Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Read online

  His knotted face loosened, and I knew I’d thrown him the life buoy he needed. I dismissed him before he could muster another round of thanks.

  That became my preferred practice: helping to ease the troops’ burdens when I could while avoiding public gestures that made me stand out as different, privileged, more refined. But when faced with another monetary collection going on at the same time, I could not maintain my silence.

  Orders had come down: officers were to sign up every man in camp—from the highest-paid to the poorest conscript—for the Liberty Loan Drive. Congress had authorized the issuance of nearly six billion dollars in bonds to fund what was sure to be a military mobilization of unprecedented scale, but the bonds weren’t selling well, trading much below par, something that the Treasury and their allies in the banks attributed nebulously to German sabotage or investors’ lack of patriotism, rather than to their own misunderstanding of the bond market. With the shortfall beginning to take on the dimensions of a scandal, they indulged in the time-honored tradition of curing economics with politics and called upon the military to squeeze dollars from their soldiers.

  Major General Franklin Bell—then in charge of the 77th Division, an accomplished soldier who’d been army chief of staff under Roosevelt and Taft and who maintained facility in the political realm—did not hesitate to implement this directive, asserting that the success of our mission depended no less on raising funds than on wielding arms and informing his colonels that the men were to be told forthwith to allot a portion of their salaries toward Liberty Bonds.

  When our commander, Colonel Nathan K. Averill, asked whether the 308th had made these allotments, I indicated that it had not and would do no such thing.

  Colonel Averill reacted as if he simply hadn’t understood what I’d said. My fellow officers in Headquarters Company—among whom I was renowned for fretting over regulations and checking every detail—also reacted with ill-concealed shock. I was the last man they had expected to question an order.

  But while I might have been as green as a spring meadow on many aspects of battlefield command, as a Wall Street attorney I understood the Liberty Bond push as well as anyone at Camp Upton. Per my entirely deserved reputation as a stickler, I also knew the army’s rules, which in their tedious elegance bound us officers no less than the enlisted men.

  “The War Risk Insurance Act, as amended,” I explained to the colonel—and shortly thereafter, per the colonel’s request, to the major general himself—“draws a clear distinction between compulsory and voluntary allotments. It also sets a limit on what portion of a soldier’s pay can be allotted without his consent. When you add up the current allotments for family and insurance, most of our men are at that cap now, or near to it. So while we can, and no doubt should, make our men aware of an investment opportunity that helps to fund our operations, we also have to tell them it’s strictly voluntary. Furthermore, we have to mean it.”

  General Bell was not pleased, but to his credit he immediately understood my concern and cut off the discussion by saying he’d ask the JAG Corps for an opinion. I had the unquantifiable sense that Bell found the order distasteful himself, though he was too much the professional soldier to let that show. I never had a chance to speak with him about it privately; not long after, he left Camp Upton for France to observe the front, then failed a physical exam on his return and was removed from command of the 77th. Like many at Camp Upton, he’d be dead within a year, though his last breath would be snuffed not by gas or shell burst but pneumonia, in an infirmary on Governors Island.

  If the legal officer ever wrote an opinion on the subject, I never saw it—but neither were the officers of the 308th asked about the progress of bond allotments again. Later that winter, when Averill was reviewing the troops, a sergeant asked him, “Sir, about the loan drive. Some of the men have been wondering. We know the army wants us to sign up, and a lot of us have. But there’s a bit of confusion, sir. Is it an order? Or is it our choice?”

  Colonel Averill looked at me, more amused than annoyed. “Captain Whittlesey,” he said, “will you answer the question on the regiment’s behalf?”

  “It’s a voluntary allotment, Sergeant,” I said. “The men can make up their own minds.” And a cheer went up in the barracks, musky and close with the smell of male bodies.

  As for the phonograph, it was cheery to have music. To hear reveille followed cheekily by “It’s Nice to Get Up in the Morning (But It’s Nicer to Lie in Bed)” or after retreat at sunset to hear taps echoed by “Give Me the Moonlight, Give Me the Girl.”

