The War Lover

by John Hersey

  As the message unfolded, men standing with girls around him cheered him, and the cheers seemed to make him wildly happy.

  As usual, some pilots from the —th Group had crashed our party, and Marrow got into an argument with one of them over which group had dropped its bombs more accurately that day, killed more Krauts, and Marrow proposed that they settle the argument with a bike race right there in the Senior Officers’ Mess, so four or five guys ran out for bicycles, and others pushed tables around to make an oval track, and Marrow and Benny Chong were selected to compete for us.

  As the desperate, aimless wildness of our men grew, with Marrow in the forefront of the restlessness, I found that I was becoming more and more embarrassed, in Daphne’s presence, over the behavior of my companions. It was national pride again; it was because she was English. I felt sure an R.A.F. party would not have turned out like this. Australians would have been like this, yes, but not Englishmen. We were crazy frontiersmen.

  “We don’t know what we’re fighting about,” I said. “Our people haven’t been hurt the way yours have.”

  I got talking with Daphne then about how badly prepared I’d been for war. I said I’d waded through translations of both Mein Kampf and Das Kapital but hadn’t got wet while wading—was, in fact, poorly motivated for combat, though I should have been, perhaps, better than most. I had had at best a passive acceptance of my country’s part in the conflict. I washed my hands of responsibility, saying that Grew and Hull should have been better aware of the true intentions of the Japanese, and should have avoided conflict by diplomatic means. I guess this was all college stuff; Janet stuff. I regarded war as a struggle between the haves and the have-nots, and I said, “You can’t really blame the Japanese and Germans and Italians for wanting to live as well as we do.” I brushed aside the notion of the Axis threat to our way of life, saying, “There’s plenty that’s not so hot about us.” But even about “us” I was unclear, unsharp. I told Daphne that my father used to talk about the Depression; being at the time engrossed in geography (for there couldn’t have been a sky without an earth), I thought of the Depression as some sort of geologic deformity, a lowered place in Pennsylvania, not exactly a valley but rather a kind of crease where there was unfamiliar misery and want. I was too young for it, and anyway, my father, being a doctor, escaped the worst of it, because sickness did not fall off along with jobs, and enough people could pay their bills so that my brother Jim and I always ate.

  Daphne said she didn’t think that wars were started on account of economics.

  “That’s what all the books say,” I said.

  She said something about men like her Dugger…but then the bike race began, and we lost that thread.

  The four cyclists rode a couple of laps, and everyone was shouting, and Benny crashed (accidentally on purpose?) into the bar, and scores of glasses were broken. People began throwing glasses then, and Marrow got into a fist-fight with one of the crashers and wound up with a shiner and a bad cut on his knuckle which came, he later said, from breaking a front tooth of one of those uninvited wisers.

  I suggested to Daphne that we get out of there. Outside it was a fine May night, and we found Daphne’s bus and sat in it, holding hands. I had no thought of where our feelings would lead us. I was caught up in the widespread delusion that men who exposed themselves to death had no moral responsibility, and in my self-centered haze I felt that Daphne asked nothing of me except my company, my good manners, my absorption in her, my strong erotic desire for her. I would have sworn that I had never been so happy, and that the same went for her.

  19/

  We had an alert the following evening, and after it, Marrow suggested that we ride our bikes out to say good night to the ship.

  He was still in his combative mood. We’d had a critique of the Helgoland raid that morning, and Marrow had got into a pointless squabble with Wheatley Bins, over a technical point—how our intervalometers had been set for the bombing. It had been obvious that Marrow was wrong and Bins right, but Buzz had hung onto the quarrel with a tenacity that exposed his true feeling about Bins. And as we rode out to The Body under a partly cloudy night—it looked as if great uneven fields of stars had fallen to the ground, leaving black holes where they had been—Marrow railed in a monotone about a group in Bins’ squadron that he called “Bins’ clique.” But I could think only of Daphne—of the pressure of her knee against mine under the table the night before. I felt a joyous pain in my chest….

