splashed here, and what splashed there. His lower lip was untouched, he needed a shave, there was some cigarette paper stuck on the lip; but his upper lip didn’t exist, he was like the Invisible Man from there upwards. About the gunner’s pal who had to take the rag in there and wipe the brains off the inside of the turret. Vivid details. I must say I went along with it, putting in my oar now and then, wanting, I think, to share some corner of Marrow’s feeling that nothing nasty could happen to him on this earth; little did I dream that our game of that evening would come home to roost on my sickened conscience weeks later, in July, when Kid Lynch had his immature but dazzling brain removed by part of a shell.

  By that time Marrow and Braddock apparently considered their malice warmed up, because they excused themselves and, with me and a couple of others tagging along to feel safe, wandered over to the enlisted men’s Nissen huts and rooted around until they found the new boys; found, in fact, a youngster named Willis Lamb, whose last name appealed to Marrow.

  I laughed that night. In those days I thought my pilot could do no wrong, and flakking-up was an honored institution, the dividing of a new man’s possessions against his likely death being a macabre burlesque of the conviction men held that disaster would strike not themselves but others. But memory has altered my point of view, and I wonder why I laughed at the sight of Marrow, with his eyes bugging out exactly as they did at the height of his stories about making love, an officer razzing an enlisted man, using death as a big joke to frighten a boy who had not yet faced it for the first time: Lamb on his hands and knees with Marrow leaning over him, Butcher Lamb who was to be Marrow’s own radio gunner, with his pathetic store of possessions scattered across the floor, his shaving set, his penknife, his flashlight (“Say, that’s a pretty keen flashlight, where the hell did you buy that flashlight?”), right down to a snapshot of his girl, a pale stick of a city girl in a cheap organdy dress that was like a whirl of spun sugar in an amusement-park eatery—Lamb’s upturned face, streaming sweat and agony, as Marrow triumphantly lifted the snapshot and said, “Well, look at Little Bo Peep! Hot s—! Lamb, when you’re shot dead I’m going to go home and put the clamps to Bo Peep. Mmm—mmm. I bet she’s got a tight crotch. Look at this, fellas. You think this girl even knows she has a c—?” I saw a momentary flash of hatred, of what might have passed for courage, on Lamb’s face, then its fading away into incredulity and despair as Marrow tore the snapshot into tiny pieces and threw them, like confetti, over Lamb’s head, and shouted amid the laughter all around, “Lamb of God! You ready for the sacrifice?”

  As we walked back to our hutment we suffered a reaction. It was obvious that the Group badly needed replacements, yet at dinner we’d heard some of the new officers talk of having spent three months sitting around with nearly a thousand other trained pilots in a replacement center in Tallahassee, unable to get orders cut sending them to the E.T.O., unable even to get up in aircraft long enough to make good on their flying pay. The new men had said, too, that they were positive they hadn’t had adequate training for combat. One of us brought these squawks up as we walked through tall woods toward our quarters, and Marrow stopped on the path, raised a fist and shook it toward Pike Rilling Hall, and through clenched teeth he uttered a cry of protest, frustration, and, I think now, yearning for the very authority he hated: “The bastards! The mother-f—ing bastards!”

  But when we got to our room Marrow said, “I’m famished. Let’s steal us some eggs.”

  So we organized a foray to the enlisted men’s mess hall, where, we’d learned, we could pull rank if we were caught, and while Braddock and I covered, Marrow and Stebbins broke a small pane in the mess-hall pantry door and let themselves in and put about a dozen real eggs and some butter in a helmet shell, and we took them back and scrambled four at a time in a pie tin on a hot plate, and while we were eating the second batch with spoons out of the common pan, Marrow, with his mouth full of hot eggs, said, “Oh Boman, letter for you. F’got to tell you.”

  “Where?”

  He pointed with his spoon at our desk. “Under some that stuff.” He turned to Braddock. “Good eggs, huh? Better’n that f—ing powder. Wonder where they’ll send us tomorrow.”

  I dug down in the chaos on the desk and finally found the letter. It was typed. Addressed to Captain Boman at the base. A promotion and no first name. English stamp. Cancellation dim; try under light. Date four days past. Locus of origin Cambridge.

  “How long this been here?” I asked.

  Buzz was chewing. He shrugged. “Day ‘fore yesterday,” he said, “two, three days, I forget. Brought it over for you.”

  I tore it open.

  “Dear Captain,” it said. “It occured to me that neither you nor your friend has my address. It is Abbey Road, 24. If you could ring up before six you could get me at the office, Cambridge 7342. Ask for Section B. If that should be impossible try Cambridge 1476 after hours, and if you catch my landlady, Mrs. Coffin, in a good humour, she might fetch me downstairs to speak with you. Better tell her you’re a colonel to offset your being a Yank. She’s a bit of a lady, if you please. Place used to be digs for University Students. She had an Indian prince once. I’d love to see you both. Do ring up, or write to: Yrs., Daphne Poole.”

