Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  Anderson looked as if he’d been slapped. “Yes, sir!” he said.

  Revnes grimaced but nodded in acknowledgment.

  I issued my customary assurances about the impending arrival of two million reinforcements and the resilience of the British at Lucknow and left the men to their thoughts. By then the applicability of the Lucknow episode had been lost even to me, but I went on repeating it. Though I’d never say it aloud, I’d begun to think instead of Leonidas dying with his Spartans at Thermopylae, Eleazar Ben Yair and his men killing one another rather than surrender at Masada, and Paladin Roland fighting to the death in Charlemagne’s rear guard at Roncesvalles. I could not resurrect my dead men, I could not restore their destroyed limbs and eyes and faces, but I could still safeguard the notion that their sacrifices had been made in service to some worthy end, even if it meant the loss of all that remained. We would fight until we were all dead. No other option was conceivable.

  As I was headed back to the command post, another German attack: machine guns strafed us with suspicious indifference, clearly providing cover for something—and there it was, a group of perhaps a dozen of the enemy who’d worked their way onto an overhanging cliff to fling grenades at us. I was lucky, spotted them quickly, got my whistle into my mouth at once. It was rare for our men to actually see gray German uniforms, and they opened fire with enormous pent-up anger and considerable accuracy. The Germans’ luck was as poor as ours was good: a couple had pulled the pins on their grenades as they were hit, and their fellows were unable to kick them off the ledge before they exploded. Gore rained on us, painting our faces as we cheered.

  What a thing to find joy in.

  I met McMurtry outside our funkhole, receiving a sergeant’s report regarding our casualties from the attack, which were thankfully few. As he turned to point out his best guess as to how the Germans had ascended the cliff, I was alarmed to see a dark line of blood down the back of his service coat.

  “What have you got there, George?”

  “How’s that?” He pivoted toward me again.

  “No, turn that way again, let me have a look.”

  Perplexed, he obliged. At the top of the dark line, between his right shoulder and his spine, an object protruded by a couple of inches. Without thinking I gave it a yank, and out it came: part of the wooden handle of a potato-masher grenade.

  McMurtry let forth a howl that must have been audible in Berlin. “Murder!” he screamed, turning on me with a rictus of shock. “If you do that again, I’ll wring your neck!”

  We stood looking at each other and at the bloody fragment in my hand, and both began laughing uncontrollably until everyone around us joined in. “I won’t do it again,” I reassured him once I could speak. “There’s only one. Go get it dressed. Didn’t you know you were wounded?”

  “Someone might have mentioned it to me,” he said and limped off.

  After their humiliation on the cliff, we expected retribution but were surprised that the enemy’s next assault was of a more psychological cast. Late in the day, Private Hollingshead—dirty, non-latrine-using Holly—materialized at the edge of the Pocket. He was blindfolded, using a cane, limping toward us while his free hand waved a white flag tied to the end of a stick. A cloth bundle hung from his neck; when he reached us, we opened it to find two packs of cigarettes, a loaf of black German bread, and a typewritten note.

  None of us had seen Hollingshead since that morning. He and seven other men from Company H had disappeared; to the limited extent that we thought about them at all, we assumed they had deserted. Unsurprisingly, they’d been captured by the Germans, who had decided to send only Hollingshead—the only one still ambulatory after the violence of their capture—back to us with a message.

  In the funkhole where McMurtry and I squatted with Holderman and Larney, Hollingshead poured out his story. “You know the airplanes?” he began, trying to keep eye contact with me and failing. “The ones been dropping packages nearby?”

  Our army had been trying to get supplies to us by air, but day upon day they’d missed the mark and the drops had landed behind enemy lines. Chocolate! the Germans would cry out as they opened the boxes. Chewing tobacco! Canned beef! Jam! Thank you, Americans! Please tell your pilots how we love their presents!

  “We know the airplanes,” I said. “Hurry it up.”

