The War Lover

by John Hersey

  She did not let me have a chance to blurt out my feelings of guilt, but said at once, “I never met your friend Lynch, but I felt as if I knew him, from all you told me. There were some things about him that I loathed.”

  I was shocked by her speaking of my dead friend in this way; the dirt had not even settled on his coffin. I told myself that Daphne must have resented my having any tie except with her. “Look,” I said. “He was my best friend on the base. He was the only flier I knew who talked my language—or yours, for that matter.” I acted hurt and more angry with Daphne than I had ever been—or than I actually was. Underneath, deep down, I must confess that I felt pleasure at what she had said, and relief. There was a distinct tickle of delight hidden beneath my indignation, and my proper and heated defense of my friend was hypocritical. As I talked about him my praise of him gradually shaded toward a slightly whining tone. “He had such a good mind, I almost never had to think when I was around him. He always had suggestions of what to do—‘Let’s go to the U.S.O. show.’…‘Let’s go get some chow.’ Or he’d say, ‘Your eyes are bloodshot, you ought to rest your eyes.’ He would eat breakfast with me, and he would try to make me eat some powdered eggs.”

  “Why do you think I said there were some things about him I loathed?” Daphne asked me.

  “I wish you’d tell me,” I said.

  “Because you hated him,” she said.

  I wanted to be angry, but a laugh burst from my lips, a laugh not at the incongruity and absurdity of what she said, I am afraid, but one of embarrassment, recognition, one that brought to fruition that earlier tickle underneath. It was awkward. I felt I should be crying, working off my horrible guilt. The least I could do—and I did it—was to pretend that I was laughing at a ridiculous point of view.

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “He was the only guy I got to know who had the courage to question some of the military poop we get. He wasn’t like Marrow, he saw things as they are. He was like an older brother to me.”

  Gradually, though, it came to me that I had, in truth, resented some important qualities in Lynch. More and more, in recent weeks, he had been interfering in my life, telling me how to do things; how to stand up to Marrow, how to conduct myself as a co-pilot, how to understand a book he had loaned me. A hatred had surely been building up in me toward my friend, even though I depended on him—or, more likely, because I depended on him—so much.

  The more I recognized this unpleasing truth, the more I felt I had to quarrel with Daphne. I poured out all that I thought I had felt about my responsibility for his death, and I told her how I had meant to speak to Doc Randall about the Kid’s condition. But even as I talked I felt the hollowness of what I was saying. I truly felt less guilty than relieved. Yet (I remembered the curious pleasantness of my sobs as I ran across the field the day before) it was hard for me to give up my generous self-reproach, and as it slipped away from me I tried to make Daphne pay for my loss of it.

  She was serene. She was wonderful to me. This made me rant all the more.

  Soon I saw that I was using the loss of my friend to make Daphne baby me, and I began to be sorry that I had quarreled with her, and I told her so, and then I began to feel more like myself.

  First Daphne said, “Dear Bo, one thing a woman learns in wartime is that combat doesn’t make soldiers into strong, tough men, rather it makes them, the more of it they have, into children who want to be consoled and petted. Even your Marrow.”

  A few minutes later she said, “Don’t let the pendulum swing too far, Bo. Don’t forget the side of him you liked.”

  As I began to think then of other parts of Lynch, of the best of him, I experienced a new kind of grief, one that was centered on him rather than on myself, a sadness which, like my sobs, had a pleasant aspect, but this pleasantness, too, had to do with Lynch and not me. This sadness was his memorial, his life after death. Through its growth in me he would help to keep me going; I would remember him and so give him a little immortality, not very much, but more than some people get.

  21/

  On the liberty bus on the way home, I found I had a strong repugnance for anything that might hurt or destroy human beings, or any life at all—a disgust so strong that it frightened me, because I had a tour to finish. I was one who had always tried to do my duty well; I couldn’t simply quit. I was in the Army Air Force; I had responsibilities. I had to try to kill, and that was revolting, sickening. I rocked back and forth with the motion of the tiny bus, full of fear, heat, and nausea.

