Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  “But O Captain, my Captain!” Revnes declaimed into my ear at unnecessary volume. “I have only been on liberty from the Army of Mars. I am on the march in the Army of Venus!” He sank into me, boneless as a scarecrow.

  “You’re only in one army, Revnes. And it demands better of you, even on liberty. Do you really expect your platoon to show discipline if this is the example you set?”

  “But a soldier must be a complete man. Don’t you agree, Captain? Not an automaton. I have been exercising my virility to better serve our nation! My every undertaking proves my loyalty.”

  “Your conduct is unbecoming of an officer, Revnes, and I’ll take action to that effect if you don’t come back quietly. We can dock your pay and confine you to quarters. Do you understand?”

  “Oh, you’re a smart one, Captain, just like they all say,” drawled Revnes, yawning a stagy and feline yawn, revealing the carmine interior of his mouth. “A real clever kid. But what this army needs are idiots! Idiots like me. Tell me, Captain, is there any law in the United States that says you can’t be an idiot?”

  “We’re not in the States,” McMurtry cut in. “As perhaps you’ve noticed. And being an idiot here has consequences—for you, which we don’t care a damn about, but more to the point for your men.”

  McMurtry had hesitated to intervene, but I appreciated the help. Revnes respected McMurtry more than he did me, and after that we got him back with little fuss.

  I reported the incident, and Revnes received a formal reprimand, but the experience galled. I had the unshakable suspicion that among the many thousands of New York men who constituted the 77th Infantry Division there must be at least one or two with firsthand knowledge of what the army would broadly term my “sexual depravity,” and although my personal conduct since arriving in France had been unimpeachable, disciplining the sexual misadventures of others felt like hypocrisy, even if it wasn’t. Revnes was right: I had been a clever kid, at least so far, and I intended to continue.

  In Calais we found that the French took a permissive attitude toward sexual matters; their local officials refused to cooperate with efforts to suppress prostitution near our bases. Meanwhile the army had launched shock-tactics campaigns to curb venereal disease—mostly to protect our health and combat-readiness but also from a touching if presumptuous concern with preserving the sexual morality of young men from rural homes. (City boys were assumed to be a lost cause.) We were all regularly instructed to shun contact with prostitutes and other loose women.

  The campaigns—promulgated with the assistance of the YMCA—were so histrionic in their portrayal of females as sources of infection that many soldiers came to regard them as much more dangerous than sodomites and other such “degenerates” criminalized under the Articles of War. I had to laugh inwardly at this rhetorical emphasis, for the YMCA facilities in New York and elsewhere had a well-established reputation as pickup hubs for queer men.

  Though I never engaged in degenerate behavior in France, I knew from the men’s talk that there were “cocksuckers” around, both in our ranks and in the towns. So there would have been opportunities. But I could see the danger that men like Revnes posed to the division—due not to their erotic predilections but to their lack of restraint—and to earn the authority to safeguard order, I held myself to a higher standard of duty than I held those under me. I didn’t relish enforcing puritanical dictates, but Revnes had left me with little choice.

  Between this unsavory business and the interminable rain, a sourness settled over me and persisted for weeks. In a pattern that would recur often, that bad thing was eventually scattered by something worse—in this case the news that we’d be moving to an active sector.

  * * *

  • • •

  The sounds of war are complex as any orchestra; one could make a study of their subtleties. Shrapnel or high explosives scream and then explode with a roar. Gas shells warble, then bang, cracking open to exhale sickness and death.

  I learned this on the banks of the Vesle River—by American standards more of a sluggish stream, not thirty feet wide and maybe six to eight feet deep.

  On August 12 we were sent to relieve the 4th or “Ivy Division” and occupy the Vesle sector, which was anything but quiet. The river snaked through a broad marshland, brush and barbed wire snarling its banks. Above it rose bare chalk ridges, six hundred feet high and riddled with caves. The Germans had dug in on the northern heights.

