Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Read online

  “Before we go over the top again, Major,” said the adjutant, “shouldn’t you swap your captain’s bars for your gold oak leaves? We don’t have to make a big show of it. I can do the honors now.”

  “I suppose it’s wise to wear them,” he said, sticking his fork into his can of beans. His voice was higher than I’d expected, flat and reedy. “Does a major get better treatment than a captain in the hospital? But it’s so dark you’d pin them on crooked. Let’s wait.”

  “Whatever you say, sir,” said the adjutant. “Major Whittlesey.”

  “Sleep well, Lieutenant McKeogh,” he said. “Tomorrow could be the day.” He squeezed the adjutant’s shoulder, then strode away, tall as a sunflower.

  I have always been fascinated by the human obsession with naming things. I have a vivid memory of John back at Wright Farm reading to us from one of their myths about the beginning of the world: “Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.” In the wild, birds generally get by without them, but those of us who live among humans tend to find the names they give us useful and to use them among ourselves.

  The army was particularly interesting in this regard, because each of the commanders had at least two names. Every time I joined a new regiment, figuring out which man went by which code name—names I’d hear as the messages I flew back Rampont were read back—felt like completing a puzzle. The Seventy-seventh Division, for instance, was called “Dreadnaught,” and all their code names began with D. Its new commanding officer, Major General Robert Alexander, was “Dreadnaught One,” and the commanders of the 308th were all variations on “Detroit,” with Captain Kenneth Budd as “Detroit White” and Captain William Scott as “Detroit Blue,” which left “Detroit Red” for Whittlesey. Humans usually name pigeons based on physical features or to evoke abstract concepts, so these code names confused me—Whittlesey was not red at all, but serene and pale, long and stately—until I caught the reference to the colors of the Americans’ national flag.

  The morning after our arrival, I met a man who lacked the tactical importance to be issued a code name but who would be the most important man in the regiment to me: the best pigeon man of whom Buck Shot had spoken, Private Bill Cavanaugh.

  The 308th had three pigeoneers, but Bill was the nonpareil. The others were Omer Richards, who’d been with the regiment from the start, and Theodore Tollefson, known as Nils, who’d joined them that week, a youth from Minnesota who might as well have had a sign on his back reading FODDER, so ripe was he to be plucked by the guns.

  Before I was sent to the front, I hadn’t fully appreciated a key trait shared by my first caretakers, John and Corporal Gault: they had chosen to keep homing pigeons. In the trenches I and my fellow birds were in the custody of men who were feeding and protecting us because they’d been ordered to. Like us, they had been conscripted into service, to a greater or lesser extent against their will. Unlike us, they were performing tasks for which they had no innate aptitude and very little training.

  Omer was trying to show Nils how pigeoneering worked on the battlefield, and I state without malice that it was a case of the dumb leading the dumber.

  “What you want to do,” Omer said, yanking Buck Shot’s white wing in his hammy hand, “is pull ’em out and look for where to attach the message canister.”

  Nils looked on with a squint, as if perplexed by bird-handling that did not involve the wringing of necks and the plucking of feathers. “Kill me quickly at least, you oafs,” Buck Shot said with a resigned groan.

  “What have we got here?” said a firm but inquisitive voice, its accent that of the surviving city men who made up the core of the regiment.

  “I’m trying to show Tollefson how to use these birds,” said Omer, flabby-cheeked and grimacing as he pulled Buck Shot through the opening of the basket. “But I still don’t trust ’em not to fly off and get lost.”

  “You can’t lose a homing pigeon,” said the voice. “If your homing pigeon doesn’t come back, then what you’ve lost is a pigeon.”

  The speaker stepped around Omer and leaned in for a clearer look, and there was Bill Cavanaugh. His striking blue eyes had the intense forward focus of a predator’s—the kind that produces instant alarm in us side-eyed pigeons—but they were set in such an open and sympathetic face that this initial effect was swiftly dispelled, then reversed. Bill’s eyes were those of a self-taught naturalist. His movements were quiet and exact. Calm and bright.

