CHAPTER 6
CHARLES WHITTLESEY
Hannibal took elephants across the snow-covered Alps, the better to bring his war to the Roman Republic. We men of the 77th Division took steamships across the gray Atlantic—fifteen hundred men in each, like skyscrapers laid on their sides—the better to fight the war to end all wars.
Here on the promenade deck of the Toloa—in international waters now, en route to Cuba—I try to concentrate on my impending escape, but as always the present streams by me, trailing hooks to drag me back toward the past. With each wave split by the white ship’s prow, recollections of my first Atlantic voyage beat against my brain.
A man traveling alone has the luxury of being meticulous to a much greater degree than do those moving en masse. After interminable anticipation, the order for the 77th to ship out came with little warning and much alacrity, haste making the waste that one might expect.
We, the 308th Infantry Regiment, left Camp Upton for France in the second convoy, which embarked on April 6, 1918, one year to the day after America’s declaration of war. Hurry and discomfort characterized our leaving. Squads were detailed to destroy everything left in the white pine buildings that was not the property of the United States government. Pictures were ruthlessly torn from the walls. The treasured phonograph was lugged away, to cheer us no more. Books both trashy and high-minded, civilian clothes both shabby and modish, boxes and packages both worthless and valuable were all seized and burned, though many a hard word was spoken by the men. The stuff was cherished but inessential to the fight; thus it perished.
The night before had blown in chilly, but we officers had had to order our soldiers to turn in their bedding and sleep on the bare spring mattresses or the naked floors. I could have exerted the privilege of rank and kept mine, but I surrendered it in solidarity. Before dawn I dug my hip bones out of the hard wood to the sound of reveille, then went to the mess hall with everyone else for a quick cold breakfast and further instructions.
“The sun never rose more beautiful, did she?” said George McMurtry, passing my table in a flurry of olive drab and hail-fellow-well-met.
By 5:00 A.M. we’d fallen in facing east, where the sun had begun to lace the clouds. We received our orders and snapped into action, stepping out for the trains to Long Island City and the waiting ferries, which took us and our gear to the North River Piers. Each of our three battalions was assigned to a huffing transport ship, its sides pimpled with rivets. Swarms of sailors swung derrick nets, hoisting blue denim barracks bags and hauling them away.
My 1st Battalion and Headquarters Unit boarded a Red Star Liner by the name of Lapland, with the 2nd and 3rd on the Cretic and the Justicia. We filed up the gangplanks and checked in with an officer, shouting over the din, then received our deck and mess and bunk assignments as well as our cork life belts, which we were ordered to put—and keep—on.
Our departure was meant to be secret, and therefore we received no grand send-off dockside, which didn’t bother me. I was still rattled by the spectacle of our parade through the city—the sense of a species shaking off its humanity in answer to some darker impulse. The eerie tension between near chaos and stealth befitted my ambivalence. When it seemed as though the deck railings might give way from the pressure of bodies craning for a last look homeward, we officers ushered most of the men to the bowels of the ship, where they clustered around the cloudy portholes.
Just as Manhattan was knocking off work for the day, the steam whistle shrilled a single, splendid note. The civilians heading home knew who we were and where we were headed, and as we turned down the Hudson and made for the sea, they spotted our trio and cheered us. Ferries blew their horns, and the residents of the buildings along the water waved white towels and handkerchiefs.
I had a spot on one of the open lower decks, jammed with men, but my height granted me a view of the Statue of Liberty receding in the golden light, a sentimental sight that nevertheless provoked my sentiments. How many crimes, I wonder now—how many blunders worse than crimes—get committed in her name?
As the stars came out, we were ordered below. The captain of the Lapland passed around the promise of a reward: one hundred pounds to any man who spotted a sub. Thinking of the torpedoes that sank the Lusitania and of the Germans’ proclamation of unrestricted submarine warfare, we eyed the waves as if we were gulls hunting prey, motivated less by the contest than by the reminder of peril. I heard many a man remark that an Atlantic crossing that might have been a pleasure in peacetime was anything but in a time of war.
