CHAPTER 1

CHER AMI

Monuments matter most to pigeons and soldiers.

I myself have become a monument, a feathered statue inside a glass case.

In life I was both a pigeon and a soldier. In death I am a piece of mediocre taxidermy, collecting dust in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

The museum has closed, and everyone has gone home. The last guests took their leave at five thirty, as they do every weekday, and even the janitorial staffers have finished their tasks: miles of floors polished and pine-scented, acres of displays gleaming and silent. A few hours remain before midnight. This is the eve of the one-hundred-year anniversary of what, according to the United States Army, was the most important day of my avian life: October 4, 1918.

I’m not sure I agree. That day was an important one, certainly, but days don’t carry the same meaning for pigeons as they do for humans, and my life comprised other days, days that might be equally worth note, if not to the army then at least to me and to those I loved.

Pigeons can love.

Pigeons cannot fight. Yet I was once as well known to schoolchildren and grown-up citizens alike as any human hero of what was then called the Great War.

Hence the stuffing of my mangled body. Hence my enshrinement here, in the grandmother’s attic of the entire country.

I hear the tale of my heroism—the simple version—over and over. I used to hear it daily from patriotic patrons who knew it by rote. Time having passed, other wars having superseded my own, nowadays I hear it every week or so from history-buff parents—usually French or British but sometimes American—as they lead their kids from case to case. Or I hear it from precocious children themselves, animal lovers fascinated by what I did. In their reedy voices, birdlike in their own right, they tell the tale as follows: During that big war in France, some American soldiers got trapped in enemy territory. They were called the Lost Battalion because they got surrounded by the Germans. They released homing pigeon after homing pigeon with messages for help. They watched and watched as the little birds fell, shot down by enemy fire. But the last pigeon, Cher Ami right here, wasn’t going to let that stop him. Even though he got shot through the chest and the leg, the brave bird struggled on, carrying his note for forty kilometers—American kids say twenty-five miles—until, close to death, he arrived at his loft at the American base. Thanks to Cher Ami, all the soldiers were saved.

Their parents will smile and say, Very good.

Occasionally a child who doesn’t know the story of the Lost Battalion will glance my way as she goes by. Catching sight of my single orange leg, she will ask, Why? Why does the pigeon only have one foot?

Balanced there on my polished oak base, I will want to explain. Naturally, I can’t.

The little girl and her parents will see that I am displayed near a Yeoman (F) uniform and a field telephone. They’ll read the plaque beneath the black-and-white photograph of an infantryman’s back as he trails a spool of wire through the woods, toward the front: TELEPHONES WERE ONE OF SEVERAL NEW TECHNOLOGIES DEPLOYED IN THE SERVICE OF WAGING WAR, it states. TROOPS STRUNG MILES OF TELEPHONE WIRE IN THE FIELD, ALLOWING INSTANT COMMUNICATION. BUT THE LINES PROVED VULNERABLE, AND THE ARMY OFTEN RELIED ON TRADITIONAL MEANS TO RELAY MESSAGES—HUMAN RUNNERS AND CARRIER PIGEONS.

The little girl and her parents will look at the engraved silver band around my remaining leg, identifying me as National Union of Racing Pigeons Number 615. I’ve never thought of myself that way, only as Cher Ami, my given name: French, meaning “Dear Friend,” though I was a British bird.

The family will read my placard, quite brief, which states:

CHER AMI, ONE OF THE 600 CARRIER PIGEONS DEPLOYED BY THE U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS, WAS AWARDED THE FRENCH CROIX DE GUERRE WITH PALM FOR HIS HEROIC SERVICE.

Huh, they’ll say, and wander off, satisfied. And I, too, will feel satisfied, partly, at the knowledge they’ve gained.

The placard gets my name at least, if not my gender. Even now, more than a century after I was first misidentified, that error still grates. Though originally registered as a Black Check cock, I’m really a Blue Check, and when I was being taxidermied, they discovered that I was—that I am—a hen. The man doing the job informed them as much, but since they’d already had the placard made and budgets were tight, they didn’t pay to change it. Good enough for government work, they said, and laughed. I’ve been wrongly called a cock bird ever since, in history books and military records.