  In this mood I thought again of what I had seen the previous afternoon in the radio room of The House of Usher.

  I was quite calm when I reached the base. I guess the only way to forget is to go through the agony of remembering.

  22/

  Just before Sully reached my bed at a few minutes before two in the morning, I rolled over and found that I was a new man. Or perhaps I should say a different man, for I was in fact much older. I was for life, and against death. A kid doesn’t need to take a stand like that. So far I hadn’t figured out what to do about anyone else’s life, I’d have to think about that later, but one thing I knew: I was going to devote every ounce of my energy from here in to my own survival. I’d need luck, but I was going to push my luck in every way I could.

  To begin with, I ran a rigorous ground check that morning. I really made sure. I was so thorough that Farr said, “Teacher’s gone off his rocker this morning.”

  Bragnani said to Farr, “So have you.” Meaning, “You said it.”

  They didn’t bother me.

  Prien had a tummy ache, on account of the length of the mission they’d ordered—all the way to Kassel, a hundred and twenty-odd miles beyond the Rhine—and he wasn’t saying so right out, but it was obvious he wanted to be excused from this raid. Please, sirs, just this once. He didn’t say that, but his sniveling did.

  Marrow listened to Prien’s whining awhile and then he said, “Listen, son, if you don’t go with us we’ll have to take that God-damn bartender along.”

  That shut Prien up, and the new Boman was glad. I wanted a gripeless crew, I wanted alertness, I wanted life.

  The long hour between stations time and take-off gave me leisure to think, and one of my thoughts was this: In some ways Ambrose Lynch had been a fine man, and now I remembered his goodness, while the rest of him, the hateful side, I had already blanked out, and with it my crazy self-reproach. His goodness was in me now; I was going to remember it and protect it, keep it alive like a coal in a poor man’s fire.

  We took off at six, and shortly after take-off we ran into scattered clouds varying in altitude from three to seven thousand feet, and it grew hazy, and there was another cloud layer, two- or three-tenths cover, at about fourteen thousand. I was sharply struck, as I had not been in some time, by the labyrinthine beauty of the sky. The Kid would have liked these sights. We came to a place where cloudlets seemed to be arranged in rows, as if on streets. Maybe my travels had brought me at last to Nephelococcygia. As we went out over the North Sea the intermediate cover increased, until it was a solid mass, over which we climbed. The top of this second slab was at twenty-three thousand, and above us, almost obliterating the blue, was still another layer, a broken one, at about twenty-five thousand. We flew in the mysterious flattened chamber between the layers, in a soft haze.

  Suddenly into the chamber from above plunged our escort, some P-47s equipped, for the first time, with jettisonable belly tanks, so that they would be able to go thirty miles deeper with us than ever before. The belly tanks made them look even chunkier than usual, like fat bumblebees, but what gave the display a staggering beauty was that the planes drew along behind them in the misty air long gauze veils of condensation. We began forming them ourselves, and we seemed to be entering a dream world.

  Marrow, however, seeing the contrails, grew cautious. That condensation, he said, was bad. One day, in a diversionary raid in
weather like this (we had been in the main force and hadn’t, thank heaven, seen it), an entire element had become engulfed in a combination of fighters’ contrails and prop wash, and all three planes had collided and fallen in ruins. The new Boman liked Marrow’s special carefulness—not realizing, yet, that it was the beginning of a danger sign in him. Buzz kept urging a particular watchfulness upon the crew; kept calling on me and on Handown to check various things about the ship.

  Gradually the clouds thickened, and three quarters of the way to the target our task force turned back. I could hardly contain my relief and delight at our recall, for we were surely far enough to get sortie credit, and we would drop no bombs. But Marrow, even though he had been extra cautious for an hour, was furious at being frustrated from carrying through the attack.