  Each day we lost men to artillery fire, some of whom we never found enough of to identify. Most of the officers slept in dugouts, but I remained aboveground like the enlisted men, figuring myself not indispensable and wanting to prove something to my troops, and myself.

  Vesle was even more rugged and filthy than Baccarat had been, and baths became distant memories, almost embarrassing, like fairy castles and treasure chests we read about as children.

  But we had some mild nights, some misty stars. And though I wasn’t a glory hunter, I found to my surprise that I was, for lack of a better way of putting it, good at war.

  Leading my men against the Germans, I displayed “tactical finesse and taciturn courage,” as Colonel Averill said when they bumped me up from HQ captain to regimental operations officer, responsible for conceiving and implementing battle plans. Though Averill and I had had a tense exchange over war-bond allotments back at Upton, like most of the men I admired the old cavalry officer, and his admiration meant much in return.

  Beyond commendation and advancement, there was a rigid passion, a stiff exhilaration, to be had from achieving success under such straitened circumstances. And I’d be lying if I said that this fulfillment—egotistical at its core—didn’t lead, on occasion, to error.

  Phosgene and mustard were the two types of gas we were trained to beware of. Phosgene was an urticant, raising hives on the skin and overstimulating the lungs until a man drowned from the inside; it smelled of new-mown hay, or rotting bananas. Mustard gas, the Germans’ favorite, was a vesicant with the strong smell of mustard seed; it killed by blistering and burning. Inhaled or swallowed, it seared everything on the way down. If one so much as brushed against trees or dirt that mustard gas had settled on, the residue clung. At Vesle I saw a private—John J. Munson, one of my battalion’s bravest men—take off his service coat after a gas attack only to have a layer of skin come off with it.

  Among the most insidious qualities of mustard gas was the fact that the onset of its effects was slow, sometimes taking a full day to manifest. But the tiniest breath of it could cause diarrhea, potentially fatal when water was scarce. Wisps in the air or on the ground dried out one’s fingertips until they split and bled. Enough in the eyes could cause permanent blindness. Most relevant to my own mistake, inhaled gas also caused a heavy, dry, chest-deep cough that might never subside. This had happened to my younger brother, Elisha, during his service as an ambulance driver. But when one has excelled in war, one tends to convince oneself that one is invincible, and I refused to consider that it could happen to me.

  Naturally it did. On August 21 a hail of shells made Swiss cheese of the roof of the farmhouse that was the 308th Regimental HQ. Most of the men inside were struck by shrapnel, or gassed, or both. A signal officer, Lieutenant Meredith Wood, rescued several men, dragging them from the splintered timber and crumbled plaster. Gassed in the process, he was in the hospital until mid-October.

  I got gassed, too, and as severely. Wood, helping me out of the building, insisted that I report it. I never did. They would have taken me off the line, like they did him. My sense of duty could not accept it.

  Had I sought treatment in that instant for the poison in my lungs, so much might have turned out otherwise. If I, like Wood, had convalesced until mid-October, neither the Small Pocket nor the Pocket might have occurred. Bill Cavanaugh and hundreds of other men might not have died, at least not under my command.

  And I might not be in the boat—literall
y—that I find myself in now.

  At the time I felt proud for sticking it out.

  I stand wheezing at the rail of the Toloa, my nose running incessantly and my lungs feeling like fire. Hateful as it is, the cough is hardly the worst thing that haunts me.

  CHAPTER 9

  CHER AMI

  After our inculcation into the army tradition of hurry-up-and-wait, the rapidity of the orders and the intensity of the bloodshed in late September and early October were bewildering.

  So many of my bird comrades had been killed by then that I’d come to think of the war as a pigeon shoot: thousands of feathers sashaying down from the clouds. Back at Wright Farm, in an unusually macabre mood, John had told us once about this so-called sport, practiced by so-called sportsmen: pigeons released from beneath worn-out bowler hats by the tug of a string, then shotgunned from the air. Participants also shot blackbirds, sparrows, purple martins, and bats. When a man has a gun, evidently, anything can be a target.

