Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  “You’re American?” I asked. I had never met an American—man or bird—and was intrigued to meet a representative of what was to be our side.

  “No, French,” he said. “It’s just a patriotic moniker. And you?”

  “Cher Ami,” I said. “And this is my brother, Thomas Hardy. We’re English.”

  “An English bird with a French name here to fly for the Americans,” said President Wilson. “And your name is masculine, but you’re a hen, unless I miss my guess. Mon Dieu, life in wartime!”

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  Amid the cacophony of the thronged loft, from somewhere on the dropping-dappled straw floor, a soft sound caught my ear: a rattling cough.

  Below me hunkered a silvery hen, not doing well but trying to hide it. Private and stoic, she was, even in her obvious illness, the most beautiful bird I had ever seen. The ends of her feathers were tinted faintly pink, like low clouds at sunrise or the smoldering ruins of an ancient city. But it was her smell that nearly knocked me from my perch: the hint of white roses at the edge of happiness.

  Without speaking another word to President Wilson, I flew down next to her and asked, “Who are you?” I knew that she might make me sick, too, but I didn’t care.

  “USA 15431,” she said, her voice like cinders.

  “No, your real name. Where did you come from? What’s wrong?”

  “Baby Mine,” she said. “I came all the way from the States in a dark crate. Storms. Five thousand miles. Sick and sad. It’s pneumonia, I think.”

  Had John come along to care for his Wright Farm birds, as I believe he wanted to, he’d have helped Baby Mine. Anything that ailed a pigeon was curable in his hands. Would these American pigeoneers bustling in their khaki take notice?

  If you want to tell whether a human is the type who truly loves animals, the eyes are a giveaway. When Corporal George Gault opened the loft door to cast us our feed, I saw care in his eyes. His accent and the tone of his voice were nothing like John’s, but he had the same patient manner and a similar mustache, though his was pure chestnut with no strands of gray.

  When the seed hit the troughs—vaster than those at Wright Farm, for we were such a huge flock—the other birds flapped over to eat, wings clapping as though in an ovation to the corporal. I remained in the straw next to Baby Mine, looking up and cooing.

  “What have we got here?” the corporal said, gently pushing me aside to lift Baby Mine in a spruce, agile hand. “Come on, sweet Baby Mine, we’ll get you fixed in no time. And, Cher Ami, if you aren’t the best-named pigeon this fella’s ever met! Don’t worry about your new friend.”

  Carrying her with the same reverence and professionalism that a museum curator might show toward a precious antiquity, he shut the loft door behind them, leaving a faint waft of chocolate in his wake: he always kept it in his pocket, and among us sharp-sniffing pigeons it became a cherished herald of his approach.

  But I took little notice of it at the time, or for that matter of the meal the corporal had provided and after which my new loftmates were flapping and jostling. My mind was fixed on Baby Mine—her voice, her smell—trying to braid every strand of her into my memory, as I might work to memorize landmarks and traces that would lead me home.

  When Corporal Gault returned to refresh our water the following morning, he did not bring Baby Mine back, and I stood at the rim of the bathing pan, bereft.

  “Stiff upper lip,” said President Wilson, alighting beside me. “Isn’t that what the men say in your country? Baby Mine is in good hands. Gault is a gem among pigeoneers. He’ll nurse her back to health, if anyone can.”

  This was typical of President Wilson—he’d offer a few authoritative words of reassurance, then follow them with a shrug of doubt meant to protect him from ever being wrong—but I was too morose to challenge him.

  Our training regimen left me little time to pine, though. To an accomplished racer, the exercises seemed remedial: allowing ourselves to be held without protest, accepting bulky message canisters on our legs, and taking stock of the sights and sounds and smells of Langres from the roof of the loft while confined to our baskets.

