Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  “I tried to think of it like a sacrament,” he said. “Being stuck here with no food. Like fasting. But what are we sorry for? This isn’t Lent, it’s a war.”

  He stopped talking and clutched my hand, squeezing until it hurt. I had wanted this touch—rather more than I’d admitted to myself—and some shamed and superstitious part of me wondered whether my want had caused this, like a wish twisted by a wicked djinn.

  All around us the men tried to sleep, piled like puppies in their funkholes.

  “I been wondering,” said Bill, delirious. “You’ve got more learning than I do, Major. Do sunrises and sunsets really look different? Or do we only imagine they do?”

  “Cavanaugh,” I said, and stopped, unable to steady my voice.

  “That was my last one, Major. I should’ve taken a better look, I guess. I’m sorry I can’t hang on. It’s an honor. Make sure, in your letter, you tell Ma and Annie how I loved them. Tell them please to take care of my birds. It’s been an honor, Major. You’ve been good.”

  “No, Cavanaugh. You’re going to make it. You’re going to survive to tell them yourself. Two million—”

  I couldn’t get the rest out, wasn’t sure he could hear me anyway.

  “You’re going to see your birds again,” I said. “After we stuff ourselves at Rector’s, you’ll take me to Hell’s Kitchen. I’ll meet your mother and Annie. Both Annies. We’ll talk about the close call you had in the Argonne and how the surgeons stitched you up. You’ll tell them what a great commander I was.”

  He smiled his gap-toothed smile, his teeth enormous in his sunken face. “All right, Major,” he said. “I’m going to close my eyes for a minute, then.”

  I listened to his shallow gasps. Sunrises or sunsets—trapped as we were, it didn’t seem to matter. War occurs in the dimensions of time and space, just like everything else. “In military operations,” said Wellington, “time is everything.” In our case time was all we had, waiting in our tiny space for reinforcements to arrive or for the Germans to finish us. Two burning fuses of unknown length.

  The next enemy assault came that night at around 9:00 P.M. Flares lit up the slope, sinking toward us on their small parachutes while the Germans hid from their own lights in the nearby brush. I ordered everyone who could still shoot to remain calm and not fire until the enemy came into view. They did so perfectly, to the Germans’ vexation.

  “Kamerad, vill you?” called a voice during a lull in the fighting, the first of many requests for surrender that we’d receive.

  “Come in and get us, you Dutch bastard!” yelled Holderman. I ordered the men to open fire on the spot where the voice had come from, and the attackers withdrew.

  Fragmented sleep, fragmented dreams. Bill huddled against me to borrow my warmth in the chill of the night. I kept waking up to see if he was still breathing, his familiar smell of hay and tobacco now cut with desperate sweat, metallic blood.

  * * *

  • • •

  The following morning, October 5, dawned with us lying cheek to cheek. Mine warm, his cold.

  Bill Cavanaugh was dead.

  I held on to what remained of him a while longer. His corpse did not repulse me; in the limited way that circumstances had permitted, his was a body I loved. It filled me instead with inexpressible melancholy, melancholy that I have never put aside. I did not pray, so instead I quoted Shakespeare—“Alas, poor world, what treasure hast thou lost!”—a fragment from Venus and Adonis. It was not something Bill would have known, and that seemed fitting, given his enthusiasm for discovering new things.

  I moved Bill’s body off my lap and stepped from the funkhole into another battlefield dawn. He was hardly the only one who had died in the night. In spite of my innate intelligence, in spite of my education, how little I understood our circumstances except that they were bad, very bad. The colossal scale of the war made it impossible to know more. It had been created by men, but by men in the aggregate and not by the kings and kaisers and presidents whom we soldiers comforted ourselves by imagining in control of it. Even the generals could be only as the blind men judging the elephant, taking it for its parts, never comprehending the whole.

