Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  As I spoke, Stacey’s leathery pioneer face clouded with anger, but this dissipated into something more like pity.

  “Major Whittlesey,” he said, “you are an outstanding battlefield commander. That opinion is unanimous throughout the 77th Infantry, from General Alexander down. I’m told that you lead from the front, pistol in hand, and that you stand tall under fire. I lead my boys the same way. It gives them courage, which is the one supply we don’t have to haul in from the rear. You know that, Major. That’s why I’m damn sure—sure as we’re standing here—that you never let your men know they’d been surrounded. They’ve been cold and wet and hungry for five days, but they never felt lost, or betrayed, or hopeless, because you never let them. You felt that way, and you still do, I’m sure. The ‘psychic blow’—is that what you called it?—was yours, not theirs. You and your adjutant carried that weight, as you should have. You didn’t shift it onto your men. Because that’s command. No matter how dire the straits, you keep your men up. Now, sit down and eat your food, will you?”

  “I’m finished, sir. Thank you.”

  He gave me a good-humored, reproachful glare, then reached behind my back, picked up the remains of the sandwich, and took a bite. “By tomorrow morning,” he said, muttering through the meat and bread, “your men will have had a full night’s sleep, and they’ll be warm and well fed, ready to stretch their sore legs and take another kick at the kaiser. And you’ll be ready to lead them. You’re to proceed north along the Ravin d’Argonne from your present position, then east up the Ravin de Charlevaux to take Charlevaux Mill. It’s time to push on, Whittlesey. Finish this and go home.”

  The bare bulbs cast their light on Colonel Stacey’s face as he chewed, impassive and leonine as a sphinx. “It’ll happen again,” I said, as evenly as I could.

  “Put it out of your mind, Major,” he said, drifting over to his desk to study his maps. It was clear that he needed nothing else from me.

  “This is not well planned,” I said. “Advancing in the ravines makes sense if you’re studying a map of France. Look any closer and it’s suicide. Those ravines are edged with mortars and machine-gun nests. Every path is snarled with barbed wire. The Germans have fallen back tactically, with the very aim of luring us there, and now we’re obliging them. We’ll have no support on our flanks. It will be l’Homme Mort all over again. We’ll be cut off.”

  “You’re getting panicky, son. You’ll have support from the 307th on your right and the French on your left. We’ll snip the Boche like pruning shears.”

  “Shears have two blades, Colonel: the 307th and the French. Why put us in the middle?”

  “Major,” Stacey said with a sharp rap on his desk. “We’ll have no further discussion on this subject. Let’s both stop pretending to be fools. It’s a damn tough job, which is why it’s been given to you. Have I been clear?”

  His anger wasn’t all meant for me. He knew that the order was stupid—that the only strategic advantage to be gained from sending us into the ravines was a demonstration to the enemy that we could afford to squander our troops and were willing to do so. The army had already shown Stacey how much it valued his opinions, and it valued mine even less. His irritation was that of a father whose impotent hypocrisy has been flushed into the open by the insistent questioning of a child.

  “All right,” I said, placing my hand on the doorknob, hard and cold. “I’ll attack. But whether you’ll hear from me again, I don’t know.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Stacey would, of course, hear from me again. So would a whole galaxy of others who’d never had a reason to think of me before.

  The colonel was quite right: that first encirclement at l’Homme Mort—we’d start calling it the Small Pocket after we’d been trapped in a larger one—had been terrifying for me. But because we’d been lucky, because it hadn’t ended in a massacre, the incident wasn’t worthy of note to the generals or the press.

  The second encirclement would be a disaster, and it would win me commendation and international fame. It would leave my brain full—as it is now, here on the Toloa’s deck—of visions of pleading faces and ruined bodies, of phantom agonies that scour the parts of my consciousness where I once held hope for the future, like the pains that plague a maimed man where a limb’s been cut away.

