Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Read online

  We went through Neufchâteau and Bar-le-Duc to the thunderous accompaniment of guns and shells. Buck Shot trembled, and I didn’t blame him. Others beat their wings. All I could manage was to hold very still. During my short life, I had been well cared for, had encountered very little danger. I thought of the falcon that chased me on my first race from Scotland back to Wright Farm. I was young then, and it had seemed like no more than a game, not something that could have meant the end of me. I had stayed so far ahead that I’d barely glimpsed the killer bird. But for many nights after I returned to the loft, the image of the falcon came back to me, jolting me from sleep aflutter. I began to imagine the curved speck of the falcon as a hole punched in the world, one through which I might slip to my doom. Ever since I’d heard President Wilson describe the birds of prey that stalked the front, I had begun to picture the war as a swirling mass of these holes, vast as the horizon and all but impossible to escape.

  As dawn was breaking, we finally pulled up to Rampont, barely a wide spot on the dirt road bordering the forty-mile length of the Argonne Forest. Another mobile loft, Number 9, was there, too, settled in under the care of more American pigeoneers.

  The forest birds were in the midst of unfamiliar morning songs, and for a moment I thought I heard an English lark among them—but it was Corporal Gault, whistling “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” as he opened the cages to let in the light and feed us. There was a bathing pan sunk into the floor, and he uncovered that, too. Being passed among freight handlers during my travels to races had shown me that men can be careless, or indifferent, or simply ignorant of pigeons’ needs, and it was a comfort to see Gault’s dependable face, particularly as distant explosions shook the earth and air.

  I made my way to the edge of the loft to see the lay of the land: what trees were nearby, and what roads. I took in as much information as I could about the loft itself, particularly its smells—the wood and paint and iron and rubber, the nests and feed and down and droppings—knowing I’d have time to learn it by sight soon enough, to plot the best approaches to its landing board. Mobile Loft Number 9 was next to us in parallel, and it looked just like Mobile Loft Number11. Not my loft! I told myself. I must not confuse them.

  “At any hour you might be needed,” said Corporal Gault each time he took us out to train, carrying our baskets in the sidecar of a motorcycle, releasing us to head back. He threw me into the air every day, sometimes alone and sometimes with others, first near and then farther and farther, until I could find my way quickly and unfailingly to Mobile Loft Number 11. Mine, mine, mine, I thought.

  Home, Cher Ami! said the voice, softly at first, then more steadily. Home to your loft by the airway! Home to Rampont!

  Beside the alighting board hung a small silver bell. Corporal Gault and the other pigeon men paid close attention to that bell and would reward any bird who rang it upon returning from a long flight with praise and a few delicious bits of corn. Not so different than returning from a race.

  Mobile Loft Number 11, we learned, was where we’d be delivering messages from the battlefield. Soldiers waiting for the sound of the bell would take them from our legs, transcribe them, and then relay them by telegraph or by telephone in code to commanding officers headquartered far from the front. Almost everything about human communication made little sense to us, but we intuited the preciousness of the rolls of paper.

  During my training flights at Langres, everything below had appeared calm and orderly, nature in perfect balance with human cultivation. Above Rampont the earth looked like a dumping ground for ashcans. What not long ago had been primeval forests and pastel meadows had been displaced by German narrow-gauge railroads and trenches that gaped like fatal wounds. I could see bicyclists distributing chocolate and tobacco and mail, pedaling along as if on a pleasure ride in the country, except the country was a hellscape.

  At Langres, flying far behind the lines, I would often smell the perfumes of what the soldiers called—among other things—women of ill repute: musk and gardenia, storax and jasmine. These odors were not to be found near the Argonne Forest. Instead I flew through wafts of darker scents, nature accommodating itself to a land of death: mushrooms in the woods, reeking like glue or creosote, particularly a toxic lollipop called the destroying angel. I’d soon learn that these bad smells were nothing compared to those of actual battlefields.

