The War Lover

by John Hersey

  But I wasn’t ready, yet, to think about all this that Daphne was so vehemently pouring out. I was feeling bruised and sullen, and I said, “If he’s so horrible, why did you undress for him?”

  Daphne blushed; a hot red glow of shame burned her face. At least I thought at first it was shame. Partly it was, I still believe. But partly it was anger.

  “Because I have a life to live,” she said. “Life goes on. You men in a war think the war’s all there is, you mistake risking your lives for taking responsibility, and you think that having taken that responsibility—which incidentally you never do by deliberate choice; you claim someone has forced it on you—you think then you can abandon all others: to your families, to your conscience, to women. Women aren’t made to sleep around.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  A funny little smile curled Daphne’s lips. “I want to be fought over,” she said. “I want to cause a war.”

  Her sudden elusiveness made me sarcastic, for my first and only time with Daphne. “The face that launched a thousand Flying Fortresses?”

  In a small voice Daphne said, “Bo, your tour’s almost over.”

  “So you were willing to get in bed with Marrow because my tour was almost over? His tour’s almost over, too, you know. I don’t get it.”

  “Do you remember that Sunday of the bank holiday, when I didn’t come up to London? That was the same thing, Bo. I was looking around; don’t you see that I have to look around, now that your tour’s almost over?”

  “You can look. You don’t have to get into bed with a guy’s pilot, do you?”

  “I got into bed with you, Bo, the first night I went out with you. I didn’t hear you criticize me for that.”

  That line slowed me down.

  “You see, my Bo, I was forced to realize, you forced me to realize, as your tour went along, that you didn’t really want me very much more than Marrow does—though there was a big difference, darling, darling; you gave me a lot. But you see, you didn’t want me, a woman; you just wanted a camp follower, a stopgap till your tour was over and you could go home to your other life. You just wanted a war girl. Isn’t that right?”

  I didn’t feel like facing quite so much quite so fast, and I lashed out again. “How come you loved this Dugger character if he was so repulsive, like Marrow?”

  “I was a child, Bo. It was during the Blitz. It’s so chancy, the kind of people you meet.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but how could you think you loved a guy like that?”

  “You had your Janet. You’ve told me all about her, Bo. We shouldn’t have to account to each other for our educations, should we?”

  Touché, but I didn’t say so.

  “And besides, darling, I broke off with Dugger as soon as I realized that he didn’t love me, he only loved war.”

  “And you’ve been breaking off with me because…” I thought of Doc Randall’s report of Daphne—how she had cried on the phone with him and had said that she loved me more than any man she had ever known, but that I didn’t love her.

  “You’re not a war lover, darling. I know that.”

  “…because I never brought up the subject of marriage?”

  Daphne reacted to that word with another blush, and again there was anger in her warmth. “All your talk about selfless love,” she said, “what was that except a kind of vague yearning for…for justification? I mean justification for the use you’ve been making of me. Selfless love! And even your not wanting to kill—”

  “Now wait a minute,” I said.

  “I don’t deny that part of it may have been genuine. What you have to do is revolting. But your compromise, darling. ‘I’ll go in a bomber but I won’t kill,’ can’t you see that there’s a lot wrong with that idea? And that what’s wrong is that you can’t go all the way, you certainly can’t give all humanity a complete love when you can’t even give it to one human being?”

  There was too much to think about, and I guess I was too young to think about all of it clearly. I was a kid. It isn’t fair, for the older people to make young kids fight their wars for them. I went back to the subject of Marrow, as if he were simpler to think about than myself.

  4/

  “He sat down on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. I think he was rather drunk. I watched him closely. He began trying to get me to mother him. I tell you, Bo, one whole class of heroes is nothing but babies! It was surprising how far he let down the bars. ‘I’m not as good as they say I am.’ And, ‘Why was I passed over?’ He kept saying he was a failure, always had been. Sent down from his college. Made a poor show of his work for—what was it, a grain merchant? A flying bum, he called himself. Failure, failure, failure. Said he’d always wanted a lot of money, the mad money was a pretense, he was a skinflint. Said he was easily discouraged. Once, he said, when he was about twelve, he got a job at a small apartment house that was built in Holand, really a kind of tenement block, he was supposed to sweep down the stairs and empty the garbage for five dollars a week, but there was a dog, a Doberman pinscher, he was afraid of the dog, and he took to skipping days, and the owner came to the house one evening and sacked him, in front of his parents, and his father bellowed at him, but when his mother tucked him in that night, she said he didn’t need to bring money into the family because he brought luck into the house.”

  Marrow’s luck!

  “ ‘The fellows never wanted me. We had a Y in Holand, it was a rickety gym and a library and a room with a piano, and one night, I was maybe thirteen, fourteen, there was this whole bunch wanted to beat me up, or something like that, after a basketball game, I wasn’t even on the team, the game got them excited, and they stood out in the yard and chanted my name, and Mr. Buckhout, he was the Secretary, he kept me in his office till it blew over.’

