Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  “Oh, no, sir, not at all. Though Ma likes that I keep the birds. They’re a better thing to spend money on than drink, which is where my father’s wages go, I’m afraid. There was an old guy in our building who kept them for years and who taught me about them. He told me once that they gave him an intelligent and profitable pastime. ‘They keep the harp of life in tune,’ he said.”

  This conversation was by a wide margin the longest I had ever had with an enlisted man and certainly among the strangest, given its topic and the many bald-faced disclosures it had included. Cavanaugh’s candor was almost insubordinate; it certainly seemed heedless of the hierarchies that defined every aspect of our lives and our mission. Without question I should have brought our exchange to a swift end, perhaps with a reprimand.

  But there on the deck with him—we two quite alone, our first morning on the open sea, the horizon visible in every direction, a clouded and violent future ahead—I could not. I reassured myself that this was a special case, that as a pigeon man Cavanaugh would likely be attached to the regiment’s command staff, that he wasn’t simply another interchangeable private whom I might have to tactically sacrifice, and that therefore this intimate dialogue was appropriate and constructive.

  This was all hogwash. I was captivated.

  “So, do you,” I asked, feeling all the authority that I had carefully constructed over the past months crumble like a gingerbread castle being demolished by a pig, “have a favorite pigeon you’ve left behind?” Never before had I possessed an ounce of care for pigeons.

  “I surely do. Her name is Annie.”

  “That was my little sister’s name,” I said, before I could stop myself.

  “My little sister’s Annie, too! She was jealous of the birds for all the time I spent with them, so I told her I’d name one in her honor, my sweetest and fastest. I have a photograph. May I show you?”

  Without waiting for my reply, he pulled a flat brass object from his breast pocket, looked at it, and blushed anew. “I’m a waiter at Rector’s,” he said, “and one of my regulars is a photographer. He told me—”

  “Rector’s? On Broadway?” I knew it well, Marguerite and I dined there often, and I wondered how I had never seen him there—or whether I had seen him and had paid him no mind, which hardly seemed possible given how stricken I’d been by our encounter that morning. His employment at a see-and-be-seen restaurant in the Theater District helped explain not only his creamy indoor complexion but also how such a working-class fellow as himself might possess such ease when among the high and mighty.

  “Yes, sir, that’s the place. This photographer wanted to do my portrait, and he said that in return he’d give me some pictures.” Cavanaugh paused to laugh and shrug, showing neither discomfort nor any conspiratorial acknowledgment that what he was describing was almost certainly—must have been—a queer advance. “But I don’t need any pictures of myself. So he offered to let me choose my subject. And here we are.”

  He held out the object for my examination: a locket containing a sepia portrait of a flaxen-haired girl who looked like him—heart-shaped face, freckles across the bridge of her nose, smart smiling eyes—standing next to her pigeon namesake, perched blurrily atop a globe.

  “The Feathered World,” I said, reading aloud the legend printed across the bottom.

  “Yes, sir,” said Bill. “The photographer said I could give it a title if I wanted, and that’s what I came up with: The Feathered World. Those two Annies are the queens of my heart.”

  The artistic poses of girl and bird, the caption, the earnestness of it all—it was almost too much to bear. I was scattered, divided against myself. I felt some interior policeman cautioning me to suppress my laughter, but I also recognized that the impulse welling within me was not laughter at all but something more like terror, or rapture. I had never before felt this way toward any living being. Why had I come up here this morning and happened upon Bill Cavanaugh? Why couldn’t I have ended our conversation sooner, turned and walked the other way?

  Cavanaugh and I both realized that I’d been staring flummoxed at the photograph for quite some time. He returned it to his pocket without a hint of awkwardness. “What about you, Captain Whittlesey?” he asked. “What brings you out so early this morning?”

  Robbed of the capacity to make even the most innocuous statement about myself, I stared sternly out to sea. “‘Eternal vigilance is the price of safety,’” I said, quoting the pamphlet we’d each been handed as we stepped aboard, orienting us to nautical life and telling us to consider ourselves self-appointed lookouts.

