I laughed, then coughed, the abrupt outrush of air having convulsed my gas-racked lungs. “Well,” I said when I could speak again, “I wish there were something more we could do than wait it out.” I wiped my glasses with a handkerchief, which only made them blurrier.
But there wasn’t, so wait we did. I envied the believers among us, who at least were able to occupy themselves by praying that the Germans wouldn’t close in and finish us.
I awoke the next morning, somewhat surprised to be alive, and received an update from McKeogh: still no contact with any friendly forces. I had him summon our signalman, Private Larney, who appeared in an instant, as if he’d simply been folded into my musette bag. Larney looked as worn and high-strung as the rest of us from days of incoming fire but as tidy as a soldier could be under those circumstances, and poised for action.
Larney was from somewhere in upstate New York, which made him what the city men called an “apple-knocker;” I could tell—in the way one lonely person can recognize loneliness in another—that his small-town upbringing and his Catholic faith and his general reticence kept him somewhat apart from the other men in the battalion. I also knew that he was keeping a diary, a practice that army regulations strictly forbade lest the contents fall into enemy hands. He’d had one confiscated by the Signal Corps already, and this time he was being more cautious, hiding the pages in his mess-kit carrier. I supposed I had a duty to discipline him, but I chose not to. He understood the risks, and I took it on faith that as a trained signalman he also knew effective countermeasures: a personal cipher, perhaps, or enough misinformation sprinkled throughout to wreck its usefulness to the Boche. In any event I had a sense that the diary was the linchpin that kept Larney spinning straight. If it helped him do his job, then I wasn’t going to take it.
“Larney,” I said, “you’re to keep this in strictest confidence and to discuss it with no one but Lieutenant McKeogh and me. The battalion is cut off, completely surrounded by hostile forces. In the event that we are overrun, you must be prepared to destroy any and all written material of a sensitive nature. Do not hesitate to do this on my order or when in your best judgment the time has come. Now, do you have the signal panels ready, in case they should send any planes over to search for us?” I honestly had no reason to believe that any planes were on the way.
“Yessir,” he said. “I’m ready.”
“Very good,” I said. “Care to update us on your progress with the ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’?”
Larney started, surprised that I knew of his project, and then blushed.
For a man who himself displayed little inclination to joke, Larney had an almost Linnaean interest in humor, plumbing the depths of each issue of the Stars and Stripes for specimens, right down to the ads for Lowney Chocolates: Not a “dud” in the box! printed beside the image of a doughboy loading his rifle, Lowney’s Chocolates—Dig In! above a drawing of a trench, Get some before they Argonne! Ouch! and so forth. But his quiet mania for documentation achieved full flower with “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” a bawdy English song that had become omnipresent along the front, spreading among the Allied forces with the promiscuousness of the eponymous mademoiselle herself to spawn innumerable variations. It was odd to see Larney, who would under no circumstances breathe a word of the lyrics aloud, devote himself to compiling them with near-monkish solemnity. McKeogh had brought me up to speed on the enterprise, reporting with bemusement that although Larney dutifully recorded every version, including those that condemned the young lady—“You didn’t have to know her long / To know the reason men go wrong” and “She’ll do it for wine, she’ll do it for rum, / And sometimes for chocolate and chewing gum” were representative examples—he seemed to prefer those that condemned the injustices imposed on enlisted men (“The colonel got the Croix de Guerre, / The son-of-a-gun was never there”) and the army’s hypocritical embrace of religion (“The YMCA they saved my soul / Yes they did—in a pig’s arsehole”).
Larney had recovered his composure. “Slow progress lately, Major,” he said. “Not much time for singing during the advance. I hope you don’t think my collection’s too coarse.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I think it’s a contribution to knowledge. When all’s said and done, it’ll probably tell the story of this war as well as any official report. I hope you’ll keep it safe—”
I sharpened my gaze a bit.
“—while making certain that any other writing in your possession that might be of value to the enemy is destroyed. All right? Dismissed.”