  One evening in December, when the music was playing and it had begun to snow, I was walking alone toward my own quarters and happened upon Corporal Baldwin, probably returning from a YMCA hut. I returned his salute, complimented his successful stewardship of the phonograph plan, and inquired generally about the sentiments of the men. Baldwin had an innate genius for communication: a sense of what it would best serve me to know and the grace to tell me without betraying confidences.

  “Spirits are high, Captain,” he said. “We feel like an army now. We’re eager to get over there. Nervous, naturally. We try to keep up with the war as best we can, newspapers being hard to come by. Some of the men can’t read too well, as you know, sir. So when we do have one, a fellow reads it aloud, for the benefit of all.”

  “Can’t listen to the phonograph all the time, I suppose,” I said.

  “I wonder, sir,” he said, looking toward the lights of the barracks, avoiding my eyes. “Some of the men want to know, and I want to tell them right. If it’s okay to ask, were you in a war before, sir?”

  “It’s okay to ask, Corporal. Had I been conscripted in as a private, I’m sure I’d want to put the same question to my commanders. No, I’ve never been to war. I’m a lawyer. I trained at Plattsburgh, and now I’m here.”

  Baldwin seemed satisfied and nodded. “Some of the things we learned about. Verdun. The Somme.” His mispronunciations were those of someone self-taught by reading, not through chatter at the club. “I guess no one’s ever been in a war like this one.”

  Laughter cut through the night air: a group of soldiers debating the correct lyrics to “It’s Been a Long, Long Time Since I’ve Been Home.”

  “Captain,” Baldwin said, “I wanted to tell you that the men think—well, sir, we think you’re okay. We know if you’re bossing the job, then it’s going to be done right.”

  I was glad of the darkness, which hid my discomfort at receiving praise. I wanted to respond to Baldwin with the same generosity, the same reassurance that all would be well, but I could not. And there was rank to consider; there was command.

  “You should get back to the phonograph, Baldwin. It sounds as though you’re needed. At the rate they’re going, those men will never puzzle through that last verse before lights-out.”

  And Baldwin laughed, departing with a crisp salute.

  At Christmastime—fine rain, melting icicles—I further improved my standing with both the officers and the enlisted men, although my motives for doing so weren’t entirely noble. Half the division got a forty-eight-hour pass at Christmas, and the other half would get the same on either side of New Year’s Eve. From brigadier generals to buck privates, most wanted Christmas and planned to spend it with their families in the city.

  But my family would be gathering in Pittsfield, and the trip there and back wouldn’t be feasible in two days’ time. Thus, if I took the Christmas pass, I’d probably return to Manhattan, too—and were I back in Manhattan with no family to visit, I would probably go cruising. Sordid sadness being the saddest sadness, the prospect seemed too depressing to abide.

  But I could make the most of a New Year’s Eve in New York City. So I volunteered to spend Christmas in camp, causing everyone to think me quite the altruist.

  That night had the pall of a glum soiree, poor weather and an anxious mood prevailing. To conjure some cheer, w
e got approval to decorate a thirty-foot pine tree that grew near headquarters and that had somehow escaped the forest dentistry of the Quartermaster Corps. We also helped the Red Cross distribute packages of food and cigarettes, as well as wholesome cards—each from a girl, unknown and therefore lovely—offering glad tidings.

  After the New Year, we felt our call to ship out drawing nearer. The army wanted us to be seen before we departed, so the city could marvel at the magic we’d wrought.

  On February 4, 1918, Colonel Averill led the 308th Infantry in parade up Eighth Avenue and down Fifth. A West Point instructor well liked by the soldiers, he was determined to reassure the Manhattanites gathered on the sidewalks that the hordes plucked from their midst by the draft had been ennobled. The men seemed determined to prove it, too.

