The War Lover

by John Hersey

  A door opened and slammed below us.

  “Boman! Boman! Boman!”

  I ran down. Major Fane, the Flying Control Officer, whom we all disliked, was standing at the foot of the concrete stairway. He led me into the control room and handed me a yellow strip torn from the teletype machine.

  “X27B 628 2208 EXPEDITE EXPEDITE PROBOMAN PIKERILLING EXMARROW PORTNEATH URGENT QUOTE MADE IT WITHOUT YOU COMMA YOU GOLDBRICKER UNQUOTE END”

  “We’ll jolt Marrow for this,” old F— Face Fane was saying. “We’ll bust him to second lieutenant.” This sad, hated man was rankled because Marrow had made light-hearted use of official lines of communication.

  I was so happy—not just that my ship was safe, but that Marrow had somehow contrived to get a message through to me even before the official reports on the mission—that I turned on Fane and said, “Say, Major, you better check with the Colonel before you break Captain Marrow. The Colonel thinks he’s a hot patootie—just put in for a D.F.C. for him, account of Hamburg.” Oh, I was extremely jaunty. But really, Fane was so straight.

  The reports were coming in. The Group had hit a front and had been scattered. Seven ships at Portneath. Others all over the south. Four planes unaccounted for. Whelan believed lost back at the target. Front passing; the Forts would be hopping home soon.

  I went back up on the upper deck, and suddenly, in the wind and my exultation, it seemed really a deck, the bridge deck of a ship, and I a sea captain. Overhead scudding clouds at three thousand hid the moon except for blurred glimpses. The feeling of motion was overwhelming. It seemed that I was alone on the bridge of a great aircraft carrier, and the long rectangle of the flare path was the flight deck, and it was not the clouds that were moving, but I, my ship, our flight deck, the movable beacon sailing along with us blinking our recognition signal in crimson flashes. Far from being a failure, I was in charge, and the ship, the night, the planes were mine.

  “Stand by to take aircraft aboard,” the sea captain murmured.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  And in they came, singly, in pairs, weary stragglers.

  I was waiting in the interrogation room. I clapped Marrow on the back and tried to thank him for his message, but he was wising around with Maltitz and didn’t even notice me. They were all giving each other the customary razz about the mission. Whelan really had been lost. I went back to the room alone. I thought I’d turn in, but pretty soon Marrow came in with a bunch, had a case of beer in cans, said they were going to play some poker. There were seven of them; the deal was full. Maltitz was in the game, and so was Brindt, and so was Haverstraw, and I obviously wasn’t. The only thing Marrow said to me was, “Prien got another gut ache. Should have heard him holler.” And Buzz threw out a peal of laughter. I went down the hall and crawled into a sack belonging to a guy named Quinn, quite a new man who’d been shot down that afternoon in a plane from which no chutes had appeared. I couldn’t sleep at all, because I didn’t feel like the captain of a great ship any more, and I was in a dead man’s bed, and the poker game got rowdy.

  3/

  Lynch and I were throwing horses on one of the low oaken tables in the officers’ club, and for a while nothing passed between us but the rhythmic korrowp-rowp-rowp of the dice in the leather cups and their clattering falls on the table, krakatakaka. Lynch looked all knocked out. We had flown to Le Mans that afternoon through rotten weather, and the Kid had had three missions in five days.

  “F— this,” he said. He was fed to the teeth with our habits of life. “Let’s go over to the room. I got a letter I want to show you.”

  Lynch’s room was one of the dirtiest pigsties on the base, because Bessemer, his pilot, besides being unable to fly a plane, had apparently never learned how to take care of himself. The place was knee-deep with wearing apparel; Bessemer just walked out of his clothes. “I bet he never learned how to wipe his own bum,” Lynch said once. “I know for a fact he doesn’t know how to get a drip of snot off the end of his nose, I mean without a handkerchief. He uses the front of his hand. I tell you, I’m on the verge of throwing up half the time.”

  Lynch wasn’t exactly a fuss-budget about tidiness, but his side of the room was not disgusting; it was a cleaner heap of dirt.