  The Body loomed, gray and dull, in the darkness of the blacked-out base.

  Marrow slapped the side of the fuselage. “Good night, baby,” he said.

  And I said, “Good night,” too, but my message had some distance to fly in the night.

  20/

  We were in the low squadron of the lead group, and Braddock was flying the lead ship of the whole attack, with some freshman general from Eighth Bomber Command riding along as a tourist, and they were perhaps two hundred yards above us and ahead of us, the craft a glinting silver tube against a midday catastali sky.

  We were coming home from Lorient. It had been an early mission: up at two forty-five, briefing at three thirty. Since we had been to Lorient on our very first mission, we had felt a blasé detachment about the assignment, and indeed, the morning had seemed to go easily. After sunup the sky had been a pale semi-globe of sapphire, flawed only by a thin sheet of frosty cirrus over Europe. There had been no ground haze; no contrails had formed; the target had been visible from forty miles away. Enemy opposition had been relatively light and had concentrated on formations other than ours. The bombing had been fair. At the rally point Marrow had suddenly asked Haverstraw, in order to check up on Clint’s alertness, what the bearing would have been to the secondary target. Haverstraw, apparently having thought his day’s work virtually over, had been daydreaming and hadn’t had the faintest idea how to answer, and now Marrow had just finished eating him out.

  Braddock’s ship was named Bull Run. Braddock was Marrow’s good friend, but I scarcely knew him, except as a ton of prime meat, a big, tall, fat man, about whom I had heard it said that he was incredibly cool and steady in the air; his nervous system must have been primitive, like a whale’s. I had not even stopped to think who else was in his ship besides the tourist: eight nobodies; to me, the plane was simply Braddock up there, Bull Run.

  We were going along all right. We had flown through some of Handown’s “iron cumulus” over the target, but none of our Group had been knocked down, and it was good, leaving the rally point, not to have any fighters around, and to have such a clear sky, with home and rest ahead, and we were all socked in close, a good formation, and nobody was saying a word on VHF about fighters, though the general, being new, was chattering a lot of nonsense. On the whole we were comfortable, with another mission, The Body‘s seventh, practically under our belts; it was really wonderful up in the sky streaking for England.

  Then Marrow was pointing. Up there, Braddock’s ship. And I thought, Look out, Brad, look out, look out, you’re smoking, number two’s smoking.

  I could not take my eyes off the thin gray telltale of smoke, more than exhaust but less than peril as yet; it did not blow out. Someone came up on VHF to tell Braddock he was burning, and at that the whole Group was alert to his danger. Suddenly the smoke went black, and there were visible flames, pale against the sky, and it seemed to me that the ships of the formation edged in closer (it was a fact that Marrow pushed up the manifold pressure) to watch, like insects crowding a night light.

  Braddock pushed over from his position above us and began a shallow power glide to try to blow the fire out, and just then Max Brindt shouted on our interphone, “Look out! What the f— is that?”

  What was it? What was it? Something had come off Bull Run and went flipping past us. I realized it was the little rear hatch door; the tail gunner must have kicked it out. No, it wouldn’t be the tail gunner in the lead shi
p with a tourist aboard. It would be the co-pilot, because under the circumstances he would be back there flying tail-gunner observer, watching the formation and reporting everything up to the general, so the general could make a fool of himself with a full supply of information; it would have been myself back in that tail position if we had been leading the Wing. I had a moment’s fantasy that it was I who had kicked out that small flipping plate; I was getting out. I remembered then with a shudder that Braddock’s co-pilot was not I but Kozak, a pale fellow who never seemed to speak a word—an impression of white, white skin with a heavy black stubble of beard, a face immobile and silent. There came a leg, and another, and Kozak was squeezing out like a creature being born, and I almost shouted on the radio, “Look out, Kozy! Christ, there are over a hundred ships here, we’re all coming at you.”

