Usually a pigeon’s release produced a hail of bullets from the enemy’s side, but this time we heard only one shot, from a sniper who’d been eyeing our trench.
It was enough.
A great cloud of small feathers showed that Buck Shot had taken a direct hit, and with an abrupt drop of altitude he was gone. In his interrupted flight, he’d looked like a shuttlecock struck badly in a game of badminton—an image I remember vividly but that strikes me now as strange, as if only through comparison to a man-made bird could I accept my friend’s death in this man-made war.
Sorrow I felt, but not surprise. Buck Shot had prophesied his own demise, and like many such prophecies made in war, his had fulfilled itself.
I was the last. Whit glared wordlessly at Omer, who continued to crush me against his side. Our major affixed the message himself and said, “Cher Ami, you’re our final hope.”
I cocked my head to look into his light blue eyes and blinked in understanding.
Richards gave me an awkward toss.
It’s odd, the things you notice in a crisis. As I flew up, I saw a blood blister, small and black, on Whit’s finger from where his pistol had pinched him; it looked like a poppy seed. This was the last I’d see of him for a long, long while.
I flew a short distance, keeping low, and then perched in a walnut tree to smooth the feathers that Omer had disheveled. The men began to yell, throwing sticks and rocks between shell bursts to get me to leave, but I only shifted from one branch to another.
I’d flown eleven missions prior to that day. I’d survived them by being patient and by having excellent judgment of speeds and distances. I was cautious and quick-thinking, mature and coolheaded, and I’m not bragging—just explaining the facts. The American fliers, Eddie Rickenbacker especially, were said to possess these same traits, and I like to imagine that they would have understood what I was doing on the walnut tree. My infantrymen, however, assumed that I was dawdling because I was an idiot, or afraid. That’s not why I stopped. I was thinking.
Poor Omer began to climb the tree, an undertaking that seemed likely to get him killed—with some justice, perhaps, since it was mostly his manhandling I had to recover from. But ready at last, I took to the sky.
At once the sky betrayed me. A massive explosive shell struck the funkhole directly beneath me, blowing the five men there to pieces and wrecking the cushion of air beneath my wings; I dropped like a stone through the plume of hot gas.
For a moment I lost all sense of myself. When feeling returned, I was huddled on the edge of the fresh crater, well speckled with mud and ash, my vision blurred, my hearing gone. For what seemed a very long time, I sat unmoving as my perceptions returned to me: the shouting men, the falling projectiles, Bill lying pale on the earth.
I shook mightily, casting the grime from my feathers. Then I rose, bringing my wing tips together with a terrific burst of claps. The air above me was deformed, chaotic, utterly disordered by the detonating shells. I found still air, and I dug my wings into it. I found billows of heat, and I rode them up.
I circled to get my bearings—feeling out the cleaner air seeping through the blood and the gun smoke, alert for the dark smell of fungus and fallen leaves from the deep forest to the south, the tang of years-old manure in the fields farther on—and I soared above the maelstrom.
In moments of extraordinary difficulty, one rises above oneself; one becomes an aura, overcast and vaporous. Above the ooze and above the bursts, above the horizontal hailstorm of bullets from the hills.
The German snipers had had plenty of time to take aim. Each bit of lead that caught me sent me tumbling, then rebuilding the cushion of air that kept me aloft. My movements became gooey; I tried not to think about why. Kept flying. Wing bones, long feathers still intact.
They shot out my eye. Head wrenched to the side, I blacked out, arced back toward the mud like one of those hateful shells. Then snapped awake, half the world gone. Kept flying.
I heard a despairing shout from bucktoothed Omer, bumbler to the end. “They’ve got him! He’s done for!”
They had gotten me. But I was not done for.
In my intact brain echoed the voice: Cher Ami! Home to your loft by the airway! Home to Rampont! A vista opened in front of me, almost as if I’d willed it. I thought of everything I could to not think about dying.
