Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  It was Abe Krotoshinsky, leading an officer from the 307th to our clearing. “I made it back to Division HQ like I said I would. I told ’em that you hadn’t given up, Major, and that they’d better come get you, and fast!”

  News of Krotoshinsky’s return passed through the clearing like a wave. Crazed with joy, the nearby men dragged themselves to their feet to hail and touch him, as if they were witnessing a miracle, and perhaps they were. A private named Fein—who’d been all but inseparable from Krotoshinsky since Camp Upton—clasped his arm and said maybe a dozen times, “Gee, I never thought I’d see you again!”

  I had to turn away to keep from crying.

  * * *

  • • •

  From writers: that’s how most of us citizen-soldiers had learned about war before we fought in one, whether that writing appeared in sensationalist magazines and cheap novels or in the Iliad and the Aeneid and the blood-soaked pages of the Old Testament.

  It seems childish now to confess, but my own notions of battle all came from literature. When we arrived in the Argonne, I viewed the landscape through the lens of the pastoral poems I knew, ticking off correspondences and variances. No shepherds or sheep but plenty of birdsong: larks in the morning, nightingales at night. Ravaged rustic houses. Rural landscapes sundered cataclysmically, to no apparent purpose.

  But the bold and hearty youths at least turned out to be much as the poets had described them—and I, chaste and masculine, had enjoyed the proximity to great male beauty. Et in Arcadia ego, though: Bill Cavanaugh, the best and most beautiful of them all, was gone, and his ugly death simultaneously confirmed the truth and proved the obscene inadequacy of those pretty verses. In life he had elevated all who served with him, and as he bled out shivering in my funkhole, the poison of war that killed him seeped into every good thing he had touched.

  It was fitting, then, that the story of the Lost Battalion was told not by bards plucking lyres but by a pack of harried journalists who scurried like chipmunks through our glade that morning, eventually finding me seated on a stump next to what must have looked like an unprepossessing group of grimy, bearded infantrymen.

  I had read these scribblers’ accounts of doughboys going over the top with “throaty cheers” and shouts of “Remember the Lusitania!”—descriptions that squared badly with my own memories of men marching forward while eating and smoking, yelling a far less romantic vocabulary. Tableaux like the one our rescuers found never made the papers or the newsreels. The dead looked so small, and there were so many. The living were weary and stinking, shambling when they could walk at all.

  The reporters seemed eager to get quotes from me, presumably since I’d been the commanding officer. I shooed them away; I didn’t want to talk. “Don’t write about me,” I said. “Write about these men. New Yorkers and westerners. All fine.”

  Most took the hint, resolving to content their editors with what I assumed—correctly—would be preposterous accounts of my valor and humility and racing off in the hope of filing their stories first.

  But one, a skinny fellow in a strange uniform, refused my brush-off. His hair was parted to the side and slicked across his wide forehead, and his ears stuck out like the handles of a jug. His lips were curled in a studied wry expression that suggested long experience with soldiers and with writing on deadline, an expression that I’d soon see belied his curiosity. His hair glinted in the sun with the shine of the well-fed.

  “Better get yourself some iron rats, Major, before you keel over,” he said, theatrically tucking away his notebook to show that we were now just two guys talking. “You want to take care of these mugs, sure. And just maybe you figure having something to do is the only thing still keeping you on the rails after the hell you went through. I’m seeing this a few times now, Major. My advice, for whatever it may be worth? If you’re gonna crack up, do it soon. You’ll get back on your feet faster.”

  I glared at him for his presumptuousness, then realized that he was trying to provoke me. For some reason I resented this ploy less than I appreciated his willingness to engage, to talk to me like a man instead of a monument. “You’ve seen this, have you?” I said with a vague wave at the reeking, cratered clearing. “A few times now?”

  He smiled. “Well, not this exactly, Major,” he said. “Nobody has quite been seeing this since maybe the Battle of Agincourt.”

  “Is that how you plan to write it up? ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’?”

