Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Read online

  I put down the paper and told the waiter that I had changed my mind: no dinner this evening, no thank you, good night. I went out into the streets, not the only one with that idea. Bands played—mostly airs from the Civil War, the last major conflict in which we’d involved ourselves—and men and women and children waved flags.

  I had trained. I could fight. But should I?

  What finally tore it for me in the days that followed were the placards going up left and right. I had never imagined myself to be susceptible to the crude inducements of a recruitment poster, yet the one I saw that balmy April evening that asked ON WHICH SIDE OF THE WINDOW ARE YOU? demanded an answer.

  You could see at a glance—as I did, staring at a post-office wall—that the sides in question were clearly defined. In the foreground a dapper, effeminate man stood hiding behind the curtain of his darkened home, while outside, a group of robust lads in uniform marched proudly in the sunlight beneath a billowing American flag. Put one of them behind the wheel of an ambulance and you had Elisha. Put some glasses on the young fop and he could’ve been me. I flushed tomato red on the sidewalk.

  The image deftly played on fears that middle- and upper-class males had become too soft at the cost of their manhood. Later I’d meet—briefly, before they were killed—many men who’d agreed with this sentiment, who had believed, before they saw the shit- and bloodstained reality, that war brought the prospect of adventure and heroism. A way to shunt, like a train, from a familiar track. Their one great chance for excitement and risk.

  The next morning I signed up to go back to Plattsburgh, not as a curious private but as an officer in training. Bayard, that prince of a man, held my position at our firm from May through August, but when I finished at Plattsburgh, obtained my commission as captain, and received orders to report to Camp Upton, I tendered my resignation.

  * * *

  • • •

  Magic tricks that are easy to learn are not worth learning. At Camp Upton the magic trick by which we transformed the men into soldiers who could reasonably call themselves part of an army was difficult indeed.

  Sixty miles from New York City, Camp Upton had gone up in haste over the remains of an old oak forest, with some stumps still in need of removal when we arrived: “forest dentistry,” they called it, and wasted no time in assigning it to the new recruits. The ten-thousand-acre tract lacked the bucolic atmosphere of Plattsburgh, consisting of sand and scrub, stunted oaks and windblown pines, desolate and isolated save for Yaphank, a nondescript village on the route of the Long Island Rail Road, unremarkable save for its ugly name.

  A few gaunt pinewood barracks straggled up from the mud toward an indifferent sky, and the white tents resembled half-inflated balloons. Heaps of lumber and swearing workmen with their teams and wagons and motor trucks suggested the place might never be finished. We were shown around to the bathhouses—which contained no baths, just cold-water showers—and given instructions on how to form messes. Suddenly gentlemen who had previously hosted formal dinner parties—or who, like me, had relied on their landladies—found ourselves dining in rustic surroundings.

  We officers were informed that two thousand drafted men were scheduled to arrive on September 10. George McMurtry—fellow captain, fellow Harvard grad, and fellow Wall Street attorney, my first and best friend at Upton and throughout the war—declared himself to be “as excited as a young girl preparing for her debut”—a sincere sentiment but hilarious coming from him. A hulking Scotch-Irishman who’d delayed the pursuit of his juris doctor to serve with the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, he was one of the few among us who’d actually been in combat, having seen action in the battles of Las Guasimas and San Juan Hill.

  I did not consider myself a snob—though the conscripts regarded every officer to be one by default, and they had their reasons—but I was astonished by the gulf between the concept and the reality of the drafted men pouring into Camp Upton. In training we’d learned that the army was deeply committed to the popular understanding of Americans as durable individualists, hardy descendants of pioneers. Their eagle eyes would make them sturdy riflemen! Their ruggedness would show those womanly Europeans wasting in their trenches a thing or two about initiative!

  But as my fellow war hero Sergeant Alvin York would later quip, for every turkey-shooting frontiersman who reported for duty, there were hundreds of city boys who’d never held a gun in their lives and who when called upon to fire one “missed everything but the sky.” And that, I should add, was when they could get rifles at all: the army, chronically undersupplied, often had our men drilling with broomsticks.

