The War Lover Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.

  BOOKS BY JOHN HERSEY

  BLUES

  THE CALL

  THE WALNUT DOOR

  THE PRESIDENT

  MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE

  THE WRITER’S CRAFT

  THE CONSPIRACY

  LETTER TO THE ALUMNI

  THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT

  UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM

  TOO FAR TO WALK

  WHITE LOTUS

  HERE TO STAY

  THE CHILD BUYER

  THE WAR LOVER

  A SINGLE PEBBLE

  THE MARMOT DRIVE

  THE WALL

  A BELL FOR ADANO

  INTO THE VALLEY

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1959 by John Hersey

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1959, and simultaneously in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Ebook ISBN: 9780593080887

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.4

  a

  TO

  BARBARA

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I THE RAID: 0200–1119 hours

  II THE TOUR: March 1 to April 17

  III THE RAID: 1119–1337 hours

  IV THE TOUR: April 17 to May 18

  V THE RAID: 1356–1404 hours

  VI THE TOUR: May 22 to June 25

  VII THE RAID: 1404–1455 hours

  VIII THE TOUR: June 28 to July 30

  IX THE RAID: 1455–1604 hours

  X THE TOUR: July 30 to August 16

  XI THE RAID: 1604–1656 hours

  XII THE TOUR: August 16

  XIII THE RAID: 1656–1739 hours

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE RAID

  0200–1119 hours

  1/

  I woke up hearing a word break like a wave on the shells of my ears: Mission.

  I sat up on the edge of my sack and fumbled with my feet for my flying boots, for even in August I liked to nest my toes in the lambskin lining first thing in the morning. I hunched there and scratched my back.

  As usual I had forestalled Sully. In those days I had a clock in my head which would rouse me, on the mornings of missions, just before Sullivan, the waker, came in and flicked on the sun, in the form of a flashlight, right over one’s face, and said, “Come on. Roll out. Breakfast at two thirty. Briefing at three.” The rising hours varied, but my headclock almost always anticipated Sully by a few seconds.

  Today’s was to be my next-to-last raid. I felt as if tiny taps were opening in me and ice water were going into general circulation. I counted the credits I had, trying to make sure of their number, because I never could seem to make sure enough:

  Lorient, Bremen the day I met Daphne, St. Nazaire, Antwerp, Meaulte when my feet were cold, Helgoland, Lorient when Braddock blew up, Kiel when The Body caught fire, St. Nazaire and flak, Wilhelmshaven when we were hot, Bremen, Le Mans, Hüls, Hamburg when we went around the second time on the bombing run, Le Mans, Nantes, Heroya at the beginning of the July Blitz, Hamburg, Hamburg again when Lynch got it, Kassel recalled, Warnemünde with leaflets, Kassel after my separate peace, and finally Poix, a milk run.

  That made twenty-three; the twenty-fourth today; twenty-five and home…. I leaned back and touched my knuckles to the wooden wall.

  Where was Sully? Why didn’t Sully come this morning?

  By the dim wash of a light that some poor gink down the hall had left lit over his bed because otherwise he would have split open a nightmare, I saw across the way in our room the bulk of my pilot, Buzz Marrow, lying on his side with his legs pulled up in the deep, warm sleep of the not yet born. I could see the white lump of sheet over him and the rectangles above him on the wall of pictures of dames, sprawling for him, giving him the old eye. He could reach up, as he said, and pat Danielle right on her Darrieux. He was cranking off sleep the way the hill used to sleep outside my window at Donkentown.