  The weather grew worse and worse, and two of our ships, Income Taxes and Flak Sack, plunked down at Ridgewell, and another, She Can’t Help It, dropped out at Sutton Bridge. Marrow was in a filthy humor as we worked our way, through the beginnings of a fog, with less than two miles of visibility, into the landing circle at Pike Rilling. He had a nasty argument on the radio with Major Fane, the Flying Control Officer, about what slot The Body should fall into in the traffic pattern.

  After the landing it was my turn to get burned up, because Marrow hopped a ride in from the plane as soon as we were parked and left the dirty work to me. It took a long time to get all the grouses about the airplane written up on Form One, all the guns unslung, and all the chutes and people into the truck.

  On the way in I saw Handown literally lie down with his beloved machine guns, with his arms around them and his cheek against one of the perforated cooling tubes.

  23/

  Marrow was waiting for me at the briefing room. He took me aside. He was fit to be tied.

  Now, the concept of security was all very well, but in actual fact our base was one big chatterbox, and the latrines and hangars and offices and hutments had ears hanging on the walls like pictures, and there wasn’t anything you couldn’t pick up if you stayed awake. Marrow had a hot bulletin, and he was furious. He had had it from Curly Jonas, our Operations officer. Curly and Bins had been called the afternoon before, along with the key officers of other groups in our Wing, to Pike Rilling Hall, and there the Wing A-3 had outlined the plans for a real stinker of a mission. The fliers had been given full details, including altitudes, routes, timings, maneuvers for each group between the initial point and the target, directions on reassembly of the force—everything but the date and time of departure. Then they’d been taken in another room and had been shown something only British patience could have constructed—a sand model of a big piece of a city, with the projected target at the center. And what was the target? Schweinfurt. “It means in German ‘In a Pig’s Ass.’ Honest. That’s what Curly says.” Marrow’s fury was at the distance. “It’s clear the other side of Germany,” he said. “God-damn near to Czechoslovakia.” Buzz said they were a bunch of murderers up at Wing.

  A couple of hours later, when word had come in that out of six groups, some of which had gone through to their targets, twenty-two aircraft had been lost that day, Marrow said excitedly to Clint Haverstraw, “Jeez, son, look at the way the —th Group and the —rd Group have been hit the last few days. Now if the —th Group would lose a few ships, you know, get thinned out, we’d win the Inter-Group League in a breeze. They’re bound to be losing some of their good players.” Baseball!

  24/

  In the club that night a handful of the pilots started talking about Lynch. Doc was in the circle, as it happened. Perhaps because of the Kid’s having read poetry over the Tannoy, one of the men said he’d never been able to figure out whether Lynch had been a fairy.

  Marrow hotly denied this. “Fairies don’t fly,” he said, dead serious. “Do they, Doc?”

  Doc Randall raised his sad brown eyes and said that it was true the Air Force doctors hadn’t run across any overt cases. Plenty of fliers indifferent to girls—maybe temporarily—and plenty of pronounced rivalry between the men; but overt, no, none to speak of.

  “A flier,” Marrow said—and he spoke with distinct pride—“can’t really go for anyone except himself.”

  “There,” Doc said, “you could be wrong. Though there’s an element of truth in what you say.”

  25/

  There wasn’t time to sleep, even for men like Marrow who were able. They briefed us shortly after midnight, and everyone in the briefing room looked more dead than alive. We were for the Heinkel aircraft factory at Warnemünde, and we were numb, we were moving like automatons, we were convinced we were going to be sent on an air raid every day for the rest of our lives.

  Well! It was at the very end of the briefing that a piece of news came that wakened me all the way, and that made me want to stand up and cheer.

  Two ships on this strike were going to carry leaflets instead of bombs. Finah Than Dinah and The Body. Stebbins, Marrow.

  Marrow, next to me, did get on his feet and holler. “Not me!” he shouted. “None of that bumwad for me!”

  Bins looked at Marrow with a trout’s cold eye. “Orders, Major.” When Bins called you by your rank, it was as if he’d done a very personal operation on you.

  “F— orders,” Marrow shouted. “I’m a bomber pilot. I take bombs.”

