Corporal Gault—who was seated at a desk across the small office, the kitchen of a converted village house—heard me stirring and came over to stroke my head, unable to hold me because I was wrapped in a bandage. His kind eyes stared down at my maimed and ungainly body, and he forced a smile beneath his chestnut mustache.
“The bandage is to keep you from pecking at your stitches,” he said. “My poor Cher Ami.” His face seemed enormous, corpulent, but I realized that I had just grown accustomed to the starving men I’d left in the Pocket, their skin taut against their skulls.
Gault kept up with his duties—supplying the mobile lofts with food and water, retrieving messages whenever bells chimed—but seemed to spend all his free time talking to me. “You’re a hero, do you know that?” he said. “You’re famous. The most famous pigeon that ever flew. You’re in all the papers, from the Stars and Stripes on up to The New York Times. Look down if you don’t believe me.”
Sure enough, the crumpled newsprint insulating the bottom of my cage contained headline after headline about my death-defying flight, partially obscured by excrement and a few drops of my blood.
“Don’t worry about the mess,” said Gault. “I’m keeping my own clippings. So’s every pigeon man in Signal Corps, probably. These are just for you.”
Though perplexed that Gault had lined the cage with the papers rather than hanging them where they’d be easier to see, I appreciated the gesture—and he’d assumed that I couldn’t read them. From the datelines I deduced that I’d been slipping in and out of consciousness for several days.
“Now take a peep at this,” said Gault. He removed something from his pocket and held it up to show me: a tiny wooden leg. “A guy in the Quartermaster Corps who’s handy with a knife made it for you. To thank you for everything. He says he’s not sure if he got it right on the first go, but he’ll keep at it until it works. As soon as the doc says you’re ready, you can try it on. With some practice I think you’ll be able to walk again—and land, too.” Gault shook his head, his voice soft and wondering. “They’re treating you like you’re a regular soldier. Better than they treat some humans, I guess. You’re a lucky bird! But you deserve it. The Lost Battalion sure was lucky to have you.”
Gault was speaking to himself more than to me, puzzling over questions that would come to occupy me for much of the next hundred years. At the time, though, I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I didn’t want to be human. I only wanted to know what had become of some of my favorite humans, what had happened to the men after I’d flown home.
I cocked my head in curiosity, and Gault seemed to become conscious of the deficiencies in the newspaper accounts. After a pensive silence, he told me what had happened.
Following the halt of the friendly barrage, it had taken 1st Army a few days to fight their way to Whit and the Lost Battalion. They’d dispatched the Fiftieth Aero Squadron to try to establish the men’s position and reopen communications by parachuting in a crate of pigeons, but one of the aviators got shot in the neck and the birds were never dropped. Thus, when reinforcements finally reached the Pocket, they weren’t sure what they would find.
What they found was a scene of horror that had been unimaginable even to seasoned soldiers. The smell had reached them first. Men who knew about such things from their civilian lives likened it to a slaughterhouse, one that had never been cleaned. The distribution of food to survivors was greatly aided by the fact that none among the relieving force could imagine eating in the presence of that stench; they happily gave up their rations.
Medics who’d seen every type of violence done to human bodies on the Western Front had still never before encountered so many wounds that had been festering for so long. They took regular breaks in their ministrations to vomit. Worst of all was the unsettling sense that the usual triage categories had been blurred beyond recognition: the Lost Battalion couldn’t be easily sorted into the walking wounded, the invalid, and the dead. A soldier who’d taken a shrapnel ball through the chest might fully recover, while another fellow shot in the hand might be dead of blood poisoning within the hour. Life and death commingled, traded places, relaxed their borders. Even the few men who had come through the incident largely unhurt looked like shades, greeting the new arrivals with yellowed grins and vacant eyes.
* * *
• • •
Of the 600 or so who went into the Pocket, only 194 emerged on foot, with another 144 carried out on stretchers. The rest were dead or vanished into the woods. Trapped in that confined space, the battalion had buried the corpses in a shallow grave near where the wounded lay until they lacked the manpower for even that. When the relievers arrived, they buried the putrefying dead wherever they had fallen.
“Only one pigeon man came through,” Gault said, his eyes shining. “Omer Richards. The rest didn’t survive.”
Bill Cavanaugh, my sweetest human friend, was dead. This was news I had already intuited, but hearing it was like being shot again. I huddled in my nest and closed my eye.
“That’s right, Cher Ami,” said Gault, placing a cloth over my cage, his voice growing muffled. “Rest up and get your strength back.”
That night I dreamt of John on Wright Farm. During my racing days, he always promised that I would make a name for myself, and it seemed that I had, to a far greater extent than he ever could have imagined. In the dream John was smiling, silent. He certainly knew about my famous flight, but I had no way to reach him except in dreams, no way to hear what he’d say about my achievement, no way to learn what became of his son.
Corporal Gault told me that my name would live forever in American history.
Forever, I can say now from inside my display here in the sleeping Smithsonian, turns out to be a lot less long than it sounds. Almost nobody remembers me now.