Banter with the enlisted men did not come naturally to me, as it did to McKeogh or McMurtry, but as in my Williams days I could excel at it by effort, showing that I took an interest. My interest was sincere, though unless I worked at it, my efforts fell more on the side of awkward than adroit. I felt more comfortable with Larney than with most; he was nearly as peculiar as I, and far less skilled at concealing it. Plus, I found that I increasingly shared his baffled fascination with the bizarre and macabre humor of soldiers, which dogged the army’s rigid official cant like a mad twin.
After long tense stretches interrupted by halfhearted enemy shell bursts and machine-gun fire, by midafternoon our passivity was becoming unbearable. The men had consumed the limited resupply of rations and were weakening from exposure. The early autumn had remained unseasonably damp and cold, as if the very earth had taken understandable offense to our activities and was defending itself however it could.
Then, somehow, something changed—the light through the clouds, or the distant sounds, or the mood of the unseen Germans as they watched through the trees. I was sure I was imagining it until I glanced at McKeogh, who was looking at me wide-eyed. He’d felt it, too.
“What do you think, Mac?”
“They’re moving,” he said. “Not to attack. They may not even know we’re here. I say now’s the time to break out, Major.”
I studied the forest and the rocky outcroppings behind it, their peaks yellowing in the oblique sunlight. “If they trip over us, we’ll have quite a mess,” I said. “Send word down the line that the men aren’t to engage the enemy unless it’s absolutely necessary for self-preservation.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, but made no move to depart. He knew I’d have another order, just as I knew how he’d choose to execute it.
“As soon as that’s done,” I said, “muster a scouting party. They’ll need to slip through the Boche at our rear and make contact with regimental command, give our location, and restore our lines. We won’t have a second chance, so use the best men for the job. I defer to your judgment.”
I knew he’d use a three-man team and that he’d pick himself to lead it. The mission fell under the category of suicide—not what I wanted for Mac. But he was the most likely to make it through. Back in high school, I occasionally saw a basketball team that was conspicuously dominated by a single scoring player whose fellows trotted uselessly behind him. McKeogh’s short stature strained the comparison, but there were many days during the Argonne Offensive when my battalion felt that way: we held our position while McKeogh and a few handpicked men disappeared into the woods to destroy machine-gun nests, kill officers, and collect German documents. He was a gifted soldier, fearless and buoyant; more than that, he was funny, dearly loved by all the men, and a hell of an administrative assistant. That last may sound inconsequential, but so much of the war was fought on paper, and Mac was excellent at recordkeeping as well as at the odious but necessary censoring of letters. By then I’d witnessed many occasions when a fine and promising man was killed or maimed owing to some stupidity of the army’s, but usually this happened without warning. In this case I could see it coming; I was ordering it into being.
McKeogh returned as dusk drew near—the time to make a break if there would be one. “Who’ve you picked to go with you?” I asked.
“Two stand-up guys,” he said, waving the two men over
: Private John J. Munson, who’d by then largely recovered from the gas attack that had skinned him alive, and Private Jack Hershkowitz, a scrappy man whom I remembered faintly from Upton.
The successful owner of a dried-fruit factory prior to being conscripted, now a successful soldier, Hershkowitz was a Romanian-born Jew who was fluent in German; he was also deathly sick with influenza. “If I stay here, I’m a goner,” he said, swaying and weak. “Might as well die on my feet.”
Munson, too, was unafraid. “Trying to get out is better than staying,” he said. “If a bullet’s got my name on it, then it’s got my name on it.”
“But we’ll strive,” said McKeogh, “to keep our noses clear of all bullets.”
Before they set out, I called on Cavanaugh to send our last pigeon, Cher Ami, while there was still enough light. “She’ll get the word through if anyone can,” said Cavanaugh.
I swear I saw the bird nod at me before he tossed her.
We watched her circle up and away. Unless a hawk or a bullet caught her, she’d be back at her mobile loft within the half hour. It was like magic. So far as we were concerned, she might as well have been bound for the moon. I was struck by a sudden visceral understanding of why the ancients regarded doves as messengers to and from the divine.