  Surely Kozak had thought of just that, or surely he would not have done what he did. He ripped his chute the moment he was out. He was too excited. His body, fresh from the speeding Fort, was going through the air at more than a hundred fifty miles per hour. I saw a flutter of shining nylon, flaglike at first, then what seemed to be a big loose bunch of femine understuff, and we were all coming up at it—he’d been small before and now, with the breaking parachute, he seemed massive; he was too excited. Then the snap. Every bone in his body must have broken, he just—his back—we were right close under him—when the chute filled, his back arched and flapped like a ribbon snapping out in a wind; it must have killed him on the instant, the way he—Kozy, he jumped to save himself but he was dead, because of the speed we were all going up there, and he didn’t wait. He just snapped, mind and body. What he thought would happen, with all those ships, he must have thought someone would run into him, that was the way I judged it, and he bailed out and did not hold his count, he must have been afraid of all those props, because we were coming all around him, and he was going to drift back through the formation, and he must have thought that if he could just get his parachute open right away, we’d all see him and could evade; but that was the wrong idea in every respect.

  I coolly thought: I’d be alive. If I’d been the tail-gunner observer in the lead ship, Kozy, I’d have dropped and dropped, a delayed jump, clear down to those newly forming white fluffy clouds on the edge of this high-pressure area of sparkling blue, a long, long drop, more than fifteen thousand feet; way down. That’s what I’d have tried to do. Arms against the sides. Knees up…But you’re dead, Kozy, from trying too hard to be alive.

  I had thought it was easy to get out, no problem, just get out and wait and pull and float down; that’s what I had thought. Maybe it wasn’t so easy. I had never let myself think about that.

  Braddock’s plane was quite far ahead and below, now, perhaps a thousand feet down, going very fast and pulling forward and down and away, but the smoke was worse than ever and flames were pouring back off the wing, not blowing out at all but fanning up, it seemed, glowing like coals in a camp stove blown on with a deep breath.

  Braddock started to climb. As he got halfway back up to our height I noticed that Buzz had begun to climb in key with him, and I looked out and saw that we were all climbing, we were all flying formation behind and above Braddock’s black plumes. We’re going up with you, Brad, don’t worry, we’re sticking with you. No, not like that, we can’t climb like that. Hey. Hey. Don’t climb that way. You’re out of control, you’re going right up to the top. What an impressive sight!—a big Fort shooting straight up, ahead of us in the sky. Your smoke. Such a clear day…No! No!

  No!

  He blew up. Right at the top, right in front of us, the whole thing. That smoke—why didn’t you all jump?—that smoke—fire, it must have been your number-two engine and a wing tank and then everything. Two or three flashes…He blew up.

  Buzz! Look out for all that crap!

  Twenty, thirty tons of bits, we’re going to fly right into the stuff. Look at it. Look at that big piece of metal. Head down, cover eyes, don’t look. Nothing’s happening, we’re diving. It’s past us.

  Marrow, good work, Marrow.

  What an explosion that was! I even heard it, I think I heard it, and that would be unusual at altitude, in all one’s gear, and that far away; it made such a big thud I think I heard it in the cockpit.

  Now it was quiet. A minute before everyone had been chattering on VHF, everybody making his big remark, we had been talking away and then everyone stopped. It was such an impressive sight. Now there wasn’t a sound, and there were more than a hundred Forts around us, but not a word, they all had something to think about; no one was saying a word, not even an exclamation. Why didn’t somebody speak? It was so quiet. I wished somebody would come up and talk. There. There it was. High squadron. “Well, form on me. We’d better take over and do something.” There, that was better.

  Junior Sailen called in. He hadn’t heard anything, you understand. Only Buzz and I and Lamb in the radio room could hear the VHF, and Buzz had only pointed at Braddock. Just that one remark of Max’s. Sailen cut in on interphone from the ball turret, down under the plane, asking, “Say, what was all that junk that went past us?”

  Marrow answered. “Braddock,” he said. “That was Braddock.”

  “Any chutes?” Junior said.

  “Anybody see any chutes?” Marrow asked.

  Max Brindt in the nose said, “One out of the tail. The guy ripped too soon.”