For the second night in a row, I had difficulty sleeping, it being vexing to expect one’s ship to be fired upon at any hour. But despite many false alarms of sub sightings from the overexcited men, we never saw one.
To call the shipboard food terrible was to overpraise it. Our meals were prepared by English cooks, evidently committed to safeguarding their reputation for awfulness. Boiled potatoes, rice, tapioca, and marmalade—no salt, no sugar, no seasoning of any kind. For lunch that day, we’d had rabbit stew, which tasted as if the cooks had left the fur on. Coffee was served from garbage cans. Seasick men puked thickly over the sides: “feeding the fishes,” they called it.
By April 8 we’d reached Nova Scotia, where we stopped to load the scuppers with coal and to take on more supplies. Supplies, supplies, always more supplies! I didn’t yet fully appreciate the degree to which wars are fought and won by quartermasters or the quantity of killing that was accomplished through lack. France would teach me that lesson, with the Pocket as my final examination.
We spent an afternoon conducting lifeboat drills in the Halifax Harbor. Dropping the boats and rowing around the icy chop of the bay provided a welcome break from the crowded ship, which I had come to imagine as a floating tenement—or as how I imagined a tenement would be, since unlike the majority of the enlisted men, I had never set foot in one. With the regiment in action, it was easier to picture the Lapland as a beehive—honeycombed with bulkheads and decks and infinite compartments—and the men as a purposeful swarm.
We departed from Halifax the following evening to a much livelier send-off than we’d been granted in New York. Women and kids waved; bands played “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” and “La Marseillaise” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The men seemed especially moved by this last one; many had sweethearts, or even fiancées. I sympathized, feeling a tinge of yearning myself—not for anyone in particular but rather for my habits in the city, where I had freedom, and privacy, and Marguerite as a trusted friend. Melancholy and relief in equal measure rushed at me through the salty air; I was sailing farther and farther from my double life.
That night, like every night, provided a beautiful sunset, a golden yellow disk sinking into the water like a coin into a slot.
That night, like every night, strict light discipline limited our activities. We’d given up our matches upon boarding the ship; absolutely no smoking was permitted outside at night, as the glow of a cigarette could be seen at sea from half a mile. Portholes were kept closed, and the only illumination came from tiny blue bulbs.
Once the bands were out of earshot, most of the men drifted belowdecks. Though it had begun to mist, I stayed above in the briny sea air to watch the sun’s last traces vanish, in no hurry to return to the fetid stench among the bunks below. From the rear deck, all I could see was deep blue water in every direction. The only sounds were the engine’s thump, like a giant heart, and the faint applause of waves against the hull. I liked the nights best, with blackest darkness all around. Sharing solitude with these fifteen hundred men made the isolation that I had always felt seem external as well, a quality of the night itself: a pathetic fallacy that made me feel less alone.
The morning after our departure from Nova Scotia, I rose early to catch the sunrise—no less spectacular—and to beat my fellow soldiers to the decks, where we’d all go to smoke in the open air.
That morning, April 10, was the first time I set eyes on Bill Cavanaugh.
I didn’t notice him at first, a slim figure leaning aslant the opposite railing, utterly motionless, his back turned to the horizon’s glow. His elbows were braced so he could hold something close to his face at an odd angle: a book. He was reading. He and I had both been craving first light, but he was using the dawn to inhale knowledge, while I’d just been impatient to safely strike an army match. I was amused, and impressed, and a little ashamed.
I didn’t want to disturb him—or, honestly, to speak to anyone at that hour—and had decided to pursue my original aim of sunrise-watching by drifting farther along the starboard side when he looked up and saw me.