Flying over fields, thinking of the peasants not there to harvest, the harvest itself not there, the earth out of which it would grow blown to smithereens. Thinking of the heads of the men, like stalks of wheat themselves, chopped by the reaper.
The mist rising and falling dove gray over the fields. No, not over the fields but over my surviving eye. The hollows of my beak, gore-clogged, caught no odors beyond those of my own wounds. I thought I really might be dying. I did not want to hang in the air, then meet eternity. I wanted to make it. I hurtled forward, following the voice. Over the familiar sites to Rampont.
Grim farmhouses, bare and hard, frugal and efficient to the point of starvation. Everything once pure now besmirched, everything sordid. The hens in the henhouses distressed, brooding. Roosters and rabbits. Very few cows. The sheep and bigger animals all eaten. I was not going to die; no one was going to eat me.
Wrecked churchyards. Graves upturned, old bones mixing with the new, and me starting to feel like a corpse myself. I thought of Bill, and of Buck Shot, and of Larney and Whittlesey, and President Wilson and Wright Farm, John and the soldier son he wanted me to save, and my parents and my sweet vain sister Miss America, and my lost Baby Mine. I was not going to die; no one was going to bury me.
Though my pain was so overwhelming that I hardly recognized it as pain, I made it. Me, NURP 615, back to my loft, alighting on the board—a graceless landing, since I could only put weight on my left claw, while my right wiggled uselessly.
I pinged the little bell with my beak to announce my arrival, just as I’d been trained. In my state of complete collapse, I showed no signs of panic. Behavior of the highest order. Major Whittlesey would have been proud.
Corporal Gault was on loft duty, thank whoever should be thanked for such things. “Cher Ami!” he said. “What have they done to you?”
He spoke to me, low and comforting. He said he’d been worried ever since he’d learned that I was attached to the Lost Battalion—that’s what they were calling us already, the Lost Battalion—and that he’d feared he’d never see me again or, by probable extension, ever hear from Whittlesey. He did his best not to hurt me, a blood-smeared fluff of feathers. The message holder hung by a few shreds of flesh to what was left of my right leg, and he took some of the tendon when he lifted the canister off. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he kept saying. I could see him holding back tears. I must have looked quite bad.
“My God, no,” he said when he’d unrolled and read the thin paper note. He could hardly hold the telephone as he relayed it to Division Headquarters. “Major, listen to this one,” he said, and read the message aloud, in code, only to have whoever was on the other end tell him to repeat it in plain English, no matter who might be listening.
Within a minute the clamor of the guns had died down. The division had phoned the artillery and ordered a stop.
I had no way of knowing whether any of the men had survived.
“I wish we could figure out which triple-distilled idiot authorized that friendly barrage,” Corporal Gault said, turning back to me, his eyes aggrieved and determined. “Come on, Cher Ami. You’re going to be all right.”
I had seen enough men die to notice that this was a thing that soldiers always told those who were surely dying. It never seemed convincing, but it seemed to make them all feel better, and that was worth something.
Long afterward, glowing with patriotic pride, Gault and a number of his commanders would tell me that I had flown forty kilometers in twenty-five minutes that day.
In wa
r it is difficult to know anything beyond your immediate surroundings. As Gault worked to clean me up, even those became unknowable to me. My mission done, my brain emptied at last of all but Gault’s soothing voice, I let myself slip into a restful blackness, with no expectation that I’d ever emerge.
It would be quite some time before I learned what happened after that.
CHAPTER 12
CHARLES WHITTLESEY
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. Set that clotted mess aside and do not look at it anymore.
But hardly an hour has slipped by these past three years without my recollecting those five days under fire without food or water, when we, the 308th, bled out, only to rise again like revenants as the Lost Battalion. Unkillable, at least in the public’s mind.