  Many birds were not killed outright in these shoots but only maimed, left on the ground as the firing went on. Twitching in pain, they lay, I imagined, like the soldiers whose comrades couldn’t make their way across no-man’s-land to rescue them.

  If I could write my own wall text here in the Smithsonian—or, better yet, if I could speak as humans do and record my testimony as an audio guide—then I would try to warn of these things.

  Spending most of a century in a museum has taught me much about humans and flight: how they envy and desire it. Since 1884, when the French invented the dirigible, and since 1903, when the Americans invented the airplane, the sky had changed. All the old myths—the dreams of Daedalus, the hubris of Icarus—had been achieved, then surpassed.

  Aerial combat seduced the public. Both sides in the Great War displayed captured aircraft as trophies and morale boosters—much as President Wilson and I have been displayed, though we pigeons are seen as sweet, not scary, never a source of awe, never striking fear into anyone’s heart. Fine by me. You can’t mount a gun on a pigeon.

  Each of my flights provided an all-encompassing view that humans could never have, not even generals. All summer long I watched the sweeping away of life’s illusions. The charnel trenches. One man hanging his canteen off a dead man’s foot. Muddy holes, constant floods of mud, mud up to the knees, mud in the bunks, in the food, entire subterranean cities of mud.

  Then the summer got hot, and I felt parched after I flew. As the weeks went on, the land grew more sullen. Water carts bogged down in the brushwood. Duckboard tracks spanned the landscape. The earth drank in blood as if thirsty for it.

  Each time I returned to Rampont with a message, the villagers seemed more accepting of the heretofore outlandish idea of infinite war, no longer sure that the Americans could end this.

  On the battlefield every regiment hummed with the same banal dread. Before each advance—what the commanders called it when they drove the infantry over the tops of the trenches into maws of the machine guns—there’d be a final inspection. The men would put their affairs in order: who would get their pistols, their money belts and any contents, their watches, their compasses, their water, and their scraps of food.

  Events that should have been singular and era-defining became commonplace, like an ancient stone bridge blown up, or a church collapsed by the tremor of the guns, or a cedar tree that had stood for four centuries splintered to kindling by a shell. Men’s bodies sustained the same damage, but this ceased to be worthy of remark.

  But if I were to narrate all this to the Smithsonian’s visitors, I fear it would fail in its intended effect. I’d be making war sound interesting—or, even worse, sublime. Humans can read glory into the most abhorrent circumstances. They believe that stories help them understand, but in fact they often merely help them pay attention. The idea that the war can be known by way of a few representative accounts of heroism and misery is a falsehood.

  Perhaps it’s simpler to give the numbers. Sixty-five million men were mobilized worldwide. Thirteen percent of them died. Thirty-three percent were wounded to the point of disfigurement and/or disability. Twelve percent were taken prisoner or declared missing. The overall casualty rate was 58 percent.

  At what point must we consider whether the human species was trying to destroy itself? Or at least—and this is more in keeping with the evidence—to reduce its male population?

  “I was prepared to die,” I once heard a private named John J. Munson say, “but not to die in stages.” First you’re a living man, he said, then a writhing animal, wounded and gasping. And then you’re a thing: dead.

  I took no offense at his pejorative use of “animal”; he was an ordinary person trying to make sense of something too wide for his mind, or anyone’s.

  Munson was a member of the unit to which Corporal Gault assigned me after I flew my tenth mission back home to Rampont, a unit that would soon be known throughout the world as part of the Lost Battalion. That summer it was still simply the 1st Battalion of the 308th Regiment of the United States Army’s 77th Infantry Division, under the command of newly minted Major Charles White Whittlesey.