  With the air of a born teacher, Bill sought to improve the other pigeon men, not arrogantly but kindly, giving advice without giving offense. “May I make a suggestion?” he said, eyeing Omer’s fumbling grasp on Buck Shot.

  Omer was clutching my poor white friend too tightly. Buck Shot bulged his eyes, partly in jest, partly in earnest. “See?” said Buck Shot. “Bill’s the only one who’s worth a damn.”

  “If you can help it,” Bill said, “it’s best to hold the birds against your body or your forearm. Try to hook your little finger into the joint of their wing, then put your thumb and other fingers around the body.”

  He picked me up with ease in a warm, clean hand—no dirt under his nails, which given those conditions seemed as heroic an achievement as any battlefield victory—and brought me to his chest. “Hey there, pal,” he said. “Hey there, Cher Ami. Corporal Gault tells me you’re a brave one. Ten missions behind you and still ready to fly for us.”

  Nils smirked. “Now I guess you’re gonna tell me it can understand you,” he said, his rounded vowels laden with doubt. “They sent me on a snipe hunt or two back at camp. I know when I’m being hoodwinked.”

  “Oh, they understand us well enough,” said Bill. “I read somewhere that in the Philippines they say that of all the birds in the world only the dove understands the human tongue.”

  I cooed and rubbed my head against his chest in affirmation, the fibers of the green wool coarse against my feathers.

  “Whether Cher Ami understands the words or not,” said Bill, stroking my back with his index finger, “she can hear the tone and the intent. See? We need to treat these little birds well, so they can do their job.”

  She. Bill had called me “she”—the only human to get that right. I wished I could thank him.

  “If you grab them by the wings or the tail,” Bill told Omer, “like you’re grabbing Buck Shot now, then their muscles strain, which might keep them from flying well.”

  “Got it,” said Omer, relaxing his hold on Buck Shot, who breathed an extravagant sigh. “I’m used to carrying chickens. When a chicken can’t fly, that’s not really a problem.”

  “I figured you’ve been around birds,” said Bill. “I can tell by the way you feed them. Pigeons just take a little adjusting. Tollefson, let’s see how you do.” Bill took Buck Shot from Omer and put us both back in the carrier. “What’s your pigeon know-how?”

  “We raised ’em on the farm back in Minnesota,” said Nils. Hovering uncertainly beyond the wicker, his face was as square as a block of wood. “But only for food. We didn’t race ’em.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Bill, and then he seemed to drift into a reverie of wonderment typical of him. “How do they do it?” he asked, his question directed at me as much as the other soldiers. “Find their way home from places they’ve never been? Well, they figure out where they are. But how? Blindfold one of us, throw us in a truck, drop us somewhere in the forest with no map or compass—I couldn’t find my way back. Could you? And these birds don’t just fly home, they do it by the shortest route at the fastest speed. They don’t quit till they get there.”

  Nils’s squint had grown more contemplative. “I never looked at ’em that way.”

  “Have a go,” said Bill, patting Nils on the back. “Take Cher Ami out of the basket. Smooth and gentle. She’s a good bird, she’ll play along.”

  Nils’s hands were smaller, neater, and l
ess shaky than Omer’s, no doubt because he hadn’t spent time yet on the front. Adept, he gripped me as Bill had shown him.

  “There you go,” said Bill. “Put her back in and try with Buck Shot. That’s it, you’ve got him. Isn’t he a pretty bird?”

  “I suppose he’s fine, on account of his plumage,” said Nils. “He’s like the kind they send up at fancy weddings. But no matter the color, they’re dirty, ain’t they? You see ’em in the cities, eating trash off the street.”

  “They keep themselves pretty clean,” said Bill, diplomatic but passionate. “You see ’em in cities—where you don’t see peacocks and parrots and penguins—because they’re smart, and adaptable. They’re there because people brought them there, and they learned to get by on their own.”

  “If they were plants,” said Omer, “they’d be dandelions.”