  I felt frustrated at our slow progress, irritated by our close quarters, and constantly aware that once released I could simply fly home to Wright Farm. The sluggish, meandering journey to France by truck and train and ship notwithstanding, I knew that Chipping Norton was about four hundred miles from Langres, manageable for any pigeon willing to brave the poor visibility and unpredictable winds over the Channel. In fact, I had a clear idea of the route I’d take, the speed and altitude I’d maintain, the sights by which I’d navigate—which, I suddenly realized, is exactly why the corporal had kept us in our baskets. We had a job to do in France; we knew it, and we wanted to do it. But when at last we were airborne from Gault’s hands, would the voice understand our purpose here? Or would it simply send us hurtling back to our birthplace, as it had always done?

  Gault’s gentle attention and a steady supply of tasty tic beans and maple peas did their work. When the corporal finally transported us to a spot south of the city walls and tossed me skyward, the voice spoke clearly: Cher Ami! Home to your loft by the airway! Home to Langres!

  Relieved, I flew back to the loft, reveling in the long-withheld rush through open air. Only later that night, as I perched sleeplessly, did a note of disquiet find me. Something that I had taken as fixed had shifted, had been shifted. I felt the world grow larger, myself grow smaller in it, and Wright Farm and my family grow farther away.

  Once Corporal Gault finally granted us liberty, I began to enjoy my training, just as I had when John had trained us back in England. The French landscape sprawled below in a pleasing pattern, villages and countryside ceilinged by glorious sky of crisp and solitudinous blue, only a permeable layer of other birds seeming to abide between earth and heaven.

  “This really is a beautiful place,” Thomas Hardy remarked upon his return from a long flight. He spoke between pecks at grains of rice and cinquintina maize, his reward from Gault for a route well flown.

  “You should go ahead and enjoy it,” President Wilson advised, forever behaving like everyone’s dad, “because it is teaching you absolutely nothing about the battlefields we’ll soon be sent to.”

  He said this offhandedly, while grooming his velvety black breast. I cocked my head at him and stamped a foot—by then I had outflown every pigeon in the loft, and I was in no mood to be deferential—but he took no apparent notice. The other birds, however, were watching my reaction closely, alert for a shift in the balance of power.

  I chose to stand down. Jealous though he might have been of my skill in the air, President Wilson was a veteran of many missions, and he’d earned his authority on the topic he’d raised. Like the other birds, I wanted to know what he knew of war. The human notion of fighting in an organized, mechanized way—with the principal aim of claiming and holding areas of ground while killing as many other humans as possible—remained incomprehensible. We had no real understanding of what a battlefield was, much less of what flying over one might be like. Since our arrival President Wilson had spoken only cryptically of his experiences under fire; now, perhaps, his wounded pride presented an opportunity to draw him out.

  “All right,” I said. “Do tell.”

  And tell he did, that evening and for many evenings thereafter. He spoke in the same indifferent, matter-of-fact tone that he used for all his stories, but what he described was so preposterously awful as to resemble folktales invented to terrify gullible squabs. He told us about German snipers who could launch metal projectiles across hundreds of yards to kill men and pigeons alike. He told us about poison gases that the Germans used against our soldiers, gases that would kill us even faster thanks to our active metabolism. He told us about exploding shells that would fall among our troops and cast jagged shrapnel everywhere. He told us about soldiers—our
own soldiers!—who fell backward and crushed the baskets of pigeons they carried, or who panicked and left their baskets behind, or who, starving after weeks without supplies, wrung the necks of their birds in order to roast and eat them.

  When he heard this story, Thomas Hardy burst into deranged laughter. “What’s so funny?” the rest of us demanded, and then we were laughing, too.

  “You might expect,” President Wilson told us one night after a long flight back to the loft, breaking a weary silence that had settled among us, “that one advantage to homing from a battlefield is that the violence of war will have banished and replaced all the usual dangers we face on our journeys. This is wrong.”