  Then I remembered the dream, or parts of it. There was a passage with Daphne; we were walking in a dry place, rocks, haste. That was not the part. Yes, this was it:

  We broke out of the undercast and saw the dawn, a great sheet of mother-of-pearl, wrinkled with altocumulus and cirrus, over the continent ahead. Under us, like mud, lay the flat, damp wad of weather that always seemed to cover England and her Channel in those months. Each time we ventured out and back, we cut through it, our wings like spades, sometimes in the dark before sunrise and sometimes, returning, in the dark after dusk. The dawns and sunsets provided my keenest pleasures, in those days, I guess, except for those that Daphne gave me. In the dream the dawn was bags of gold, heaps of oranges, fires in hedges, snow on mountains, piles of smoking autumn leaves, cotton gods and cotton cherubs, sheets of flesh, films of oil on water, flying seas of wine. I dreamed the colors. Mostly and finally it was mother-of-pearl, dark, blue-gray-green, a fundamental range that would have been depressing but for its infinite variety and its shimmering changeableness, like that of the watershot silk in one of Daphne’s dresses when she walked.

  Daphne was in the pilots’ compartment with us, standing behind my seat where stolid Handown, the engineer gunner, usually stood on take-offs.

  I could see vividly in the dream our cockpit: the two columns and wheels, Marrow’s and mine, and the dials and switches and lamps and gauges and throttles milling around like a New Year’s Eve crowd in Times Square.

  We broke out, as I say, into the huge oystershell of heaven, and I looked across at Marrow, to see how he was taking the sight.

  Marrow was being Marrow; a hunk of machinery, concerned only with his work, which was to drive twenty-seven tons of metal up a road of thin air. F— dawns; they were for co-pilots. The big man sat, as always when he had the controls, leaning forward toward the pilot’s column. He bulged in his leather coat, and its huge collar, lined with yellow-tan fur, was folded down over his shoulders, and the throat was not zipped up all the way. He looked like a motorcycle cop, arrogant and sure of his victims. We couldn’t have been high enough for oxygen, because his helmet was loose, and the hard leather chin cup and pointed strap hung down on my side, and the fur-lined visor was turned up, and the bulge of the earphone and the chin cup and the goggles were the only precise shapes in that whole pile of shapes; the goggles were up on his forehead, their elastic strap bunching the crown of the soft headgear. A hank of oily blond hair stuck down on the right side of Marrow’s forehead, under the goggle strap.

  I saw Marrow in the dream as I had seen h
im early in our tour, not as I saw him toward the end.

  Buzz did not wrestle with the ship, as some men seemed to do, and as I think I did, for I am a shorty and also was much impressed with the law of gravity. He handled all that airplane with his finger tips, and his movements were gradual, and the ship’s were smooth. He was a powerful figure, an impressive organization of flesh and cloth and leather and fur and rubber, yet he handled the plane not with power but rather with tender, sad care. His fingers adjusting the trim through a button on the automatic pilot were as sensitive, as plastic, and as modest in relation to the whole man as the knob itself in relation to the tremendous strength of the cables and stress of the wings of the plane. He held the wheel the way he’d hold a martini glass and a butt when he thought he was snowing a dame.

  I watched him, and his face was no more and no less expressive than the altimeter or one of the r.p.m. indicators. His eyes moved without haste from dial to dial, and at times he looked out at the shoals of atmosphere beneath us, or at the gaps of toplessness in the clouds above—but in a calculating and not a sensuous way, and now and then he checked his wingman and the element ahead of us, higher than we. He was calm and automatic.

  All of a sudden I, Charles Boman in the dream, could stand the sight of Marrow’s complacent ease no longer, and I grasped the wheel on my side in my tight, muscle-bound way, and I stamped my feet onto the rudder pedals. I fought to push the column forward and turn the wheel to the right, and I tried to kick right rudder. But the controls would not move under all the strength I could bring to bear.

  I looked over at Marrow, and he was still flying with his finger tips and with his legs relaxed. His fingers and his unforcing feet were holding the plane smoothly on course against the currents of air and against all my strength.

  I fought frenziedly to take the plane off course, but the turn-and-bank indicator was level, and the rate-of-climb indicator was as steady as a stopped clock, and nothing I could do would change anything.

