Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  “On such a happy occasion as this,” said President Wilson, fluffing his feathers, “might one be forgiven for wishing that human bigotry be suspended for the day? Or for a few hours, at least?”

  I agreed. Some among the 308th became quite vocal in their racism after the Small Pocket incident, during which a Negro regiment, the 368th, had been unable to advance to cover their flank, thereby becoming a convenient repository of blame after Whittlesey and his men were surrounded. As a few fair-minded soldiers pointed out, given that the 368th had been furnished little training and even less proper equipment than its white counterparts and had been ineptly led by its white commanders against an unusually tough German position, it had performed quite creditably under the circumstances. This, however, had not been an argument that most of the regiment was prepared to entertain, and it was swiftly buried in the self-serving nonsense of officers’ reports. I thought about telling President Wilson this story as the parade came to an end—it was rare that I knew about something he didn’t—but didn’t see the point.

  The alleged failure of the 368th at Binarville, coupled with the manifest unwillingness of most white American soldiers to serve with Negro units, persuaded the army to assign those units to the more legitimately egalitarian French, where they generally excelled. One in particular, the extensively decorated 369th—the first American unit to reach the Rhine—hailed from the very neighborhoods where our parade concluded. A few weeks earlier, they had paraded this same route up Fifth Avenue into Harlem to be met by cheering crowds and signs reading MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY. President Wilson and I wouldn’t hear a word spoken about them until many years later, during our mutual tenure at the Smithsonian.

  From atop his steed, Major General Alexander made a show of reviewing his troops a final time: twenty-five thousand hands saluting him spiffily.

  In the mild unruliness that ensued, the men falling out of formation, I saw Whittlesey full on, his body in shadow, his face in light, looking even taller in his peaked cap. The right kind of eye contact can feel tactile, like being physically touched, and so it was when the pale blue eyes behind Whit’s spectacles met my remaining golden one. An unmistakable thought passed between us: That one, I fear, is not long for this world.

  “Corporal,” Whit said, tapping Gault’s shoulder, “I know that bird! Cher Ami, I mean.”

  “Everyone does, Colonel Whittlesey,” Gault said, laughing, then holding our basket toward Whit for a better look. “Just like everyone knows you. It’s an honor to meet you.”

  “Thank you,” said Whit. He didn’t quite seem to be listening, just staring fixedly at me, although I knew he had stopped seeing me. I knew what—whom—he was thinking of. I was thinking of Bill, too.

  “I—” Gault said, then cleared his throat. “I was on duty when Cher Ami came in with your message, sir. I telephoned it to Major Milliken, my CO, and he rang the 152nd to stop them. Cher Ami flew fast, sir—very fast, when you consider the shape he was in—and we relayed the message right away. I know they say it was the French, sir, but I know it was us. I think it’s terrible, the way the army has—”

  “She,” said Whit.

  “Sir?”

  “The shape she was in,” said Whit. His reedy voice, slightly raised, sounded both distracted and unhinged. “Corporal, on behalf of all of us who were in the Charlevaux Ravine, I’d like to thank you for your fast and accurate handling of my message. As bad as the incident was, it might have been a good deal worse. I’m satisfied that you and your commanders did a fine job, and I hope you’ll give them my thanks.”

  “Thank you, sir. That will come as a great rel—”

  “Now, about Cher Ami,” said Whit. “May I have that pigeon, please? I understand that she would need to be formally designated as surplus material. I’m familiar enough with the process, and I’m happy to assist with the administrative end of it.”

  Gault froze, his mouth agape.

  I flapped my wings to get the men’s attention and poked my head between the basket’s wide warps, cooing to signal that I was in favor of this idea.

  “What on earth are you doing?” asked President Wilson. “Have you gone mad? That officer won’t know a blasted thing about keeping birds.”

  “He’d learn,” I said.

  President Wilson was correct, of course: there was no way that Whit could take care of me remotely as well as Gault and his colleagues at the Camp Vail lofts, especially given the special care that my injuries required. That didn’t matter to me. I was in pain all the time, not sure how much longer my body would hold up even in the custody of the army’s best veterinarians. And I felt as though Whit and I belonged together.

  Understandably, Gault decided to take the request as a joke. “Oh, that’s a good one, Colonel,” he said. “But these little fellows can be a lot of trouble and a real mess besides. Wouldn’t you rather have a dog?”

  “No,” said Whit, and then he stopped to cough rackingly before going on. “I have some sense of what would be required. I knew her handler, a man called Bill Cavanaugh. Very knowledgeable. Enthusiastic. Perhaps I could assist you as a volunteer first, until I know the ropes. I work as an attorney, but I can come to New Jersey on weekends. I’m sure I could learn to take excellent care of her.”

  “I understand, sir,” said Gault, although he clearly did not. “I’ll check with command and let you know.”

  Whit flinched, coming back to himself, like someone who’d been drifting off to sleep, speaking without realizing it. “Sorry,” he said. “What’s your name, Corporal?”

  “Gault, sir. George Gault.”