  The Kid dug down into an orange crate he and Bessemer kept on their desk for personal treasures, and he pulled out an airmail letter and scaled it to me.

  “Dear Ambrose,” it began.

  “Know something?” I said. “All this time, I never knew your moniker.”

  “Ambrose,” he said. “From the Greek. Means ‘immortal.’ Great name for a birdman.”

  “No wonder they call you Kid.”

  “The hell with it. When the war’s over, I’m going to turn it in for a new model. I’d like to be called Hephaestus. That’s a hot name. Hephaestus Lynch. I’d like to be a fireman. Sit around the firehouse in your slippers. Slide down the pole. Steer the back end of the hook and ladder. Read it,” he said, sticking his chin out at the letter.

  It was from his wife.

  “Paul, you know him at the market, makes it perfectly clear that if you are willing to pay extra, he’ll disregard your sugar coupons. I feel like saying, You crook, do you know where my husband is? People just stare at you with a glazed look when you get emotional about the war. Sometimes I think I’m a plain sucker for going without the extra sugar, and extra meat, and extra gas, because of you. I had a slight accident backing out of a parking place in that lot in back of the bank, but Fred’s Body Shop said they could fix it for about fifteen dollars, I guess I’ll wait, it doesn’t look bad. Millicent finally got her license. It cost her about two hundred dollars at the driving school. Time before last she quit because the instructor lost his patience with her. ‘I’m not paying you to shout at me,’ she told the man. What made me think of it was my having the accident backing. Millicent couldn’t learn to back, she couldn’t get the idea of turning the wheel the opposite way. Her last instructor got so disgusted he made her pull over, and he got right out of the car, and he said he was going to walk down the square, and when he came back he wanted her to be backed into a driveway that was there. He left her cold. She tried six times, and finally she got in catercorner, and when he came back, she said, ‘Is that good enough for you, mister?’ You know her sharp tongue. ‘It’s not for me, ma’am,’ he said. ‘It’s for that other fellow that gives the tests.’ She finally got her license. I rode with her once and she just went smack down the middle of the road, straddled the white line. This fellow behind her about honked himself to death, and she kept saying, ‘What’s the matter with him anyway? Man driver!’ This morning she called and wanted me to ride over town with her, but I had to go to the church. I was glad.”

  “What’s the point of all this?” I asked.

  “The point, you’ll come to the point. That first part is a smoke screen.”

  I came to the point, all right. After three pages of closely packed trivia, in the next-to-last paragraph of a long, gossipy letter, Mrs. Ambrose Lynch made the point unmistakable. “Darling, darling,” she wrote, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I feel everything rising up in me, and I have to make a confession to you. Please try to understand that the whole reason for this is I love you and I miss you so much I kind of broke down. I couldn’t stand missing you. I cried myself to sleep every night and I used to gnaw my knuckles. I’ve been seeing Tom. Millicent is so wacky and trusting. It started at the Masquers’ dance. Darling, you have to believe that you come first, I’ve been trying to stop it with Tom. I don’t love him. He’s not like you. I swear, I swear to you…”

  I couldn’t read any more. “Nice of her to tell you,” I said.

  “Ruthie’s an original,” the Kid said. “Marked originality all through school. You could be fully confident that she’d find an ingenious new twist. Just being a whore in the boring way of all the rest of the poor wives who’ve been
left at home to gnaw their knuckles by their mean husbands—that wasn’t good enough for our Ruthie. You see, she’s got a real good twist, has it worked out that it’s not only good for her to confess, it’s good for me to hear confession. Makes me a priest. That makes celibacy easier for old Father Ambrose. Get it?”

  “Who’s Tom?”

  “Millicent the Woman Driver’s husband. Junior executive in an aluminum-tube company. He’s essential to the war effort and a famous tail hound in our town. Listen, Bo, if you only knew the irony of Ruthie saying she doesn’t love him!”