  Silhouetted against the twilight, he spoke with his eyes closed, as if imparting this warning were a final task keeping him from sleep. “The Argonne Forest is still full of buzzards and sparrow hawks. The war has driven the mice from the fields into the woods, and so the raptors are healthy and plentiful. Also, the Germans have trained falcons for the specific purpose of taking pigeons voyageurs. Even the most dead-eyed rifleman has trouble shooting a bird on the wing—and unlike the Americans, the Germans don’t use shotguns—so to supplement their bullets they conscript the fastest birds of prey to capture and kill us. This is always the way with humans, you see. Pigeons home; it is our nature. And falcons hunt pigeons; this is natural, too. But the humans pervert our respective natures toward their own ends. And by doing this perhaps they express their own nature. Who can say?”

  This didn’t seem right. The care and training that we got from John on Wright Farm, that we were getting from Corporal Gault at Langres, didn’t feel like a perversion of anything to me. It felt like collaboration, maybe even like love. I didn’t feel as though I’d been warped in their custody but instead as though I’d become more completely myself.

  I wasn’t sure how to argue this, so I kept silent, pretending to be asleep until, without intending to, I slept.

  For the next few weeks, cars and motorcycles came and went, gradually taking all my Wright Farm loftmates away, including Thomas Hardy. I wanted to go, too—but I was also afraid I’d go before Baby Mine returned or before I learned what had become of her.

  Our lofts provided a good vantage from which to observe the American troops whom we’d be supporting, and much of what we saw did not put us at ease. Even though these soldiers understood themselves to be saving the French, they could act like invaders themselves. Medical officers tried to establish sanitation and in the process denigrated the villagers’ habits. When the doughboys got paid, they spent their salaries haphazardly, insensate to the greed they exercised and the jealousy they inspired. And if I sometimes grew frustrated at being unable to make myself understood in human language, it was nothing compared to the frustration that emerged between doughboy and villager, both so reliant on speech and yet mutually unintelligible. The failure of words to function as accustomed caused many a minor disagreement to become major.

  The local French children helped bridge this divide. They ran free as roosters all over the streets, and I credit them with teaching the doughboys the little smattering of French they were able to acquire.

  Knowledge flowed in the other direction, too. Day in, day out, the cheeky enfants loitering near the doughboy quarters learned the men’s drills quite well. Their little leader, a towheaded and toughly cherubic boy, gave the commands in fine English, not omitting the profane. “Parade rest, you flea-bit fuckers!” he’d shout, augmenting his piping voice with a sergeant’s growl.

  Late one afternoon I watched this same urchin, snaggly teeth giving him the air of a field mouse, run up to a soldier and ask for a cigarette, s’il vous plaît.

  “Mais tu es bien trop petit!” the man said with a laugh, stating the obvious: the boy was too little.

  “C’est pour mon père!” said the boy, though there were no pères in that village, nor pères anywhere, all of them having been sent to the front.

  The soldier didn’t have enough French to continue the debate, and sadness stole over him, as if he were thinking of the boy’s father’s fate, or of his own. He relented, and the boy hopped off with his treasure like a sparrow to his nest.

  I remembered myself as a fledgling in the Wright Farm loft, after I left the nest but before I mastered flight, under normal circumstances the most perilous time of any bird’s life. Although my parents and John looked after me well, I was always in danger from hawks and cats and foxes. I was a fledgling for only a few terrifying weeks; human children pass entire years before they’re able to fend for themselves. For the thousandth time, I wondered how such a delicate species—slow runners, poor kickers, ineffective biters thanks to the peculiar placement of their all-but-useless noses—came to dominate the earth.

  The group of children, having witnessed their leader’s success, now clustered around the same soldier, their filthy hands outstretched. “How do they learn to forage like this?” I wondered aloud. “No one is training them.”

  “Hunger is a good teacher for any animal, I suppose,” said a voice from behind me, a voice like cinders.

  It was Baby Mine. I was staggered by how much more beautiful she was in health. Some of her feathers were the color of violets.

  Without quite deciding to, I flew to her, cooing low and pecking lightly at her ravishing neck. She welcomed my attention, pecking in return. “I didn’t know if you’d ever come back!” I said.

  “I have,” she said. “And it’s all thanks to you, for getting me the care I needed.”

