Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  Cavanaugh opened his message kit and began to write according to Whit’s dictation, the three men deploying ciphers and ellipses as the contents demanded. As he spoke, Whit slipped a long finger through a gap in the wicker to stroke my back. By then I had been with the army long enough to know how unusual it was to be touched by so lofty an officer. “Buck Shot!” I said. “Look! The major is mad for pigeons!”

  “Not so fast,” said Buck Shot. “Cavanaugh is mad for pigeons. And I think Whittlesey may be mad for Cavanaugh. Before you arrived, he’d talk and talk with Bill about us, as must anyone who talks to Bill for any length of time. He’s a real poetic type, the poor man.”

  Whittlesey had taken barely a glance at Bill since he and McKeogh had walked in, and his voice remained crisp and official, but it was easy to see a softening in the set of his face, a warmth that I hadn’t noticed before. It reminded me of my time with Baby Mine, of whom I tried not to think too often. What would be the point?

  “You may be right,” I said. “But I don’t think the feeling is reciprocal in quite the way the major might like.”

  “Whit’s in for a disappointment,” Buck Shot said. “But then who among us is not?”

  Whittlesey signed the message and slipped it into its canister, and Bill unlatched our door and reached in. “I’ll send Buck Shot,” he said. “He seems the more agitated by what we’ve been through today. If he can make it home to rest, it’ll be good for him and good for us.”

  “I defer to your judgment, Private,” said Whit, laying the metal tube in Bill’s palm. Bill affixed it to Buck Shot’s right leg opposite the identification band on his left, then smoothed his creamy feathers.

  “So long, friend,” said Buck Shot. I wished him good luck and promised to see him back at Rampont. Bill carried him out the doorway and tossed him two-handed into the sky.

  We spent a miserable night in our funkholes, the rain and the cold clinging to us like an ooze. The next day we advanced negligibly, pinned down by German machine guns. No reinforcements arrived.

  By the next morning, our situation unaltered, it became clear that our runner chain had been broken—which is to say that the runners had all been captured or killed—and furthermore that few of us pigeons remained. Buck Shot had been correct: we had advanced too far ahead of the rest of the 77th Division, and as a reward we’d been cut off from any hope of assistance.

  If I may be forgiven for stepping back from my tale for a moment—for increasing my altitude, as it were, to provide a more expansive view of its landscape—I would like to add emphasis to a point that my casual visitors in the Smithsonian tend to miss. While most of them learn that the Lost Battalion was thusly named when it got cut off from the rest of the Allied forces, and while a few of them understand that this occurred because Whittlesey’s men were uniquely successful in advancing as they’d been ordered to do, almost no one seems to grasp that this happened to the battalion not once but twice in the span of a week. The incident that I have just described was the first—the “Small Pocket,” they would come to call it, in order to distinguish it from the larger one that lay ahead.

  As Whittlesey’s reports of success and requests for further instructions flew away on pigeon wings and received no replies, as his brave runners saluted smartly and charged into the forest and disappeared forever, the realization began to spread like an infection among the officers that we were trapped, that we had trapped ourselves, that our success was failure, that we’d been doomed not by our bad luck or poor performance but by a systematic deficiency within our own army, and that we were now living through a nightmare.

  This was wrong. As we’d soon see, a true waking nightmare requires full knowledge that a disaster is about to happen—indeed, that it has happened before—and that this knowledge will do nothing to stop it from happening again.

  Even as the extreme peril of our situation clarified, Whit never once let it show, on his face or in his words. Even, perhaps especially, under those circumstances his speech remained cool, with an anachronistic formality. Uniquely among the men, he never flinched or crouched when under fire; he wasn’t foolhardy or reckless but simply seemed to accept his fate and to know that it would encourage his men to see him upright and unafraid. Best of all, he was funny—not rollicking but droll, an emperor of understatement. When a German machine-gun unit located us that afternoon and strafed us until their ammunition was spent, his equipoise remained uncracked. “Most unpleasant,” he said to McKeogh, as though remarking on an inferior cup of tea.