  Before I felt really good I had three quick thoughts: Of course she knew my last name because that was all Marrow ever used; and, Nice straight note, no fake excuses for being forward, and only one serious defect—that word “both”; and, The rascal, hiding the letter on me for three days. The worst I could think of my pilot then was that he was a playful rascal.

  Braddock looke
d at my face and said, “Rich aunt die?”

  4/

  On the hardstand, next morning, just before we boarded The Body, Clint Haverstraw said he had something to tell us all. He looked pale and earnest.

  Haverstraw was one flier who never had wanted to be a pilot. He had elected navigation because he had a long head for numbers and patterns. The one thing he lacked was a sense of direction, and it appeared that navigation was unnatural work for him; the worse he was at it, the harder he tried. When, getting a fix with a sextant to keep in practice, he shot the sun, you had the feeling he left it thoroughly dead. He did most of his navigational figuring in his head, and though he seemed quiet, steady, efficient, he made dangerous mistakes, not of computation but of application; formation flying saved us. He was rather submissive, eager to do a good job, though he had told me once that the idea of dropping bombs and killing people was deeply disturbing to him. Somehow he tickled Marrow, who seemed his opposite pole, and when others teased Clint, Marrow rose, often angrily, to his defense. Haverstraw was inflexible; hated change of any kind. His enemy was not Nazi Germany but dirt, and he uttered the word “mud” as if there were some of it clinging to his palate about to trip by counterweight the sluices of nausea. He would not have dreamed of going on a mission without carrying his good-luck charm—a British swagger stick.

  “Spill it,” Marrow said.

  “You won’t like it,” Haverstraw said. “Maybe I better not.”

  “P— or get off the pot,” Marrow said.

  “I’ve been doing some figuring,” Haverstraw said. Then he said we’d had a sixteen-per-cent loss on the Bremen mission, “but let’s say, to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, that five per cent is more normal.” His calculations indicated, he said, that if you took an attrition rate of five per cent and applied it to the remaining ships in the case of each successive mission, only two hundred seventy-seven out of each thousand planes would survive the standard tour, twenty-five missions.

  “Great timing, Clint,” I said. “Perfectly calculated to calm the troops just before battle.”

  But Marrow gently said, “Lay off him, Boman.” Buzz turned to Haverstraw. “Thanks, son,” he said. “I tell you something. I don’t give a s— if only ten are left out of a thousand, I’m going to be one of ’em.” He stared us all down. He seemed a great man in those days.

  As we emplaned through the belly hatch, I happened to follow Haverstraw aboard. He paused at the mouth of the hatch, grasped his swagger stick as if it were a wand, touched lightly once with its tip each of the four sides of the hatch opening, then leaning and twisting his torso he kissed the skin of The Body just to the right of the doorway. After that he went up into the ship.

  They had given us St. Nazaire, another of the U-boat bases on the Bay of Biscay, and after Bremen we were nervous without yet knowing enough to understand why.

  Getting a mission started—that was when Marrow was at his best in those early days, for the wait before the take-off was the bad time, with so much idleness. He kept us all busy; poured out a stream of chatter. “All right, Boman, watch that number three. Is number three coming up all right?…Watch the cowl flaps.” Then taxiing: “How are we on the right? O.K. on the right?” because if a wheel went off the hardstand into the mud the whole mission could be loused up. And he had similar jogs for all the others, keeping them on their toes.

  That was a rotten mission. There were low-flying clouds and spotty rain at the base. The —th Group, which was supposed to lead the strike, left the rendezvous ten minutes early, and our people had to fly with our throttles wide open twenty minutes to catch up. Five ships aborted.

  Over the continent we flew through a clearing, and below it was surprisingly hazeless so early, and we had reached base altitude, and looking down I could see a spread of France, flat, farm-textured, the faraway greens night-washed and yellowy under the morning sun. I saw a river that must have hated the sea, so much did it writhe in its reluctance to reach the coast. And there were towns, like splotches of gray fungus, here and there on the carpet of Brittany. Views like this from the upper sky made me feel, even in danger, a kind of calm that came from considering myself an insect, or a unit of virus, for the activities of men—I imagined a Breton farmer playing a game with greasy cards at a tavern table, wine at his elbow, a fat brute with pink skin, bloated and selfish, oblivious to war, his bloodshot eyes flashing as he raised a winning card and slapped it down on the table and bellowed his triumph—were reduced to a microscopic scale, so that a whole city of such activities was no more than a stain on the earth, and a whole province of them was only a splash of cartographer’s green. It was comforting to think of men as being so small as to be invisible altogether, and therefore of the self, too, as utterly insignificant: a poor target.