  The earth lay before me like a bare idea, a wasteland that we could not traverse. We had to stay put. The brook babbled as it always did at the foot of the ravine. The sound seemed like mockery now, but the mockery was in my head. Water was still only water.

  Men woke up nearly mad from thirst, their mouths leathery, but I posted a guard to keep them from trying to scramble to the brook, lest snipers pick them off like squirrels.

  The living rose from their holes and turned out the pockets of the dead in search of cartridges. We were on our way to starving to death, the men’s eyes popping out, their cheeks caving in. I joined them, moving from spot to spot, citing the approach of my two million. My repetitive behavior, heedless of circumstances, had come to resemble that of a ghost.

  As I was reviewing the reports of the surviving commanders with Larney, McMurtry staggered up, sturdy and unflappable amid the filth and butchery. His bruised leg had stiffened during the night, and he approached the project of walking on it as if it were a challenging new hobby that he’d taken up, like golf or billiards. His bulldog jaw, far leaner than it had been in Baccarat, retained its customary tenacity. The men and I adored him for that.

  “Morning, Major,” he said. He must have noticed something in my face that gave him pause. “Cavanaugh?”

  I shook my head.

  He puffed a short equine sigh, then nodded. “Damned good pigeon man,” he said.

  “The best I’ve known.”

  “His bird saved us, I suppose. Which, to my way of thinking, means that he saved us. Or had quite a hand in it anyhow.”

  “And so my report shall read,” I said.

  He allowed an interval of respectful silence before he spoke again.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ll be pleased to know that I managed enough sleep last night to have those clichéd dreams of mashed-potato mountains and gravy lakes, butter-pat meadows and trees with trunks made of porterhouse steaks.”

  “Now that I think of it,” I said, trying to elevate myself to his bluff, unruffled manner, “our grenades do resemble little metal pineapples if you look in the right light.”

  Larney followed this exchange, probably trying to determine whether it merited inclusion in his compendium of war humor. As usual, his own contribution was sincere but devoid of wit, well meant but at cross-purposes to our own remarks. “Some of the men are eating twigs and acorns and roots,” he said. “They’re rolling up dry leaves and smoking them. It’s nothing like a Camel, they say.”

  Jokes and pranks did occasionally break the tedium of our confinement; unfortunately, they were all played by the Germans and thus rather cruel. Late that morning Captain Holderman saw one of the Company K privates hop from his funkhole, don his pack, and dash toward the rear. Holderman grabbed him by the belt and asked what he thought he was doing; the private replied that he’d gotten word along the line that the 77th had been driven back and that I had decided to withdraw our command.

  “Remind the men,” I ordered when this story was relayed to me, “that among the enemy are many English speakers who will attempt devious ruses. The men are to confirm the truth of any directive that arrives from nowhere and always to use common sense. They should be particularly skeptical of orders to withdraw, as this battalion shall be doing no such thing.”

  The German ploys continued, with diminishing artfulness. Around midday a heavily accented voice cried out “Gaz masks!” Infantry Drill Regulations included no such command. One of the men responded with a shot into the underbrush, and the trickster died with a howl.

  By the late afternoon, the Germans had abandoned fake commands in favor of sham orders given to their own imaginary troops, intended to persuade us that we were surrounded by a
vastly larger force. “Bring up ten machine guns on the left!” they’d yell, and the German speakers among us would holler back “Wint Beterben!” which I gather translates loosely as “a bunch of fart-bags.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Throughout, my men’s spirits seemed not to flag, which made me feel both better and worse—better because they had committed themselves to fight to the last man, worse because it was I who had brought them there, who was inspiring their sacrifice.

  Toward the end of the day, our American artillery started up again, causing us to fear a repeat performance of friendly fire, but this time it hit the enemy. It seemed only to goad them into redoubling their attack on us, this time with grenades. We staved them off but took still more casualties. One man, a replacement whose name I never knew, had his legs blown off and lay there while the rest of us fought, crying “Mama!” until he died.