  Some of the recruits alighted in the Yaphank station bearing tennis rackets, bathing suits, and bathrobes, as if they expected to be guests at an elegant resort. Others might as well have been refugees: short, gaunt, hollow of eye and cheek. Plenty were illiterate. Upon their arrival at camp, many received adequate dental and medical care for the first time in their lives. Ditto nutrition. They feasted on cantaloupe, fried liver, cornflakes, creamed cauliflower, chili, pudding, stewed peaches, and iced tea. Animals fattening for the slaughter.

  Many were animalistic in other ways. Even had he not later given me countless reasons to remember him, I would never have forgotten the figure that Philip Cepaglia cut on arrival, stumbling off the train in a red silk shirt and a pink bow tie: a sweaty valentine still drunk from an all-night wedding reception in Little Italy. The other Bronx men in the battalion called him Zip, so that’s how we all came to know him; it was, I later learned, a derogatory term, one that Neapolitans who’d been in the States for decades applied to newer immigrants from Sicily, supposedly because their Italian was too fast to understand.

  When I first tried to address him, I discovered that Cepaglia could speak only three words of English, two of which were “Merry Christmas” and the third of which was “fuck.”

  These were the men who would make up the 77th Infantry Division of the United States Army. They came from a total of forty-three countries, which earned us our nickname, the Metropolitan.

  “Well, Captain,” McMurtry said as we stared into that melting pot, “we’ve got to get them from ‘Alla right, boss’ to ‘Very good, sir,’ and we’ve got to do it double time.”

  “At roll call tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll explain that in the trenches the order to duck will be given in English, and if they don’t understand it, their heads may be blown off.”

  Attendance at English classes among my men was high, but I’m sorry to say that many of their heads were blown off anyway.

  In the barracks that first night, the new privates swore like virtuosos and urinated out the windows. After lights-out they parted the dark with belches and barking, yelled conversations, real and mock farts. McMurtry, whom I studied closely in my search for a leadership style, did not resort to the screamed vulgarity favored by many of the sergeants, engaging the men instead with a perpetual finesse, one that allowed him to mix and joke with them but still assert his superiority and bend them to his will.

  “All right, all right!” he called into the din. “You’re a rowdy crowd, not prone to doze. Come morning we’ll start your training, and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts you’ll sleep soundly tomorrow night.”

  We officers couldn’t be everywhere all the time, so in order to discourage certain recurring behaviors we put up certain signs, of which I took a hand in the composition. Given how I’d been living in Manhattan, I hardly considered myself a prude, but I must admit to being ill at ease with my regiment’s coarse talk and lewd humor, their contempt for authority, and their streetwise cockiness. I did not want to be perceived as a martinet or a cold CO, so my signs addressed them in language they could understand. PLEASE DO NOT SHIT IN FENCE CORNERS, read one I that recall with particular satisfaction. They proved effective.

  So, too, did I find myself ordering men who were accustomed to changing their clothes seasonally to wa
sh themselves every morning, change uniforms often, and take pride in a neat appearance. This wasn’t easy, as the supply sergeants handed out coats and breeches ill-fitting and mismatched. Men with thirty-two-inch chests found themselves given thirty-sixes and told to be grateful to have anything to wear at all. They looked like badly pulled taffy, and on more than one occasion I had to order them to swap.

  Given my own double life, I didn’t feign hypocritical disapproval of what my men did on their days off or leave time, provided their activities didn’t leave them sick, dead, or in jail. I left moralizing concerns to the representatives of the Young Men’s Christian Association, who strove like choirboys to keep the troops from harlots and strong drink. Like all the men, I was grateful for the forums that the YMCA established throughout Upton—eight huts and a three-thousand-seat auditorium—upon the stages of which we could watch boxing matches, motion pictures, and theatrical productions as well as religious programs on Sundays. The YMCA was proud to inform us officers of the significant demand for Bibles from the men in camp; I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the Good Book wasn’t always being put to its intended use. The onionskin pages evidently made perfect rolling papers; one Sunday a private told me that he’d “smoked through the New Testament as far as Second Corinthians.”