  Now I have a confession to make. Lynch’s trouble made me feel good, and I think this is why: That morning, while we had waited out at the dispersals for stations time, I had suddenly discovered that several members of our crew seemed to regard me as a strong, giving, and supporting person. I’d have expected this from Junior Sailen, because we all took care of him, but Prien, the cold fish, came up to me on the Q.T. and said, “Boy, are we glad to have you back, sir!” I remembered that Prien had had a gas attack going to St. Nazaire, and I mentioned it, and he said it was because things were in such a mess without me. This, mind you, was when Marrow was at the peak of his career as a hero. Later Handown banged me on the back and growled, “Wasn’t the same without you, sir.” Max and Clint both said something that seemed to me more than formality, and finally even Jug Farr said, “You shoulda seen the time we had with those two apple-knockers yesterday”—meaning Marrow and Maltitz. I found it was true that Marrow was wearing his heroism as if it were a dramatic costume; he was dangerously close to being funny, and his self-importance was even further inflated by the fact that he had been assigned the leadership of a squadron on this mission. With Whelan missing, Colonel Trummer, the ape from Wing who did the bubu over Hamburg, had been given temporary command of our Group. We knew he wouldn’t last, because even those myopic goons at Wing must have been able to see that he was a horse’s ass. His motive for letting Buzz lead a squadron had been pretty obvious to everyone except Marrow, who had assumed that it was his due. Marrow had been cavalier about preflight checks and all the mundane preparations of groundlings, and this had given me a chance to take myself pretty seriously, too.

  And so when Lynch, in his dry, caustic, understated way, threw the horror of his life into my lap, I had begun to regard myself as a pretty helpful fellow, a boulder. While he was talking along about his wife, I had freight going on two tracks in my mind, for besides trying to sympathize Lynch into a stupor, I began thinking about how I was going to rescue Daphne from Section B, get her a room in Bartleck, spring her from her slavey job, and set her up, let her enjoy herself and me. I had sensed the passionate, dissatisfied yearning in Daphne our last times together, but I guess one would have to call my attempt at a solution for it an example of Gross Error—only I didn’t know that until much later. At the time I was The Helper.

  But a curious thing happened as I was handing out the comfort to the Kid: Somehow things got turned around, and all of a sudden I was pouring our my most sincere and terrifying worries to Lynch. I had had my bombing-and-being-bombed dream for the first time, and I began talking about the destruction of the City around St. Paul’s, and all the boarded-up houses, and Daph’s father knocked off by a direct hit while he was working as a first-aid stretcher bearer. I didn’t want to kill, I didn’t want any part of the destruction of civilization, I was looking for a way to eliminate myself from the slaughter squad, I was interested in the survival of mankind; yet when these thoughts began to go through my head in the night, I told the Kid, I wondered whether they were simply rationalizations for efforts to find a way of saving my own skin, and I worried whether there could be virtue or safety in being passive in the face of German aggression, and I thought that my yen for a larger allegiance than to the land of Senator Tamalty and of Colonel Whatshisname who wanted to stuff us with golden bantam might be unpatriotic, might be based on my love for a foreign girl, might be just another way of looking for the nearest exit.

  I can see now, better than I saw then, that I was also on the edge of expressing to Kid Lynch my deep inner battle about Marrow—whether to regard him as a hero, or as something quite different, and how to serve as his co-pilot in either case. And this undoubtedly lent an edge of reality and personal emotion to my worrying about the abstract question of passivity in the face of aggression—concretely, mine in the face of his. But it remained for Daph to make me see this openly.

  And about Daphne, too. Did I have a right, since I might be killed any day, to entangle Daphne deeper and deeper with me?

  Well, the Kid began answering my questions, giving me advice, and I didn’t realize then, but I know now, that what he said made me angry.

  But instead of arguing with him, I read my bad feeling as misery over his trouble, and I switched the conversation back to that.

  I managed to end the evening with a very comfortable view of myself as Humanity’s Helper. After I turned in I began thinking about how I’d talk with Doc Randall about the Kid. Try to get the Doc to get behind him. I felt so good then that I dropped off into a dreamless sleep.