“Good morning, Captain Whittlesey,” he said, coming to attention and saluting. It was the most perfect salute I had ever seen—perfect, I realized later, because its perfection was achieved for its own sake, not to impress me. As he turned, the copper light from the east caught him, shrinking the pupils of his sapphire eyes. I detected no nervousness in his expression, and its absence reminded me of its ubiquity in the other enlisted men who chanced upon me. His face showed only guarded readiness and a trace of good humor, like that of a skilled tennis player awaiting a serve. He carried his book smartly at his waist, saving his place with the tip of a little finger.
“At ease, Private,” I said. “What brings you out so early? Most men don’t want to prolong these dull days by waking up any sooner than reveille requires.”
He lowered his hand, nodded toward the open sea. “I’ve never been on a boat before, sir,” he said. “Not even the Weehawken Ferry. It’s a thrill for me. I figure from here on I’ll be seeing and doing a lot of things for the first time, not all of them this pleasant. So why not make time for the sunrise?”
“And for study?”
He brought up the book, held it in both hands. “The Homing Pigeon,” he said, “by Edgar Chamberlain. I’m a pigeon man, sir—I mean, I’ll be handling pigeons for the regiment—but I keep birds at home as well. I want to learn everything I can about them.”
“I’m impressed you managed to get that book out of Upton.”
“It took some convincing, sir,” he said. “The roundup of personal effects was pretty thorough. But I told them that it’s related to my army work, and they understood.”
This was a good answer—explaining the situation without suggesting that anyone hadn’t done his job—and he didn’t seem to offer it with care, only honesty. His face was stunningly symmetrical, perfectly proportioned, like that of an antique statue, and I understood at once how convincing he could be.
“What’s your name, Private?”
“It’s Cavanaugh, sir. Bill Cavanaugh.”
“Lucky for the regiment to have an experienced pigeon man in its ranks. And lucky for you, too, I suppose, that the army has put you to work doing something you enjoy.”
“It is, sir,” Cavanaugh said. “It really is. To hold a pigeon and to feel it enjoy being held . . . well, sir, it’s a pleasure unmatched by any other.”
Though I took it at first for a trick of the morning light, a closer look confirmed that he was blushing. This soldier who’d converse with a captain or a king as easily as with a fellow private would, I’d come to learn, turn boiled-lobster red whenever he spoke of something he loved. And he loved many things, though none, I think, more than pigeons.
“Being in the loft with my homers,” he went on, “quiets all the troubles of life. It’s like growing roses, I imagine. Pursuing beauty, cultivating it, but never reaching it completely. Not that my family ever had space for a garden.”
It felt rare, almost unsafe, to hear a grown man speak so openly of his passions. My mind alit at once on my own comparable pursuits, in much the same way that one’s hand might reach automatically for one’s wallet while navigating a crowded street. To be clear, I’m referring not to my dalliances with men—an appetite is not a passion—but rather to my dalliances with poetry, which I had written seriously since I was a boy and for which I had earned modest acclaim at Williams. Even at work in Manhattan, I would still sometimes hit upon a promising string of iambs and cancel engagements in order to spend the weekend coaxing them into a sonnet or a villanelle. But no one in the army or back at my law office knew that I did this, and I had never for a moment considered telling them, or sharing my verses with anyone but Marguerite. It had never occurred to me that I might do so.
I tried to steer Cavanaugh back toward practicalities. “So you breed and race them?”
“Yes, sir. They really are a lot like roses. Flying flowers! All different colors, different degrees of hardiness. To appreciate them you can’t just go by how they look but also what they can do in the air. Their power and their smarts.”
“How did you come by this hobby? Has your family always raised pigeons?”
“Oh, no, sir, not at all. Though Ma likes that I keep the birds. They’re a better thing to spend money on than drink, which is where my father’s wages go, I’m afraid. There was an old guy in our building who kept them for years and who taught me about them. He told me once that they gave him an intelligent and profitable pastime. ‘They keep the harp of life in tune,’ he said.”