  “That was Kozak,” I said. “That pale guy.”

  Then little Junior Sailen, down in the close cocoon in which he flew, said in a low voice, icy dead cold, “I knew it. I knew it. You can’t get out of these God-damn crates.”

  It hit me. Nobody had got out. Not one. They all died. Kozak died. Braddock died. That general. Ten men dead. I had always thought you could get out of a Fort, it was so big. Plenty of hatches. But maybe you wouldn’t get out. You’d just sit there and get killed. You couldn’t escape.

  I thought: I’m scared. Somebody’s got to help me. Look at Marrow, maybe he’ll help. Oh, Jesus, look at Buzz, he’s smiling at me. He can see I’m scared. I see his eyes smiling behind his goggles to buck me up. He wants to tell me something, his eyes are bulging out as they do when he talks about getting a piece of tail, he’s going to speak to me, he’s pushing the interphone button on his wheel with his thumb, he’s going to say something to all of us.

  “It can’t happen to this bucket, boys, not while I’m in it!”

  21/

  I was in rough shape when I got to Cambridge.

  We went to a pub and drank quite a lot, and to my amazement I blurted out, “Why do you love someone as short as I am?”

  There had been no mention of love.

  Daphne hung her head and said, “Everything’s so mixed up.” I understood that she was not really answering my question.

  There was a woman at the next table, a pretty but hard-looking blonde, a working girl, waiting for a man, or hoping for one. She was getting drunk and angry. The owner of the pub cross-examined her about her expectations. Stridently she insisted that someone was coming to meet her, though she kept looking over toward the bar, alongside which a pair of young Americans, one in a leather flight jacket and the other in a crimson nylon basketball windbreaker with the nickname of his unit applied in cursive script across the back, were playing darts. The owner managed to hustle the girl out of the place, but not before she had drawn a great deal of attention to his inhospitality.

  Stirred by the sight of the blonde’s loneliness to an awareness of my good fortune in Daphne’s company, I began to recite some sentimental verses: “I dreamed I stood in a valley of lovers,” and “Wine comes in at the mouth,” and “I whispered: I am too young,” and I was carried away on a flood of emotion, so that at certain lines my voice caught in my throat because the words seemed so valid for Daphne and for me. Her eyes had a way of melting, her lids sagging down, when I came close to a truth about her, and I was half ch
oked when I spoke the phrase, “…cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes….”

  Daphne had a curious trait. She felt things deeply, I knew, and when she was moved her face would soften and grow pink, full of warm, warm blood, and her eyelids would droop in that way, and sometimes a hand would move spasmodically toward me, but suddenly her mouth would say something that seemed to me quite out of key: that seemed to me almost harsh. This time she abruptly began to recite:

  “…Here, said she,

  Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor.

  (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

  Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks…”

  I suddenly felt cold and gloomy. The Channel! Each time we went out, and each time we came back, I dreaded crossing England’s moat: just to think of that choppy, frigid stripe of water gave me a chill.

  But one glance at Daphne’s face relieved me, for she was blandly looking at me, with a faint smile curling her lips. These lines she had spoken were simply nice words she liked; she was not trying to say anything, except perhaps that I had let my batteries get overcharged. My verses and hers—there was the gulf between us. Naive sentiment; powerful irony. A nice clean-cut American boy; a woman on the edge of a Europe in agony. But I insisted on being serious in my own way. I reached out my hand and touched Daphne’s cheek, and with the slightest movement of her head, pressing her cheek against my palm, she acceded to my seriousness and confirmed her surrender. “Dear, dear Bo,” she said.

  “My darling!” I said. It was the first time I had used that word, the first time I had claimed her.

  Daphne gave me her liquefied look, and her cursed little mouth changed the subject. “Your pilot,” she said, “has a wild look in his eye.”

  For a moment, driven back from my intimacy with Daphne, I saw in memory the blinding burst that had been Braddock’s plane that morning, and I said, “Remember, the other night, when Buzz was burning those words in the ceiling, the guy whose shoulders he was riding on?”