  4/

  On the last day of June, Marrow’s ego, already stretching its seams, took in two new pump strokes.

  His promotion to major came through.

  And Wing Public Relations ordered him to go up to London and take part in a Special Services broadcast to the States, on a program that was part of a series designed to let the home folks get acquainted with their heroes overseas.

  Marrow, who didn’t want to be thought an unripe major, bummed a set of second-hand, tarnished gold maple leaves from, of all people, Wheatley Bins, a wearer now of the more elevated silver leaves of a lieutenant colonelcy.

  Then Buzz talked Trummer into letting him take his co-pilot, bombardier, and navigator along to London for moral support, and into authorizing our driving up to London in a little British weapons carrier from the base motor pool.

  All our sergeants—Handown, Sailen, Farr, Bragnani, Lamb, and Prien—came out to the gate to cheer Marrow away.

  Marrow drove the little British truck pretty fast, but in broad daylight it wasn’t too bad, for Clint, Max, and I could see, if not feel, that we were on solid ground, and we could gang up on Buzz to make him slow down when it mattered most.

  All the way Marrow rehearsed what he would say on the program. He was going to tell the people back in the States what conditions were really like over here.

  We three kept egging him on.

  I was still suffused with the glow of my helpfulness, and I daydreamed of yesterday’s preflight, during which the enlisted men had come to me with their questions and complaints. My banquet of self-congratulation was cut off short, however, by the thought that all of us in the crew, and especially the enlisted men, had restored to Marrow his glow of magic. “Old Untouchable,” Handown called him. He was a hero where it really counted—in the eyes of his own men. There was, to be sure, some mockery in their worship of him, but that was only because the invincibility with which they had endowed him was so important to them, so vital to their survival, that they dared not show their true reliance on it and openly made fun of it.

  Junior Sailen had kneeled on the hardstand before the raid the day before, with his flat hands pressed together like those of an altar boy, and his innocent eyes had turned up to the threatening stratus above, and he had said, “Our Buzz who art in heaven….”

  We all took strength from the myth of him just when the real he was going soft.

  A bevy of P.R.O.’s, the most humble of whom wore, with less self-consciousness than Marrow, the golden maple leaves of majors, took us from Eighth Air Force headquarters in a pair of khaki Buicks to a loft building, and they led us up some metal fire escapes into a chilly, brick-walled room with a number of partition-like baffles on wheels which stood around a heavy wooden table. A couple of mike booms hung their globes of ripe fruit over the table.
Max, Clint, and I, whose uniforms looked wrinkled, mildewed, and napless alongside the crisp outfits of the headquarters johnnies, were pushed behind one of the baffles when it had become obvious that every time one of us cleared his throat, our huge-shouldered hero looked over at us and giggled.

  The broadcast turned out to be a farce—a bitter one, considering the appalling sincerity of Marrow’s conviction that he was going to tell the world The Whole Truth. He had taken strength from his own myth, he felt the inner power of a hero. He had a message to tell: that our Wing Headquarters was full of horse s—. He thought the taxpayers of the United States would be interested to know that.

  Clint and Max and I, watching the broadcast, which was really only a recording session for a broadcast that would come later, could see nothing except the hypocrisy of institutionalized heroism. It was sickening.

  The broadcast was to last six minutes, and there was to be another star on the show. What with introductions, a trailer for the next broadcast in the series, and a short fight talk to the home front by a chicken colonel from Public Relations, Marrow was to get two minutes, really not quite time enough to tell The Whole Truth.

  Anyway, they had handed him a script.

  The other star of the show, Marrow’s Co-Hero, was a sergeant gunner from a Liberator who was said to have shot down two German fighters on the same run. He could barely read.

  Marrow’s two minutes consisted of a description, in the form of a first-person narrative, of how he had led the strike against Hamburg around for its second bombing run. The tale as he read it had been written up at third hand from the interrogation report by a former news-magazine writer who was working as a P.R.O. at Eighth Air Force. This wasn’t what had happened at all; it was a tense little over-simplification; it was a two-minute lie.