Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Read online

  That was just my tiny corner of the war. Even from my bird’s-eye perspective, the magnitude of our forces’ involvement was hard to take in. Within little more than a year of its late entry into the long conflict, the United States military raised, trained, and transported an army of two million men to France. Despite the brevity of our participation, 53,402 American soldiers lost their lives in combat; 204,002 were wounded. Over a million Americans—more soldiers than had served in the entire Confederate army—fought in the forty-seven days of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, advancing thirty-four miles against enemy lines, ending the stalemate.

  I think of these numbers all the time. I have so much time to think and think.

  I think of the eight million horses who died in the Great War, roughly the same number killed as all the soldiers of all the human armies.

  I think of how humans used over a hundred thousand of us pigeons on the battlefield, and with a 98 percent success rate. Of how twenty thousand of us lost our lives in combat.

  Can humans ever atone for dragooning beasts into their own conflicts on such a colossal scale? What form could such atonement take?

  A few of them try. They ascribe to us their own fraughtness and foibles. And with animals’ honors, the light of our heroism shines on the personnel who worked with us as well.

  I like to believe that here in the Smithsonian I stand as a steadfast sentinel, reminding those whose eyes fall upon me of untold immensities of mute sacrifice. But perhaps I am just a tatty mass of feathers and a couple of glass eyes in this small display case for an enormous war.

  I like to think that I betoken memory. But then I think of the scant relics of my cherished commander, Charles Whittlesey: Galloping Charlie, our captain-then-major, known as Whit to my beloved Bill Cavanaugh, and therefore to me. Whit’s helmet and other articles reside in the library of his alma mater, Williams College, where nobody ever goes to see them, not really. People at least accidentally see me on their way to more popular exhibits: Julia Child’s kitchen or all of World War II.

  World War II, which happened even though the horrors of the Great War were said to have obviated all future war.

  When he is awake, Sergeant Stubby and I debate over that. He thinks we should forgive the humans and that they meant well. I am not so sure.

  These days the children passing by are not impressed with us, so accustomed have they become to zoos and aquariums, where they stare and stare at living animals, active and unstuffed in their cages, their tanks, their habitats. But even here, as in those places, we animals stare back. Humans make their mighty interventions in our lives—hunting, taming, training, breeding, eating; warping our bodies and instincts away from nature, toward their own ends—and they imagine that their great power puts them beyond our regard, beyond our judgment. But we observe, even as we are observed. Most humans forget that.

  My beloved Bill Cavanaugh, the 308th Infantry Regiment’s greatest pigeon man, understood this and always looked me in the eye with a feeling of reciprocity. Whit did, too. Whatever Bill wanted him to do, he did.

  In life my eyes were golden. Most of us have eyes that range from red—ruby, if you use the fancy lexicon of the pigeon fancier—through orange to yellow.

  The taxidermist who prepared me used standard orange-and-black, two dull disks popped into my empty sockets. I was already missing one eye, shot out on that final flight by the same bullet that carried away my right leg. An injury every bit as horrifying as I hope it sounds.

  Pigeons can feel pain.

  I wanted to protest, to say to the taxidermist, Pardon me, but if I am to be preserved because of my sacrifice in the war, does it make any sense to erase the signs of that sacrifice? I want to have only one false eye, because people should see what the war did to me. And I want that eye to be golden!

  But even had I been alive, the man, as a man, would not have been capable of understanding my language—would not have even perceived it as language. It doesn’t matter, I guess. I can still see through this flat glass. In my state of being now, I can see most everything.

  Men shot the eyes out of their fellow men, too. I first saw such an injury through the wicker basket weave of my coop, bouncing upon Bill Cavanaugh’s back. The man in question was walking toward us as we were supposed to be advancing. One of the officers yelled at him that he was going the wrong way. “Stragglers are to be shot,” the officer said.

  The man, sweaty and shaking, stopped there in the dark woods and laughed like a maniac.

  “You think that order is funny, Private?” the officer said, releasing the strap on his sidearm holster.