  “Well, a few of us went after them food parcels. Because an officer from Company H ordered us to.” This was a blatant lie; there were no officers left in Company H. “The Fritzies ambushed us. Four killed, four wounded. They asked us questions, but don’t worry, Major. We told ’em we outnumber ’em ten to one.”

  “I hope you lied to them better than you’re lying to me. Come to the point.”

  “They sent me back on the condition I deliver this message,” he said.

  In my bloodstained fingers, the linen paper’s pristine whiteness made it seem like an object from a more advanced civilization.

  The German commander had mistakenly addressed his message to the 2nd Battalion, but we took his meaning:

  Sir:

  The Bearer of the present, Lowell R Hollingshead has been taken prisoner by us on October 7. He refused to the German Intelligence Officer every answer to his questions and is quite an honourable fellow, doing honour to his father-land in the strictest sense of the word.

  He has been charged against his will, believing in doing wrong to his country, in carrying forward this present letter to the Officer in charge of the 2nd Batl. J.R. 308 of the 77th Div. with the purpose to recommend this Commander to surrender with his forces as it would be quite useless to resist any more in view of the present conditions.

  The suffering of your wounded man can be heared over here in the German lines and we are appealing to your human sentiments.

  A withe Flag shown by one of your men will tell us that you agree with these conditions.

  Please treat the Lowell R Hollingshead as an honourable man. He is quite the soldier we envy you.

  The German Commanding Officer

  I handed it to McMurtry, who read it and handed it to Holderman, who read it and handed it back to me. We looked at each other and smiled. “Private Larney,” McMurtry said, “this may be of interest to you.”

  For there was humor—sardonic and typically Teutonic—in this letter, particularly in the words “human sentiments.” We had plenty of human sentiments toward the enemy who had killed or wounded more than half of our besieged command over the past five days. But they were not sentiments likely to inspire acquiescence.

  McMurtry began to chuckle as he handed Larney the message, then to guffaw. “Hell and blazes, boys,” he said, “we’ve got ’em licked! Otherwise they wouldn’t have sent this!”

  Holderman grinned. “Combat failed, so now they’re begging!” he said. “We’ve got ’em right where we want ’em, Major.”

  Larney had taken on the bright-eyed look he got whenever he was working hard to memorize details for the diary he wasn’t supposed to be keeping. “You want me to write up a response, Major?” he said.

  The men had seen Hollingshead’s undignified return, and now a crowd had gathered to see what was afoot. I had to use the moment correctly.

  “They don’t deserve one. We’re Americans. We can’t surrender. Larney, I want you to take in the signal panels immediately. We can’t have them mistaken for white flags. Commanders, have the men keep anything white—bandages, handkerchiefs, anything—hidden away.”

  Once I was sure that I had made my point, I told the gathered men to go back to their posts, and word spread quickly. The sons of bitches! the men said, and Kiss our American asses! and far worse. We’ll never surrender!

  The Germans had miscalculated. Five straight days of torture had not broken us. This latest overture did not crush our resolve but rather set it aflame. The target of our suffering and anger now seemed hittable.<
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  There remained the matter of Hollingshead. “You had no business to leave your position under any circumstances without orders from a superior,” I told him. “And we’ll listen to no more lies about that. Go back to where you belong.”

  Hollingshead seemed half asleep, less humiliated by this debacle than he had been by the tree-shitting incident. Perhaps he’d used up all his shame. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Oh, sir, about this stuff.” He held up the bread and cigarettes. “Should I split . . . ? And how . . . ?”

  “No one else in this encampment,” Holderman said, forming his words with extreme precision, “will touch that fucking bread.”

  Hollingshead skulked back to his hole, ate his bread, and smoked one of the gold-tipped cigarettes that his captors had given him. He immediately became sick and began to complain. “Shut up,” I heard another man say. “Here you are, kicking because you’re puking. Hell, I ain’t got nothing in me to puke.”

  Larney returned from pulling in the panels. The men’s spirits were elevated; mine were not. “The Germans won’t like this much,” I said. “At this point they must attack. And it’ll be a big one. So be prepared.”