Even here on the windswept deck of the southbound Toloa, even looking into the glass-green ocean, I see those incidents. This afternoon I can bear it, because soon I’ll have sneaked free. War renders all parentheses porous, slipping out and asserting itself not merely as a clause but rather as the entire contract. I signed one with no termination provision and no limitation of liability that obliges me to live publicly with the memory of the Pocket.
Tonight I am breaking it.
While Cher Ami sat in the walnut tree preening her blue-gray feathers before flying away with my message, I swear I could see her thinking. Her golden eyes stared straight into my mind, and then she took wing.
As I watched her go, the leafless branches of the trees looked like skeletons’ fingers, their foliage shredded away by our artillery. The gnarled hands pointed the way out but clasped us in. Desperation rose like bile in my throat, and I wished I could vomit it out. But I steeled myself.
We saw Cher Ami get hit, but we saw her keep flying, and as she passed from view, I was seized by a near-frenzy of relief, one that I dared not demonstrate for fear of encouraging the men toward carelessness. Richards was wrong, as usual: Cher Ami did not appear done for. If she didn’t make it, we’d all surely die.
Why was Richards here? I felt a spasm of dread. “Where’s Cavanaugh?” I yelled above the din as our second-rate pigeon man dashed back to cover.
“Wounded, Major,” said Richards. “Looks pretty bad. He’s in your funkhole. It was the nearest one to where he fell.”
An unseen hand reached beneath my ribs and crushed all it found there. I could not speak, and for a moment I stepped outside myself, surprised in an oddly clinical way at the intensity of my anguish.
“Major?” said Richards. “With your permission, sir, I’d like to eat the leftover bird feed? We ain’t got any homers left, and I’m near to starving.”
I nodded, and Richards began tearing into the packets of yellow cracked corn and dried maple peas, first weighing them in his palms to judge how best to ration their contents—using what formula I could not imagine—then flinging pinches of each into his mouth, crunching them with his back teeth as his buck incisors chewed the air. The sight made me irrationally angry at him for being incompetent and ugly and unscathed, unlike Bill Cavanaugh.
A little after four o’clock, about an hour and thirty-five minutes after it had started, the monotonous torrent of agony from our own army’s guns finally ceased. McMurtry and I looked at each other. “Praise be to God and to that blessed pigeon,” he said, wincing as he lifted his burly frame from his squat.
“Cher Ami,” I said, looking across the Pocket where a few men’s heads emerged like moles from their holes. “Let’s get a count of who’s still alive and see if her work was in vain.”
Sirota, our medic, had run out of wraparounds. He moved about the hillside transferring crusted bandages from the dead to the soon-to-be-dead.
I made my own rounds, trying to say—without sounding cockeyed—that the friendly barrage had conferred one benefit: now the generals really knew where we were, or perhaps more accurately knew that we were still there, holding our ground. Unable to bring relief from pain, I tried to bolster morale, moving from man to man repeating, Remember, there are two million Americans pushing up to relieve us. The words had long since slipped free of their specific meaning and become pure ritual, both for me and for my listeners.
Two million Americans to the rescue or not, our own numbers were grim. A pair of lieutenants from the 306th Machine Gun Battalion—Marshall Peabody, my friend since our Camp Upton days, and Maurice Revnes, of whom I had worked hard to keep my strong dislike in check—had been together in their command post up the slope when a shell exploded on the edge of their hole, blowing off part of Revnes’s left foot and tearing Peabody’s left leg to pieces. Overwhelmed, Sirota and our other two remaining medics had been unable to respond to their cries for first aid. Peabody had managed to put a tourniquet on his own mangled limb, and one of our corporals had come to help Revnes, but that help had consisted of two handkerchiefs covering the wound, held in place with used bandages from a first-aid kit. Peabody and Revnes had been two of my last three machine gun officers.