  Then one day on the way back to Rampont, I smelled white roses at the edge of happiness. Baby Mine had arrived. I spotted her in the air by her flower-petal feathers; she was coming home from a training flight, headed for Mobile Loft Number 9. For the first time in my life, I was able to quiet the voice for a moment, to deviate from my route enough to meet her in the air.

  We flew together, her movements fluid and linear like the steady unspooling of time itself.

  “I don’t know if it’s being thrown in with each other in the war like this,” she said, “or if I’m crackers, or what. But back at Langres, after you left, I couldn’t stop thinking of you. And it isn’t just because you saved my life when I was sick. I was afraid that I’d lost the chance to tell you, but now that I haven’t, I want you to hear it: I love you. And if I die, I loved you.”

  “I love you, too,” I said, hardly able to believe my ears. We pigeons are forthright in our declarations of love, but to receive one from her was more than I had dared to dream. “And we’re not going to die. We’ll make it through.”

  “I don’t know if we will,” she said. “I sometimes wonder what our lives would be like if we were free to choose our own destinations. If we didn’t have to follow the voice.”

  This was a radical notion, one I had never heard spoken before, one I had never even quite managed to think. “I’m not sure what we’d be if we didn’t.”

  “We wouldn’t be tools of war,” she said. “We know that at least.”

  “That’s true,” I said, unable to dispute her sense of impending peril. “If you could choose where to fly, where would you go?”

  “That’s just the thing,” she said. “It’s impossible to imagine. But if I could, I’d want to fly there with you.”

  And with that, Mobile Lofts Number 9 and 11 came into view, and we went our separate ways to ring our separate bells. I wished that I could gather her to me at the end of the day, as dusk gathers itself to itself. All that night my heart beat harder, knowing how close she was.

  I was further along than she in my training and was therefore always released farther from Rampont, so I would keep my eyes and nose alert for her on each flight back, usually to no avail. But sometimes I found her, and we’d fly together, speaking desperately of our youths in England and America, of adventures we’d had on races, of the small things that gave us pleasure in the world.

  These rendezvous began to add minutes to my return times, which did not go unnoticed. The pigeoneers began to fear that my homing skill—and therefore my usefulness—was on the wane.

  “War waits for neither man nor pigeon,” Corporal Gault told me one morning, with what seemed like sincere regret. And I knew then—or I strongly felt—that I was about to be parted from Baby Mine for the last time.

  The hour had come to go into combat.

  Gault plopped me into a two-bird shipping basket, a large silver cock on the other side. No point in making introductions. Gault covered us up with heavy meshed wire, put a loose canvas bag with a drawstring over that, then piled us into a motorcycle’s sidecar and hopped in with us. A private whom I’d never seen drove us twenty kilometers to the edge of the woods. We came to a narrow path where two other pigeoneers in a second motorcycle waited to take us another twenty kilometers farther on.

  “Adieu for now, Cher Ami,” said Gault, and I breathed deeply so as not to forget his scents of chocolate bars and shaving cream. “When all else fails, and it often does, we’ll rely on you to carry the news. I hope to see you back at Rampont, and soon.”

  They
dropped us in Grandpré, ravaged and dour, where we were immediately carried down into a deep, dark hole, larger and darker than any I’d ever seen or been in. Though we are aerial animals, pigeons have no aversion to the earth—our wild ancestors often nested in shallow cliffside caves, and back on Wright Farm some of us liked to wallow in the deep pits that Bobs, John’s big black hound, compulsively dug, the dust bath fabulous between our feathers—but this was not like that. This was a trench, twisting for miles under fields, miles under woods, wide enough for hundreds of soldiers to lurk in and sleep in and fire guns from.

  I waited in my basket, dark and cold and wet. A pigeoneer was supposed to feed me corn and peas and water every day, and mostly that happened, but sometimes it didn’t. I was prepared to risk my life by outflying falcons and bullets, but I hadn’t been prepared to become an unloved piece of furniture. I was thankful for the wire that covered my cage, for a gruesome gray rat with a cruel face stared at me each night, night after night.