  “That, more or less, is the angle I’m working, all right.” He extended a hand, which I took. I had forgotten that human skin could be so clean. “Runyon is the name,” he said. “With the New York American.”

  “Runyon,” I said. I pictured myself in Mrs. Sullivan’s parlor on a summer morning some years earlier, reading every word of a piece that I’d meant only to glance at. “Damon Runyon? I’ve read your writing on baseball. I’m not very interested in baseball, but I’ve read it.”

  “At your service,” he said, touching his cap. “I have stepped away from the stickball beat these days, as you can tell.”

  “Bad luck for you, I’m afraid. You’ll have to find another fellow for your Prince Hal. I’ve said all I need to say today.”

  “Sure about that, Major?” he said, patting the pocket where the notebook had gone. “The story gets written regardless. You prefer not to give me a quote, which is okay. This army is full of guys who love to see their name in the paper and who heard you say something one time, or think they heard you say it, or anyway can imagine you saying it, and what I need can be had from them. Now, I do not care to write bunkum, Major, so I wanted to chin with you for a minute to get the fix on what sort of egg you are. Neither do I make threats—not against war heroes anyway—so I will not have you thinking that that is what this is. I just want to tell you what is about to happen before it in fact happens.”

  Given the state I was in, it took me a moment to follow what he was saying. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Just write it up and leave me out of it. If you need a hero, there must be twenty or thirty men in this valley who’ll fill the bill. George McMurtry. Neb Holderman. Krotoshinsky. Cepaglia. What do you need me for?”

  Runyon looked as confused as I was. Then he laughed, not unkindly. “Sorry, Major,” he said. “That particular horse has already come to exit that particular barn. While you were busy trying to keep your guys alive, ink-slingers like me were making you famous from Paris clear to Honolulu.”

  I felt nauseous. For the past few days, I had mostly forgotten that a world still persisted outside the war, and now that world was rushing at me before I’d had a chance to think about rejoining it. “Runyon,” I said, trying to strike a sincere balance between kidding and serious, “as you may know, I’m an attorney in my civilian life. When you’re drafting your story, you may wish to consider the ease with which I can litigate.” I forced a toothy smile, which I imagine was perturbing. “That was a threat. Now, with the understanding that everything we say is off the record, can you tell me how the hell it came to be that everybody knows who I am?”

  “Sure thing, Major,” he said. “That only seems fair. Mind if I have a seat?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he sank to the dirt beside my stump, folded his legs, lit two cigarettes, and handed one to me. I hesitated, then took it, sucking hungrily at the tobacco and collapsing in a coughing fit. He waited for me to finish before he spoke again.

  “Probably one out of every three reporters covering the Argonne,” he said, “is a guy like me, in the employ of some New York paper.”

  “Which basically makes you press agents for the 77th Division,” I said, “given how many of our men hail from New York.”

  “The army pays a sight better than what Mr. Hearst will give me,” Runyon said, grinning to reveal a set of surprisingly white teeth. “Otherwise you are on the trolley. I know the 308th has many a westerner, too, but San
Diego to Omaha is a hell of a paper route, so New York is where our bread gets buttered. You really are as smart a guy as they say.”

  “Flattery’s appreciated,” I said. “Though it will get you no comment.”

  “A fellow can’t be blamed for trying,” he said. “But yes, whatever the five boroughs’ very own National Army Division does is damn well interesting to folks back home. Plays pretty good in Mr. Hearst’s other papers at that. When your tenement boys turn out to be the best backwoodsmen this side of Daniel Boone, for instance . . . well, that sells a subscription or two.”

  “Because nobody expected it.”