  “He said he was puny and pigeon-chested, he bought some springs from Sears, Roebuck to build his shoulders and arms. He said he never got good marks in school. ‘Something made everybody hate me.’ ”

  Daphne said Marrow admitted that all his aggressiveness was “bluster and bluff.” “ ‘Why do you suppose Haverstraw is my favorite guy on the crew? Because he’s an officer and a weakling. It’s easy for a guy to feel like a big shot when he associates with children.’ ”

  And that reminded him: Once, he said, he’d been playing with his friend Chuckie, and a blast of dynamite had gone off on some construction job, on the edge of town, and he thought it was thunder in a clear sky, and he was terrified that it was some sort of message or warning, and he ran home to his mother. And next day Chuckie called him a coward. “Ever since then,” he said, “I’ve been scared of being scared.”

  Daphne was positive that it was right after telling this anecdote that he volunteered to her that all his stories of his great swordsmanship were imaginary. “The only thrill I get, it’s flying.”

  I tried to pin Daphne down. “What is he, then? What is it about him that makes you call him what you do?”

  “I’m not an expert. This is just a woman’s theory.”

  “I fly with this guy, don’t forget that.”

  Daphne thought a few seconds and then said, “One who loves fighting better than the things he’s fighting for.”

  I tried to think what Marrow might be fighting for. No ideas, no hopes or dreams, certainly. I pictured a white frame house, vintage about nineteen twenty-five, in Holand, Nebraska. Some evergreens that had been put in as “landscaping” have grown far too high for their purpose, and the living room and dining room are dark in the daytime. There is a collie sleeping on the porch. A man in black trousers and a white shirt, with suspenders hanging down and his detachable collar detached, and an unlit half-smoked cigar in his mouth, walks slowly back and forth behind an underpowered motor lawn mower which is spewing out clouds of thick blue exhaust. A woman, nearly white-haired, with a look un
der her eyes as if a pair of grasping hands had ahold of her cheeks and jaws and were pulling the slack flesh to the sides and downward, comes out onto the porch; the screen door slams, and the collie, who is very old, painfully rises….

  “He’s a superb flier,” I said, “and if he loves war so much, why was he passed over?”

  Daphne was frowning. “A war lover—my Dugger—your pilot: he’s a hero, as I see him, in every respect except that he gets a tiny bit too much satisfaction, ‘bang,’ Marrow called it, out of some deep-down instinct for…perhaps hunting.” Daphne was having a hard time with this. “I’m trying to tell you…. It’s silly for me to try to analyze it, Bo; I’m a woman. It’s just something I feel…. It has to do with death. That’s close to it. I guess when you say the things a man’s fighting for, you mean: life. And Marrow doesn’t want that, he wants death. Not just for himself, but for everyone.”

  I remembered Marrow’s flashing eyes, that day the three of us lunched in Motford Sage, and the sound of the ladle jangling in the soup tureen when he pounded his fist on the table and said, “I want to kill death.” Even death. Death was a bastard, a sergeant. I had a picture of the man in the black pants with the suspenders hanging down: he was skulking in the obscure corners of the dark house, laying an ambush for the boy, ready to roar, ready to jump the boy. Death the Father Almighty.

  “So the heroes,” I said, “are Marrow, Brindt, Jug Farr? Is that it?”

  “No, no, no,” Daphne said, “there can be the other kind, who fights fiercely, Bo, when he has to, much as he hates it, because he loves what he’s fighting for more than himself—life, I guess. Dunkirk. You only have to say a word like that. London when they blitzed us.”

  “That stuff you told me about Marrow, here…” I shook my head.

  “He can’t make love, because love has to do with birth, life. When he gets in bed, he makes hate—attacks, rapes, milks his gland; and thinks that makes him a man…. You’re stronger than he is, Bo—how could you not have known that? He said the medal’s yours. It’s still on the floor. You can have it if you want it.”

  I got up and went across the room and there, under the dressing table, was the Distinguished Flying Cross. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand: my medal.

  “But the tough thing,” I said, “is when you have this character on your side, in your own airplane. What are you supposed to do about that?”

  “That’s very hard,” Daphne said. “These people can make you think you love them. I guess the first thing is to know who they are and what they want…. But be careful, darling.”

  I was so full of rushing thoughts and feelings that I hardly knew what I was saying or what I was hearing. I was utterly bewildered; nevertheless, I felt stronger than I had for weeks; yet I felt somehow desperate, too. I heard myself saying to Daphne, “Do you think we could make a life together?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know, now. I’ve never loved anyone as much as I did you, yet…”

  “Did?”