Truly nobody remembers the Mocker, a gargantuan cream-colored bird, fluffy as an overstuffed pillow, whom I met during my convalescence at Rampont. Gault brought him in and set him on the table next to me at the beginning of November, when the shortening days cast the converted kitchen in violet shadows.
“This gentle giant flew fifty-two missions before being wounded,” said Gault by way of introduction, turning the great bird’s cage to face me. “We can’t put you together, lest you mess each other’s dressings, but maybe you’d like the company.”
A good idea in theory but less than satisfying in practice. Though the Mocker’s wounds were less severe than mine from a bodily standpoint, they were mentally much worse. He’d lost his left eye and part of his cranium to a rifle bullet; the vet had given him a lopsided turban of gauze to protect his exposed brain where the bullet had carried the bone away. The bandage swooped down over his missing eye, and the other didn’t focus on anything.
I tried to strike up a conversation. “Fifty-two missions!” I said, looking into his face, drab and void. “You’re a much bigger hero than I ever was. And I don’t just mean your size.”
“I was born in 1917,” he said, puffing his chest. “My name is the Mocker.”
I blinked at him, puzzled by his response, and tried again. “It seems that we’re both lacking an eye,” I said. “I find that I’m adjusting, but I won’t really know until I’ve flown again. I’m terribly anxious about it, to be quite honest. How long has it been since your injury?”
“I was born in 1917,” he said. “My name is the Mocker.”
Over and over. To every question.
He recovered more rapidly than I did. After two weeks they put him on a transport ship among thousands of wounded men and sent him to the Army Signal Corps pigeon lofts in New Jersey, a place that I wouldn’t see for months.
Along the way the army awarded him a Distinguished Service Cross, and the French gave him the Croix de Guerre, both of which he damn well deserved, but I was happy to see him go. Through no fault of his own, he gave me the creeps. His missing brain chunk must have contained t
he better part of his personality, because the husk of the bird I met was utterly unreachable.
Many years later, when a lay historian with a particular interest in homing pigeons came to see me at the Smithsonian, I overheard her say that the Mocker died on June 15, 1937. That can’t be right, I thought, but she went on to confirm it: he’d been the last of us pigeon heroes of what was then still known as the Great War, though with armies massing in Europe again it wouldn’t be for much longer. He lived for almost twenty years in that eerie eternal state.
Shortly after the announcement of the unbelievable Armistice, Corporal Gault rushed in, radiant with good news. “Not only is the war over,” he said, “but they’re sending us away, Cher Ami, away from this backwater! We’re going south, to a hospital on the Riviera!”
“I was born in 1917,” said the Mocker. “My name is the Mocker.”
“We’re not taking you, I’m afraid, my huge heroic friend,” said Gault, for all the difference it made. “But, Cher Ami, you’re renowned enough to merit a personal escort, namely me. I’m to stay there tending to you and overseeing the other recovering birds! You’re my feathery ticket out, dear friend. You’ve earned us warmth and sunshine.”
I had heard of the army hospitals in the South of France, first from President Wilson at the lofts in Langres, cocky President Wilson who somehow knew everything, and then from the men of the various battalions to which I’d been attached, who spoke of them often. They featured among the myriad stories that Whit had used to comfort his injured men, saying, You’re going to make it. You’ll be down on the Riviera while we’re still soaking through these woods.
I was keen to be going, mostly because it meant that I was finally well enough to travel and that soon I could start training again—for my own well-being, not for resumption of the horrible business of battlefield messaging. But mostly I was happy for Corporal Gault, who was fairly afloat at the prospect of relocation to that airy southern clime that the men spoke of like a land in a fairy tale.
* * *
• • •
The Riviera was a landscape that encouraged enchantment.
Once upon a time, a busted-up blue pigeon who most men mistook for a cock, who had been grievously injured but by some magic survived, went with her human protector to a rainbow land of azure sea and turquoise sky and shimmery cliffs and the scratchy-fresh smells of wild lavender and thyme. Fishing boats and palm trees, jasmine and mimosas.
In the vast army lofts near one of the hospitals where Corporal Gault oversaw us—recuperating birds from across the Western Front—the hot, high drafts of scent intoxicated us. Our tolerance for beauty was so low, given the grim gray ditch we’d come from, that almost any hint of loveliness would have sufficed to make us drunk.
And amid that profusion of perfume and color, I was still able to detect the smell of white roses at the edge of happiness.
In the luster of the Mediterranean light, Baby Mine basked.
At first I could not believe my eye, thinking perhaps that my lack of depth perception was causing me to imagine things. But as I inched closer, hobbling unevenly between my real leg and my wooden one, I could see her pink-tinted feathers and intelligent beak. I wanted to fly to her, hesitating only because of my wounds. My beechwood prosthesis gave me the staggering gait of a tortoise, translating my former grace into pitiful comedy. But this was no time for vanity. I called out her name.
She turned and flew to my side, and the air we breathed became oxygenated with joy.
“Cher Ami!” she said. “Dear Friend. Your name is like the start of a letter that a soldier might write. Whenever I carried a message for the army, I imagined that I could send one to you, too, and I thought of what it might say. It helped me get through, I’m sure of it. But what happened to you? Are you in much pain?”