  The rain continued into the next day, with no word from headquarters. Without support we couldn’t move forward, and without guidance we couldn’t fall back, so we had to stay put and keep our cover, though there was no doubt that the Germans knew our position. Predictably, we came under attack again that morning, this time from artillery.

  When the shells began to fall, Whittlesey, Cavanaugh, and Larney, the signalman, had been out in the open, puzzling over routes that might take runners back to American or French territory. With a combination of shouts, whistles, and gestures, Whittlesey directed the platoons into defensive positions as explosions rained splinters of stone and wood from the hillsides. Larney had the good sense to rush from the funkhole where we were sheltering to retrieve Whit before the Germans adjusted their trajectories; tugging on the major’s belt, he looked like a mariner trying to strike a tall sail in a high wind. Whittlesey barely managed to fold his long limbs alongside Cavanaugh’s and Larney’s as a shell obliterated the spot where he’d been standing and buried his protruding boots in gravel and mud. “Why didn’t God standardize me?” he wondered aloud once we could all hear ourselves again.

  By that afternoon I was the last pigeon, all others having been dispatched with their terse but urgent messages. While I awaited my inevitable flight, I watched with interest as a gray mouse approached our funkhole, in search of the cracked corn that had slipped through the weave of my basket. Little four-fingered hands, little sniffy pink snout.

  We did not speak, but I was grateful for the distraction. I had to occupy my mind with something or I’d have gone mad there in my basket, passive, unable to move—which is how the men must have felt as well.

  As the shadow of the ridge inched toward the bunker door, Bill broke my reverie. “Come on, Cher Ami,” he said, slipping a message into a canister. “I’ve saved the best for last.”

  I flew with all my usual alacrity and then some, because this time Bill was the one who had tossed me. Cher Ami! said the voice, Home to your loft by the airway! Home to Rampont! as I flew above the horror, noise and smoke and screams made more eerie for their filtering up through the crowns of the trees. Still, I was glad to have my flight hidden from any marksmen and falconers who might be below, alert for the telltale clap of pigeon wings.

  * * *

  • • •

  My eleventh mission. I made it back with no difficulty. How close Whit’s trapped men were to Allied territory! On the ground the distance had seemed extreme and insurmountable, when in fact it was only insurmountable.

  I slowed by flapping forward, stretched out my legs, and alighted on the landing board, then gave the bell a hard peck. Corporal Gault appeared instantly to collect my message, leaving me with fresh food and water and, as always, the smell of chocolate.

  A flash of white beside me and a familiar morose voice. “Welcome home, Cher Ami.”

  “Buck Shot! You made it! When reinforcements didn’t come, we were afraid that something terrible had happened to you.”

  Buck Shot fixed me with a look that said he was very happy to see me but that I was being very dense. “We all made it back,” he said. “The pigeons did anyway. The runners were lost, I think.”

  “Well, if the generals had our position,” I said, “why couldn’t they send relief?”

  “They could have,” said Buck Shot. He gave me an affectionate peck and fell silent, leaving
me to my thoughts.

  By that point in the war, I had spent so much time with men—next to them in foxholes, carried on their backs—that I’d come to see us as part of the same flock, so much so that I’d sometimes forget the crucial differences between us. The greatest, perhaps, was that we pigeons had no choice but to perform the task we’d been assigned: when our baskets were opened and we were hurled into the air, we heard the voice and flew home, no matter the danger, even if we were wounded or sick. I do not mean to diminish my accomplishments; not all birds flew equally well, and I did what I had to do with effort and skill.

  But men seemed to have a choice of whether to fight or not. They’d face consequences if they didn’t, but it was hard to imagine that any could be worse than death, particularly the deaths I saw them suffer. Yet the majority followed all orders, no matter how stupid. Even when it became clear that they might be sacrificed at any time, whenever it was necessary or simply convenient.

  I don’t know whether my message helped Whit and his men in any way. One could never quite tell in the mess of the war when things happened for a reason or just happened because they happened.