  The wire also kept out fragments of shells that exploded nearby, and the canvas kept us safe from gas attacks. Whenever a gas shell burst, the pigeoneer—nondescript, no aficionado like John or Corporal Gault, just a man doing his job—pulled the drawstring and kept us covered until the all-clear.

  One leaden morning, after days of waiting, the pigeoneer lifted me. He took the commander’s message on a small piece of thin paper and slipped it into the canister. Then, around my right leg, he affixed the tube with two narrow copper wires. The message was written in code; if I got killed, the Germans wouldn’t be able to read it.

  The pigeoneer—who never spoke a word to me during all my time there—threw me at the patch of dingy sky above the trench. Circling to gain altitude, I pushed the thought of my death aside. Fiery-edged clouds contrasted and harmonized with rifle fire: silvery muzzle flashes, silvery bullets. I thought of turkeys and geese and other table birds as I felt myself basted in a hot shower of metal.

  But so, too, did I feel the slap of cold air on my beak and the joy of being loosed, and I heard the voice: Cher Ami! Home to your loft by the airway! Home to Rampont!

  In twenty-five minutes, I flew thirty kilometers, back to the landing board of Mobile Loft Number 11. Corporal Gault rushed to me at the sound of the bell and phoned my first message to headquarters, far from the loft and the front. Baby Mine was long gone by then, in some other basket in some other trench, but for the rest of the day I got to coo with my friends and eat and bathe and sit on the roof in the sun. Home. That night Gault patiently explained the significance of the message I had delivered, and although I understood little of it, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take pride in my accomplishment.

  Of course I had to go back: on the motorcycle, in the basket, in the air, all summer long. Sometimes the wind came in gales and the rain fell in torrents, but I flew the thirty kilometers in under a half hour every time, over and over.

  CHAPTER 8

  CHARLES WHITTLESEY

  We heard that the Germans had a proverb: “He liveth best who is always ready to die.” I never asked any of our prisoners to confirm or deny this, but we would soon find out they fought that way.

  The British soldiers with whom we were attached for training outside Calais warned us that the devils in field gray had emplaced across the Meuse-Argonne—which we planned to overtake—four Stellungen, or belts of fortification. As in some blood sport dreamed up by demons, we Allied troops would have to pass through parallel rows of pillboxes and bunkers that on maps looked like the spiked collars of malevolent dogs. In a Teutonic touch both silly and terrifying, the belts were all named after characters from the Nibelungenlied, an epic poem I knew mostly via Wagner works that Marguerite and I had been bludgeoned by at the Met; the third and worst Stellung, for instance, was called Kriemhilde, after the vengeful bride of the hero Siegfried.

  When our assault on those fortifications came later that fall, it would be less grand opéra than Grand Guignol: prolonged, yes, and massive in scale, but possessing neither art nor glamour.

  Any man among us who expected cries of “Vive les Américains!” when we landed in Calais was due for disappointment. Nobody cheered; they’d seen it before. The port city’s buildings, bombed so often by German airplanes, stood windowless beside the water like blinded faces, mute and empty. Aside from German prisoners working the docks alongside Chinese laborers, and soldiers from every Allied nation, Calais was a ghost town.

  It was the first place we’d been that felt like it was at war, and for most of us our arrival was sobering. Not for all of us, however.

  “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!” sang Lieutenant Maurice Revnes as he led his men through the streets. Revnes was a showboat, an actor in civilian life who’d produced a few one-act plays in New York before volunteering for the Plattsburgh camps. He’d been the theatrical director at Upton, and he’d resume that role on this side of the ocean, gathering musicians, singers, and vaudevillians to form the Argonne Players. Talented but mean was how I’d pegged him, and seeing him make his entrance in Calais did nothing to change my opinion: a toothy smile and scornful eyes, bluff and swaggering, his performance a poor fit for a city marred by tragedy. I exchanged glances with McMurtry, a little down the column, and he shook his head in disgust.

  If Revnes noticed, he paid it no mind. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!” he sang again, louder, his gaudy tenor echoing off the chalky walls.