  “‘It takes a force of only nine pounds to explode a modern mine,’” he replied, laughing.

  “You must really be devoted to reading if you’ve committed that to memory,” I said. “Where are you from?”

  “Hell’s Kitchen,” he said, and finally for an instant he looked self-conscious, both proud and embarrassed. “Most of the boys in my barracks are not what you’d call literary-minded.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I remember when your group arrived in Upton, you brought a banner. It was quite poetic.”

  Cavanaugh grinned. “‘We’re from Hell’s Kitchen! We’ll keep the kaiser itchin’!’ I thought it was pretty funny. But I’m not so eager to kill as those fellows. I’m glad to be a pigeon man.”

  The words were out of my mouth before I could properly shape them. “You’ll be expected to fight, too,” I said. It felt to me like a lament, but it sounded like an admonition.

  For an instant a crease appeared in Cavanaugh’s otherwise placid forehead. “Oh, I know, sir,” he said. “No need to worry about me. I’m no shirker.” His smile returned, a bit stiffer. “Well, I’d best be going in now, sir.”

  Watching the rhythm of his receding back, I wanted, insanely, to touch him, to prove such a handsome and thoughtful man real. But that would have been madness—I was his commanding officer, and there was no evidence to suggest that he would have welcomed, even covertly, the impassioned advances of my silliest fantasies. Instead I clenched my fists in silence. But even as I tried to resist, I could feel: he had let the bird of my heart come out of its cage.

  * * *

  • • •

  The crossing lasted ten more days, and there was little to do, so I took my entertainment where I could find it. Some of us officers got French lessons; a few played bridge, while the privates played poker. Chores like abandon-ship drills and cleaning our quarters became almost pleasurable relief from boredom. We chatted, we watched the other ships in the convoy, we counted down the hours until the next bad meal.

  Apart from occasional concerts by the regiment’s musicians, the primary group diversions were religious ceremonies. Though I wasn’t sure I believed in God then, and I certainly don’t now, I took to attending the daily Mass held by Father Halligan, one of the Catholic chaplains, a practice that my Unitarian family would have thought very strange. I had been told, quite correctly, that Halligan was an excellent speaker and a charismatic man, which partly accounted for my interest. I also guessed that men hailing from Hell’s Kitchen would likely be among the flock.

  It was a theatrical scene: the padre there on the lower aft deck, sunlight on his vestment and wind in his candle flames, counseling his listeners to trust in God and each other and the justness of our cause. The men sang hymns, led by a badly mutilated piano that they’d hauled up from the hold: a relic of the Lapland’s previous service as a luxury liner. Halligan drew a crowd, and I couldn’t find Bill Cavanaugh’s face amid the other faces.

  Afterward I saw James Larney, our signalman, exchanging greetings with the other congregants. Older than most of the men and always with a just-scrubbed air, Private Larney worked as a civil engineer in civilian life. He was alert and adept at complex tasks, which led to his assignment as signalman; on the battlefield he’d have to carry and use communication apparatus ranging fr
om flags to lamps to mirrors, and he’d have to keep track of a constantly shifting system of codes. He had excelled during training, and I hoped his performance would carry over to combat. I imagine he hoped the same about me.

  “Captain Whittlesey,” he said, surprised to see me. “I didn’t think you were in the fold.”

  “I’m not. But I’ve been told that Father Halligan is worth hearing regardless. Say, Larney,” I added, feeling impatient and adventuresome, “do you happen to know a private called Bill Cavanaugh?”

  “The pigeon man?” said Larney. “Yes, sir, I do. Now, there’s a soldier who’s suited to his job, Captain. He lives and breathes pigeons. He knows a lot about the wireless radio aboard the ship, too. Interesting guy, very curious about communications. That’s him there, in fact.”

  As the crowd broke up into pockets, I saw Cavanaugh seated at Halligan’s battered piano—it was customary, I later learned, for it to be put to secular use after Mass concluded—and as I watched, he began to play with fluid, unassuming confidence.