  On that last night of September, though, I was just a field officer sent back to his battalion alone, no hands to be held. I found my men with great difficulty in the darkness. I visited myself upon them like an unwelcome shade whom they wished they could unsee.

  Or so it felt when I made myself say, “Orders are to advance at daybreak.”

  The men actually took it like champions, just as Colonel Stacey had assumed they would. No barracks to be had, we nodded off where we sat to the common refrain—uttered softly, like a lullaby—up and down the trench: It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.

  CHAPTER 11

  CHER AMI

  Take the thing that bothers you and place it in parentheses.

  I’ve told myself that a thousand times since we got stuck in the Pocket. Bracket the death that spatters against you.

  But not a day has slipped by these past hundred years that I haven’t recollected my final flight. And now, on the eve of their centenary, here in the darkened museum—Sergeant Stubby asleep beside me, climate-controlled air sighing around us—those events replay behind these glass eyes that I can never close.

  “Leaders, get your men up!” yelled Whit on the morning of October 1, his blue eyes metallic in the pewter dawn behind his wire-rimmed spectacles.

  Low clouds, an autumn chill—the sky had poured the night before. Many of the men scrambled to reattach bayonets that they’d removed in the night; weary, waiting for the order to go over the top, they’d kept nodding off and almost falling on their own blades.

  As we lurched forth again—Buck Shot and I on Bill Cavanaugh’s back, he like all the men already exhausted, covered with cootie bites, feet festering with sores—we understood the orders as the sergeants hollered them: Advance until the last man drops!

  We pressed through an apple orchard under heavy sniper fire: fruit exploding, and skulls as well. Somewhere ahead a soldier trilled a jaunty tune as the German bullets hissed through the branches.

  “Good grief,” Bill muttered over his shoulder toward our basket, “some ghoul is whistling the William Tell Overture.”

  He promised to explain the joke later but never did.

  Our advance stuttered and stopped, stuttered and stopped. The trees were too small for hiding, and the bullets seemed to come from everywhere at once regardless. The smell of apples—fresh apples burst by bullets, brown apples stomped into the dirt, no orchard keepers left to harvest them—cut through the battlefield reek, reminding me of the cider mill back on Wright Farm.

  The men picked up the wounded and carried them along. In some cases there was nothing left to carry. As we paused on the steep slope of a north-south ridge from the forest into the valley, the officers trying to determine how best to proceed, one soldier struck a match to light his buddy’s cigarette. A shell hit the kid holding the smoke bull’s-eye in the chest, blowing his organs all over the ground, knocking the boy with the match unconscious.

  With the conditions too dangerous for us to either keep moving or remain exposed, Whit halted us and had the men dig in along the Binarville Road, a Roman highway made of stone blocks—fifteen hundred years old, Bill told us. An artifact of the dawn of human order in Europe, an order now collapsing. The dense forest that crowded the slope behind it was thick with underbrush, giving the Germans cover to approach by slipping from tree to tree.

  A little railroad snaked through the ravine. Log sheds, splintered ties, and a few dead Germans were scattered along a narrow path of open ground. The enemy appointed their outposts in greater luxury than we did ours: this encampment seemed a regul
ar village, complete with an empty mess hall, bathhouses, latrines, and a sort of church for makeshift services. Whit set himself up in a three-room log cabin and put the commander of the supporting battalion, a steady-handed captain named George McMurtry, in a concrete dugout two hundred yards away. If a shell dropped on one, the other might survive.

  “Do you sweethearts smell that?” said Bill, finishing a funkhole large enough for himself and the basket of us. “Something stinks worse than a Gansevoort sewer.”

  “It is worse than a sewer,” said Larney, pointing to a boxcar on the narrow-gauge tracks.

  A decomposing German lay inside, head out one end, feet out the other, his face a purple mass squirming with maggots. In swift unspoken agreement, the men gave the car a shove, Bill making the sign of the cross, as if asking forgiveness for his crassness. The offending odor rolled along about a hundred feet, then tipped off the warped track.