  “Nobody,” he said. “No offense meant. You fellows are full of surprises, and that always makes great copy. But Kidder Mead is the gent you really have to thank for your newfound notoriety. Know him? New York World before he enlists, now a press officer for First Corps. Hell of a newspaperman. You’ll like him, Major: another fellow does his job a bit too well for his own good. The guy writes two releases a day, and they all read like dime novels. Anyway, early this week a UP reporter following the 77th gets wind of the pinch you and your guys are in and cables it to the bureau. His editor comes back with, ‘Send more on Lost Battalion!’ And the name sticks. The generals do not seem to like it very much—a lot about this episode will be hell to explain if anybody pushes them on it, which nobody will—but this fellow Mead, he picks headlines like handicappers pick horses, and he is never wrong. So he plays up the Lost Battalion angle. And that, my friend, is how you and your men come to be a batch of bona fide heroes.”

  As Runyon lit another cigarette off the one he was finishing, I watched the other reporters rove among the survivors. “What if we’d been wiped out?” I asked. “We very well might have been. How would Mead and the rest of you tell the story then?”

  He shrugged, then removed the spent smoke from his lips, crushing it out on his boot heel. “Well, in such a case, it is no longer Agincourt,” he said. “Instead we have the Alamo of the Argonne. The bigwigs can use that, too. Just like they used the Lusitania. The important thing is that you guys do not surrender. That is everything in a war like this. A war that is frankly, if you will pardon the expression, a fucking mess.”

  “Can’t print that in a family paper.”

  “Add that,” he said, “to the quite lengthy list of absolutely true things you can’t print in a family paper. Listen, Major, on the level, things are about to become very strange for you and your men. Up till this week, you are just pieces on the checkerboard: dispensable, sure, but at least you know what your mission is. Now you are the big story. Something that nobody ever talks about is this: the folks back home are fretting not just about what to do if Johnny never comes marching home again but also about what to do if he does. They know that a very bad business is in progress over here, and they are scared about what exactly it does to their fine sons. The army is in sore need of guys like you, to show that it is all okay, that the sweet fellows who come over are the same sweet fellows who come back. And the showing of that is a mission with no end. If I know the newspaper business, you and your men are going to be watched for the rest of your lives. Every time one of you passes through any turnstile whatsoever—birth, marriage, death, new job, political appointment—your picture will be in the papers next to two or three columns, probably not too accurate, about the Lost Battalion. Are you following me?”

  I nodded. “It’ll be the same sort of hullabaloo that England makes over the survivors of the Light Brigade.”

  “You really are a brainy one,” said Runyon. “Williams and Harvard? But your snoot isn’t up in the air. Watch your step, Major, or you could end up a congressman. You got a doll at home, waiting by the fire?”

  I gave him the rueful laugh that was my set response to this question, the one I’d been rehearsing since high school. “Nope,” I said. “No doll, no dame, no tomato, no broad. However the current parlance puts it.”

  “Damn shame,” said Runyon. “For both of us, that is. These stories always play better with a love angle. But this is off the record anyway, right? Speaking of which, if you will excuse me, Major, I need to go find someone I can quote.”

  “Naturally,” I said, shaking his hand as he stood, relieved that he was leaving. “Thanks for giving me the lay of the land.”

  “Thank you, Major,” he said. “For your time and for what you did here. When the army starts slinging the applesauce—and it will—try to remember that you held these fellows together and got them through. Good luck to you.”

  And he shuffled away, cool but eager. It was obvious that everyone was going to talk to him, and I hoped for the best result.

  * * *

  • • •

  Not long after Runyon and I parted ways, I looked up to see Major General Alexander himself stomping toward me across the clearing, holding a starched handkerchief to his nose to shield it from the stench. His small eyes squinting, his eyebrows knit in a permanent frown, he congratulated me in his gravelly voice. I saw no cause for congratulations, but I thanked him.

  “I’m pleased to promote you to the rank of lieutenant colonel, effective immediately,” he said. He held out his hand to his adjutant, who filled its palm with my new insignia, silver oak clusters to replace gold. He took a half step forward as if to pin them to the shoulder loops of my ruined uniform, then realized that my height, which exceeded his by more than a foot, would require him to stand on my tree stump to do so. He grabbed my wrist instead, thrust them into my hand, and clapped me on the elbow as if trying to rouse me from unconsciousness.