  But a few days later, Whittlesey, Cavanaugh, and the surviving men of the 308th Infantry Regiment were finally rescued. Not long after that, I was reattached to them, and we went into battle again.

  CHAPTER 10

  CHARLES WHITTLESEY

  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.

  We’d lost so many officers in the Vesle sector in August that I received a promotion to major and was given command of the 1st Battalion, events that immediately renewed my sense of being an impostor. The fact that I was far from the only officer with limited combat experience commanding hundreds of men did nothing to diminish this feeling. So many of us were attorneys and bankers, leading bricklayers and stevedores against the battle-tested Imperial German Army. When I was a young lawyer, I had a recurring dream of suddenly finding myself before a judge, trying to argue a case for which I hadn’t read the brief. The war felt like that but a thousandfold.

  As always, McMurtry helped put me at ease—not with reassuring words, which I might have mistrusted, but simply by behaving as if my elevated rank and authority were entirely proper, barely worthy of remark. It was strange to think that I now outranked my friend, this man who’d charged up Kettle Hill with Roosevelt.

  As we prepared to lead the regiment over the top and into that menacing landscape, I stood looking at the men—more my men now than ever before. Their lives, if they escaped with them, would be divided forever into Before the War, the War, and After, and between those divisions would stretch psychic no-man’s-lands as desolate as any in France. The hoary generals remained well behind the line, preserved and protected in their sumptuous headquarters, with minimally inconvenient access to hot food and mistresses. They treated the war like an abstract game, as if they were avid schoolboys learning craps, gambling for inconsequential stakes. Advances and retreats—safe at Bar-le-Duc, safe at Rampont—they indicated with candy-colored stickpins, stabbed into pretty maps. They’d clap one another on the back when the pins inched forward and make a show of concern if the pins reversed, but they didn’t comprehend the mud-covered men who became their own memorial statues on the spots where they fell. The boys who died so the pins could move.

  Of course, the enlisted men weren’t always paragons of selfless decency themselves. My adjutant, Lieutenant Arthur McKeogh—known as Mac, though he did possess something like Arthurian chivalry—told me about a conversation he’d overheard between two privates in Lieutenant Revnes’s platoon: a Brooklyn man who’d come over with us on the Lapland and one of the new westerners from the Sunshine Division. The latter was valorous, it seemed, but totally untrained. They came to us not knowing how to do anything.

  McKeogh was a tiny man, five feet tall in his boots, who could be quite unobtrusive when it suited him, which it often did. “How does it work, though?” he heard the Sunshine private say, his folksy twang making the query somehow more desperate. “How do you put in the clip?”

  “I’ll show you,” said the New Yorker, heedless of McKeogh’s presence, “but it’ll cost you five francs.”

  “All right,” said the rangy man. “Which one’s the five-franc piece?”

  At this point McKeogh broke in. “Private,” he addressed the New Yorker, “are you charging your fellow soldier to show him how use his weapon? This fellow who’ll be giving you cover when you go over the top? You’ll wager that against five francs? I don’t like to hear any man tell me what his life is worth—and I’ll be damned if I’ll let him set the price so low.”

  McKeogh oversaw the return of the five francs, improbable as it seemed that the westerner would survive long enough to spend it.

  On that misty morning of September 26, the regimental postmaster moved through the line like a ghost, collecting our letters, including mine to my mother and my brother Elisha.

  My trench watch told me that the hour drew near 0600; the bombardment would cease, and we would proceed soon. The brass whistle hung at my neck, heavy as a cross, but otherwise I felt too light. The orders of the night before had been to leave behind overcoats, ponchos, rain slickers, blankets, and shelter tents in favor of basic combat gear: rifle, bayonet, steel helmet, gas mask, short combat pack with two days’ iron rations—four boxes of hard bread, two cans of corned beef—mess kit, entrenching tool, cartridge belt with a hundred rounds, a full one-quart canteen, and a first-aid pouch.