  “Oh, Gault is a quality pigeon man,” I demurred. “He’d have noticed you without my help. He’d never let a perfect bird like you die.”

  “Well, you helped him find me faster, and I’m not sure how much longer I could have lasted. So thank you. Gault says it will be a while before I’m ready to train near the front, but I’m well enough now to be back in the flock.”

  Another bird intruded alongside us with a series of ungraceful flaps—a bird with feathers so purely and brilliantly white that his every arrival was like a signal flare or a loud noise. “You’re doubly lucky, then,” he said. “Not sick but not going into battle either.”

  This was Buck Shot, a recent arrival from near Chicago. Striking though he was in appearance, he was a tactless bumbler, lacking the humor to see the grim comedy in our circumstances, much less in his ironic name. Among birds and men alike, a sense of humor was a critical asset in war, far more important than skill or courage.

  Buck Shot had a standard litany of complaints through which he constantly cycled, and in Baby Mine he saw a fresh audience. “Do I look like a bird who belongs on a battlefield? Look at me! Pure white! I’m practically a fancy pigeon. I have no business flying around with messages on my legs. I’m an emblem of peace, and they’re sending me to a bloodbath. Not to mention how easy I’ll be to spot in flight!”

  “Buck Shot!” President Wilson called sternly from the floor of the loft. “As you may be aware, there are certain countermeasures that pale birds like yourself can employ to decrease visibility in the air. Why don’t you leave those two alone, fly down here, and let me tell you about them?”

  I was grateful for his intervention, but it turned out to be unnecessary. The door to the loft swung open, and Corporal Gault walked in. His eyes easily located Buck Shot and Baby Mine, then pivoted to plain me perched beside them. “Your dear friend is back, Cher Ami!” he said. “I’m glad you got to see her now, as I’m afraid you’ll soon be separated again.”

  For a moment I was concerned that Baby Mine might still be ill, but then I saw the way Gault looked at Buck Shot and me, and I knew: our time had come. The two things I’d been waiting for were happening at once, and one was taking me away from the other.

  Baby Mine and I exchanged pained looks, our warm necks lightly entwined, both flummoxed as to what to say.

  “Well,” said President Wilson, staring philosophically through
the loft’s open door, “there’s nothing to be gained from mooning about. This is what war is: Saying good-bye. Just saying good-bye, friends. Might as well get used to it.”

  He was, as usual, half right. If war was saying good-bye, it was equally finding oneself at a loss about what to do with sudden hellos, unexpected connections made as the world fell to pieces.

  Baby Mine gave me a peck on the beak just as the corporal scooped up Buck Shot and expertly lifted me in his other hand. I tried not to look back, tried to accept that I’d never see her again, that to hope otherwise was childish, that our separation was for the best. While our fellow pigeons did not regard bonds between hens as unnatural, the humans who kept us certainly seemed to—and in any case such a pairing could serve no human purpose, as it would yield no champion racers, no progeny at all. While I preferred to think of us as the humans’ partners and collaborators—and we were; I wasn’t wrong—we were also their property and their tools. What did I expect?

  Gault placed us in our wicker basket along with a few other birds whom I didn’t know, then carried us outside, where a tall, narrow, four-wheeled cart awaited our arrival.

  “It looks like a covered wagon,” said Buck Shot.

  I didn’t know what a covered wagon was. Mobile Loft Number 11, my third home, had large barred windows to admit breezes, and its front end was crowned with a caged-in alighting board, beyond which we could hear the commotion of many other pigeons. Gault gently placed us on the board, and we advanced through swinging wires to join eighty other homers from all over the Langres complex, fluttering amid brightly colored nests.

  Gault closed the cage, lowered thick blinds over the windows, hitched the loft to a truck, and off we went. The ride was terrible, jouncing us around, all the more nauseating since we couldn’t see. It grew as dark outside as in—we were traveling with lights off through the inky night, since we didn’t want airplanes to see us—and at one point we were nearly upended when the truck towing us became stuck in a shell hole.