I never behaved like a typical hen, it’s true. But I am a female, and female war heroes are rarely given their due.

This erasure annoys me.

I do appreciate that placard for its refusal to overemphasize me: one of six hundred. There were so many of us, and so many of us could be called heroic. My fellow pigeon President Wilson, for instance, my fond companion during the war who joined me for a time in this display case, this eternal institutional afterlife. They shipped him over to the Pentagon in 2008, I think. I miss him.

Though he’s not the bird I miss the most.

Pigeons have an almost bottomless capacity for longing.

I’ve still got Sergeant Stubby in here with me, sleeping now. He and I talk and talk and talk when we’re both awake.

He was the mascot of the 102nd Infantry, 26th Division, accompanying his unit in the hellish French trenches, awarded a gold medal by General John J. Pershing. A consummate joiner, as are most dogs, he was made a lifetime member of the Red Cross, the Young Men’s Christian Association, and the American Legion. He stands over there by the canteen, the bread tin, the wire cutters, the first-aid kit, the mess kit, and the trench periscope, looking as pert and ferocious as he did in life, or so he assures me.

His paws, quick and light, look ready to leap from his mahogany block mount, and even in repose his underslung jaw seems ready to bite the enemy or eat a treat. His ears appear as though they could still rotate to hear an incoming shell, and his studded leather collar gives his stalwart adorability the slight sharpness that befits an army pup. I never call him Stubby; I call him Sarge, because my doing so pleases him. He’s a dog of uncertain breed but seems mostly Boston terrier in appearance and temperament. He’s also the only dog—as he’ll tell you, repeatedly—to have been nominated for rank and promoted to sergeant through combat.

I don’t much care about rank. Most of us pigeons are less fixated on titles and decorations than on missions completed. In this respect we resemble the flying aces—or so I gather; we had no contact with them during the war and certainly never sought to emulate them. Something about performing one’s duties alone, aloft above the carnage, may engender this attitude.

Dogs, on the other hand, are infantry through and through, not to mention rule-bound and craving of human regard. Sarge deserves the regard that he received. He served eighteen months on the front, in seventeen battles. He gave comfort to the wounded, saved his regiment from a mustard-gas attack, and stopped a German soldier by clasping the seat of his pants in his terrier jaws until human reinforcements arrived to complete the capture.

He, unlike me, is excited about my centenary. But as I said, dogs are like that. I am to wake him at midnight so he and I can celebrate. Knowing Sarge, this will mean that we will reminisce and sing “Auld Lang Syne.” Dogs love singing. And I love Sergeant Stubby. His uncomplicated good cheer and patience remain constant even in death, and I can see why the men of the Yankee Division adored him. His owner had his pelt mounted on a plaster cast after he died in his sleep in 1926, and Sarge passed into the heterogeneous holdings of the Smithsonian in 1956, where he still greets each day as though this placement were the best and most unexpected surprise.

Sarge is, however, not immune to indignation and is given to wondering aloud why the army hasn’t seen fit to present either of us—or, for that matter, the many other creatures who served alongside us, birds and horses and mules and dogs—with the Distinguished Service Cross. The DSC was not, I remind him, an honor customarily presented to animals, at least not while any of us were alive. Well, a posthumous award is still an award, he always replies, snuffling.

General Pershing did give me a small silver medal, but it was just a made-up thing. Though aren’t all honors, really? Either we believe that they matter or we don’t.

Still, I like having my Croix de Guerre here next to me. Next to, not on, as it’s too large and heavy for a pigeon to wear, and I haven’t a uniform on which to pin it. The French have long been more willing to perceive valor in sapient creatures of species other than human. Their citation notes that I—NURP Number 615, Cher Ami, un pigeon voyageur—was responsible for the safe delivery of twelve battlefield messages in France. Here in the States, I’m remembered only for that final voyage, but I flew many missions before being invalided out trying to save my Lost Battalion.

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.