  “Shot?” the man said. “I already have been. I’ve lost a lamp.”

  He tilted up his helmet-shaded face and pointed to his socket with his left hand, opening his right to show the orb in bloody proof. Grinning.

  He kept grinning, and the officer nodded, approving the man’s return to the first-aid stations in the rear.

  Their exchange was quick, and I looked away, shuddering. Afterward I had to ask my basketmate Buck Shot if it had really happened. It had, he said.

  We kept on our way, quieter then. I huddled against Buck Shot’s dingy white feathers, saddened and repulsed by what I’d seen, but not quite imagining that such a wicked injury could—would—happen to me.

  When it did, it wasn’t what killed me. I lived on with my wounds—bodily and otherwise—until June 13, 1919. The taxidermist did his work, and I ended up here not long after.

  Like my fellow hero Major Whittlesey, I had expected the Great War to be a temporary interruption. I’d settle back into my original orbit once the guns fell silent. Instead, within eight strange and painful months of my famous flight, I was dead. Three years after he and his mutilated band of survivors were freed from the Pocket, Whit was, too. Well prior to our respective deaths, he and I both realized—and suffered considerably from the realization—that after a war there can be no getting back to the original plan.

  In the Great War’s immediate aftermath, many seemed to think that honor and glory ought to be more than adequate compensation for our inability to recuperate our lives to a state of normalcy. When he was still in here with me, my pigeon buddy President Wilson would rag me, joking but jealous, about all the ink committed to Whit and me in newsprint, magazines, the pages of books.

  But so much of it was wrong, and so much of it was terrible. The worst was a phenomenally popular poem, titled “Cher Ami,” by Harry Webb Farrington. I can still hear President Wilson reciting it in a mocking voice:

  The finest fun that came to me

  Was when I went with Whittlesey;

  We marched so fast, so far ahead!

  “We all are lost,” the keeper said . . .

  Dreadful, for so many reasons.

  But heartbreaking, too, as a reminder of an era when a man like Farrington—a Methodist revivalist, a university graduate, the athletic director for the French troops during the war—might be moved to grind out such a commemorative poem, indeed a whole book of them, with the certainty that he was creating an enduring memorial to noble events. Many men who served in the war displayed this sort of rough-and-ready, well-rounded masculinity, as sensitive to the value of abstractions like Art and Poetry as they were to Honor and Glory. Few who saw combat managed to retain this attitude, at least without a great deal of effort.

  And this is as it should be. The worst thing about Farrington’s poem is that it presents the vast obscenity that was the Great War as a jolly adventure—but in fact any war story, no matter how unsparing or how true, warns against war only if its audience wants to be warned.

  Even my story. Over the years the crowds that pass by my case have taught me that.

  Paraphernalia of violence surrounds me here and seems to thrill at least as many as it appalls: an entrenching shovel, a .30-caliber machine gun, an artillery shell for a French howitzer.


  I, too, have become paraphernalia of violence.

  A German hand grenade, nicknamed “turtle” by Allied forces, interests me particularly, as does everything that humans make and then give an animal’s name. What purpose do these nicknames serve? Do they make the lethal apparatus seem more natural and therefore inevitable? Therefore no one’s fault?

  Sergeant Stubby considers this interest morbid. I tell him it’s simply a matter of taste—a human concept I picked up but still don’t completely understand. Is it tasteful to have stuffed us and put us in the Smithsonian?

  Even now, on this side of it, death perplexes me. Unlike human beings, birds tell no stories about what follows death; I expected the void. Now I’m here, free from all bodily needs, watching and remembering. I’m not sure how long I’ll continue like this. I don’t know whether my and Sergeant Stubby’s wakeful states are the result of taxidermy or—somehow—of the adulation we earned during our brief lives. Maybe death is like this for every animal. The ancient Greeks associated message-bearing pigeons with oracles; from where I perch, it would seem that there’s something to that belief.