  Again I turned toward Marrow. Buzz was staring across at me. His face was white and broad and too big, and it wore an appalling look of disapproval.

  After that, Buzz and I were playing acey-deucy in the officers’ club, and Daphne was whispering, and everything became pleasant in the dream.

  2/

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was two minutes past two in the morning. They had told us, up at two. I wondered again where Sully was. He usually started at our hut.

  Then I was wide awake and I remembered the other thing. I hated Marrow. For three days I had hated him.

  When I had first seen Daphne’s face, that previous Saturday, I had realized there had been some change. It was not in anything she said or consciously did, but rather in some kind of conviction that came out through her skin from inside her, for she was such a feminine one that essences, odors, and colors seemed to be expressed out of her at the slightest stirrings of her innermost feelings. I ran up the creaking stairs of the house in Bartleck where I had taken a room for her, and my heart was beating as it did on take-offs. I opened the door and stood in the doorway. Daphne was sitting in a straight wooden chair against the wall by a dormer window on the opposite side of the room, reading and waiting, and at the sound and sight of me she started up, dropping the book and apparently not caring whether she broke its back, and she ran across the room, and as she came toward me her eyes restored my beat-up leather jacket and brushed my hair, and she said, “How beautiful you are!”

  That was guff, and I knew it, but I ate it.

  She did not run all the way into my arms—she never had—but stopped in front of me and waited there for me to move or speak.

  “Darling,” I said.

  “That word,” she said, and she moved under its influence, just a swinging shift in her stance.

  But I was uneasy. Had I forgotten something? There was a shapeless doubt at the edge of my mind. Some change. Yes.

  “Work?” she asked.

  “Stand-down for the day,” I said.

  “Oh, darling, I’m so glad.”

  But it was done. In those few moments I had stood as if before a judge, hearing—yet not clearly hearing because of the murmuring in the courtroom—a sentence pronounced. It was not much. Just a hint of a change. In the afternoon we went to an exhibition cricket match at Lishton and sat on the grass in the shade at the edge of the grounds seeing the white flannels of the players flickering in the sunlight, and the bowler, like a primitive cartman, rolling the big wheel of his stiff-armed pitches endlessly, endlessly, and the restless Yank uniforms around us, and a loudspeaker explaining the ins and outs of the interminable performance. And later we walked in the village, along the narrow sidewalks, and she held my arm. The black of the thatch, the damp stone of the walls, the windows squintingly small as if the light of English days could not be trusted to have the free run of a man’s castle; the elegant Caledonian lettering of PONGREN & KNEE, APOTHECARIES, and the honey-varnished buns in the baker’s window, and the strong smell of dung at the end of the High Street, where inside a courtyard could be heard a plainsong of cattle—these familiar things in the village were unchanged, yet everything was changed in my eyes and in my heart, which lay in my chest like a bag of gravel, because of the slightest shift in the balance of Daphne’s and my feelings. Not a hard word had been spoken and it could not be said, by any means, that we had run into disaster, but there had been a change, there surely had been a change. I kept juggling the pieces of the puzzle in my mind, and finally, remembering my having had the duty in Ops on Thursday night, and remembering, too, the way my pilot and best friend in the group, Buzz Marrow, whom I myself had told that Daphne had been due back to Bartleck from Cambridge that afternoon, had jounced along the corridor of our Nissen hut with his comical tippy-toes walk, hoisting his huge form at every step on his incongruously delicate feet, saying he was just going to have one lousy limey beer at the officers’ club, and it would probably be warm as p—, as usual—but he hadn’t come in until two in the morning; remembering all that, I put together the most improbable notion I could devise: that Marrow had had my Daphne.

  And when I got back to our room I woke him up, to find him grinning at the very moment of his return from pit-bottom sleep, where he was such a familiar, and I asked him to his face whether he had been with Daphne.

  He rolled over on his back, hugging the pillow he had brought from the States with him, his eight-dollar pillow which he called “Down Girl,” and he leered, and he denied it. “Wished I had been,” he said. “You lucky son of a bitch; I bet she’s a lay and a half.”