  “My apologies, Gault. I’m afraid I got a bit carried away by my comic scenario. I’m a New Englander, and our senses of humor are very dry. And I must admit that I’m a bit overcome by the sight of my old pigeon comrade.”

  “That’s quite all right, Colonel,” said Gault. “The two of you went through hell together.”

  Whit put a finger through a gap to stroke my wing, and I could feel a small but constant tremor, one that his fellow men couldn’t see but that went to the core of him. He bent his towering frame to lean closer, and I saw myself reflected in his spectacles. “You’re looking well,” he said, “all things considered.”

  “The Vet Corps really performed a miracle on him—on Cher Ami,” said Gault, avoiding the question of my sex without conceding the point. “And that wooden leg really works. I wouldn’t have guessed. Cher Ami is flying quite well. Getting used to the missing eye, too.”

  But Whit wasn’t talking to Gault; he was talking to me. “Thank you, dear friend,” he said. “I’m glad of the chance to see you one last time, for old times’ sake.”

  I often wish that humans could understand me, but rarely so painfully as in that moment. Though I spent only a few days with him in the Argonne—scarcely more than a week—Whit had impressed me as one of the finest men I’d encountered: brave and capable, perceptive and kind. His participation in the war helped me understand the genuine values that humans used to justify it, and seeing the waste it made of him—even after it left his body all but unscathed—convinced me of its essential malevolence, its ability to shape individual and collective human will to its destructive purposes, rather than the other way around. I wanted to tell him that.

  I wanted to tell him that when we made our separate Channel crossings into France, we’d both been younger than seemed imaginable; a few months after the Armistice, we were both old beyond our years. Our status as heroes had made us strangers to ourselves, transfiguring us into icons of victory, undefeated and indestructible, not subject to the limits of living beings. But so too had fame’s spotlight pinned a shadow to each of us that no one else could see, an uninvited guest who sat at our meals, woke us from rest, and impelled us to return again and again to the battlefields we thought we had escaped.

  I wanted to tell him that I understood.

&n
bsp; “Good-bye, Corporal,” Whit said, forcing a funny little smile. “Thanks for putting up with my jest. Good-bye, Cher Ami. A finer bird never flew the skies.”

  His voice broke with what might or might not have been another cough, and he hastened away without waiting for Gault’s reply. I watched him go, moving steadily through men he had commanded and men he hadn’t, waving and returning salutes, until he made an abrupt turn and almost collided with another soldier, one nearly as tall as he. The two men spoke, then walked off in step.

  Gault, perplexed by the entire exchange, lifted our basket and carried us in the opposite direction, past the row houses toward Lenox Avenue, where motor trucks waited to return us to our lofts in New Jersey.

  And that was the last I saw of Charles Whittlesey.

  * * *

  • • •

  Five miles in from the Atlantic, with rail sidings out of Hoboken and access to the port of Little Silver, Camp Vail was an ideal site for the Army Signal Corps School, and to the humans in charge we pigeon veterans were ideal teaching tools. Those among us who were not too seriously injured could help soldiers learn the care, handling, and training of homers. Those who were fertile could breed, building up the pigeon army within the human one. And those who were simply heroic messes—who could neither fly well nor breed successfully—could be deployed to educate the public about the importance of keeping a supply of carrier pigeons at the ready for when the next war came.

  The next war. An acrid glop of vomit rose in my crop whenever I thought about it. We were often assured that the Great War—“great,” they called it—had been the war to end all wars, but this was spoken far too often to be true. It was widely known that the treaties formalizing the end to the fighting were not being written with an eye toward preventing future hostilities, and the U.S. Army had resolved not to be caught short of pigeons again.

  President Wilson and I shared our home loft with fellow battle-tested veterans: Lord Adelaide, a blue-checkered cock, and Blanchette and Petite Rosette, twin red-checkered hens who’d made it through still healthy enough to be bred. Aside from these, dozens more came and went.

  Baby Mine was not among them.

  To a casual observer, it might seem that we wounded heroes had the lightest duties, but a mascot’s work is the killing kind. The damage I’d sustained on my last flight to Rampont lingered. Every morning I woke up weary.

  From an anatomical standpoint, we homing pigeons are architectural perfection—our physiognomy ideal for what we’re supposed to do—but my architecture was wrecked. Whenever I flew, my torn muscles and dented ribs nearly pulled me apart from the inside; whenever I didn’t fly, my body tensed and sickened from its innate desire to be airborne. I became like one of the shell-shredded cathedrals we’d sometimes see in France: my soaring arches and unsullied lines were still visible, but they’d never regain their wholeness.

  Rest might have helped, but I got little. Monday through Friday the Signal Corps took me by train or motorcar to elementary and high schools, town-hall meetings and ice-cream socials. Though the physical exertion was minimal—I sat in a basket—the experience of repeatedly traveling a certain distance from Camp Vail and calculating the route and speed and elevation of a return flight that I would never be allowed to make became mentally taxing.

  But I had a duty to perform. Civilians demand heroes to process vast loss.