  Headquarters—which had declared that the first phase of the offensive would be complete within seventy-two hours—had already begun to issue contradictory directives. As the last shells screamed through the soft gray dawn, I motioned McKeogh to my side. “Mac,” I said, “have the company commanders make it understood: HQ’s orders are that we’re not to stop to give first aid. We continue forward regardless of casualties.”

  McKeogh looked surprised, then relaxed with a wry smile. My own age, but with the agility of a much younger man, he’d worked as a journalist in the city and had the cool cynicism engendered by his profession. “Yessir,” he said, clapping a deliberate hand on the first-aid kit that our initial orders had insisted we all pack. Then he was off to spread the news, wraithlike in the mist.

  The seconds ticked down, and I felt beset by the sort of agitated, blurry-edged fatigue that one experiences when one can least afford it. I was not alone in this. The regiment as a whole was weary and full of the flu, with more than half of us—including me—leaky-assed from dysentery. But the generals’ plan made no allowances for disease.

  I blew the whistle.

  Beyond the trench line, we were greeted with an opaque curtain of fog. It further concealed already well-hidden enemy positions but also shrouded more mundane hazards, like snagging branches and slippery rocks alongside steep drops. Catastrophe struck immediately: one of our men—there wasn’t enough of him left to tell whom—snared a bag of grenades on a clump of hazel, accidentally pulling a pin, and blew everyone in his clumsy vicinity to kingdom come. Nothing to do but brush off the shreds of flesh and keep moving.

  The awful mist and the rough topography kept funneling us into bottlenecks, and a sniper or a machine-gun team awaited us at each. The New York veterans had learned how to spot machine guns masked under logs or rocks by watching for a thin bluish haze—the expended powder from a nest—or grass flattened by muzzles firing, but those tricks worked only under normal visibility.

  As the mist burned off, I saw McKeogh huddled against a tree, and we both heard, between the chirps of the bullets, a drip-drip-drip on the leaves at his feet. It was not raining. Above him in the branches dribbled the remains of a German sniper. McKeogh jumped but stayed put until it seemed safe to move on.

  By the end of that first day, we’d made
it close to our stated objective, the dépôts des machines, and I prepared to write up my reports and to receive orders from the rear, were any to reach us. Given our positions, reporting to HQ meant sending pigeons, and sending pigeons meant an occasion to speak to Bill Cavanaugh.

  Knowing he’d likely soon be needed, he’d dug in near the abandoned German bunker where McKeogh and I had spread out our maps. We found him seated next to his basket, speaking quietly to its occupants. On the side of the carrier, he had pasted two hand-printed labels bearing the birds’ names: BUCK SHOT (WHITE) AND CHER AMI (BLUE).

  “Nameplates, Cavanaugh?” I said. “I didn’t realize this was a formal function.”

  Cavanaugh blushed. “If anything happens to me, sir, I want the other pigeon men to know what to call them.”

  I remembered the jittery white bird from the Vesle, but the trim and muscular blue one I hadn’t seen before. Its round, intelligent head ticked toward me, and its gold eyes met mine in what felt like compassion. “New arrival?” I asked.

  “New to us, sir, but not to the war. The Signal Corps says she’s flown ten missions, all of them in near-record time.”

  “She?” I said. “Cher Ami? Somebody doesn’t know French.”

  “More likely it’s that somebody doesn’t know pigeons, sir. She’ll serve the battalion well, I think. Buck Shot’s pretty keyed up, as usual. I’m trying to calm them. That was a hell of an advance.”

  “It looks as though they’re calming you in turn,” I said. Coos flowed from the carrier like the murmur of a stream. “Say, Cavanaugh, why don’t you move them into the bunker for now? Lieutenant McKeogh and I will meet you there once we’ve finished our review.”

  By tacit agreement McKeogh moved ahead of me along the tracery of deer paths that linked our positions; following him, I felt like a giraffe in pursuit of a mongoose. Once we’d gotten the report from each of the lieutenants—our losses hadn’t been as bad as I’d feared—we made our way to the bunker in the failing afternoon light.