  Bill laughed. “That’s not far off,” he said. “I happen to like dandelions, too. But keep in mind that while the birds we’ll be carrying may look like those feral pigeons, they’re modern racing homers, with the best qualities of eight different breeds. We’ve got hundreds of years of trial and error at our disposal. Now, let’s take a crack at putting on the message canisters.”

  Bill scooped me out again for a demonstration, and Nils followed along, attaching a metal cylinder to Buck Shot’s leg. “I won’t do it now, of course,” Bill said, “but if this were the real thing, I’d take Cher Ami and toss her. If you’re sending both birds with a duplicate message—not a luxury we’re likely to have on this offensive coming up—then wait sixty seconds between tosses. You want to give them every advantage of not getting shot and making it back to Rampont.”

  “I think I’ve got it,” said Nils. “I guess I’ll find out after we go over the top.”

  “Hey, Cavanaugh?” said Omer, consulting a battered scrap of paper. “That bird. The one that’s just pigeon-colored.”

  “Cher Ami,” said Bill.

  “You keep calling it she and her. But the Signal Corps’ waybill says it’s a cock.”

  “Does it?” said Bill. “That’s wrong.”

  “Huh,” said Nils. “How the hell can you tell the difference?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” said Bill with a wink. “You just ask ’em. They’ll let you know.”

  He took Buck Shot from Nils and returned us both to the basket. Omer stepped over and peered in with his topaz eyes, not unlike a goat’s. “They’d be dandelions if dandelions lazed about in a basket all day,” he said, tapping the roof of our carrier. “Eating peas and corn while we’re being fed biscuits made of weevils and old straw.”

  Bill fixed him with a look, friendly but reproachful, as he finished securing our door. “Sometimes we look at animals and think they’re doing nothing,” he said. “But in fact we really have no idea what they’re doing. Somebody who saw us sitting in our trenches would probably think that we’re doing nothing, too.” He stood, deftly tossed an empty message canister into the side envelope of the wool cap atop Omer’s head, and walked away with a laugh.

  Wait, don’t go! I wanted to say. I hadn’t felt so well understood since Baby Mine and I got separated. I don’t know whether the men felt the same way, but for me, as bad as the danger and discomfort and privation could get, worst of all was the absurdity, the desperate impression that everything had careened out of control. Simply being seen and appreciated felt like a glimpse of blue sky through a squall line.

  Bill was right: we pigeons were never idle but watched our humans always. We listened, too. To stave off boredom, I kept my collection of animal metaphors that I heard them use. A veteran soldier had called the Baccarat sector a sleepy old lion who only rarely awoke to stretch his claws—by contrast to the Vesle, a monster hellcat who scarcely ceased to spit and scratch. As they went about their work at night, the men often described themselves as ants, busy but insignificant. They dehumanized their enemy, too. Pigs, they called them. Dirty.

  I shared these discoveries with Buck Shot, who didn’t really care but humored me all the same.

  The men said the gray uniforms of the Germans made them look like wolves. Both sides were so defensive in their tactics that the violence had no resemblance to the predator—prey dynamics of the animal world; it was more like prey—prey. Pray, pray you don’t get hit by a shell: I heard many men under fire offering panicked prayers to a god whom, I gathered, they believed to reside in the sky. But I had spent a great deal of time in the sky and had never seen evidence of any gods there.

  The men said machine-gun bullets chirped by like meadowlarks.

  Sometimes they renamed animals as different animals. They called the canned corned beef in their rations “monkey meat” and referred to their body lice as “shirt rabbits.” They’d pick the insects off one another, comparing themselves to apes grooming in some great gray zoo. I could tell that many of the men felt terribly lonely, helpless and estranged from their fellow soldiers, but they were never alone and never powerless thanks to all the life that depended on them, the lice and the rats and the mice. Each man was the miserable monarch of a kingdom that squirmed with vermin, one that consisted of the dirt and the bit of sky each one could see from the dirt, of their feet in their boots, of their boots in the mud—a kingdom all but indistinguishable from a grave.