  A common rhetorical situation following the Great War involved the dead speaking. “We are the Dead,” for instance, begins a line from John McCrae’s well-known poem “In Flanders Fields.” And we are, I am, dead and speaking, speaking in a way that would be called “from beyond the grave” if I’d been given a grave instead of this bright glass case.

  Even in the throes of the archivist mania that I esteem among the staff here, no curator would ever taxidermy a human soldier. But even if the Smithsonian was so disposed to flout taboo, it couldn’t have the man it wanted the most: it couldn’t do Charles Whittlesey.

  Whit, it seems, wanted the opposite of what I got. His family put up a marker in the cemetery in Pittsfield once it was clear that he was gone for good. But it’s an IMO: In Memory Only.

  The name of the exhibit that my body is in, here with good ol’ Sergeant Stubby, is The Price of Freedom. When they point from the other side of the glass, Freedom isn’t free, I hear the patriots say. Blah, blah, blah. They’re right, but not for the reasons they think they are.

  The Great War cost me a lot, and although it’s not a competition, on this, the eve of my centenary, I can honestly conclude that it cost Whit more.

  CHAPTER 2

  CHARLES WHITTLESEY

  Monuments matter most to pigeons and soldiers.

  Some matter more than others. None matter more to me than the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument on Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side.

  It’s not a monument for my war, the Great War, the war that has caused me to be known these past three years as “Go to Hell” Whittlesey, heroic commander of the Lost Battalion. Instead its white marble gleams for the Union army, which won the Civil War almost sixty years ago.

  The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument has a personal significance for me, one that has nothing to do with war. It’s where I—fresh from Harvard Law School, naïve and lonesome—met the man who would be my entrée into the double life I led until I chose to let the war interrupt it.

  My thoughts keep returning to it tonight, though Marguerite and I are currently a couple of miles away, walking from the Rivoli movie palace on Broadway toward her midtown apartment. The November breeze blows chill and damp. I’m wearing my best fall jacket, which feels a bit ostentatious—it’s already discomfiting that the Rivoli’s ushers invariably make a show of recognizing me—but Marguerite likes the pomp of seeing a film there, the spectacle of the other moviegoers who pack the Greek Revival building being as interesting to her as anything on the screen. She works in advertising, and even on her weekends she harbors a professional interest in human behavior. Knowing better than to apply her gimlet amateur psychologist’s eye to me, she has to exert her analytic capacity on strangers.

  I enjoy the program of musicians—soloists, organ, and orchestra—who accompany the movies there. Enjoy turning invisible for a while in the darkness, no one asking for stories of the front in France.

  As we arrive at the door of her kitchenette apartment building at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, Marguerite drops my arm. I have told her that I’m going away for the weekend, which is true. I’ve also let her think that it’s to check on my parents in Pittsfield, which is not.

  “Thank you, Charlie,” she says, reaching into her reticule to find her key. “As always, it’s been a lovely evening. Maybe when you get back, you can see somebody about that cough.”

  “I might,” I say, though I won’t. I’ve already been to the specialist that Bayard—her brother-in-law, my best friend and former law partner—recommended; the man told me that he was sorry but that not much can be done for gas-related TB. Not even for a war hero.

  “Well, I hope you do,” she says, her eyes meeting mine from behind her glasses—a couple of gangly four-eyes, that’s Marguerite and me. “I need to keep you around for a while. My Friday nights would feel aimless without you.”

  I make myself smile. Even at thirty-five—a certified Old Maid, as she puts it cheerily—she looks young and bright. When I no longer monopolize her free time, she might get into greater social circulation. She deserves more vivacious companions than solitary, wheezing me, looking every day of my thirty-seven years and then some.

  My little sister, Annie, might’ve grown up to look like Marguerite, I think for the millionth time. And been every lick as smart, probably. Ever since I met her, Marguerite has been like a sister to me.

  She squeezes my hand, and I kiss her on the cheek, which smells faintly of geraniums. “Don’t get too close!” she says, kissing mine back. “I’m a regular bed of garlic.”