  “He says he learned to play in Hell’s Kitchen saloons,” said Larney. “Can’t read music, not a note, but if he hears a tune once, he can play it back exactly.”

  “Billy!” somebody shouted from somewhere. “Strike it up, why don’t you, and play ‘Over There’!”

  Cavanaugh obliged. It had become customary to sing “Over There” in grim, humorous paraphrase—substituting “when” for “till”—to mock or accept the prospect of death. That’s how the men sang it that morning to Cavanaugh’s accompaniment, which made up in verve what it lacked in refinement: “And we won’t come back when it’s over over there!”

  I liked watching him in the center of the circle, happy and necessary, but when the twist to the lyrics arrived, my breath caught, though I’d heard it sung that way dozens of times before.

  The notion that Cavanaugh might not return made me realize that at that moment my strongest desire was to see him in Manhattan, going about his everyday life in a nation at peace. Then a second realization struck, like the cross that follows a jab: I, to a great extent, was responsible for whether he and every other man singing on the aft deck came home alive. I knew this, of course; I had thought of it constantly since receiving my commission. But the responsibility felt different, weightier, when I considered the specificity of what might be lost.

  I felt desperate that my Manhattan should have Bill Cavanaugh in it. He did not seem queer. Nor did he seem like trade, as Felix would have put it: a working-class man who would provide sexual favors to other men but who expected eventually to marry and have a family. In his blue-eyed, impenitent enthusiasm, Cavanaugh seemed almost to stand outside sex, with all its complications and distractions.

  Still, I thought I could go see him at Rector’s at least. I could take Marguerite there, and Bill Cavanaugh would be our waiter. I could tell him that I was interested in taking up pigeon racing, maybe, and ask him to teach me how to do it.

  It seems stupid now, looking back.

  The days slipped by, and we strained our eyes as we smoked on the decks, until one morning we spotted a low dark streak, dismissed at first as a cloud on the horizon. Then the cry went up—Land! Land!—as if we were explorers of old, conquistadors in reverse.

  And land it was: Ireland. The soldiers of Irish extraction—Bill Cavanaugh included—saluted the motherland as we passed through the Irish Sea.

  On the evening of April 19, our convoy dropped its anchors in the river Mersey, within sight of Liverpool. We stayed on the ship that night as there was nowhere better to put us, though we were mad to get out, a tin of stinking sardines come back to life.

  The next morning the Lapland berthed at last, and the men whooped and hollered down the gangways toward terra firma. “Nice to have something before our eyes besides wave after wave,” said McMurtry as we watched the men hand over stacks of Soldiers’ Mail postcards to a Military Postal Express Service crew. I imagined Cavanaugh’s sister, Annie, getting one from him, rushing to show to their mother, maybe going all the way to the roof to read it aloud to her pigeon namesake.

  Dockside, a group of elderly women greeted us. We were hungry for anything that hadn’t been cooked on the ship, and they were selling ginger buns and hot coffee. We still had only American money, but we settled on a nickel as the equivalent of the price of the breakfast, which they quoted as tuppence, ha’penny.

  The story soon went around of an old Scouser woman, widow’s black shawl wrapped about her stocky frame, who held out a steaming cup to one of our men and asked him, “Did ye come over to die?”

  The man, nonplussed, nearly dropped his mug. “Not if I can help it, lady,” he said.

  The woman’s eyes went wide, abashed. “No, no!” she said. “What I mean is, did ye just arrive?”

  The accents took some getting used to, but we didn’t have much time to adjust. Before we’d stopped feeling the phantom roll of waves beneath our feet, we’d been loaded onto railcars and sent south through the English countryside to Dover, where we’d make the Channel crossing to Calais.

  Our steamship went under the escort of the Dover Patrol, as well as a Royal Navy blimp, placid and watchful above scudding gray clouds. I kept my eyes on it, transfixed, wondering what it might be like to fight the war in the air.