  * * *

  • • •

  On the morning of September 26, we quit the trenches for the forest. Well before dawn we had been awakened—as it seemed every sleeping thing in Europe must also have been—by the roar of an artillery barrage of unprecedented scope and severity directed at the German positions. We all knew then that the time had come to advance.

  Major Whittlesey, his oak clusters now affixed, prepared us to go over. Outwardly he set about his command with utter conviction, but I could sense inward doubt about what the generals had demanded that he demand that his men do.

  Within days it would be clear that his misgivings were warranted.

  While Whittlesey was committed to following orders, as any successful officer must be, he was also quick to recognize the extent to which those orders were callous or unfair, and he’d try to bridge the gap between what was required and what was right through his own exceptional effort. The morning of the advance, he had had to close the company kitchens early in order to get the regiment into position, even though some men were still in line for breakfast. As we stood massed in the trench awaiting the signal to go over, he raced up and down the line handing out hunks of bread and cold meat; when he ran out, he stood directing the anxious mass to their places with his own dry slab of bacon as a baton.

  Then, like some gaunt referee, he blew the whistle that sent us forward, leading the way with a pistol in one hand and a set of wire cutters in the other. The dawn was vaporous and dewy to the point of opacity, but he kept calling out through it, tall as a lighthouse, his confidence and good cheer shining like a beacon, drawing the men forward. He might have doubted his orders, but he believed in his men, and in turn they wanted to please him. That was another metaphor I’d collected: Whit, they said, was a lamb who fought like a lion.

  The green darkness and tangled undergrowth through which we advanced convinced me that Whit was correct to be suspicious of his orders—not because they were ill-conceived but because the Allied commanders who’d ordered us to advance into the Argonne probably didn’t believe that success was possible in the first place. The land was fissured with rises and ravines that were all but invisible beneath the thick woodland canopy. “‘Copse’ is only one letter off from ‘corpse,’” said Buck Shot, his only comment as we proceeded through the trees: a fortress made of forest, snipers in the leaves.

  The one bit of happy news was that the basket containing Buck Shot and me had ended up on Bill Cavanaugh’s back. Whenever the guns would fire and everyone would pancake flat onto the ground, Cavanaugh would protect us, finding us cover, keeping us low. The men were dispersing into t
he mist like mist themselves, losing one another, losing their way—something that was not supposed to happen, which seemed to be the theme of the campaign.

  The only thing that went right was that we succeeded in breaking through the German defensive line. And then even that turned out to be bad.

  By the afternoon of the first day, we’d made it close to the stated objective, the dépôts des machines, a mostly abandoned but still-defended German railhead in the shadow of the inauspiciously named Moulin de l’Homme Mort, or Dead Man’s Windmill. The troops seemed to be in bright spirits as Whittlesey sent word down the lines that they’d done well and would dig in for the night, falling early due to the steep hills and sinister trees.

  Characteristically, Buck Shot did not share in the good cheer, but in this case his dread proved unnervingly prescient. “We did too well,” he said. “We’re too far in front. We’re going to get stuck here.”

  There was an abandoned bunker to shelter in, done up in legendary German splendor, complete with left-behind bottles of mineral water. Bill used some to fill the pan in our basket, and we were drinking it in, parched and shaking from the long day’s advance, when Whittlesey angled his tall frame through the door, followed closely by McKeogh, his diminutive adjutant. In the weird atmosphere of the erstwhile enemy stronghold, the two looked even more than usual like a marionette act.

  Bill rose and saluted. Whit noted the mineral water and our basket’s full pan, and he failed to suppress a smile. “At ease, Cavanaugh,” he said. “Lieutenant McKeogh has set up a runner chain to report our position and establish communications with HQ. But I’d like to send one of your trusty birds as our insurance policy. Though I’m concerned we haven’t enough daylight left for them to navigate by. If they won’t make it to Rampont tonight, then I’d just as soon wait till the morning.”

  “Oh, they’ll make it, Major,” Bill said. “The manual says to release them at least an hour before sundown. Once they get aloft they’ll have twice the sun they’ll need.”