  This was a test: he’d disclosed a small, arguable transgression to see how I’d react, the better to gauge the breadth of my tolerance. That he’d hazard this experiment at all was proof of how far the battalion had come in terms of cohesion—but it represented a risk for me, too. If my response were disproportionate, they’d make me out to be a prig, or so insecure in my authority as to feel the need to pounce on the mildest lapse. If I laughed along with him and his fellows, I’d put myself on their level, smudging a line of command that on the battlefield would need to be straighter and brighter than a searchlight’s beam.

  So at first I said nothing, only met his gaze with an even smile. Then, when his courage seemed to flicker, “That’s resourceful,” I said. “Along those same lines, Private, if you’re feeling peckish, you might check the chaplains’ schedules and take Communion as a second breakfast.”

  As jokes go, it was unlikely to make the pages of the Lampoon, but it seemed to do the trick, returning the soldier’s serve, not surrendering the point. A couple of onlookers suppressed nervous laughter, and I walked away.

  But I honestly wasn’t sure quite how the exchange had come off until weeks later, at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, where I and some of the other officers had gone on leave for dinner and a drink. “I heard a story about you, Whit,” McMurtry said, and proceeded to recount my exchange with the private, fairly accurately in substance if not in my exact phrasing. Wary, I allowed that it was true.

  Marshall Peabody—a brash and friendly banker from a family of bankers, now a second lieutenant in the 306th Machine Gun Battalion—cackled heartily at this, as he did at most things. “You keep it pretty well hidden,” he said, “but you’ve got a wit as keen as a safety blade.”

  I appreciated that, but I was most concerned about McMurtry’s judgment. He knew it and with a hint of mischief let me suffer in suspense. “Many who served in the 1st Volunteer Cavalry,” he said at last, “cannot finish a conversation without mentioning that fact. I try to be more sparing, but in this case I hope you’ll indulge me. One of the many lessons I learned from watching Colonel Roosevelt during our scrapes in Cuba is that a well-timed jest can spur the troops better than the finest bugler. If you’ve got your wit, then you’ve got your wits, and men know they can follow you without fear. That’s something the army doesn’t teach its officers, but you seem to have puzzled it out on your own.”

  “We’ll see how my sense of humor holds up under fire,” I said, an honest bit of modesty to mask my pride and my relief.

  My sense of humor held up well enough for the rest of that evening, at any rate. With the help of the Harvard Club’s good scotch whiskey—still flowing freely in those happy days before the Volstead Act—McMurtry’s endorsement put me enough at ease that I relaxed my customary reserve and ventured a few mordant observations about the goings-on at camp, thoughts I had previously relegated to my letters to Marguerite and otherwise kept to myself. These, as it happened, were so well received as to leave my companions teary-eyed with laughter, alternately roaring and gasping for breath, and the commotion earned me an even larger audience as civilian men from nearby tables joined our group. In short order I stowed my profound uncertainty as an untested officer and entered territory familiar from my student days: the domain of the raconteur. This odd paradox—i.e., sometimes the best place to hide oneself is center stage—was one I took so thoroughly to heart in my youth that I almost forgot I’d learned it, but it came back to me then with invigorating force.

  Throughout the war I looked back on that evening at the Harvard Club with great fondness, recalling it as the moment when I found my footing among the officers and struck up some of my truest friendships. But then the Pocket tainted my nostalgia, as it tainted everything else. Now what I remember most acutely about that night are the uncharitable gibes I made at the expense of my conscripted men, their styles of dress and habits of hygiene, their malapropisms and infelicitous grammar. Men who, though pressed into service against their wills, would come to display poise and courage to equal Hector’s. Men whom I would lead to their deaths.

