The War Lover

by John Hersey

22/

  On Wednesday, June the ninth, we went to Cambridge and heard the university students sing madrigals on the banks of the Cam, and I lay beside Daphne among the listeners on the grass under the enormous trees of the Backs, full of desire in the warm afternoon.

  Between numbers some Yank near us said to his pal that the concert was part of an annual celebration, which was, he said, called May Week because it was in June.

  “These screwy limeys,” the pal said.

  I saw Daphne blush.

  After the sing Marrow wandered off with some others, and Daph and I hired a punt and drifted on the narrow river along the Backs, under the marvelous King’s and Clare and Garret Hostel and Trinity and St. Johns bridges, for an hour or so, and it was then that I worked my way, with Daphne’s help, to some thoughts which foreshadowed my crisis of late July.

  While the students had been singing their sixteenth-century madrigals, about which I knew nothing, my mind had wandered, and I had spent some time thinking about girls back in the States. There had always been a girl. I had some very particular associations with the casual ones during the phases. With Penny it was a moving picture in Sikeston, Missouri, called Here Comes Mr. Jordan; with Sybil it was her old man’s Buick, in the mountains out of Denver, parked in a turnout, not even necking, but listening to Tommy Dorsey on the car radio; with Marylee it was a tune, This Love of Mine, blaring out of a juke-box in a drugstore in Montgomery, Alabama. All through the whole time, like a theme, ran Janet, my home-town girl, who was official, who seemed inescapable, like an inheritance. The reward of this rumination had been to appreciate Daphne all the more, for with each girl, no matter how much of a yen I had had for her, I had always been conscious of some quality that grated on my nerves, and with Daphne I could find no cause for holding back.

  I got the knack of poling the punt right off the bat, then after a while I just sat in the stern, and we talked.

  Daphne was open with me. There was no language barrier. In some way we cut straight through our differences of nationality and experience.

  I understood that she had seldom provoked aggressive behavior in men, for though she was fragile and feminine, she had, besides, the enormous inner strength of a woman at peace with herself.

  “We never argue about anything,” I said.

  “Why should we?” she said. “I miss you so much when I’m away from you, how could I spoil the time when we’re together?”

  She loved longing; it was clear that she loved the suffering that a deep attachment could bring.

  “What would you do for me?” she asked.

  The things I promised to do were out of songs. Climb a mountain. Slow boat to China. I could write a book. Swim the ocean wide. I’ll make a string of pearls out of the dew—my safe song. Yes, with Daph I felt, above all, far away from danger of any kind.

  Then suddenly it seemed that Daphne was cross-examining me a little. “What do you want of me?” she asked. It was an anguished question and took me by surprise.

  Bed came into my mind first, but I knew I must give a better answer than that. Comfort when I am in despair. Good company; good talking; good laughing. A way to kill dead hours between missions. I felt embarrassed, because it was clear that Daphne wanted to shake some kind of open-ended commitment out of me, a promise, a very big promise, and all of a sudden I was chary and evasive.

  “There’s a war on,” I said, as if to explain my long pause. “I want this war to be over and done with.”

  “Why are you in it?” she asked. “I mean, what have you to do with war?”

  Her question was oddly worded, and I should have known Daphne well enough by then to realize that she meant the question exactly as she asked it, for I suppose she had a woman’s belief that wars could only end when men refused to fight in them, but I was rattled, and I probably would have scoffed at that belief as too namby-pamby, soft, because I certainly didn’t think that conscientious objectors would bring a warless world, and anyway I chose to believe that she had simply asked me the standard question of those days.

  “I don’t know what I’m fighting for,” I said. “Certainly not for Senator Tamalty’s brand of patriotism. I don’t think any of our guys are fighting for that—not even Marrow. I think they’re fighting to finish twenty-five missions, period. I know that doesn’t sound very good to somebody who’s English, Daph, but I swear, I think that’s the only war aim. Every mission you get behind you is one more mission toward getting finished. If you can just get through it alive, that’s the thing.” I think I was too embarrassed even with Daphne to speak of the sense of decency that had been on my mind.