  Given that over half the men under my command were dead, promotion was the last thing I felt I deserved. I wondered for a moment whether the army would have made me a full colonel had none of my men survived.

  I thanked Alexander again.

  Reticence makes the talkative awkward; they trip trying to fill the silence. Even when they’re major generals. “What a godforsaken pit you had your men dig into, Whittlesey,” said Alexander, his arms akimbo, looking from the hill to the brook and back.

  “It was actually rather pleasant when we arrived, sir,” I said.

  “Had you made it a bit farther, past that road,” he said, pointing north, “then our 1st Army airplanes wouldn’t have had such a hard time finding you in this thicket.”

  Rage narrowed my peripheral vision, like black tunnels closing in, a rage I hadn’t known I felt. My pistol-bruised fist tightened around the new silver leaves, and I struggled against the impulse to hurl them into the mud—or to stuff them down the general’s throat. My mouth fell open in a snarl as my mind assembled a response likely to land me in the stockade.

  But Zip Cepaglia spoke before I did. “First Army artillery sure found us real good, General,” he said. “Found us no problem.”

  Alexander wheeled like a hunting dog in the direction of Cepaglia’s voice. Cepaglia stepped forward, chin up, to save him the trouble of guessing. The general stalked toward him but shifted his attitude as he became conscious of the many reporters within earshot.

  “My boy,” he said, laying a paternal hand, thick and pawlike, on Cepaglia’s wiry shoulder. “That was not our artillery that fell on your position. It was the French. The French! Let’s have no confusion about that.”

  He turned and raised his voice, speaking partly to the men, partly to the newspapers, mostly to himself. “You men have had a hell of a week,” he said. “A hell of a week indeed. And we won’t forget it! No we won’t. You’ve made your nation proud.”

  The men were not favorably impressed by this performance, beyond being moved to try it themselves. “You hear that, Sarge?” J. J. Munson all but shouted, ostensibly to Red Cullen, who was standing right next to him. “It was the French that shelled us! Don’t that just beat all?”

  “Well, I’ll be,” said Cullen at the same volume. “I wonder how in the hell they got set up southeast of us when they were s
upposed to be southwest, on our left flank?”

  “I guess war’s plumb full of goddamn mysteries, ain’t it, Sarge?” said Munson.

  The general marched away, pretending not to hear, just as the men were pretending not to be speaking to him. I looked over at my three soldiers and tried to give them a cautioning smile, but with each flash of the sun off Alexander’s spotless boots my mind returned to the helpless fury I’d felt while we were being shelled: the inferno of noise, the enemy watching in glee. Through all their cruelty, I never harbored an anger toward the kaiser’s troops to match what I felt toward my own commanders at that moment.

  It was a good lie, whoever had come up with it. Blaming the Germans wasn’t an option—too many incriminating duds still littered our funkholes—but since the French 75-millimeter gun was also the main field weapon of the American artillery, guilt could be plausibly shifted in that direction. No one who’d actually been in the Pocket would believe the explanation, but that didn’t matter. We were symbols now, no longer in control of our own stories.

  After we got back to the States, many former members of the Lost Battalion would drift into my law office and beg me to lead a campaign to set the record straight. Forget it, I’d tell them, The war’s over. Leave it in the past. Make a life for yourself. Advice I was no better able to follow than they were. They’d leave unsatisfied.

  I hope these men were pleased when, a couple of years later, the army finally confessed that its own shells had indeed done the most grievous harm to the soldiers in the Pocket. By that time I myself was indifferent, well beyond satisfaction.

  * * *

  • • •

  After watching General Alexander tramp through the clearing, receive and return salutes, and address a pack of reporters, Runyon among them, I became aware of a voice beside me.

  “Major,” said Cepaglia, low but insistent, as though he might have been saying it a while. “I done a thing that’s maybe bad, and I want to talk about it. Okay?”