  Bins just waited him out, didn’t say another word. There was some snickering around us. I tugged at Buzz’s sleeve. He sat down muttering.

  But he didn’t give up. He rushed up after the briefing and raised hell. Delighted as I was, I do believe that Colonel Bins had been vindictive, and had assigned leaflets to Marrow precisely because Marrow had on a previous occasion so loudly objected to the idea of carrying them.

  Marrow was still arguing at stations time—though by that hour, having failed in an attempt to put a call through to Wing, he was down to a journalist who worked for the O.W.I, or O.S.S. or something, in a uniform without insignia, a big tall fellow with a Poonah mustache and a German accent, who was trying to explain to Marrow that die ideological varfare vas pozzibly more important dan die uze of violenze.

  “You can’t tell me,” Marrow said, “that bumwad is going to win a war.”

  But we took the leaflets in our bomb bays, and all that day I felt, along with intense sleepiness, a serenity that I’d never experienced on a raid before. Over Warnemünde, from the initial point to the rally point, the flak was extremely hot, particularly at the bomb-release line, where we flew through a storm of puffs. On the way out nearly a hundred fighters hit us, driving in to within seventy-five feet, from all directions, while some twin-engined craft arched rockets at us from eight hundred yards away, out of reach. But after the bomb-release line, as we swung for the rally point, I looked out and back and down, and I saw that our boxes of messages had broken open, and the paper began to flutter, like many pigeons’ wings, downward.

  26/

  My God! They gave us another raid the following day, and again the briefing was just after midnight, and once more the mission was for the Fiesler aircraft-component factory at Kassel—a city for which we’d been alerted six times. We somnambulated out of the briefing and dozed on the truck going out to the dispersals, and by the greatest effort of will in the world I carried out a thorough ground check, and at four thirty we took off, this time into a marvelous cloud-soft dawn the color of peaches going from ripe to over-ripe, and there were heavy clouds over Europe, but before the target they cleared, and we dropped our bombs. We had a rough time coming home, with the Hun using air-launched rockets again, and co-ordinated attacks of four abreast coming from the rear. Several of our ships were damaged but none was lost; Big Bum Bird, Expendable VI, and Little Girl Blue landed at Boxted, Queenie at Great Ashfield, Voodoo at Martlesham Heath, and Miss Manookie at Little Staughton.

  Riding homeward, feeling drugged, I thought hard about Daphne, to keep myself awake. And for a second, just aft
er we had sighted our runway, and I could feel the flood of certainty that we had made it again—just then I was overwhelmed with gratitude to my Daphne, who asked for nothing and gave me everything. Her understanding of me was greater than my own of myself. It struck me that I had loved her—as I had at first grieved for Lynch—all for myself, far too selfishly, so what I had offered her could hardly be called love at all. I wanted life, and peace, and a chance to give her better than I had given, and at that moment, as the wing on my side lifted, and we banked, pulling out of the formation to go around to settle back on the earth, I made an unauthorized separate peace with the enemy. I was going to find a way to quit killing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE RAID

  1455–1604 hours

  1/

  Two minutes beyond our turn toward the initial point the last group of German fighters dropped away, and none came up to take its place.

  It was five minutes to three, so I had been awake for thirteen hours, and we hadn’t even reached our target.

  Now that the fighters had left us, I expected Marrow to give me the controls, but he sat there, leaning forward, holding the wheel not in his usual light way but in a pair of fists.

  “Want me to take her awhile?” I asked him.

  He was a long time answering, then he said, “Suit yourself.”

  “Wait a sec,” I said. “I’ve got to get me some relief.”

  I unplugged and unstrapped myself and went back to the bomb bay and unhooked the tube and managed to get everything unzipped, voided, and zipped again without any freeze-up. I opened the aft bulkhead door, and Lamb was at his gun without any literature in hand, and I went through past the ball turret and took one look at Farr and Bragnani in the waist compartment. The deck was littered with spent shell casings. Each was at his gun, scanning the sky so intently that I could back away and secure the door without having been noticed.