  I thought some more later on about trying to kill in order to stay alive. In school in Donkentown, when I had been about ten years old, I’d been interested in dinosaurs. Maybe it was because I was so small, such a shorty, that I was crazy about brontosauruses and stegosauruses and triceratopses and allosauruses and the greatest of all, tyrannosauruses, the kings. Those beasts took millions of years to adapt themselves to killing in order to stay alive—did it by developing spikes as tall as men, tails that could knock down houses, collars of bone as big as the sides of Sherman tanks, claws like axe blades. They had brains the size of walnuts. And seventy-five millions of years had passed and I, in my Flying Fortress, with my brain the size of a goodly grapefruit, might just as well be a tooth in a leather-winged pterosaur. It seemed to me that for civilized man, it was not enough to have as the central idea of life mere survival.

  When I came to think more carefully about the question Daphne really had asked me—what had I to do with war?—I realized that fighting in the war was something I was doing simply because it seemed easier than not doing it. I was a member of a community in which flying and fighting were the only accepted ways of behaving.

  It all seemed to come down to the proposition that I would rather die than behave in a manner that was not considered normal, proper, usual.

  At the same time, looking at Daphne in her yellow dress on the green thwart of the flat-bottomed boat, I knew that I would far rather live than die.

  What would I do for her? she had asked me.

  At the end of July, at the height of the series of raids we called our Blitz, having put Kid Lynch’s body to rest in the U.S. military cemetery here at Cambridge, I passed through a crisis in my attitude which came from trying to pull these confused and conflicting thoughts together, and it was not until the last trying passage of the Schweinfurt raid that I was to come face to face with what they all meant for me. On the day of the madrigal concert they were merely random, troublesome ideas.

  When our hour’s rental of the punt was over, we went to Daphne’s apartment.

  23/

  A bunch of us were sitting around in Titty’s room, gassing about a mission we’d flown to Wilhelmshaven that day, June eleventh.

  In walked a screwball character I’d seen around the station, who looked about sixteen years old, a flaming redhead, and I saw LYNCH stenciled on his leather jacket and assumed it was the jocko everyone called the Kid, who kept reading poems, ditties, doggerel, and wisecracks over the Tannoy—I guess with the acquiescence of the Special Events officer. The Kid would break into the middle of nothing on a rainy afternoon with a clean limerick. Always signed off, “Lieutenant Lynch reporting.” Some guys thought him a nuisance, but I’d been for him, sight unseen, on the ground that he was a co-pilot who was said to be a much better flier than his first pilot. A man in a position like that has to disseminate screwy verse.

  We in Titty’s room got talking about the lone black Fort, the German spotter, which we’d seen again that afternoon. Following a briefing for Bremen and a leisurely take-off at noon, clouds had made an attack on the primary target impossible, and as the formation had turned at Bremerhaven for our secondary, the lead group, too eager or not poised enough, had swung too sharply, and the turns of succeeding groups had grown wider and wider,
till ours, at the end of the line, like that of the outermost man in a game of Crack the Whip, had overswung so far that our bombing had finally been rushed and poor, and we had cut for home, disgusted, and then, in the evening sky, tracking us from a position to the rear and high above the last element of our Group, that unmarked B-17 had made its appearance and had stayed with us nearly halfway across the North Sea and at last had turned back and had flown, unescorted and incongruous, toward Germany.

  While we were talking about the spotter, someone brought up the concept of the Germans as good fighters, good sportsmen. All Quiet on the Western Front. Wings. Kid Lynch kept quiet. Marrow said one of our crippled planes had pulled out of formation on one raid and had put its wheels down and the German fighters not only hadn’t fired on it but had hovered around it, sort of mothering it down to the ground. The Krauts probably wanted another spotting ship, but Marrow had to believe that this was the Code of the Sky. Never shoot at a man in a chute. The Victory Roll. The fellowship of aviators. Fliers were different from other men; enemy fliers were more like you than Allied foot soldiers.