Her flight gave me a quick thrill of hope, but when she vanished over the ridge, the feeling did as well. We were really down to last things now: last pigeon, last scouts, and soon, perhaps, last bullets and last breaths.
But despair didn’t strike until I turned toward Cavanaugh, who was sitting beside his wicker basket, both now emptied. The tiny door gaped—no point in closing it—and Cavanaugh looked lost, senescent, a hundred years old.
Now he was an ordinary soldier like the rest of us.
* * *
• • •
The last day of September dawned windy and wet and still quiet, too quiet. Then the woods roared to life—not with the fatal attack we’d been expecting, nor with the artillery barrage that preceded every attempted Allied advance, but with a liquid rush of American troops from nowhere and everywhere, blowing up German positions, establishing their own machine-gun nests, whisking our dead and wounded to the rear and water and rations to our front line. They met so little resistance that I wondered for a moment whether McKeogh and I had spooked ourselves, imagining an enemy that had never been there.
In the confoundingly arbitrary way the war had of unfolding just like that, five days after we’d set out on the advance, we’d been rescued. My men emerged from their funkholes like worms flushed by a hard rain, teeth chattering, barely able to grip their rifles. Had I encountered the battered and unkempt troops who relieved us in civilian life, I’d have guessed them to be vagrants; by contrast to my own men, they looked like Olympians, hale and bronzed.
McKeogh, Munson, and Hershkowitz had made it through—as had Cher Ami, hours ahead of them—and we had the four of them to thank for the white bread, Karo syrup, and bacon that the supply wagons were now passing around. McKeogh’s little party had spent a wild night in the woods, slipping through the middle of a German encampment and killing a half dozen of the enemy to deliver the news of our whereabouts to the regimental command post by daybreak. McKeogh’s war was over: he’d been shot in the hand, and the surgeons judged his usefulness in combat to be at an end. Hershkowitz’s was as well: he had walked out of the woods at the point of collapse, running a fever of 105, and been remanded to the infirmary. Only Munson, gas-flayed and lung-burned though he might have been, was sturdy enough to rejoin us. All three men would later earn decorations for their valor that night. Cher Ami would rejoin us, too, though she received no medal. Her honors, like my own, would come later.
Word was sent down the line: Colonel Cromwell Stacey, the new commander of the 308th, wanted to see me posthaste. By the time I’d organized our resupply, the sun was very much down, the area still very much suspected of containing German units, and I made my way to HQ through the blackest night, passing from reserve post to reserve post in silence, holding the hand of each successive guide. After so many days of lonely terror, I liked this hand-holding; it was fine indeed to feel rough human skin, the sense of being led instead of leading.
The regimental adjutant handed me a hot cocoa and a ham sandwich and sent me straight to Colonel Stacey, an ax-faced man who invited me to warm up by the potbellied stove in his cozy office. Steam rose from my drenched uniform as if I were subliming. Amid those simple comforts that the past five days had made strange—warm mug, soft bread, smell of burning wood—my body felt as if it were not my own, and I considered that I might have died without noticing.
Stacey remained standing; indeed, it was difficult for me to imagine him seated. He looked intensely uncomfortable to be indoors at all. Under the bare lightbulbs strung across the ceiling, his skin was uniformly brown and lustrous, the color of varnished walnut.
I knew him by reputation. A veteran of the Marine Corps and the coast guard as well as the army, with which he’d seen combat in Puerto Rico and the Philippines well prior to the current war, he’d been in France only since March and had already earned the Croix de Guerre while helping to thwart the German advance on Paris. He’d made no secret of his contempt for some of his superiors’ decisions, and rumor had it that his candor had gotten him transferred here to the 77th, a command he did not want. He’d spent a couple of furious weeks idle at Divisional HQ and then had abruptly taken over the 308th when his predecessor, Colonel Austin Prescott, had botched the commencement of the Argonne Offensive so badly that General Alexander ordered him taken into custody. Stacey was by all assessments a capable and courageous commander. I could feel him struggling against automatic contempt for me, a bespectacled major from Wall Street, just as I tried to moderate my own suspicion that he was a bloodthirsty psychopath.