This conversation was by a wide margin the longest I had ever had with an enlisted man and certainly among the strangest, given its topic and the many bald-faced disclosures it had included. Cavanaugh’s candor was almost insubordinate; it certainly seemed heedless of the hierarchies that defined every aspect of our lives and our mission. Without question I should have brought our exchange to a swift end, perhaps with a reprimand.
But there on the deck with him—we two quite alone, our first morning on the open sea, the horizon visible in every direction, a clouded and violent future ahead—I could not. I reassured myself that this was a special case, that as a pigeon man Cavanaugh would likely be attached to the regiment’s command staff, that he wasn’t simply another interchangeable private whom I might have to tactically sacrifice, and that therefore this intimate dialogue was appropriate and constructive.
This was all hogwash. I was captivated.
“So, do you,” I asked, feeling all the authority that I had carefully constructed over the past months crumble like a gingerbread castle being demolished by a pig, “have a favorite pigeon you’ve left behind?” Never before had I possessed an ounce of care for pigeons.
“I surely do. Her name is Annie.”
“That was my little sister’s name,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“My little sister’s Annie, too! She was jealous of the birds for all the time I spent with them, so I told her I’d name one in her honor, my sweetest and fastest. I have a photograph. May I show you?”
Without waiting for my reply, he pulled a flat brass object from his breast pocket, looked at it, and blushed anew. “I’m a waiter at Rector’s,” he said, “and one of my regulars is a photographer. He told me—”
“Rector’s? On Broadway?” I knew it well, Marguerite and I dined there often, and I wondered how I had never seen him there—or whether I had seen him and had paid him no mind, which hardly seemed possible given how stricken I’d been by our encounter that morning. His employment at a see-and-be-seen restaurant in the Theater District helped explain not only his creamy indoor complexion but also how such a working-class fellow as himself might possess such ease when among the high and mighty.
“Yes, sir, that’s the place. This photographer wanted to do my portrait, and he said that in return he’d give me some pictures.” Cavanaugh paused to laugh and shrug, showing neither discomfort nor any conspiratorial acknowledgment that what he was describing was almost certainly—must have been—a queer advance. “But I don’t need any pictures of myself. So he offered to let me choose my subject. And here we are.”
He held out the object for my examination: a locket containing a sepia portrait of a flaxen-haired girl who looked like him—heart-shaped face, freckles across the bridge of her nose, smart smiling eyes—standing next to her pigeon namesake, perched blurrily atop a globe.
“The Feathered World,” I said, reading aloud the legend printed across the bottom.
“Yes, sir,” said Bill. “The photographer said I could give it a title if I wanted, and that’s what I came up with: The Feathered World. Those two Annies are the queens of my heart.”
The artistic poses of girl and bird, the caption, the earnestness of it all—it was almost too much to bear. I was scattered, divided against myself. I felt some interior policeman cautioning me to suppress my laughter, but I also recognized that the impulse welling within me was not laughter at all but something more like terror, or rapture. I had never before felt this way toward any living being. Why had I come up here this morning and happened upon Bill Cavanaugh? Why couldn’t I have ended our conversation sooner, turned and walked the other way?
Cavanaugh and I both realized that I’d been staring flummoxed at the photograph for quite some time. He returned it to his pocket without a hint of awkwardness. “What about you, Captain Whittlesey?” he asked. “What brings you out so early this morning?”
Robbed of the capacity to make even the most innocuous statement about myself, I stared sternly out to sea. “‘Eternal vigilance is the price of safety,’” I said, quoting the pamphlet we’d each been handed as we stepped aboard, orienting us to nautical life and telling us to consider ourselves self-appointed lookouts.
“‘It takes a force of only nine pounds to explode a modern mine,’” he replied, laughing.
“You must really be devoted to reading if you’ve committed that to memory,” I said. “Where are you from?”
“Hell’s Kitchen,” he said, and finally for an instant he looked self-conscious, both proud and embarrassed. “Most of the boys in my barracks are not what you’d call literary-minded.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I remember when your group arrived in Upton, you brought a banner. It was quite poetic.”
