Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Read online

  To and from the depot we marched, through town after beautiful town brought to ruin: unchanged and of little significance for hundreds of years, then reduced to rubble by explosive shells and incendiary bombs. Houses disemboweled, guts pouring forth into sunless streets. Skeletons of churches, their entrances blocked by fallen chimes. Sometimes we’d pass a single shop left intact amid a row of destruction, a mannequin in its window raising a hand like Christ in blessing over a wrecked civilization.

  Whenever we passed a tavern, Revnes would complain that the beer in France tasted more like rain, watery despite the exorbitant prices French farmers demanded. The men around him always laughed and agreed. Revnes, I’d begun to notice, had the ham actor’s habit of speaking to his platoon while really addressing other audiences: men in other units, or the French townsfolk, or, most often, me and the other commanding officers. The trick allowed him to skirt insubordination while maintaining the escape route of having been misunderstood. I began to mentally review punishments I might impose without recourse to a court-martial, just to be prepared.

  It was hard to keep track of thousands of men, but I did my best to know at least something about each of those with whom I was in regular contact. A few were troublemakers like Revnes, but many more were guys so wholesome that one could imagine them drinking nothing harder than root beer and eating nothing more exotic than white bread slathered with butter. I did my best to be worthy of leading them.

  One afternoon, in the last emaciated husk of a village we passed on our way back to camp, an old woman in a peasant scarf with a face as dry and lined as a walnut emerged from a shop that I’d taken as abandoned. “Cartes postales?” she called out—postcards—desperate to sell them. The men had been performing well and were due for a break, so we halted the column and let the company fall out.

  The soldiers passed through the small shop a few at a time, and the woman fanned her cards out on a battered counter. Some showed sylvan scenes, others bucolic landscapes of what this place must have looked like before the war. Others slipped casually between the respectable ones bore pictures of nude women, or of men and women locked in carnal embraces. The woman asked the men if these cards were bon, and many replied oui. Some bought them and tucked them into their pockets with varying degrees of embarrassment.

  I made a point of letting these transactions proceed, literally looking the other way. The men, I imagine, took my averted eyes as indicative of my self-imposed restraint and steady moral code. In fact I simply wasn’t tempted, or especially interested: the cards weren’t at all artful, and their prurient appeal was lost on me.

  Instead I watched Bill Cavanaugh. He didn’t buy any cards either—politely refusing the old woman’s inducements, slipping her some coins anyway—and this pleased me. For a moment, when he noticed me noticing his gesture, I met his gaze, blue as the cornflowers that lined the ditches. But he immediately looked down and away.

  “All right, Sergeant,” said McMurtry, “let’s line ’em up.”

  “One more kilometer, boys!” shouted an overeager corporal as the men filed out, only to have some wiseacre answer, “Kill-o-meter? More like kill-yourself.”

  That day’s supply run hadn’t delivered the bedding the army had promised, so back at camp the men dozed off under used blankets, crusted with blood and reeking of delousing solution.

  * * *

  • • •

  Early June it was time. We had orders to occupy the Baccarat defensive sector, east of Nancy in Lorraine, at the western foot of the Vosges Mountains. I had enjoyed the British sector and often found myself fondly recalling the Tommies’ attitudes and expressions, particularly the infrequently bestowed compliment “Good show!” I resolved to do my best to put on such a show every day I was in command.

  One summery morning, warm and gilded, we marched back to the Calais station to ship south in boxcars labeled HOMMES 40, CHEVAUX 8. We filled them with hommes, there being a shortage of horses given how many had been killed in the almost four years of fighting.

  The upstate men felt awkward crammed and standing in the cars, but those from the boroughs felt right at home. “A fella feels just like he’s riding the subway,” called Bill Cavanaugh from a corner. The air vibrated with excitement, the men exhilarated to be going somewhere again, finally. I felt less electric and more liquid, lonely and anxious, still suspecting my own fraudulence and wishing, always, for more time.