  These events were monotonous, except when they were harrowing. One sunny morning Corporal Gault carried me not to a waiting car but to the auditorium of the Signal Corps School, where the folding seats had unfolded beneath the torpid forms of disfigured men. Incapacitated veterans. As Gault walked up the aisle to place my cage onstage, I cataloged their wounds, comparing them to my own by instinct and in sympathy.

  A man whose jaw had been torn off by a bullet. Another whose teeth had been shattered by shrapnel. Another whom mustard gas had blinded. Wheelchairs lined the walls, containing men with rolled trouser legs, empty fabric pinned to itself. Sleeves hung limp and vacant, fingers and hands and forearms and arms blown off by explosions or lost to gangrene and amputation.

  The army had brought them here to educate and cheer them, to convince them that their future could, and ought to, be bright.

  I hunched in my basket as a press officer took the podium.

  “Rehabilitation offers the promise of living an independent life as a contributing member of society,” he said. “We have brought you here to assist you. There is a way forward. Our victory in Europe has proved what the world has long suspected: this will be the American century, an era of unprecedented opportunity and prosperity. Others like you are already integrating themselves back into the engine of our national economy. You shall watch some of them here, in this short moving picture.”

  He raised his hand to signal the projectionist. The lights dimmed, and we watched a brief film that might as well have been called So, You Got Maimed in the War! Images of injured doughboys flashed between intertitles of soothing assurances that their lives could proceed normally.

  The press officer read the words in a lockjawed Yale accent for the benefit of the sightless. “‘I will never become a charge upon public society,’” he said, ostensibly on behalf of the man on the screen, who was missing a leg—his right, like mine. “‘When the government fits me with a new limb, I’ll be good as new. As soon as I can learn to use my new leg handily, I’ll go back to the machine shop once more.’”

  Though the human audience couldn’t recognize the sound as such, I couldn’t help but burst with ghastly laughter at a scene near the end: a group of amputees, beaming cheerfully, hobbling about a grassy field in a staged game of baseball. One-legged soldiers hopped around the bases while their wheelchair-bound comrades cheered from the sidelines, as if the ability to go through the motions of the national pastime were conclusive proof that everything would be all right for these men.

  “‘In veterans’ hospitals,’” read the press officer, “‘men learn to use prosthetic limbs, undergo reconstructive surgery, and receive care for respiratory ailments. The blind receive special assistance in the learning of braille.’”

  When the lights went up, the press officer asked whether the men had any questions.

  One blind veteran spoke toward the sound of the officer’s voice. “All the special assistance in the world,” he said, “won’t change the fact that I’m a charity case and always will be. I sit in the hospital all week, forgot, till every Sunday, when the volunteers come out to read to me. Feeling guilty after church, probably. Feeding the blind ape peanuts.”

  “If your question is what the army can do to help,” the press officer said, “then we’ll see to it that you get some information on braille. You won’t have to rely on others to read anymore. Next question? You, Private, in the front row.”

  The man stood up. The lower half of his face had the texture and sheen of melted candle wax; the army surgeons had done their best, but it had not been very good. “In my city,” he said, “they’ve passed an ordinance, a law, that says people with severe facial injuries have to wear masks or hoods in public, so as not to scare women and children. They’ll fine you if you don’t comply. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Our army doctors are creating specially designed masks that hook around a patient’s ear to add an anatomically correct chin, nose, or cheek to a face,” said the press officer. “We’ll have more information on that and a variety of other salutary developments today after lunch. But first—”

  “Not about the mask,” the private said. “About the law. How do I get them to change the fucking law?”

  The press officer’s assistant hastened over to quiet him. “But first,” the press officer said, “we have a special guest, by the name of Cher Ami. Corporal?”

  Gault looked mortified, apologetic for still being able-bodied. He lifted my basket and carried me to the podium, where he delivered a sp
eech that I had heard dozens of times, synopsizing my heroics, detailing my honors, then running through the list of wounds from which I had gloriously recovered. Although the speech was always the same, the catalog of injuries had a sicker resonance than usual and seemed almost scolding. If this pigeon can get better, why can’t you? There you go, enjoy your moral.

  At that point Gault usually held me in his arms as schoolchildren filed by to pat or squeeze me, but these men were in no shape to file, so he made his way up the aisle instead. Any man who wanted to could examine my wounds; the blind could lay their fingers upon me. As I was passed around like a relic or a fetish, gentle hands touching my feathers, I considered how many of these men would spend their lives alone. Even given the war’s substantial winnowing of the population—over a hundred thousand Americans killed, over sixteen million dead worldwide—it would be hard for disfigured men to meet women or to marry. I sympathized. These men and I had been poorly used.

  But between us was one crucial difference so far as the public consensus was concerned. To marriageable women, and indeed to everyone else, I was cute, even with my wounds. Especially with my wounds. In the beginning I was honored to appear before these men in the hope of lifting their spirits, but it quickly became apparent that that was not the point of putting me on display. By showing me to the injured men, the army told them, This fluffy, cooing thing with its wooden leg is what the public will know of the ravages of war. Your task is to remain unseen. By showing me to the public, the army told them, War is a game, and its costs are light enough to be borne by even this little bird. The burgeoning American empire demanded sacrifices; my job was to help make them acceptable, even entertaining.