  At dusk I slumped in my funkhole, my palm bruised and throbbing from my pistol’s recoil, and joined McMurtry in watching Larney lick grains of coffee from a discarded can. This in turn reminded McMurtry that he still had a small piece of fatty bacon—it couldn’t have weighed an ounce—that he’d used to grease cuts on his hands from the ubiquitous barbed wire. He pulled it from his overcoat, picked off the lint, and sliced it in two, giving me the second bite.

  That night we heard machine guns firing to the south. This was unusual only in two respects: first, that they weren’t firing on us, and second, that they weren’t German. The German Maxim gun is fed by a belt and rarely misfires; in action it sounds like a monstrous stock ticker. The guns we heard chugged unsteadily, rarely managing a half dozen shots in a burst, and were firing past Hill 198: it was our own 77th Division, attacking the Germans with the despised Chauchats. Though none of us spoke a word, a glance from funkhole to funkhole in the moonless dark revealed countless pairs of American eyes widening in excitement as the realization spread.

  But our prospective rescuers were still far away and likely had little sense of our exact location. McMurtry slid along the dirt to whisper in my ear. “A flare’s no good,” he said. “They won’t see it for the damned hill.”

  I listened as the distant Chauchat was answered by nearer German guns. “A bit like the bagpipes of Lucknow, isn’t it?” I said.

  McMurtry gave me a look that confirmed we’d had the same idea, then motioned Larney over.

  From all my years in classrooms, the lessons that have stayed with me most vividly have been digressions, asides, anecdotes told mostly to relieve the lecturers’ own boredom, and officer training at Plattsburgh was no exception. There I’d heard about the bagpipes supposedly played by Highlanders in the relief force that broke the siege at Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny and how they had alerted the trapped British of their pending rescue. McMurtry and I reasoned that if we could hear the Chauchats of the 77th, then perhaps they could hear ours. I had the nearest lieutenant—William Cullen, who went by Red—fire bursts from his own Chauchat during a period of quiet: four bursts of five rounds each to empty the clip. It was a risky use of ammunition and an obvious signal that provoked another round of shots from the enemy. Worse, the sound of the American guns ceased shortly thereafter, and my hopes of relief anytime soon were dashed—though I kept my discouragement off my face.

  The temperature plummeted to nearly freezing, and I forced myself to crawl from funkhole to funkhole in the trickling drizzle before the men made their nightly attempts at sleep, repeating my refrain about the two million Americans, embellishing it with the tale of Lucknow. Those surrounded British troops had held out for forty days, I told them, and we’d been in our spot only four, so we could stick it out a while yet.

  As I moved on through the darkness, I’m sure I left the men baffled by my military scholarship, wondering where the fuck Lucknow was. If they thought of our circumstances in any sort of historical terms, then they probably compared our enemy to a rather different group of Indians and imagined me as analogous to Colonel George Armstrong Custer.

  That night I was awakened by McMurtry’s hand on my shoulder, and I rose with a start to address whatever the trouble was. My vision was blurred, my throat rough, and I realized that I had been sobbing; he had only sought to quiet me before the men heard.

  October 6, the fifth day, was foggy. I felt as if I had slept wrapped in damp towels that had frozen overnight. The weariness in my eyes must have been clear to Holderman and McMurtry, who did their best to cheer me.

  “We’re beaten up but far from licked,” said McMurtry, clapping me on the back. “When he hears ‘Stand to,’ every man still jumps from his funkhole to take his place on the firing line.”

  “Isolation, starvation, heavy casualties—if those haven’t broken the boys yet, then they’re not going to,” said Holderman. “It’s like any other misery: it seems intolerable, and then you get used to it. Hell, by the time those two million soldiers finally break through, our guys won’t want to leave. They’ll be building themselves fishing lodges.”