“I am,” I said, honest with her, as I always was and would always be. “It’s low in the background, a smoldering fire but always there. I’m all right, though. I’m surprised you recognized me.”
“Of course I did,” she said, our wings touching.
“You look unchanged,” I said. “But none of us is unchanged. You’re recuperating?”
“Somehow I wasn’t wounded,” she said in her ashy voice. “I’m here because of my dumb lungs. From all that damp in the trenches—all that northern French rain—they got infected again. But Gault thinks the Côte d’Azur will cure me if anything can.”
“Gault knows what he’s doing,” I said. Suddenly self-conscious, I dipped my beak to smooth the feathers over the scar on my breast. “I’m sorry that I look this way.”
“It makes me sad,” she said, tilting her head to gaze evenly into both my remaining eye and my feathered-over socket. “You’re too smart for me to lie to you, and I’m too smart to think you’d to want me to. But I’ll say this honestly: to be grotesque is to possess an almost magical ugliness. Now you possess it.”
I kissed her neck with my beak. “I’m still myself,” I said. “Even more now than before. I love that you understand that.”
She kissed me back with a certain solemnity. “I’ve learned that everything that thinks and feels,” she said, “grows by subtraction. Detachment brings perspective. Wisdom comes from letting go. It’s true for humans, too, but most of them seem to struggle with it.”
“Their world is very complicated,” I said.
“They’ve made it that way. Just look at what they’ve done.”
At first I thought she was talking about the war—which was all but erased by our current surroundings, present only in the injuries it had inflicted, transformed into a symptom, or a specimen, not unlike the transformation I’d undergo later, upon arrival at the Smithsonian—but she wasn’t. She was talking about the lofts, the hospital, the hotels, the streets, the harbor, the palms that lined the quays—the entire human project to remake the world, of which the war was a shadowy, ineradicable part. We watched it in silence for a while, marveling at the sweetness and sadness that underlay all we saw.
“I wish I could let go of this feeling,” I said. “The sense of being at war. They say the war’s over, but it doesn’t feel over. It feels like it was always there and always will be. Do you know what I mean?”
She nodded her glossy head. “It’s hard to put aside the anticipation and dread. The thought that the next minute might be your last. You learn that when you’re under fire—the agitation keeps you alive—but when all the shooting stops, you can’t unlearn it. It lives in you, just like the voice that tells you to fly home. But it’s over now, Cher Ami. It can’t hurt any of us anymore.”
As she finished, we both jumped at a voice that came from behind us—startling, even though it was familiar.
“President Wilson,” said President Wilson, “reporting for duty at the Langres loft reunion.”
Though wounded, he was still black as an oil slick and authoritative as ever. Aside from the eye, the two of us had been shot in exactly the same spots, only his damage had all been sustained on the opposite side of his body: my dark mirror of injury. He regarded us boldly, with no self-consciousness, as he told us his tale.
“I was assigned to the Tank Corps at first,” he said. “Sometimes they dropped me from airplanes to men on the front lines. Things got most exciting when they transferred me to the 1st Division. I saved the lives of many soldiers. But I owe my present appearance to my final mission. November fifth.”
“Oh, no,” said Baby Mine. “Only six days before the Armistice.”
“Fate, she is cruel,” said President Wilson. “Some infantry units on the Verdun front became cut off. They sent me with their coordinates so the army could locate them. I found my way to my loft at Cuisy through fog and heavy fire. The Germans gave me these souvenirs—”
He stretched to his full height to give us better views of his absent foot and the bare patch on his breast, his black feathers glinting in th
e honeyed sun.
“—but I got my message through.”
We filled him in on our own experiences. Always attentive to his keepers’ discussions, he had heard about the Lost Battalion, but like all who got their news from official outlets, he had no sense of the true dimensions of the horror that occurred in the Pocket. For once he seemed to be at a loss for a response.
So the three of us fell silent, looking at one another and out toward the sea, watching a few white cloud puffs hurry toward Corsica. Learning to accept again that life could be pretty.
* * *
• • •
The following two months unspooled like an idyll. The loft men all believed I was male, so they did not think to interfere with the fact that Baby Mine and I had mated up. If anything, they thought our union sweet: war pigeons in love.
I learned to fly again, thanks to the patient training of Corporal Gault. When not swimming through the aquamarine sky, I whiled away the hours catching up with President Wilson and Baby Mine. We talked about the pleasant features of our present, and we could speak freely about the unpleasant features of our past, which was a solace. Gault never had us fly significant distances, and Rampont receded in my mind, supplanted by our clement new home.
One day in December, still warmer and sunnier than anywhere we’d come from, an unfamiliar human voice wafted in through the wire squares of the flypen where Baby Mine and I exercised. “I heard you were here, Cher Ami,” it said.
I flew to the perch nearest the man: a soldier in a wheelchair, being pushed by a nurse with marcelled red hair that peeked from her white cap. Both of the man’s legs were missing below the knees.
He looked surprised that I had responded to him, that I seemed to be—and in fact was—listening to what he had to say. The flash of delight in his eyes was pushed aside by grief and doubt, and the nurse placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Page 24