I assigned control of our automatic weapons to a Sergeant Hauck, whom I knew not at all, as he’d joined us the week before. Peabody, his face a mask of suppressed pain, refused to be moved to shelter and attempted to resume command; I had to order him to accept that the duty had passed to Hauck. “Yes, Major,” he said, sweat beading on his square jaw where his dark beard grew. “I’m sorry I got hit. If you can have someone help me keep it loaded, I can still use a rifle to fight off the Boche.”
“We’ll see to that,” I said. “And you needn’t apologize. Just hold on, and remember, there are two million Americans pushing up to relieve us.”
“Two million goddamned Americans my ass,” said Revnes under his breath.
Having larger problems to deal with, I pretended not to hear and continued on to the command post to confer with McMurtry. We were down to so few officers that I was unsure of how we’d go on. During the barrage McMurtry had received a contusion in the knee that left him hobbling, and Captain Holderman had been cut badly by shell fragments. He insisted on remaining in command, and having no replacement, I let him.
On my way back from taking stock of the disaster, I found a private named Hollingshead, called Holly, squatting to relieve himself at the base of a tree. I was furious. With so much now out of my control, having my few remaining applicable directives ignored filled me with unaccustomed rage.
“You’re violating a direct order, Private,” I said, interrupting him in mid-shit. “Use the latrines we dug. Have some respect for yourself and for basic sanitation.”
Hollingshead, mortified, soiled himself in a scramble to simultaneously pull up his trousers and salute, succeeding at neither. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said.
“A man who defecates against a tree is a man who declares that he is no longer part of the army, that he is in fact no longer part of civilization. What do you think we’re fighting for, Private? Do you think you’re going to die here, Hollingshead?”
His lower lip quavered, his face crumpled in tears. “S-sir?” he stammered.
“You will not die here, Private. You will continue to shit and to fight in this army as ordered, like the well-trained infantryman you are. You will do so with pride and with dignity. When you return to your unit, make it known to your fellows that any such future act will be punished. Now, go and clean yourself up, Private.”
“Yes, sir!” said Holly, his face flushed pink, fastening his pants as he rushed away.
Alone for a moment, I leaned my forehead against the oak’s splintered bark, took long breaths, and absorbed the sickening odor of what Hollingshead had left as it danced with other battlefield stenches.
I returned to my funkhole as dusk was falling. Larney and Richards saluted as I approached, and their grim and wary faces told me before I
could ask that Cavanaugh was beyond help. My first sight of him—gutshot, curled in anguish—confirmed it. Straight-limbed and charming Bill, so full of joy, now already smaller, the way that the dead shrink up.
The two privates slunk off without a word spoken, and I sank to the earth at Cavanaugh’s side. “She did it, Bill,” I said. I had never called him by his first name before. “Cher Ami, your favorite. She got them to stop.”
“Cher Ami was the best one,” he said, his voice faint but emphatic. “I said that, didn’t I, Major? I knew she’d come through.”
“You were right,” I said, smoothing the damp yellow hair off his forehead. “Try to rest.”
It was early yet, but there was no food and nothing to do, nothing but yell at men about their poor sanitation and watch the best of them die, killed by their own slipshod army. By then we had all learned that the hours between dawn and dusk took an eon to pass. In the absence of proper sleep—I hadn’t had any of that since we’d left Camp Upton, didn’t yet realize I’d never have it again—the texture of dreams began to steal into our waking lives whenever the light died in the skies.
With the responsibilities of command in suspension, I’d look at the faces of my men and be tormented by my superfluous schooling. Famine is in thy cheeks, I’d think: a fragment from Shakespeare. Romeo to the apothecary. Act 5, scene 1.
“It’s funny, Major,” said Bill, his sapphire eyes glassy. “I woke up starving this morning. Now I’m just cold. I used to think about Rector’s and all the food I’d eat there when I got home. Crabs and yams and cantaloupe, steak and strawberries.”
“We’ll go to Rector’s,” I said, a thing I had wanted to tell him for months. “When we get back to Manhattan. And you’ll be my guest, not my waiter. We’ll split the entire menu.”
Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Page 21