  Then Lynch spoke up, and at first he rattled me, but I see now what he was doing. He wanted to show this self-deluded glory-boy that all the crap about the chivalry of the air was just a way to pretend everything was going to be safe and nice—for Number One, one’s self. Of course the Kid had uphill going in our crowd. Humanity’s abomination was not at all clear to us, for we’d been too young for Spain, and it was too soon for Auschwitz, and we thought we had, in the Fortress and the blockbuster (what a vaunting name that seemed then!), the greatest weapons man would ever hold in his fist—because of course our war was going to be the last war ever. There’s too much idiocy at large about how we were disenchanted young men who’d been wised up by A Farewell to Arms and Soldier’s Pay and Three Soldiers. We were up to our tallywhackers in illusions, slogans, shibboleths, belief in magic—mostly out of ads. We were ready to die to the last man for Dinah Shore, rare sirloin, a cold beer, and a Caribbean cruise. Maybe we didn’t put much stock in the Four Freedoms; that was propaganda. But we really believed in Time and the Post and Collier’s and Life. Anyway, the Kid said he’d heard from the boys in S-2 that this fellow in the spotting plane was known as the Black Knight, he was from the Black Forest, he wore a black onyx ring that Hitler had given him, he had taken pilgrimages to all the scenes of German heroism. Lynch was persuasive, he could weave a subtle web out of fantastic threads, and that night he took strands, I guess, from the Nibelungenring and from the Grimms and the Walpurgisnacht, and I tell you, it was creepy. He threw in a bit of Fainéant Le Noir for good measure. It was the first time I ever saw Marrow scared. After the session broke up he took me in our room and questioned me, with a kind of feverish desperation, about how much I thought Lynch knew, and whether all that could be true about the Black Knight. I had to face it that Marrow half believed every word the Kid had said. I think Lynch had Marrow believing that each evening the Black Knight drank a tiny silver gobletfull of blood drawn from the veins of captured R.A.F. and U.S.A.A.F. pilots. After that, when we saw the Black Knight on missions, Marrow would suddenly become cautious, and would start raising hell with me about manifold pressures and oil temperatures.

  24/

  Lynch dropped into the seat next to mine at supper the following evening. “You and I have a pair of lulus for pilots,” he said.

  “At least mine can fly,” I said. I’d heard about the clunk Lynch had drawn, Bessemer.

  “I don’t know which I’d less rather have,” he said, “a born non-flier like mine or a bloody hell’s angel like yours. Boy, that Airman’s Code stuff!”

  I told Lynch that Marrow was human, that he’d just adopted a pet dog—a half-starved medium-sized long-haired nondescript—and that he was pretty good to it, and the pup had taken to him at once. And about how Marrow felt about sergeants, and about his old man having been a sergeant in the First World War. And that just before I’d come over to the mess hall, Buzz had said: “Know what I’m going to do? I’m going to inject this mut with hydrophobia and let him go after some of these sergeants.”

  But Lynch got off that topic. “Hear about the zoot-suit riots in Los Angeles?” It seemed that beginning back in the winter hoodlums dressed in exaggerated pegtop trousers and long jackets and pointed shoes, and wearing enormous watch chains, had begun waylaying lone sailors in San Pedro, beating them up and sometimes stabbing them, and over the months had extended their crazy operations to the whole Los Angeles area. Lynch told me that there had been open warfare in the past week between bands of servicemen and gangs of zoot-suiters.

  My eye had vaguely wandered across two-line items about the zoot-suiters in Stars and Stripes, but Lynch was up on all the details—the circumference of zoot pants at the cuff and at the thigh—and what interested me was the fiery intensity with which he talked. He wanted me to discuss with him the reasons for these outbursts—guilt over high wages and non-combat status, latent homosexuality, the pose of indifference on the West Coast; the Kid was full of theories. This was the first conversation with any meat in it that I’d had in a long time. Lynch was serious. He was fighting a war, in which he might lose his life, and he wanted to know and feel all he could, good and bad, about the country for which he might be asked to pay the ultimate tax.

  This earnestness surprised me. The uninhibited Kid who broadcast doggerel and bad jokes on the Tannoy hadn’t prepared me for this other man.