  “After all this pain,” said Larney, “you become like an animal.” More thoughtful, as ever, than most gave him credit for, he shook his head at the men’s profanity but also in fellow feeling. “Does one wild animal surrender to another?”

  The assault came before sundown. My men—little more than hungry scarecrows—repulsed it as if nothing gave them greater joy. Never mind that they were severely wounded or too weak to stand. Every man remaining steadied his aim and fired into the enemy. Those who could not hold weapons loaded the weapons of their fellows.

  When the Germans, confident of their victory, sent two soldiers with flamethrowers to finish us off, we shot them, the liquid fire sizzling through the underbrush, the soldiers carrying the weapons going up as torches. With the aid of the added illumination, we dispatched the rest in a tornado of rifle fire.

  Ammunition was running low. I heard Holderman cry again and again to charge bayonets, and the men did as he said, hungry for the chance to plunge a blade through German gray, to avenge their dead friends. Those with no bayonets used rifle butts or their boots and fists. Between airplanes and mustard gas and machine guns, every battle I had fought in to that point had felt terrifyingly modern, as if history had tipped off its axis. The killing that evening felt a thousand years old.

  The Germans must have thought they’d raised the dead. Frenzied and bleeding, bearded and tattered, the remnants of our battalion fought until the last German fled. Intoxicated by their own ferocity, the men collapsed into their holes and hugged their comrades and cheered their victory. The exultation was immeasurable, and transformative. I thought of folktales in which men become beasts in the light of the moon. Faces I had seen every day for months came toward me in the dark, and I did not recognize them, nor they me.

  If called to, we could not do it again. We had fewer than two hundred fifty men left with any strength, and it was no longer certain that they could be effective in battle. Five of our six machine guns were wrecked; even if they hadn’t been, they could serve only as clubs, since we had no ammunition.

  I let the men rest that night untroubled, or at least untroubled by me. A few were making out their wills—on field message pads and scraps of magazines, on Bible pages and strips of clothing. With no writing utensils around, they wrote their testaments in blood, available in abundance.

  On the morning of October 7, I asked for a volunteer to make his way back to Division Headquarters—a doomed job, I thought, if ever there were one, but I had no better options and no shortage of volunteers.

  I sent Abraham Krotoshinsky, a Jewish private from the Upton days, quick and brave, whom I trusted completely. “If you get through,” I told him, “tell them we have not surrendered but that help must be sent at once.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, so much shorter, looking up at me. “Can I leave most of my equipment behind?”

  “You’re the one doing this job,” I said. “Do it any way you please.”

  He saluted, clearly thrilled to be getting out of the Pocket, to be doing something other than defending himself. Like many of the men, he seemed to have concluded that death would be an improvement.

  I felt certain that that was the last I would see of Abe Krotoshinsky.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sometimes the moment we are about to cease believing in something is the moment that that thing proves itself to be true.

  Unbeknownst to me, even as I was sending Krotoshinsky on his way, my promised two million Americans were pushing up the Argonne Ravine to relieve us.

  By noon several companies had maneuvered through a gap in the German wire, and a lieutenant by the name of F. A. Tillman was leading Company B of the 307th Infantry Regiment northwest, supported by Companies A and M.

  I’d been worried that the relief forces, if they got close, wouldn’t be able to find us, but Tillman assured me afterward that our nauseating stench let him know he must be close.

  Upon arriving at the perimeter of the Pocket, he promptly fell into one of our sentries’ holes, landing on one of our men, who instinctively tried to kill him with a bayonet. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Tillman managed to choke. “I’m looking for Major Whittlesey.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” the sentry replied.

  “I’d rather not. Listen, you damn fool, you’re relieved. I’m with the 307th. We’ll have food up to you right away.”

  I was talking to McMurtry when the sentry ran up with the news. “Major, a lieutenant is here,” the private said. “He spoke the words we’ve been dreaming of for days.”