  We stayed overnight near the station in Nancy, then continued the trek on camions, French motortrucks. The trucks had no shock absorbers, so the journey felt like being sloshed for hours in a cocktail shaker. As we drew close to the trenches, we got out and walked: fifty minutes of marching to ten minutes of rest, as usual.

  “No-man’s-land” had a specific meaning in the war: the fatal flyway for bullets that separated opposing trenches. But the term seemed applicable to the villages we passed, too: no men of military age remained in any of them.

  True to form, Revnes led the regiment in a vulgar marching song:

  Lulu took the farmer’s horse and team

  To drive to the country store,

  But she eloped with the old studhorse

  And won’t come back no more!

  Bang, bang Lulu!

  Bang her good and strong!

  What’ll we do for banging

  When Lulu’s dead and gone?

  I longed to be the sort of carefree person who’d join the ribald chorus, but also congratulated myself on not being such a person.

  The song passed the time, and it would have been pointless for me to look askance. But when some of the men began pilfering grapes from vineyards along the roadway, I couldn’t stay silent, sympathetic though I might have been to their hunger for the tough-skinned fruit, the largest quantity of fresh produce we’d seen in months. “Remind your platoons,” I said to the assembled lieutenants, “that we are here to rescue this country, not to sack it. We help these people; we do not threaten their livelihoods by stealing from them. Any soldier who forgets that shall be assigned extra duty for not less than thirty days. I trust that I have made myself clear.”

  Baccarat was a “quiet” sector—given our near-total lack of combat experience, from officers down to privates, the Allied strategists had wisely opted not to plunge us into the thick of battle—but it still wasn’t safe to march too close to the front in daylight, so we bivouacked until nightfall and continued in the direction of the billets we’d been promised.

  June 21 was a Friday night, the bright moon like a pearl. We, the Metropolitan Division, were many of us thinking of what we’d be doing in the city were we still at home. Midway through the woods, we passed the Fighting 69th, part of the Rainbow Division that we were relieving. Amid the splintered trees, with moonlight burnishing their faces, the city men sang “Sidewalks of New York” together and called out streets and home addresses. I held back—this was a working-class salute—but I wished I could share their panache and neighborhood pride. What would I call out? Midtown, by Grand Central? Or, worse yet, Wall Street? Not likely. When I heard Cavanaugh call out “Hell’s Kitchen!” I turned to catch his silvery face, as fine in profile as Mercury’s on a dime.

  After the woods our good cheer was quelled by the faint first whiff of a real battlefield, a gagging combination of shit and gunpowder, gas and blood, decaying flesh and muddy rot. Though still distant, it was almost unbelievably awful, sending a spark of panic up my spine. I glanced down the column at McMurtry for reassurance, as I often did, only to see him as pale and stone-faced as I was. I immediately understood that all our training—the rehearsal of thoughts and actions, the merging of individual identities into a coordinated and interdependent force—was done in anticipation of this very moment, to stanch the fundamental impulse to flee from such terror. We smelled that death—perhaps the death of civilization—and we kept moving toward it, thereby becoming something more and less
than human. Much of what happened to us later, I now believe, simply followed from that moment.

  At last we arrived at our billets, old barns with dirt floors and starlight streaming through the roofs and walls, holes for windows, chickens everywhere, rats eating from manure piles shat by years-dead cattle. Late as it was, depressing as the accommodations seemed, some of the men still had energy for jokes, most of which took on a cruel and antic cast all too well suited to our circumstances. One private showed such a fear of rats that he was certain to become a figure of fun; every time he fell asleep, one of his buddies would run a bayonet up the seam of his pant leg, and he’d bolt awake and scream loud enough to wake men in adjacent barns. Laughter and merriment. Annoying, yes, but who was I to ruin their fun?

  For the 77th was to be the first American division to enter the line.

  * * *

  • • •

  For three weeks we had French mentors, and they told us stories. Proud and dignified, they were also respectful, and down-to-earth, and grateful for the relief. “It’s the least we can do, after that hand you lent us back in 1778,” McMurtry said.