“Damn good work at l’Homme Mort, Whittlesey,” he said. “Your men kept their heads in a sticky spot, which is a real credit to you and to your little lieutenant as well.”
“McKeogh, sir.”
“That’s the man. He turned out to be quite a killer. But then small men often do. Sorry to see him go, but this fight will be over by the time that nick on his hand has healed. He’ll be of more use back home, as an instructor. It’s a very different war we’ve got here, Major. Very different from the wars I’ve known.”
After the combat surgeon invalided him, McKeogh had been spirited off toward Calais and would soon be convalescing aboard a transport ship. I wouldn’t see him in person again until nearly a year later, when we’d meet for dinner at Rector’s in Manhattan.
“With the war ending soon,” I said, “I suppose the men whom McKeogh trains will never have a chance to apply his lessons.”
Stacey looked at me with a flash of suspicion, as though I were mocking him, which to some degree I suppose I was. “Oh, they’ll apply them,” he said. “You can be sure of that. I hope you don’t hold with those fellows in the newspapers who say this war will cure us of our will to fight. When Germany surrenders, Europe will be a goddamned mess from Paris to the Urals. For every soldier in those trenches who swears he’ll never fire a rifle again, there’ll be another who’s found that he has a taste for it. Mark my words, Major, we’ll be over here again.”
I didn’t have the energy to argue, wasn’t sure I disagreed anyway. “About McKeogh,” I said, “I’m recommending him for commendation. Munson and Hershkowitz, too. Up to and including the Distinguished Service Cross. We wouldn’t have been rescued without them.”
“I’ll support that,” Stacey said. “Good for morale. But let’s have no more of this talk of ‘being rescued.’ That’s not what happened. You took a position and you held it. Your lines were cut, temporarily, as will happen in battle. Other units extended the advance to your position. And with the Boche on the run, we’ll soon push even farther ahead.”
“So the advance went exactly as planned? That�
�s the official line?”
“That’s the truth, Major. Fret about precision all you like when you’re practicing law. Out here we’re only concerned with end results. And the plain fact is that we are exactly where General Pershing expected us to be.”
“I’m sorry, Colonel, but it seems to me that that was my battalion’s trouble. We were exactly where General Pershing wanted us to be. Our mistake was to get there on schedule, forty-eight hours ahead of everybody else.”
Stacey laughed. “You’re not wrong, Whittlesey. And now you’ve shown the rest of these laggards how it ought to be done. Starting tomorrow I think you’ll find that the quality of your support has increased quite a bit.”
The ham went dry in my mouth, and I swallowed with effort. “Tomorrow, sir?” I said. “Sir, my ranks are depleted and exhausted. They ought to relay to the rear. They can’t go over the top again tomorrow.”
Stacey stepped closer and put a hand on my shoulder, his expression that of a parent preparing to share some difficult news about Santa Claus. “Of course they’re depleted and exhausted,” he said. “They ought to be. They’re fighting a war. This is the last push, Whittlesey. From the Meuse to the Argonne, this offensive cannot spare a man. Your battalion fought like hell to take and hold l’Homme Mort, Major. Relaying them to the rear now would be an insult, not a mercy.”
I returned my half-eaten sandwich to its plate and stood. I knew that Stacey had a reputation for resisting orders he thought stupid; I was well known for hewing to duty, but also for speaking up when my superiors overstepped, and I hoped he would esteem that.
“Respectfully,” I said, “the men are badly shaken. They have experienced a psychic blow out of proportion to their actual casualties, substantial though those have been. They did as they were told, and as a result they were trapped in the midst of enemy territory with every reasonable expectation of doom. They feel betrayed, as if they cannot rely on their army to support their efforts, and therefore they will now be reluctant to make those efforts. They ought to be reassigned to a support role, and not to the vanguard.”
Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Page 18