  I laughed obligingly at this. The two captains didn’t know—and I didn’t want to worry them by telling them—how many men had come to me directly in their hunger and despair to request permission to try to break through the German lines at our rear and make it back to Division Headquarters. This would have been suicide, but the men clearly knew that, and I didn’t insult them by pointing that out. Instead I assured them that such adventures were better left to the scouts and that I needed them here. They always nodded in understanding and returned to their posts, but I knew that soon they’d stop asking and just leave.

  Marshall Peabody had died during the night. He’d held on far longer than any of us had expected and had remained lucid through his agony, taking occasional shots at the enemy until his hands grew too weak, then exhorting those around him to fight like hell. His destroyed leg was swollen and filthy, and it was obvious that infection would kill him if blood loss didn’t. As it happened, blood loss did; his tourniquet slipped, and he was gone.

  His death struck the few surviving men in his machine-gun company hard. Even wounded he had functioned as a moral center of gravity for the 306th, and when that gravity dissipated, they began to drift.

  Around midday Private Sidney Foss—a youth with thin lips and beady eyes who absolutely should not have been appearing at my command post at midday—appeared at my command post. He saluted perfunctorily and presented me with a note written on a field message pad. Major W, it said:

  If our people do not get here by noon, it is useless for us to keep up against these great odds. It’s a horrible thing to think of, but I can see nothing else for us to do but give up—The men are starving—the wounded, like myself, have not only had no nourishment but a great loss of blood. If the same thought may be in your mind, perhaps the enemy may permit the wounded to return to their own lines. I only say this because I, for one, cannot hold out longer, when cornered as we are it strikes me that it is not a dishonorable thing to give up.

  Revnes

  I read it a second time, very closely, then handed it to McMurtry without a word. He read it and returned it to me, and I folded it into my pocket.

  At the commencement of the Argonne Offensive, General Alexander had issued an order declaring that any man who called for his unit to retreat or fall back was a traitor who should be shot by his commander or by any patriot who happened to be in the vicinity. When I read it, I was stunned—under the Articles of War, it was flagrantly, almost luxuriantly illegal—and I opted to ignore it, the way one might ignore flatulence at a white-tie dinner. The order came back to me vividly as I read Revnes’s message, because at that time I was nurturing a strong impulse to walk over to his funkhole and put a bullet in his chest.

  “Looks as though Lieutenant Revnes is a little scared,” I said, as quietly as I could, then turned to Foss and asked, “Where will I find the lieutenant, Private?”

  McMur
try looked concerned. “Do you want me to—”

  “Stay here and rest your knee, Captain. This errand isn’t worth the discomfort.”

  Foss led me through the Pocket to where Revnes sheltered among other injured men. I had expected to find him reclining open-shirted, brooding like Byron, but instead he was pale and clenched, obviously suffering. Staring down at his crippled foot, I felt pity vie with rage.

  Revnes was seated next to Herman Anderson, a sergeant from my own Company A. Both men watched me sullenly, while the soldiers on either side of them shrank back to whatever extent their injuries would allow.

  “Now, listen, men,” I said. “Everything looks good for reinforcements to get through, and it will be a little matter of time before we rejoin the division. Please don’t be scared.”

  I didn’t have Revnes’s talent as an orator, but I think I did a fair job of addressing my entire audience while giving the impression that I was speaking to the three conspirators. I then reversed this approach and allowed the men to glimpse the degree to which I was restraining my anger. “You are probably all aware,” I said, “that Lieutenant Peabody died overnight. You will also remember the encouragement that he offered to all of us, even after being badly wounded. Not many of us are as brave as Lieutenant Peabody. But I think we can all appreciate his bravery and can resolve not to dishonor him by abandoning the example that he set. I hope every man here will continue his defense of our position with vigor and with pride, because—let me be quite clear—there is going to be no surrender. Sergeant Anderson, do you still have ammunition for your sidearm?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good,” I said with frightening cheer, and looked him full in the face. “If you see any signs of surrender from anybody—a white flag, upraised hands, anything like that—you shoot him.”