  The crowd was huge and ready to be dazzled, despite a driving snowstorm and a bitter wind. Face upon cheering face appraised us as we filed by, snowflakes on our olive drab, slush under our boots. Marguerite and Bayard watched us pass, as did men from the Williams and Harvard clubs, and men whom I had met on the street and taken home and then never met again. On the march, though, I had no impression of individual identities, either among the spectators or in our uniformed column. We seemed to become two huge organisms, one watched and the other watching, creatures at once new to the world and utterly ancient, enacting a ritual older than history itself.

  Dazzle we did, and with such effectiveness that enlistments soared throughout the city during the next week, and the army issued orders for infantry units all over the country to do the same in their cities.

  I should have been proud. Instead all I felt was ineffable sadness, which—I did not understand at the time but realize now, aboard the Toloa—was due to the fact that we were about to take these men whom we had improved so much physically and mentally to Europe and erase all traces not just of that improvement but of their entire existence.

  Here at sea I put on my dress uniform and hang my regular clothes in the tiny wardrobe. I might as well look the part of war hero tonight at the captain’s table, as it will be expected of me. The very last expectation that I’ll be required to meet.

  CHAPTER 5

  CHER AMI

  Hannibal took elephants across the snow-covered Alps, the better to bring his war to the Roman Republic. We pigeons took trains across the green Cotswold Hills, south to the Channel port of Dover, the better to carry our message-bearing prowess to France.

  In the motorcar on the way to the station at Chipping Norton, John recited “Channel Firing” in honor of the poet’s namesake, my brother Thomas Hardy, the only one of my siblings also chosen for my batch: the Wright Farm Dozen, soon to be scattered across the Argonne Forest. Narrated by bodies in their coffins, it tells of how the stupidity of war disrupts divine order enough to wake the dead. Dead now and conscious forever, I remember his choice as not merely apt but also prophetic.

  “I wonder,

  Will the world ever saner be,”

  Said one, “than when He sent us under

  In our indifferent century!”

  As directed by a soldier, John loaded our wicker basket onto a military train. It was a dulcet day in early May. Even the snorts of the engines and the stink of the coal smoke couldn’t disguise the luxuriant smells of damp and dirt and unfurling plants. By way of farewell, John checked the food and water in our basket and patted its top shut with his great paw of a hand—that hand which had a hand in raising us all.

  “Well, my birds,” he said, his voice bearing an unaccustomed rasp, “I wish you bon voyage and good luck. When the Hun marched off to the front in August of ’14, the kaiser told ’em, ‘You will be home before the leaves have fallen.’ Now, if it ain’t the spring of 1918. I hope you lot can help the Yanks put the stop to it.”

  He waved and turned, and the soldier slid the door to the boxcar shut. The circumstances of our transportation seemed so normal that I had to remind myself, as my eyes adjusted to the half-light, that this was no typical Saturday trip; John wasn’t shipping us off to a race.

  Aboard the boxcar with us and adding to the odor—comforting, mind you, to us country pigeons—were half a dozen horses and a pair of mules. Wood chips and dust, leather and molasses, sweat and manure. Most pigeons are fond of horses. Once we put aside the obvious difference in size that inclines us to think of them in almost geographical terms, we find them quite easy to understand and sympathize with.

  The train pulled out, heading south and west toward the junction at Kingham, and we animals settled in place, braced against the boxcar’s rocking. “Are you messenger pigeons?” one of the mares asked.

  (The reader may be forgiven for wondering how animals of different species—indeed of different genera, families, orders, and classes—are able to communicate, whereas humans’ speech is often entirely unintelligible to others of their kind who reside only a sea’s or a mountain range’s breadth away. The answer is that I don’t know. I might also respectfully add that we animals find it very odd that humans have such trouble understanding one another, and add further that we suspect this might be due to their rather impoverished notions of what qualifies as language.

  But here, too, I question myself, because in fact the animals to whom I have felt the closest kinship have always been those whose lives are most closely bound up with humans—dogs, horses—as well as the human animals themselves.)

  “We are indeed messenger pigeons,” said Thomas Hardy, his voice raised above the train whistle’s shriek. “Are you warhorses?”