  We went to Barbetta for dinner, Marguerite’s choice. She had insisted, as she often did, on theming our evening: we were seeing a Valentino picture, she reasoned, and Valentino hails from Italy. The meal was delicious. Rather than a red-sauce-ladling joint with checked tablecloths, Barbetta was a Piedmontese place, upscale and a bit eccentric. I paid, of course, not minding the price. Though she doesn’t know it yet, this evening will be Marguerite’s parting memory of me, and I want it to be perfect.

  The movie was ridiculous, as we knew it would be, having seen Valentino earlier that spring in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on another of our Friday outings. We snickered in the upper balcony, far back above the crowd. His dandyish poses! The purple prose of the title cards! His randy leers revealing the whites all the way around his smoldering eyes! But we had to admit that the Latin Lover did possess a titillating magnetism, as the papers all said.

  Marguerite’s face—thin, full-cheeked, pale under her dark hair—glows in the streetlamps. I am struck by a pang of sorrow and fear at the small precious goodness that the world contains and that I will shortly abandon, but I believe I succeed in keeping it from my expression, which in any case the lamps have cast in darkness.

  “Adieu and good night, Marguerite,” I say. “Dream, if you can, of Valentino.”

  “Same to you.” She affects a swooning, moony gaze like that of Agnes Ayres in The Sheik and steps inside, laughing that laugh of hers, a sound like a china plate breaking. She might have waved, but I’d already turned away.

  At a safe remove from her windows, I stop to light a cigarette. Even with my cough, I smoke so much these days that I could use a Pershing boot as an ashtray. At this point I’ve no good reason to stop.

  From here I’ll head back to Broadway, then north to Eighty-ninth, to the monument on the banks of the Hudson. It will take me a while to get there, even at my pace: Galloping Charlie, tall as a weed and always marching double time. My ship doesn’t hoist anchor until eleven tomorrow morning, and the radium hour hand of my army-approved wristlet—my trench watch—glows at ten forty-five. I should make it to the monument by eleven thirty, and I won’t take long bidding my farewell. Tonight I’m interested only in the place itself, not t
he men who haunt it, as I might have been in the past.

  I’ve always enjoyed strolling the streets, whether with the intent to remain solitary or to meet someone. Lately my walks have been almost exclusively nocturnal: in the dark no one recognizes me, and this anonymity reminds me of my former freedom.

  But walking at night also makes it more likely that I’ll lose my bearings, which is something I no longer enjoy. Before the war few pastimes afforded me greater pleasure than wandering through the city, ending up somewhere strange. But now, having been twice officially lost—lost as in waylaid, misplaced, unreachable, doomed, lost as in the Lost Battalion—I find the appeal is itself somewhat lost to me. I need to know where I am. I want a magnet in my beak, like Bill Cavanaugh said pigeons have, always able to seek and find home. Cher Ami, my savior, I grieve you, I think absurdly, eyes to the sky. All the pigeons are roosting, of course. The sky stares back, empty.

  A slight, dapper man at the corner adjusts his hat atop his perfectly slicked hair: a type that’s come to be known as the Vaselino. I smile as I pass, picturing him wearing a kaffiyeh and perched atop a steed, but I take care not to meet his gaze.

  I suppose I shouldn’t mock Valentino; he may be a ham, but he’s a better actor than I.

  The Lost Battalion: that’s the straightforwardly named picture they convinced me to appear in, rushed through production in 1919. I agreed to play myself. Myself! I didn’t feel as though I could tell them no, not in light of the case made by Major General Alexander—who also played himself, with greater enthusiasm—that this movie would be good for the reputation of the troops who served, and for the army as a whole, and also good for the memory of the dead, the dead for whom (I felt, although Alexander did not say) I must claim responsibility. My trusty second-in-command, George McMurtry, played himself, too, as did Cullen and McKeogh, Jordan and Hershkowitz, Cepaglia and Bergasse, Munson—poor Munson—and Krotoshinsky.