  Before I encountered Whit, or any of the other men whose names would be bound up with mine in the annals of history, my heart leapt into my beak at the sight of Buck Shot, in the same wicker carrier that Gault had popped me into. Though he’d been a bit of a nuisance at Langres, the sight of familiar eyes was a joy, lending a momentary sense of order.

  But Buck Shot did not look happy to see me; he did not look happy about anything anymore. His prized white feathers had taken on the dingy hue of city snow, and his eyes were rheumy.

  “Buck Shot!” I said, brushing past six other pigeons to join him. In war, I’d found, one had to behave as if one had privacy, though one was never alone, except in the air.

  He shrank from my affectionate peck. “What’s wrong, my friend?” I asked. For an instant I took his watering eyes for tears of sorrow—I had certainly seen plenty of those from the men.

  “Gas,” he said. “Mustard. The pigeoneer didn’t get the canvas over us in time. The other birds died. The pigeoneer was killed by flamethrowers. Smelled like roast meat.”

  “Oh, Buck Shot,” I said, carefully preening his wings, wanting to restore him to his pristine dove-self. “You’re lucky to be alive!”

  “You think so?” He didn’t reciprocate my preening but didn’t pull away either. “I’ve been with the 308th before. They have one decent pigeon man. I hope we end up with him.”

  “I hope so, too,” I said, “but we’ll pull through regardless. I’m just happy that Gault has thrown us together again.” My confidence was overstated for Buck Shot’s benefit; he needed reassurance. Some pigeons, like some men, are able to meet the demands of war while others crumble. There’s no way to predict what you can stand until you stand it.

  “All summer,” said Buck Shot, not meeting my eyes, “flying all those missions, when I’d look down, what I saw reminded me of the Chicago Stockyards. Soldiers waiting in the trenches while other soldiers went over the top, like they were livestock waiting for other animals to be hung and skinned and gutted.”

  “I’ve never seen a stockyard,” I said. “But I’ve heard some of the men make the same comparison.”

  “No matter how high I fly,” said Buck Shot, “I can’t stop smelling it. The rotting flesh in these fields makes the slaughterhouses seem like rose gardens. Slaughterhouses are organized, after all. They get cleaned. They don’t waste. When I first saw one, I couldn’t believe it, never thought killing on that scale was possible. I thought humans were monsters. Then I thought about their cities and how they need to feed all those people, and I accepted it. But now I see them doing it to their own kind, and for nothing. So I was right. They are monsters.”

  Not being of a mind to dissuade him, I finished preening him in silence, trying to imagine how my unstoppably optimistic broth
er Thomas Hardy might respond. But it was impossible to imagine Thomas Hardy being here at all.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was hardly the only new member of the 308th. As the summer tipped into fall, the regiment received replacements from the 40th Infantry Division, known as the “Sunshine Division”: strapping men—boys, really—from the ranges and ranches of the western United States. Their tanned faces were to supplement the conscripts from the Midwest who’d arrived earlier to fill out the depleted ranks of the original New Yorkers. The regiment needed to be at full strength, for it was about to take part in a massive offensive that would span the war’s entire Western Front.

  A lot of the new boys hadn’t been supplied guns. The Ordnance Department had told the commanders not to worry: so much of the regiment would be killed in the first few minutes of the offensive that the survivors could take their pick of the weapons of the dead and keep advancing.

  I noticed that even when they weren’t in the trenches, the veterans of the 308th held themselves like hunchbacks, their muscles remembering the low ceilings and the need to stay down.

  With one exception: a tall, thin man who walked upright and with a self-possession that incandesced at the dim edge of the Argonne Forest.

  I saw him the evening we arrived but didn’t realize who he was at first. His eyes hid behind his wire-framed spectacles in the gathering gloom. His build was gangly, his mien that of a friendly owl, his air scholarly and introspective even as he sat on a stump eating his rations and speaking softly to another soldier. His adjutant was a tiny, spry man with the appearance of an impish child. The vision of the two of them together—even seated, the former was taller than the latter—seemed designed to illustrate the surprising diversity of the human species.