  I didn’t believe it and crawled to the perimeter to investigate, anticipating the springing of a German trap at every inch.

  But it was an actual fact. We were relieved.

  As if he were performing a vaudeville gag, Tillman produced a steak sandwich from his musette bag, and I stood eating it slowly until McMurtry, keen that something was up, found us.

  “For God’s sake, give me a bite of that!” he said, taking the sandwich from my hand.

  As we passed it back and forth, Tillman updated us on his advance to connect with on our right flank. “We’re pretty happy to rescue you,” he said, hale and blond, practically fat in comparison to our emaciation.

  “Rescue, hell,” I said, unable to stop myself. “If you had come up when we did, you wouldn’t have put us in this fix.”

  He didn’t reply to that, probably attributing my outburst to my being half crazy from the ordeal. He placed his men as a protective screen on the heights of the road, and McMurtry and I supervised the distribution of about sixty cans of corned beef hash to our officers, who measured out each mouthful to ensure that everyone got some.

  The wounded got fed first. I watched as realization dawned on the haggard men, most too stunned and too dehydrated to cry. Stepping from the funkholes that they had expected would be their graves, they shook hands with one another, spread the word, fell to their knees in prayer.

  “It’s like being reborn,” said Larney, trembling.

  “I feel like a cat,” said Holderman, slightly hysterical, “having all nine lives at once.”

  I handed the heel of the steak sandwich to McMurtry, who seemed to eat it in one bite, like a snake with a trick jaw. I felt an extraordinary lightness, like drunkenness but pure, as if I could float over this place of death, like a blimp above the Channel. I was happy. Truly happy.

  It would be one of the last times.

  CHAPTER 13

  CHER AMI

  In my first dream after the Pocket, I dreamt of a cemetery without name or end, and its tall columbarium, those memorial structures modeled on dovecotes, with small drawers set into the mausoleum walls: little crypts for the ashes of th
e dead.

  But in the dream each box contained the taxidermied body of a pigeon whom I had known and loved: President Wilson, Buck Shot, Fast Time, Lady Jane, Big Tom, Miss America, Thomas Hardy. Last but not least, my long-lost darling, Baby Mine.

  Some of the drawers contained the remains of men: Bill, and Whit, and Omer, and Nils, and Corporal Gault. Not their ashes but their bodies, stiff and shrunken like dolls, now no bigger than doves themselves.

  I’m not sure how I was opening those drawers.

  I woke up looking into the face of an army doctor with sandy hair and pimples on his nose. I woke up and thought, Am I a human now?

  Because they were doing human things to me, things I had heard of them doing to save wounded men. I could not believe I was not dead. Coming back into my body, seeing out of my single golden eye, trying to struggle upright, I realized that they had removed whatever had remained of my right leg. It tingled and pained, but there was no limb there, only air.

  I felt the veterinarian—he was a vet, I knew that, I was still a pigeon—stitching up my feathered breast as best he could.

  “He’s awake,” the sandy-haired man said. “Chloroform, please. We can’t have him thrashing.”

  A hand put a tiny cloth over my beak, stinking and faintly sweet, and I felt my consciousness vacate—a mercy, because the needle and thread passing through my flesh was too much, even for a racing homer accustomed to physical suffering.

  I dreamt again—of lavender clouds tinted with yellow, yellow clouds tinted with gray, silver clouds tinted with pink, clouds unscrolling in a sky of powdery blue, clouds I’d never fly among, not if I became human.

  When I next awoke, they had finished sewing and I was alone, nestled softly among paper and straw in a private cage. Not in the mobile loft with the other birds but in an office, atop a table near a potbellied stove. I felt not well by any means, but better.

  Before I remembered all that had happened—Bill gutshot, the walnut tree, the exploding shell, the bullets, the voice calling me back to Rampont—everything seemed distant but okay, like I was seeing it through a thick dawn fog, rosy and blurred. Then came clarity: what I’d been through and my present and permanent incompleteness. One eye, one leg.