  “Darling, you’re so American. You get what is and what you want all mixed up together in your head.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE RAID

  1656–1739 hours

  1/

  And so it was Marrow who had broken down and not I. He simply sat in the co-pilot’s seat and stared, and this was the most terrifying thing Marrow, the flier, could do—suddenly to go passive.

  The four planes Prien had called in raked through from the rear before I had got set in Marrow’s spot, without touching us, and they flew on to hit the main force. They, or others, would surely attack us again, for a plane couldn’t straggle and be as lucky as ours had been for long.

  I called Clint and asked him if he’d fired the flares, and he said he had, and I asked him how far he thought it was to the coast. Thought! He knew exactly. It was three minutes to five; our task force would be between Brussels and Ghent; we were now about twelve minutes astern of our former position in the force, so we would be perhaps ten miles short of Brussels; if we were holding a hundred and thirty, we would be at the coast in approximately thirty-five minutes.

  Clint followed these steps out loud on the interphone, but the calculations that were embedded in them he must either have made beforehand or else have worked out like lightning as he spoke; in either case, he was being astonishingly efficient, with none of his equipment at hand. It was all straight in his head. Where was the foggy Haverstraw whom Marrow had so often caught daydreaming?…My own mind (my heart was low; I felt irretrievably sad) was still enjoying the remarkable clarity that followed, like a stalker, after trouble. I began piecing together the duties of all the crewmen.

  I ordered Lamb to put out a distress call on MF/DF and to open the pulse of our IFF to “very wide” and turn it on, even though this was early for it. I visualized the whole process far ahead: how some listener in England would pick up our MF/DF call and would relay the message to the Main Locater Station, and it would get in touch with the control station to which Pike Rilling was attached; that control station from then on would give priority facilities to The Body. And a little later the scanners of the homing apparatus, seeing our pulsation on the special “very wide” band, would follow our track all the way in and would report our progress to the Main Locater Station, which would, in turn, pass on every detail to our Wing Headquarters in Pike Rilling Hall and, in case we might be forced to ditch, to the Sea Rescue Organization. This was the first time my mind had dared to leap ahead to England—and to the possibility of survival.

  I checked the rate-of-climb indicator and saw that if it was still functioning properly we were dropping much faster than before, for it said we were now losing about two hundred feet a minute. The altimeter indicated that we were at just over thirteen thousand feet. I was about to tell the crew that we could knock off oxygen in a few minutes when something went wrong with the controls.

  The wheel wrenched itself forward, the nose went down, we began to dive.

  I thought a cable must have parted.

  I grabbed the wheel and pulled with all my strength and managed to get the column back a little, but we still were out of control.

  Then I looked across the way and saw that Marrow had slumped forward onto the co-pilot’s column. I was fighting his weight; and I thought: Even in unconsciousness, he’s trying to kill us all, his innermost center really does want death for everyone.

  I called Handown to come down and help me with something—fast. When he showed up I was tugging on the pilot’s wheel with my left hand and trying to pull Marrow back with my right. Marrow was half conscious. He’d rouse up and sort of flap his arms and his head would roll around on a loose neck, and I’d be able to gain a little on the column, and then he’d crumple forward again, and I’d lose what I’d gained. Handown pulled his shoulders back, and at once I was able to ease back and level us off.

  We had lost four thousand feet.

  Marrow, who was hovering on the edge of consciousness, wouldn’t stay put. And with the nose guns and ball turret out, and Lamb away from his gun on the radio at least part of the time, we couldn’t afford to have Handown in the cockpit being Buzz’s nursemaid. I indicated with my head that Neg should try to drag him out of the seat and get him aft. But that was not easy to do. The trapdoor between the seats was open, and in his gear Marrow weighed two hundred pounds, and he had just enough fight in him, besides, to make his weight squirm. Negrocus got Marrow half out of his seat and saw that that wasn’t going to work, so he propped him back up in it, and, holding Buzz with one hand, Neg worked out of his own parachute harness with the other, and he used his harness to strap Marrow’s chest and shoulders and arms to the back of the co-pilot’s seat.

  Then Handown went up in his turret, and the first thing he did was to come on interphone and say, “Listen, you jerks, Lieutenant Boman is now first pilot of this ship. Do you understand what I
’m saying?”

  “What happened to the Major?” It was Farr, sounding sober.

  “He resigned,” Handown said.

  “You a pretty good flier, Lieutenant?” Farr again, sounding drunk.

  I said, “Everybody off oxygen. But check in first.”

  Prien didn’t show up with an answer, so I sent Junior Sailen back to see what the matter was, and Junior, having plugged into the jackbox in the tail position, reported that Prien was gone. The little escape hatch back there had been kicked out. That dip and dive must have made Prien think he’d taken complete leave of his digestive equipment, and he’d bolted. I asked Junior if he could work Prien’s guns, and he said he’d try.