Cavanaugh grinned. “‘We’re from Hell’s Kitchen! We’ll keep the kaiser itchin’!’ I thought it was pretty funny. But I’m not so eager to kill as those fellows. I’m glad to be a pigeon man.”
The words were out of my mouth before I could properly shape them. “You’ll be expected to fight, too,” I said. It felt to me like a lament, but it sounded like an admonition.
For an instant a crease appeared in Cavanaugh’s otherwise placid forehead. “Oh, I know, sir,” he said. “No need to worry about me. I’m no shirker.” His smile returned, a bit stiffer. “Well, I’d best be going in now, sir.”
Watching the rhythm of his receding back, I wanted, insanely, to touch him, to prove such a handsome and thoughtful man real. But that would have been madness—I was his commanding officer, and there was no evidence to suggest that he would have welcomed, even covertly, the impassioned advances of my silliest fantasies. Instead I clenched my fists in silence. But even as I tried to resist, I could feel: he had let the bird of my heart come out of its cage.
The crossing lasted ten more days, and there was little to do, so I took my entertainment where I could find it. Some of us officers got French lessons; a few played bridge, while the privates played poker. Chores like abandon-ship drills and cleaning our quarters became almost pleasurable relief from boredom. We chatted, we watched the other ships in the convoy, we counted down the hours until the next bad meal.
Apart from occasional concerts by the regiment’s musicians, the primary group diversions were religious ceremonies. Though I wasn’t sure I believed in God then, and I certainly don’t now, I took to attending the daily Mass held by Father Halligan, one of the Catholic chaplains, a practice that my Unitarian family would have thought very strange. I had been told, quite correctly, that Halligan was an excellent speaker and a charismatic man, which partly accounted for my interest. I also guessed that men hailing from Hell’s Kitchen would likely be among the flock.
It was a theatrical scene: the padre there on the lower aft deck, sunlight on his vestment and wind in his candle flames, counseling his listeners to trust in God and each other and the justness of our cause. The men sang hymns, led by a badly mutilated piano that they’d hauled up from the hold: a relic of the Lapland’s previous service as a luxury liner. Halligan drew a crowd, and I couldn’t find Bill Cavanaugh’s face amid the other faces.
Afterward I saw James Larney, our signalman, exchanging greetings with the other congregants. Older than most of the men and always with a just-scrubbed air, Private Larney worked as a civil engineer in civilian life. He was alert and adept at complex tasks, which led to his assignment as signalman; on the battlefield he’d have to carry and use communication apparatus ranging from flags to lamps to mirrors, and he’d have to keep track of a constantly shifting system of codes. He had excelled during training, and I hoped his performance would carry over to combat. I imagine he hoped the same about me.
“Captain Whittlesey,” he said, surprised to see me. “I didn’t think you were in the fold.”
“I’m not. But I’ve been told that Father Halligan is worth hearing regardless. Say, Larney,” I added, feeling impatient and adventuresome, “do you happen to know a private called Bill Cavanaugh?”
“The pigeon man?” said Larney. “Yes, sir, I do. Now, there’s a soldier who’s suited to his job, Captain. He lives and breathes pigeons. He knows a lot about the wireless radio aboard the ship, too. Interesting guy, very curious about communications. That’s him there, in fact.”
As the crowd broke up into pockets, I saw Cavanaugh seated at Halligan’s battered piano—it was customary, I later learned, for it to be put to secular use after Mass concluded—and as I watched, he began to play with fluid, unassuming confidence.
“He says he learned to play in Hell’s Kitchen saloons,” said Larney. “Can’t read music, not a note, but if he hears a tune once, he can play it back exactly.”
“Billy!” somebody shouted from somewhere. “Strike it up, why don’t you, and play ‘Over There’!”