  It was interesting, and sobering, to see the change that came over McMurtry during our discussions with the French. He was still as buoyant and steady as ever, but his relaxed mien was gone, replaced by minute attention to our counterparts’ every word. We were now, I realized, approaching conditions of which my battle-hardened friend was as ignorant as were the rest of us.

  Not every combat veteran among our commanders, of which there were several, seemed to share his concern, and the French intuited this. “Please understand,” a patch-eyed colonel told us, “that the devastation you will witness along the front has no military precedent. Even in the fall of Carthage, the Romans had at their disposal no poison worse than salt.”

  I wanted to see no-man’s-land, to be prepared, so I signed up one night for a Cook’s tour of sorts, along with a handful of other officers. We crept through the trenches in small groups to reduce the likelihood of the division’s commanders all being wiped out by a single burst of shrapnel, then took turns peering over the edge toward German territory. The occasional star shell illuminated the barbed wire and the churned earth, the heaps of rags and meat that had once been human beings. That alien landscape, devoid of comforting common objects to put the vista into scale, did not seem real and taught me nothing. It settled into my bones like the chill that heralds a fever.

  When we got behind the line again, the French colonel bade us adieu with one final tale. “There is no purpose in terrifying you further,” he said, wearily sipping his coffee, “but I have heard rumors of a battalion-size group of ghoulish deserters from both sides, British and Australian and French and German, who hide in abandoned trenches and come out only at night, looting supplies from the corpses. They have secret lairs everywhere, and long beards, and they wear rags and uniforms covered in patches. Barely human, more like carrion dogs. The generals don’t know what to do. They’ll need to be eradicated, but it will have to wait until after the war. Perhaps we will gas them. Naturellement,” he concluded with a hint of mischief, “the most superstitious among the troops speculate that these men cannot be killed, because they are already dead yet do not know it. But this is beyond the scope of our concerns.”

  “Surely this war is horrible enough,” I said, smiling, “without enlisting the supernatural.”

  The colonel shrugged, then spit contemplatively. “I hadn’t yet told that story to anyone from your army,” he said. “It is difficult to know how properly to report such a thing. But I think of it often, and I had to get it out. A good-bye present for you, my friends, along with the sector, which we leave to you tomorrow. Merci and bonsoir.”

  For the next three weeks, Baccarat was ours alone: the first time an American division had held a section of the Western Front independently. The time passed without notable incident, apart from the sensation of that which had been abstract becoming real, then routine. The unseasonably wet weather we’d seen since our arrival continued, the raindrops like the ticking of a billion tiny clocks: mud, potatoes, mud, black coffee, and mud. Continually cold, continually wet, we feared influenza as much as we did the enemy. Every type of supply was short, and many of the men took to using coffee for shaving, given that it was hot and more plentiful than water. A popular pastime—particularly in Lieutenant Revnes’s platoon—became damning the generals for living in relative luxury far behind the lines.

  One muggy night a few of us officers went on liberty to the nearest town, which like all towns close to the front had a bustling trade in goods and activities favored by soldiers, given that military paychecks were the only source of revenue. McMurtry was keen to enjoy a mediocre beer, as were most of the other officers.

  My biggest delight was being back in civilization, walking amid the storefronts, however pitiful, and seeing the people and the signs. On a chipping plaster wall on the way to the tavern, I saw a poster that the Signal Corps had put up, clearly for the benefit of our own men:

  BROKEN LINK IN VITAL COMMUNICATIONS: DON’T SHOOT! THE CARRIER PIGEON!

  The letters were emblazoned above a cartoon image of a dead bird, X’s over its little eyes.

  “Now, who would do a damn fool thing like that?” I asked Lieutenant Peabody. His boots and mine were marching in step across the cobblestones, not out of intention but habit.

  “Some bored man itching to shoot his rifle, I guess. Not one of my machine-gunners, that’s for certain. Wouldn’t be any fun.” He laughed, then shrugged. “Or someone very hungry.”

