The War Lover

by John Hersey

  Clint came back up in a few seconds. I shouted to him, “Listen, could you get Neg and come up here and the two of you drag him”—jerking my head toward Marrow—“back to the radio room? We’re going to have to help him get out.”

  So Neg and Clint went to work, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy work, physically or mentally.

  After a bit I got on interphone and said, “All right, let’s dump those guns. And listen, Lamb! Have you got us tuned in on the control station?”

  “Yes, sir. They been telling us we’re doing jolly well.” Lamb was livelier than I’d ever heard him. Mimicry now. There was, in all of the crew, come to think of it, and in my own heart, a crazy kind of willingness, eagerness, merriment in those last few minutes of that long dreamlike flight.

  I flipped the jackbox switch over and told the control people I was down to about twelve hundred feet and that I was going in in three to five minutes.

  And the kindly voice in the next room said, “Righto. We’ve been talking with the Sea Rescue chaps. They’ll be onto you in a jiffy…. Good landing, old man.”

  Then I told Lamb to screw down his distress-call key and have his afternoon snacks. All the secret call letters and frequencies were on rice paper which the radio operator was supposed to eat before a ditching.

  In a minute he called up and said, “M-m-m. So nourishing, so good.”

  Then the ship began shaking, and I realized a gun was shooting, and I said, “For Christ’s sake, whose gun is that?”

  It was Handown’s. I guess he loved his guns too much to have heaved them into the sea. I remembered his cuddling them in the truck going in from the plane that time, with his cheek laid tenderly against the barrel. Neg said a Heinie had jumped us. Some Marrow with a German name, I thought.

  I told Neg to come down in the co-pilot’s seat, because I was going to need him when we went in, and I ordered everybody to get Mae Wests on and get into the radio room. And put a Mae West on Marrow, somebody.

  We still had five hundred feet, but the water seemed very close. The waves were not bad; the wind was not making the feathery streaks that it made when it was fresh. I swung slowly in a more northerly direction, to be heading into the breeze. The German had left us.

  “Everyone got a Mae West?”

  There were no answers, and they knew enough to keep a couple of fellows on interphone back there, so I supposed everyone was set.

  I decided a little formality couldn’t hurt. “Stand by for water landing,” I said.

  I fastened my safety belt; Neg already had his tight. I opened my window; Neg’s was open.

  Then I remembered a pilot named Cheeney, who’d been rescued from a ditching, sitting in one of those fat leather chairs in the officers’ club, taking a sip from a drink and putting it down on a table and pointing at his glass and saying, “You think it’s soft when you swallow it, but when you land in it”—he struck a fist into an open hand—“landing in it is like hitting a stone wall in a car that’s doing sixty.”

  But then there was lots to do, and I forgot Cheeney.

  Handown knew every step—he lowered the wing flaps, cut the engines, feathered the props, cut all the fuel and ignition switches. We were screaming back and forth to each other all the time.

  Suddenly we were in silence, but for the whistling of the wind. The waves—the rows of stone walls—seemed to be passing us very fast underneath.

  I was really feeling our way on the wheel, holding the wheel in my finger tips, and in my throat I was conscious of the shape, if not the sound, of, “Daph, Daph, Daph.”

  I was gliding in, a normal slow landing, with full flaps, and I gave the last gentle pull, to level us, and we skimmed and skimmed and skimmed, in a three-point attitude, with the tail maybe a tiny bit lower than usual.

  We hit. My eyes were shut. The shock was astonishing. I had my forearms up to protect my face. I opened my eyes. We were completely under water, water was pouring in the trapdoor between the seats, and in my window, and there was a score of tiny fountains coming through the instrument panel. I felt that my weight was forward. I was leaning on the wheel with my arms. I reached with my right hand for the catch of my safety belt.

  Then daylight broke through the windshield!

  We settled back in a level position, and the water stopped pouring in from all directions. I dimly realized that the nose had buried at first and then the ship had quickly settled back in a normal attitude.

  Next thing I knew I was out the window, and in the water, and I jerked my Mae West tabs, and I saw Lamb standing on the wing trying to release a life raft from the bomb-bay fairing. The rafts wouldn’t release themselves the way they were supposed to do, and Lamb was energetically tugging and cursing. Very soon the wing was awash, and I climbed up on it and saw Bragnani and Clint beyond it. Lamb had the raft free. It would only inflate part way, but we four got into it.

  I shouted, “Jesus Christ, she broke in two!”

  Clint said, “All we had to do was walk out.”

  Apparently the water, like a maul hitting a bung, had knocked the ball turret up through the ship, and the fuselage had split apart there. The tail section was taking a dive. The forward part was still level. There was a sound of a long sigh, as the air seeped out of the wet wings.

  “Oh, jiminy, I forgot something,” Clint said, and he jumped out of the raft, but I grabbed his collar and hung on. The lunatic wanted to go back for his lucky swagger stick. I convinced him it was down in the opened-up front, already far under water, and he climbed back in with us. I guess he had gone out of his mind for a few seconds.

  We paddled through between the two halves of The Body, both of which were settling fast, and beyond we saw Neg Handown in a raft with Farr hanging onto the side of it by one arm, looking as if he couldn’t get in.

  I glanced around, and I saw Marrow; he was bobbing against the fuselage, just back of the right wing. I jumped in and swam to him.

  His face had fallen forward into the water. His Mae West wasn’t inflated; the air in his jacket must have been holding him up.

  I wrestled with his bulk, and suddenly his head came up, and his hands thrashed, and he was saying something, but I couldn’t make out what. Maybe it was, “Leave me alone,” or, “Don’t touch me.” There was a kind of ferocity on his face; the lips were pulled back, the strong teeth bared. His eyelashes glistened with sea water. He pushed me away, and he paddled forward along the fuselage and out over the right wing. The ship was going under fast now. Marrow pulled his way along what little of the number-three engine was still awash, and he reached one of the blades of the propeller, and he threw his arms around it and hung on, yes, for dear death. The blade took him down.

  I swam horrified back to Handown’s raft and got in. It was shot full of holes like the other one, and Neg already had the hand pump going.

  As the last shoulder of the plane disappeared, “Poor guy,” Lamb quietly said.

  The Body was gone, and we six were alone on a big sea.

  I saw that Farr couldn’t climb into the raft. His left shoulder was covered with blood. Neg and I dragged him aboard.

  I asked him when he’d been hit, and he said it had been over the target. So the brandy had been medicinal after all. He had been brave, surely above and beyond the call of duty. I thought of Junior Sailen’s long silence about his wound, and I thought: My God, what human beings will bear for each other’s sakes.

  A Spitfire dipped down out of the evening sky, and we waved and cheered, and it circled us, and half an hour later, more or less, a launch came into sight. There was a man in a yellow slicker out on deck holding a handrail on the wheelhouse roof, and he began waving from a distance. Neg and I pounded each other on the back.

  When the launch drew near, the crewman, who was wearing a heavy blue turtleneck sweater under the slicker, called out, “Anybody hurt?”

  “Just
my feelings,” Handown shouted. “Those bad old Germans.”

  I got it across that Farr was hurt. “Righto,” the crewman called. “Just hold on half a mo’. We’ll have you fixed up splendid.” The launch eased close to us. “All right, maties, lend a hand, give a shove, that’s it!” And we had Farr aboard. What did they give him to fix him up splendid? Brandy.

  We were all on the rescue boat soon, and with a roar it lifted its head and raced toward England. I looked back. There was a broad wake of churning spindrift, almost like a contrail in the sky. Except for that path the sea was barren. There was not a trace of Marrow, who had loved war, or of his ship, which he had named The Body.

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