  It seemed to me that he was lying. We had had a late alert. I slept little.

  3/

  I found out, to my cost, from Daphne, that he had been lying, in a way; or partly. But this was not why I hated him. Daphne had told me everything he had said and done, and it was much worse than I had thought. I hated him because his magic and strength had been illusions. I hated the taint in him. I hated the insight that he, through Daphne, had given me about certain men and war, and the despair for the future this episode had given me; the sense of degradation, the glimpse, as in a nightmare, of clawing, bestiality, filth, worms, blackness of tombs.

  But I also felt a new strength of my own. I had at least a clearer eye.

  I looked across at Marrow again, for he had sighed deliciously, and I think that part of my hatred at that moment must have stemmed from the way he slept—just like a hill in a peaceful landscape. He was a specialist of sleep. He went to bed each night in fresh underclothes, so that in the morning, at the next-to-last moment, he could pull on shirt and pants and socks and, walking into a pair of shoes, keep right on walking, without shaving or brushing his teeth or even really waking up, to the Nissen hut that served as a lounge attached by a corridor to the Number Two Officers’ Mess, and there he would lie down, curled up like a cutworm, on one of the fake-leather sofas with steel-pipe a
rms, “catching five,” as he put it, while the rest of us shuffled in and took our places to eat. Yet he was never quite the last to sit down at table, and he was every bit awake when he did.

  Here he was, conked out, with an arm crooked around his private pillow. Tacked above the head of his bed was a sign he had had Chan Charles, the squadron painter, letter for him, and that he’d covered with transparent talc as he had all his pictures of dames. “This pillow,” the sign said, “is NOT Government issue. It belongs to W. S. Marrow. It cost eight dollars. Do not borrow. This means you.”

  “I bought that pillow in Woolman’s furniture store in Dayton,” I had heard him tell other fliers a dozen times. “It’s a hundred per cent pure goose down. Eight lousy bucks. Jesus, that thing has been everywhere I been. It went all around the phases with me: Spanner, Lowry, all around. Why s—, that pillow’s paid off eight hundred bucks in sleep dividends alone. And that ain’t all, son. That’s my ‘Down, Girl’ pillow. I used to tell a girl, ‘Feel that,’ and she’d put her hand on it, and I’d say, ‘No, no, put your cheek on it, just feel that with your cheek, you never felt anything that soft.’ Well, the minute she put her cheek on it, s—, she was a pushover. Down, girl! Any son of a bitch steals that pillow, I’ll cut his b—s off.”

  My dream came fleetingly into my mind again, and I thought of the changing sky in the dream, and for some reason I remembered the sky the morning of our mission to the Heinkel plant at Warnemünde, the day we carried the leaflets and when Buzz about blew a gasket because, as he shouted, we weren’t going to clobber the squareheads but only drop a lot of bull s— on paper. The ship was going along fine, its vibration as soothing as the sound of a coffee pot perking, and the sky, as we moved in it, up and out, was giving us its fantastic gift of variety. A tree slowly changes its lights and stirs in the morning breeze—the great oak in the corner lot by Aunt Caroline’s house, I remember it!—but the sky is like a human mind, with uncountable shifting pictures and caverns and heights, and misty places, and lakes of blue, and big sheets of forgetting, and rainbows, illusions, thunderheads, mysteries—and in it, all around us, as we went on our work of those awful days, death and the dealing of death. That day, however, I felt happy, because we weren’t going to drop any death, only leaflets, “bumwad,” as Max Brindt, our bombardier, who was just as angry as Buzz, called them. And I remember the clarity when we got all the way above the cloud cover. The sky above us, where the fighters were dogging, was just solid with contrails, long, feathery paths of condensation; from a distance it seemed as if there were a hundred giants, skating and cutting up the ice of the sky. It was brilliant on top.