  It was comforting during that long night to hear Bill and Larney chat as if they were old friends catching up over dinner, even though their meal was limited to two sticks of chewing gum.

  Their topic was wireless telegraphy, as radio was called then. Larney was complaining that the militaries were not wise enough to adapt new technologies as readily as old. “Even naval telegraphy can’t transmit voices,” he said in his low, measured tone, his accent so different than Bill’s. “Only Morse code. No offense to your birds, but I wish they could go both ways.”

  “I know,” said Bill. “They probably do, too.” He stuck a finger through the slats to pat my head, and I cooed agreeably, although in truth the idea of homing in two directions was perplexing, and rather disturbing if I thought about it too much.

  “Well, they’re a blasted sight better than signal lamps and panels,” said Larney, folding and refolding his empty gum wrapper. “And the telephone cable. You unwind it and it gets instantly broken. I want a portable two-way radio. It’s coming, I know it. But it’s not going to help us in this war.”

  “Lately,” said Bill, chewing his gum slowly to make it last, “whenever I think about it, I can’t imagine anything getting through. To the commanders in their châteaux, I mean. Tooling around in motorcars, surrounded by their yes-men. Oh, sure, the messages get delivered—Company X advanced, hooray, Company Y got wiped out, tough luck—but we can’t ever tell them the most important thing, which is that this entire war is goddamned insanity.”

  “I read that Joffre always insisted on a two-hour lunch,” said Larney, his voice rising slightly. “Haig still takes his daily horseback ride. Hindenburg gets ten hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. How can you get men like those to understand cold rations and lice?”

  “Here we are at the line,” said Bill, putting the canvas sack over our basket, preparing us to turn in for the night, “and yet not more than a mile or two away, everything is French beauty. Beech forests. Vineyards. Leaves starting to turn. That’s what’s really fucked.”

  Larney didn’t blanch at Bill’s profanity but declined, as always, to use any himself. “It reminds me a touch of home,” he said, quieter again. “The trees. Anemones and cowslips underfoot. No sounds of battle, just the whispering of the leaves.”

  Their damp uniforms crumpled, yielding up a little smell of sweat as they curled against each other and did their best to pass the night in sleep. I let my own breathing deepen and synchronize with Buck Shot’s and tried to do the same.

  * * *

  • • •

  Starting the next day, time became featureless, a fever fugue of suffering punctuated by German attacks. Those arterial pulses of horror only underscored our swampy passivity: the routine of the ordeal. By then the battalion had stopped receiving resupplied rations, which meant no mealtimes to give structure to the hours, and so they dragged. It seemed increasingly likely that the men would begin to consider our corn and peas as a source of food—and us as well. But I trusted Bill to keep us safe.

  That morning Colonel Stacey sent a runner saying that a one-hour barrage would be followed by the resumption of the infantry attack. “‘You will press on to your objectives at all costs,’” our major read aloud to McMurtry in his reedy voice. “It’s déjà vu, George. Going over again with no blankets, no raincoats, no reserve rations.”

  “No coffee either,” McMurtry said. “No rum. No experience, in the case of most of these fellows. My boys who had the best skill at this sort of fighting are all in infirmaries now, or in cemeteries.” He clenched his beefy hands into and out of fists. “You can see what’s happening plain as day, but damned if you can stop it. The krauts are going to maneuver to pinch us off.”

  Whit sent the runner back with confirmation that he had understood his orders, along with a request for rations and ammunition that would never come.

  The customary barrage flew over our heads: tons upon tons of shells loaded with shrapnel and high explosives, bringing detonations and pandemonium to the territory we’d be advancing through, concussing the men’s skulls. “I hope this doesn’t hurt your bird brains as much as it does mine,” said Bill, adjusting his helmet and hoisting our basket, where I nestled next to Buck Shot. I was touched by his concern, unable to reassure him that our pigeon heads were better insulated than men’s, less apt to be rattled.