  The importance of battlefield communications, and therefore of pigeons, had been so thoroughly drilled into us during our training as officers that I tended to forget that the enlisted men might not have an equal understanding of the topic. The Signal Corps did its best to run telephone wires to frontline units, but the infantry usually outpaced them—and if the wires weren’t secured along their full lengths, the enemy could listen in. A soldier sent to deliver a written message could be killed or captured. Radios were mostly useless in the field, fragile and unwieldy, and even when they worked, their transmissions could be picked up from the air.

  But pigeons remained as fast and as reliable as they’d been since the time of Alexander the Great. I thought of Bill Cavanaugh and how it would grieve him to see one of our birds killed, much less eaten by his fellow soldiers.

  The tavern was hazed with tobacco smoke and dotted with oak tables, each topped with bottles and ringed by other American soldiers. A pregnant French girl—her baby’s father probably gone with the French force we’d relieved—took our order, deux bières for Peabody and McMurtry and vin blanc for me.

  “Lieutenant Revnes is also on liberty tonight, isn’t he?” I said. “I don’t see him here.”

  “We can rule out the other taverns,” Peabody said, “because there aren’t any.”

  “He’s probably cooped up memorizing a monologue by Shakespeare, or Shaw, or Ibsen, or whomever,” said McMurtry. “There’s no reason to worry about him.”

  “I can think of any number of reasons to worry about him,” I said.

  “Well, he’s on liberty, Whit,” McMurtry said. “We can’t very well expect our men to defend freedom if they’re not allowed to enjoy it now and again. Sure, he’s probably up to no good. But if he’s not hurting anyone and he’s still able to discharge his duties when he returns, then let’s leave him be.”

  I could see several holes in that argument, but I chose not to attack them and smiled instead. “McMurtry, you’re an example to all of us,” I said. “You always see the best in everything, be it person or incident.”

  “Oh, like hell,” he said, concealing his embarrassment with a sip of his beer. “Charging me with Pollyannaism will be a tough case to prove.”

  “Now, hear me out, fellows. I’m being uncharacteristically sincere. Were McMurtry to be told, hypothetically,
that one of our men had stolen a thousand francs, he would most likely say, ‘Oh, I don’t believe that! He’s quite incapable of such a thing.’ If proof of the man’s guilt were provided . . . well, then he’d say, ‘If you’re sure, then he probably did. But there must have been some reason for it that we don’t know anything about. You notice that he didn’t steal two thousand, which he might easily have done.’ Am I mistaken, gentlemen?”

  The other officers laughed. “Let’s have a toast to McMurtry,” Peabody said. “If the czar and the kaiser shared his generosity of spirit, we might be raising our glasses at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street tonight.”

  We drank another round, then settled up with the girl. The bell in the church spire chimed ten o’clock as the tavern door swung shut behind us, closing the songs and cigar smoke and lamplight off from the sleepy street.

  It did not remain sleepy, alas. “Good night, ladies!” came a lubricious tenor voice from the terrace of the battered house next door. “Good night, ladies! Good night, ladies! We’re going to leave you now!”

  Revnes staggered down its steps and into our path, a bottle of cognac dangling from his right hand, a woman barely wearing a slip enfolded in his left. In the silence following his command performance, the splashing of the fountain in the square sounded like mocking laughter. Haughty as an insolent housecat, he all but ignored our presence on the otherwise empty street.

  “Lieutenant,” I said, barely above a whisper, hating the impression of Americans he was giving the town’s beleaguered residents. “Collect yourself.”

  I snatched the cognac from his wilted grasp and handed it to the whore. “Merci, Capitaine,” she said, clutching the bottle and drawing herself up into a posture of elegance despite her smeared lipstick. “Perhaps you and your friends would like to come in?”

  “Non, merci,” I said, shifting Revnes’s weight to my own shoulder and leading him from the doorway. “Lieutenant, your liberty has come to an end, I’m afraid.”