  Lynch was pretty ugly to look at, yet he gave an impression of charm and even beauty. His hair was of an unbelievable redness—not russet or auburn, but the color of the undersides of stratus clouds in one of the sudden-flash sunsets we used to have in Donkentown; you expected the violent glint to fade off his head any moment, to give way to gray and night. His eyes had something wrong with them: the folds of skin and conjunctiva around the lids were somehow pulled tight, so his eyes seemed too small and piggish. He had not the usual redhead’s creamy complexion but a pitted and thick-looking skin, like canvas or a fruit rind. He looked, despite these flaws, a fresh and childlike person. The rapidity with which his mind worked; the warmth of his feelings; his wit, heard on his tongue and seen in his queer eyes; and, perhaps most impressive of all, the passionate seriousness that underlay his flippancy—all these gave him more than enough to pay back the debt on his looks.

  He was twenty-two, and he was a college graduate, a married man, and—hard to believe!—the father of two daughters. Maybe this was where the seriousness came from.

  At the table in the mess hall, amid the crude jokes being passed back and forth like mashed potatoes, Lynch secretively showed me a snapshot of his “three women.” The little fat girls were redheads, too—Ruby and Ginger (nicknames, he told me). I’ll bet I was the only man on the base who knew that the Kid was a father.

  25/

  We had a raid the next day, June thirteenth, our eleventh mission in The Body, to Bremen, and I couldn’t wait, after it was over, to seek Lynch out and talk it over with him.

  The mission as a whole had been a dud, because another wing, not ours, had cut off from its briefed course about thirty miles before the initial point and had headed straight for the target, and this short cut had put it on a collision course with our Wing, which had followed instructions, so we were forced to circle wide to avoid the others, and in the ensuing confusion most of our groups dropped their bombs a couple of miles from the city out in the sea. But I couldn’t help telling Lynch that this had been our best raid in The Body. Fighter opposition had been stiff, and we had been hot. Reports of sightings by our crew had been quick and concise, and our interphone discipline had been tight.

  Lynch and I, still in our flying suits, holding sandwiches at the Red Cross stand, talked rapidly back and forth and sometimes we put the food down and, with our two flat hands banking and angling, we illustrated maneuvers.

  I seemed to want to convince Lynch that Marrow was a remar
kable pilot. His evasive tactics that afternoon had been superb. Under head-on and tail attacks, he had devised a subtle, eccentric corkscrewing, a spiral path varying from four to six compass degrees out of the line of flight, which must have given the Germans exceedingly difficult targets, as their reflection allowances must have been continually varying; yet Marrow seemed to hold formation and over-all course as truly as any.

  Another thing: We got a radio message, halfway home, that there were some VIPs visiting Pike Rilling and that upon returning to base we were to take one low pass over the field, flying smart formation, and I told Lynch that Marrow had turned the plane over to me for that run (having a puppy must’ve made him kind-hearted), and I’d felt great, supposing that Hap Arnold, or Clark Gable, or somebody else of consequence was down on the ground watching me hold The Body in there like a screwed-on attachment.

  Lynch shrugged at that; later he came out with what he meant by the shrug.

  Just then Marrow came over and tore down before Lynch all that I had built up about him. He was laughing hard. “Boman,” he said, barely able to control his heaving and cackling enough to speak. “Boman, Jesus, the joke’s on you, kid. Foley got shot down. Over Germany. Now that he can talk French. You and your God-damn foreign languages.” And he went rollicking off to tell someone else; I gathered later that he kept telling the story as a joke on me.

  That evening Lynch told me that he had heard about Marrow’s having knocked the bottom out of the old cup at the Bartleck railway station and that he, Lynch, had, a few days later, sneaked a new enamel cup out of the mess hall and had carried it to the village on his bike and had hung it on the spigot against the station wall, to replace the wayfarer’s cup one of our men had destroyed.

  Later he said to me, “I flew that pass over the field today, too, but that was only because Bessemer may be a first pilot but he can’t fly formation yet. He’s promised me he’d try to learn how. But listen, Bo, what makes you think Marrow was being kind-hearted to you, letting you fly that run? In his language that was an insult. Marrow’ll fly when it matters, Boman can fly for the shiny-ass brass.”