  Slightly behind us, though we couldn’t see them, we heard sergeants up and down the line saying, Get ready, gang! and then the whistles blew and everyone stumbled forward, men falling everywhere, the air blue with bullets and hung with cries of First aid!

  The battalion advanced, sending its wounded to the rear. Every prospective path forward was snarled by underbrush or barbed wire or both, often in tangles deeper than the men were tall. The forms of these sprawling barriers seemed to reflect the madness of the war, antic and perverse and sometimes wickedly clever: one soldier tore his shins on a jagged strand strung beneath the surface at a river crossing. The men cut the wires when they could, but it was slow work and had to be done while they were exposed to fire from the surrounding hills.

  Traversing the valley, we came upon a young German soldier, wispy and blond, too young to grow a beard. Surrounded by Americans, he raised his hands and yelled, “Kameraden! Kameraden!” in a cracking voice. Rather than kill him, as I’d seen other commanders do for the sake of convenience or revenge, Whittlesey took him along, keeping him nearby. One of the men, a German-speaking replacement from Minnesota, asked the prisoner how he liked the war. “Not very well,” he replied in listless English, scuffing through the decaying leaves. “But there are more of us quite close. We will destroy you.”

  As the battalion advanced steadily along the river, the men’s trepidation seemed only to increase. “We’re getting close to the spot where the Argonne and Charlevaux ravines meet,” Bill whispered to us as we hunkered behind a dead oak, waiting for the signal to move. “There’s a hill there. You can probably see it if you look. From that hill the Germans can hit anything in the valley. And we have to get around it. So when we advance, keep your little heads down. A lot of us aren’t going to make it through the next few hours.”

  But toward the end of that second day came unexpected good news: one of Whit’s scouting parties had found a hidden path to the hilltop and cleared the German defenses there with little resistance. When Whittlesey and McMurtry ascended to take a look, they expected to find a machine-gun nest; what they found instead was a wide double trench that stretched farther than they could see. This was the vaunted line of fortifications that they’d been dreading for weeks, apparently abandoned.

  The men’s spirits were high, but so were their casualties, and with night falling, Whittlesey and McMurtry ordered their companies to dig in. We proceeded down the hill’s steep opposite slope toward Charlevaux Brook, where the men established a perimeter near a small grove of pines—a box about three hundred fifty yards long and seventy yards deep—as the sun began to set behind the fat gray clouds and the bald white hill of La Pal
ette. The trees on the hillside had begun to take on their autumn colors. As Bill dug and Buck Shot and I ate our evening meal, I noticed a mossy wooden footbridge that spanned the brook a short distance away; then the dusk swallowed it.

  Our spot was well chosen. The brook provided a source of water, and the stony bulk of the hill that we’d descended shielded us from the arc of the German artillery. Though death and injury had thinned our ranks, the losses were offset slightly by the addition of troops who’d wandered in after being separated from their parent outfits: a company from the 307th Infantry and two from the 306th Machine Gun Battalion. Whittlesey finished the day with about seven hundred able-bodied troops, perhaps another hundred too ill or badly wounded to function, and a handful of German prisoners.

  Just as he’d been taught at Camp Upton, Whit set up machine guns and rifles to cover the flanks, then sent a water detail to fill and lug back canteens. He sent a runner—a man—and a messenger—a pigeon, one I’d never seen before and would never see again—to relay our coordinates to Colonel Stacey. He ordered the men who still had them to eat their iron rations and to share with those who didn’t. He did everything right.

  As night wrapped around us like a gray German uniform and the men made their usual jokes about digging their own graves, McMurtry squatted at the edge of the major’s funkhole, a short distance from where Bill had dug us in. “Well, Whit,” he said, “we seem to have broken the Giselher Stellung as if it were paper!”

  “‘A steel band’—isn’t that what their propaganda calls it?”

  “Not so steely without anyone to man it.”

  “Evidently not. You suppose they’ve all turned tail back to Luxembourg?”