  As I bade my tipsy companions good night under a clear sky of autumn stars, I felt a sense of complete well-being. Though my place was a straight six blocks east, past Grand Central Station, I walked south with McMurtry to give myself a chance to thank him for his encouraging words.

  He waved my gratitude away like a cloud of gnats. “Balderdash,” he said. “Just stating plain facts.” He stopped, gave me a kindly, appraising glance, and shook my hand. “You know, Whit, when I met you, I took you for a reticent, professorial sort. And that’s fine. The army can use such fellows. But now I see you’re a regular guy. Which, to be frank, I prefer.”

  He set out for home. Not quite ready to do so myself, I stood and contemplated the columns and lions of the public library, that cool and orderly warehouse of wisdom. Other men may thrill to the sight of Old Glory rippling in the breeze, but for me the library was a better symbol of what I had taken up arms to defend.

  I walked around its pale expanse and turned the corner into Bryant Park, where I met a young plasterer—drunken and sullen, curly hair still powdered like a periwig with the gypsum of his trade—and brought him almost wordlessly home, taking care not to disturb Mrs. Sullivan.

  * * *

  • • •

  Like the whole of the 77th Infantry, we men of the 308th Regiment all hailed from the five boroughs of New York City. In terms of our attitudes and experiences, however, we officers held less in common with the enlisted men than we might have with bankers and barristers from Bolivia, or Fiji, or the Planet Mars. My youthful excursions into socialism had fostered sympathy for the workers of the world but had given precious little guidance when it came to encountering them in person. I thought constantly about esprit de corps—words whose French origin, I knew, would be a cause for mockery or irritation among the privates if I spoke them aloud.

  “The trouble with this outfit,” one often heard it said at Camp Upton, in both the polished tones of majors and the rumpled burrs of privates, “is that all the officers come from below Fulton Street and all the men from above it.” Concord on the topic of discord, as it were. The enlisted men and draftees were immigrants, Bowery boys, Lower East Side roustabouts, educated on the streets. They pegged us “the Fighting Eggheads” and wondered how such men, many of whom had never so much as sustained or inflicted a bloody nose in a humdrum bout of Saturday-night fisticuffs, could expect to command them to kill. Many of us wondered the same.

  The great amplifier of trouble at Camp Upton was boredom. We officers had the wherewithal to return to the city on leave, but many of t
he enlisted men did not and so remained in camp, at loose ends. When idle and alone, one might be moved to compose lyrical ballads; when idle in the company of other idlers, one’s thoughts inevitably turn toward petty intrigues and grievances. Days spent preparing to face a deadly enemy whom one never actually meets are long and fraught days indeed.

  We officers tried to provide relief when we could, but in that tense atmosphere any generous act might also be taken as an affront to dignity. Dignity, I was often reminded, is something that most men prize above their very lives. My men were prepared to risk the latter for me, and in return they expected me to honor—and defend—the former.

  With winter closing in, every barracks wanted a phonograph, and those of the 308th were no exception. One of the lieutenants brought me Corporal Walter Baldwin to ask my permission on the company’s behalf. I liked Baldwin: quiet, judicious, even-tempered, a soldier the others listened to. He was training to become the battalion’s message clerk. Later he’d be among the few men who’d walk out of the Pocket alive.

  “We’re going to do it the usual way, sir,” he said. “Taking up a collection. Only if it’s all right with you.”

  “What do you expect to ask from each man, Corporal?”

  “A dollar per man,” he said, looking at his shoes. Weighing whether to ask if I’d like to contribute.

  I handed him five, which he tried to reject, but I insisted. He blushed, almost with a wince, and seemed eager to take his leave, already worrying about how he’d recount this conversation to his bunkmates, anticipating their contempt at my high-handedness, dreading the prospect of defending me. I had put him in a fix.

  “One thing I suggest,” I said. “Ask a dollar per man, just as you’re planning. But remember that some of these fellows are already sending every spare cent home to wives and children. Trust that they’ll earn their music in other ways. Take up the collection, but don’t tell anyone what anyone else has paid. That includes me.”