  Yes, I had begun to watch my own reactions very closely, and I decided that there was not, in the mission, the sensation of personal danger I’d experienced in more intimate conflict, such as boxing, which I’d doggedly done in school. Flying at high altitude in extreme cold, unnaturally masked and strapped, depending on oxygen for survival, forced to communicate with my fellow creatures mechanically (I had to remember to press the button at one end of my half-moon wheel to make myself heard), above all seeing the earth so far below as a mere pattern, a palette, gave me a feeling of severance, of being cut off, of being, as I was in an English pub, foreign. I think I’d have been very surprised at the connection with humanity that would have been involved if The Body had been hit; and I guess I would have reacted automatically with a further disconnection—by bailing out. I decided that the battle on the ground between missions was much more hazardous than combat itself, and up there I felt a kind of numbness, an alienation. All that changed later.

  Over the target, where there was eight-tenths cloud, the enemy met us strongly. Prien exclaimed once on the interphone, with distinct accents of enjoyment, over the sight of one of our planes going down asmoke. I had an uneasy feeling about him, for he with his bad stomach seemed to regard combat as a kind of game.

  Flak was heavy (“We could’ve let our wheels down,” Handown said afterwards, “and taxied on the stuff”), and just before the bombing run there was an incoherent bit of jabbering on the interphone from Bragnani, but soon Farr broke in on CALL, saying, “Don’t pay no attention to him.”

  Those two. The crew of a Fort was supposed to be a big happy family, its members all willing to die for each other. Our crew was not that. We had individualists and cliques aboard our ship, and lots of bickering and hard feeling, even when we were in danger. Another thing. According to the poop you got in the movies, all enlisted men were supposed to have hearts of gold, and all officers were supposed to be f—ups. I couldn’t see it that way. A sergeant waist gunner was the trouble-maker on our ship. Farr. For my money he single-handedly justified Marrow’s insane war on sergeants. Farr and Bragnani, the two waist gunners, were willing to die for each other, so they said. They claimed they had made a pact that if one had to go the other would, too, and I believe Bragnani would have followed Farr, all right, into the jaws of a lion; the other way round, I’m not so sure. At any rate, those two were surely allied against the rest of us; I still remembered the practice flight when I’d stumbled into the waist compartment with those flare pistols aimed down my throat.

  Farr was aggressive, always known as an irascible and difficult character, and consequently he was our lowest ranker, tech-three; he’d been demoted twice for brawling. Bragnani was not so much his friend as simply fastened to him, imitating every moment Farr’s loud gripes. As Haverstraw’s enemy was dirt, Farr’s was the U.S. Army. “You’d think they’d give us some consideration. All this bull s— they put out! They never had it so good. I’ll be f—ed if I’ll brown my nose for those bastards.”

  On the bombing run Farr called in a claim that he’d shot down a German fighter. Regulations required that such claims should be reported at once to
the pilot and be logged by the navigator. “I got one,” Farr shouted. “I got me a ME-109.”

  “You lying bastard,” Marrow said. “You never did. You made it up.”

  Farr and Marrow ranted on the interphone until I shut them up.

  The Group’s bombing was frightful. Visibility was poor, but it was good enough to see that most of our bombs fell short, into the sea. Going home the lead group turned north over Brest before the briefed point, and our formation had to take such a sharp turn that it went to pieces. We became scattered in a cloudy sky. The weather worsened, and Haverstraw had no idea where we were, and our ships landed separately at R.A.F. airdromes all over Southern England—at Warmwell, Potreath, Predannack, Exeter, Portland Bill—but Marrow took us right through a front and, flying low with a chart in his lap, got us home to our own base; only one other ship made it.

  Upon landing we learned that our radio gunner, a timid, conscientious boy named Kowalski, had frozen his hands over the target. At altitude that day the temperature had been forty-five degrees below zero, and in such cold as that, ninety seconds’ exposure is enough to freeze a man’s hands into solid blocks. The boy had been too afraid of a bawling out to report his condition; he just whimpered, when we found him in the radio room, doubled over. His gun had jammed; the electrically heated gloves we’d been issued were all right to push a throttle or turn a turret crank, but they were too cumbersome for clearing a gun, and the poor sucker had tried to work too long with naked hands.

  Marrow was gentle with Kowalski, who was, as Marrow said, “one of my boys.”

  At the interrogation Farr pushed his claim of having shot down a German, but Marrow obdurately suppressed it.

  Farr was pale with anger, and unexpectedly he turned his rage, as soon as we were dismissed, on his pal Bragnani. Farr declared that before the bomb run—when we’d heard that burbling on the interphone—Brag had panicked and had wanted to bail out. Farr said he’d restrained him by force.