Cavanaugh obliged. It had become customary to sing “Over There” in grim, humorous paraphrase—substituting “when” for “till”—to mock or accept the prospect of death. That’s how the men sang it that morning to Cavanaugh’s accompaniment, which made up in verve what it lacked in refinement: “And we won’t come back when it’s over over there!”
I liked watching him in the center of the circle, happy and necessary, but when the twist to the lyrics arrived, my breath caught, though I’d heard it sung that way dozens of times before.
The notion that Cavanaugh might not return made me realize that at that moment my strongest desire was to see him in Manhattan, going about his everyday life in a nation at peace. Then a second realization struck, like the cross that follows a jab: I, to a great extent, was responsible for whether he and every other man singing on the aft deck came home alive. I knew this, of course; I had thought of it constantly since receiving my commission. But the responsibility felt different, weightier, when I considered the specificity of what might be lost.
I felt desperate that my Manhattan should have Bill Cavanaugh in it. He did not seem queer. Nor did he seem like trade, as Felix would have put it: a working-class man who would provide sexual favors to other men but who expected eventually to marry and have a family. In his blue-eyed, impenitent enthusiasm, Cavanaugh seemed almost to stand outside sex, with all its complications and distractions.
Still, I thought I could go see him at Rector’s at least. I could take Marguerite there, and Bill Cavanaugh would be our waiter. I could tell him that I was interested in taking up pigeon racing, maybe, and ask him to teach me how to do it.
It seems stupid now, looking back.
The days slipped by, and we strained our eyes as we smoked on the decks, until one morning we spotted a low dark streak, dismissed at first as a cloud on the horizon. Then the cry went up—Land! Land!—as if we were explorers of old, conquistadors in reverse.
And land it was: Ireland. The soldiers of Irish extraction—Bill Cavanaugh included—saluted the motherland as we passed through the Irish Sea.
On the evening of April 19, our convoy dropped its anchors in the river Mersey, within sight of Liverpool. We stayed on the ship that night as there was nowhere better to put us, though we were mad to get out, a tin of stinking sardines come back to life.
The next morning the Lapland berthed at last, and the men whooped and hollered down the gangways toward terra firma. “Nice to have something before our eyes besides wave after wave,” said McMurtry as we watched the men hand over stacks of Soldiers’ Mail postcards to a Military Postal Express Service crew. I imagined Cavanaugh’s sister, Annie, getting one from him, rushing to show to their mother, maybe going all the way to the roof to read it aloud to her pigeon namesake.
Dockside, a group of elderly women greeted us. We were hungry for anything that hadn’t been cooked on the ship, and they were selling ginger buns and hot coffee. We still had only American money, but we settled on a nickel as the equivalent of the price of the breakfast, which they quoted as tuppence, ha’penny.
The story soon went around of an old Scouser woman, widow’s black shawl wrapped about her stocky frame, who held out a steaming cup to one of our men and asked him, “Did ye come over to die?”
The man, nonplussed, nearly dropped his mug. “Not if I can help it, lady,” he said.
The woman’s eyes went wide, abashed. “No, no!” she said. “What I mean is, did ye just arrive?”
The accents took some getting used to, but we didn’t have much time to adjust. Before we’d stopped feeling the phantom roll of waves beneath our feet, we’d been loaded onto railcars and sent south through the English countryside to Dover, where we’d make the Channel crossing to Calais.
Our steamship went under the escort of the Dover Patrol, as well as a Royal Navy blimp, placid and watchful above scudding gray clouds. I kept my eyes on it, transfixed, wondering what it might be like to fight the war in the air.
From the deck of the Toloa, I can’t say for sure how far we are from land, only that land is completely out of view. Yet here swoop the seagulls, even this far out. How do they do it?
During burials at sea, the officiant says, “We therefore commit his body to the deep.” What about a burial in air, when one dies in the sky and falls, the lifeless impact like a second death? Plenty of men died in midair during the Great War, and plenty of birds did, too, Bill Cavanaugh’s included.