  “We’re going to get the kaiser, going to get the kaiser!” sang some of the men in reply as we awaited the order to march to our quarters.

  Nearby a French captain with his right arm in a sling leaned against the base of an old stone watchtower, smoking with his good hand. He called to Revnes, “You remind me of me in 1914.”

  “Merci, mon ami,” Revnes replied, doffing his cap to reveal the handsome sheen of his close-cropped blue-black hair.

  “I saw this all the time at the front,” the soldier continued in English, accented but clear. “You want to attack. You are ready. But when the moment comes, perhaps you change your mind. Often when one has never done something, it seems quite easy to do.”

  At our camp outside town, we began to hear similar sentiments from the British soldiers—the Tommies—who took charge of our education in throwing grenades and firing machine guns. Fights broke out occasionally, and then regularly, between our sergeants and those of the British army; our boys were deaf to the gradations of class that defined the Tommies’ service, while also being unaccustomed to the tartness of the admonishments they received in training, and I spent an alarming amount of my time smoothing over conflicts and supervising reluctant handshakes. But somewhat to my chagrin, I discovered that I had a better rapport with the British officers than with many of my fellow Americans.

  “At first it was exciting,” admitted the captain whom I was shadowing, as we watched the men learn the thrusts of a bayonet drill. I’d often heard tell of the famous English reserve and encountered it often in Calais, but this officer was refreshingly open, even urgent, in his disclosures, and he had the kindly if unsettling mien of a haunted soothsayer.

  “The training was dull, of course, as was all the waiting,” he said. “But I was slow to appreciate the extent to which our expectations had been shaped by the way we all spoke. Elevated by an almost feudal language. A friend was a ‘comrade,’ a friendship a ‘fellowship.’ Horses were ‘steeds’ and actions ‘deeds,’ and the enemy was ‘a foe,’ and danger was ‘peril.’ The dead on the field would be ‘the fallen.’ We would not be fast, we would be ‘swift.’ We would not sleep, we would ‘slumber,’ and we’d gaze not into the sky but into ‘the heavens.’ In the end that shaped us more than the training did.”

  “This is scholarship of a different sort than I know from Williams or Harvard,” I said as my men drove and lunged.

  “But the Oxford view I’d had of war could not long stand,” he said. “Those were not our ‘lim
bs’ strewn over the fields but our arms and legs. None of us who’ve survived this long can ever hear the word ‘machine’ without his poor brain following it with ‘gun.’ It’s really done us.” He smiled: sorrowful, not cruel.

  The war drew closer. Its approach was less like the coming of a storm, more the onset of a sickness. We could feel it changing us.

  Periodically we’d march the men eight kilometers to the nearest train depot to pick up supplies. The army was loath to admit how unprepared it was in regard to combat gear; much of the equipment we were issued was French and British, particularly the weapons. The light machine gun was a French model called the Chauchat; the men nicknamed it the “Sho-Sho” and within a few weeks began calling it the “Shit-Shit,” based on its habit of jamming after firing only a few rounds. The best means of clearing a jam in the Chauchat, per an oft-repeated quip, was to throw it away.

  We were somewhat better provisioned with defensive gear. The train delivered an adequate supply of steel helmets, which replaced our wool caps; the mass of us donning them around the depot was like a sudden bloom of hard gray flowers.

  “One of the most versatile pieces of equipment imaginable,” said McMurtry as we stood near the boxcars. “It sheds water like a roof, serves as a chair in the mud. It can be instantly turned into a candlestick in the dark. I’ll take it over a rifle any day.”

  “If it can dissuade the occasional piece of shrapnel, then I’m sold,” I said, rapping its edge and making it ding.

  The army also provided maps of the countryside for use on practice marches. I studied mine alongside Omer Richards, one of our battalion’s pigeon men, so he’d understand where his birds might need to go. Lanky and pale-cheeked, with a sweaty face and peculiar topaz eyes, his most notable feature was that he wasn’t Bill Cavanaugh. But I was charmed by the French-Canadian private’s delight at noticing a hamlet on the map north of us called Saint-Omer, his namesake.