  From the deck of the Toloa, I can’t say for sure how far we are from land, only that land is completely out of view. Yet here swoop the seagulls, even this far out. How do they do it?

  During burials at sea, the officiant says, “We therefore commit his body to the deep.” What about a burial in air, when one dies in the sky and falls, the lifeless impact like a second death? Plenty of men died in midair during the Great War, and plenty of birds did, too, Bill Cavanaugh’s included.

  CHAPTER 7

  CHER AMI

  We heard that the Germans had a proverb: “He liveth best who is always ready to die.” We soon learned that their army fought that way.

  The practicality, hard-heartedness, and hint of perversion mixed in that maxim seemed to strike our men as stereotypically German, which is probably why we heard them quote it so often. I never met a German bird who could confirm or deny it.

  We Allied pigeons did, however, receive frequent briefings from our keepers about our German counterparts, inevitably shaded with envy and concern. The enemy’s pigeons were better prepared, Germany being one of the first nations to establish military lofts in Danzig, Stettin, Tönning, and Wilhelmshaven, places whose names we knew by rumor and reputation. Metz and Cologne, too, each said to hold over four hundred trained pigeons at any given moment, all ready to carry messages from cog to cog in the giant Teutonic machine of war.

  After we landed in Calais, we began to hear stories that even a century later leave me heartbroken and horrified. Whenever they occupied Belgian or French territory, the Germans would order all pigeons in the region destroyed. Anyone found owning or selling birds, combatant or noncombatant, would be punished for possessing contraband. One million pigeons were confiscated and killed in Belgium alone.

  Unlike some species—crows, cowbirds, cuckoos—pigeons are not vengeful. But some part of me was eager to take to the air on behalf of these slaughtered birds, if not to avenge their deaths then to fly for the side that hadn’t committed such an atrocity.

  When the basket containing me and Thomas Hardy and the rest of the Wright Farm Dozen finally reached France alongside innumerable other conscripted pigeons, the landscape that met us was bleak and sunless, nothing like the green Cotswold Hills. The soldiers unloading us wondered aloud whether the previous three and a half years of steady gunfire and explosions along the Western Front had seeded the clouds, making the weather wetter.

  “Oh, look,” said Thomas Hardy, his usual good cheer finally veering toward sarcasm. “We get to ride another train.”

  Mucking through the final miles by truck, we arrived at the Am
erican pigeon lofts in Langres, an old French city, walled and fortified since the days of the Romans, its towers peering from a limestone promontory, the red-roofed houses coiling up and around the hill like beads on a string.

  Langres was far from the front and hadn’t undergone the destruction we’d see in other towns, but it was cold and somber all the same. The men plucked us from the trucks and put us in whatever lofts had space. I flew slowly to a perch—more of a hop, really, its being so crowded—and looked out at the complex: hundreds upon hundreds of us, rippling like water, all shades and colors, all army birds.

  “This isn’t any better than the basket,” I said to Thomas Hardy, longing to stretch my wings and soar. “Being cooped up in here makes me feel more like livestock than a racing homer. Are they fattening us for slaughter?”

  “They’ll send you to the front soon enough,” said a voice from the perch beside us. “Then you’ll see what slaughter means.”

  It was a baleful-looking black cock with frizzled feathers and horny feet. He spoke with his eyes barely open, without turning toward us, as if conserving his energy. “When I first came to the war,” he said, “I met a bird who’d been attached to a French battalion during the Nivelle Offensive. When the mutiny started, the soldiers being marched to the line began bleating.”

  “Lambs led to the slaughter?” I said.

  “Their officers could do nothing to stop it,” he said. “Unseemly, perhaps. But the poilus have my sympathy.”

  His orange eye opened and stared straight into mine. His small pupil was ringed with yellow, reminiscent of a bull’s-eye, though I’d soon learn that he was gifted at evading shrapnel and bullets: an almost—almost—unhittable target.

  “Who are you?” said Thomas Hardy, in a friendlier tone than I’d have managed.

  “President Wilson’s the name,” he said, puffing his oil-black breast like a head of state.