  “So they’ve told us,” the mare replied. “Though we’d rather not be.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “I thought horses love war.”

  The mare snorted, as did her five compatriots. “Men love war,” she said. “Kings love it, and so do their poets. ‘Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die. / Into the valley of death rode the six hundred!’ Twelve hundred if you count the horses. Most of those men survived the Charge of the Light Brigade. Most of those horses didn’t. The poets don’t rhyme about that, do they?”

  That struck me as cynical but not false.

  The horse kept her head low, shifting her hooves to the train’s chuff as it picked up speed. “Our groom told us that horses can’t even charge in this war,” she said. “The battlefield’s all pits and barbed wire. We’ll just haul supplies to the front lines.”

  “What’s wrong with hauling supplies?” said one of the mules in her heavy canvas halter.

  “Nothing at all, Edna dear,” said the horse, clearly accustomed to placating her comrade. “I’m just explaining to these birds how far removed our war will be from the gallant cavalry exploits of old.”

  “Just because you dray horses can trace a sliver more of your heritage back to Alexander’s stallion Bucephalus, that doesn’t make you authorities on combat,” said Edna. “Many animals of many sorts will help our humans win their war. After all, who’s to say what they need from us, exactly? I’ve heard a story about sailors on the HMS Glasgow who keep a pig as a mascot. They took him from a German cruiser they sank and kept him for a lucky charm instead of eating him.”

  “An exception that proves the rule,” said the horse. “The sailors know they’re no different from the pig. They spared it just as they’d want to be spared and because sparing it made them feel powerful, although they’re not. If they thought any of us were ever coming back, then the British government wouldn’t have to force the farmers to donate us. You’re not here on your own accord, are you, birdies?”

  “Of course we’re not,” I answered, the fresh straw in the basket fragrant beneath my claws. “But we’re honored to be going. We’re ready to put our skills to use for something besides winning prize money.”

  The horse hoisted her head to peer at me with her beetle-black eye. “I suppose if I were flying over the trenches instead of toiling in the muck,
then I might think the same. None of us has a choice, so it really doesn’t matter. As for me, I’ll do my job, but I’ll do it with my eyes wide open, not fogged with slogans of shared sacrifice. Our injured stableman told me a tale about the children of Lord Kitchener and a letter they wrote him. ‘Please spare our pony Betty. It would break our hearts to let her go.’”

  “And was Betty spared?” asked Edna the mule.

  “You bet your tail she was,” said the mare with a toss of her mane.

  We sank into a momentary silence. From inside our basket, between the planks of the boxcar, we could see the countryside clipping along. Land that only a few weeks ago had been brown and drab beneath us on our practice flights now flashed by in verdant grass and blinking bloom—apple, cherry, and pear trees filling the air with blossoms.

  “I still say they’d be lost without us,” Thomas Hardy piped up, cheerful as was his welcome way, a way I never shared but miss. “The humans, I mean. They wouldn’t know what to make of themselves. I’ve heard that they call Georges Clemenceau ‘the Tiger’ to make him sound brave.”

  Edna brayed. “I’ve heard that they call Lloyd George ‘the Goat,’” she said, “because he’s as randy as a billy when it comes to the ladies.”

  “They also say,” said another of the horses, “that he’s hung like one of us, as the phrase goes.”

  And so the ride went on, from Kingham through Oxford toward London along the Thames, stopping now and then for water or coal or to be shunted onto a longer train. And our conversation, too, went on in this crasser vein, which I would learn is typical among man and beast alike in times of war: talk of death giving way to talk of sex.

  As we rolled on, I also thought about what Thomas Hardy had said—the idea that humans need animals to understand themselves. Later, on the battlefield, I would come to see soldiers befriend the field mice and wrens who ventured into the trenches seeking morsels of food. Even the smallest creature—a spider on her web—could give a man the mercy of taking his mind off the violence raging at all hours, reminding him that the earth still retained some forms of order even within the catastrophe.