CHAPTER 9
CHER AMI
After our inculcation into the army tradition of hurry-up-and-wait, the rapidity of the orders and the intensity of the bloodshed in late September and early October were bewildering.
So many of my bird comrades had been killed by then that I’d come to think of the war as a pigeon shoot: thousands of feathers sashaying down from the clouds. Back at Wright Farm, in an unusually macabre mood, John had told us once about this so-called sport, practiced by so-called sportsmen: pigeons released from beneath worn-out bowler hats by the tug of a string, then shotgunned from the air. Participants also shot blackbirds, sparrows, purple martins, and bats. When a man has a gun, evidently, anything can be a target.
Many birds were not killed outright in these shoots but only maimed, left on the ground as the firing went on. Twitching in pain, they lay, I imagined, like the soldiers whose comrades couldn’t make their way across no-man’s-land to rescue them.
If I could write my own wall text here in the Smithsonian—or, better yet, if I could speak as humans do and record my testimony as an audio guide—then I would try to warn of these things.
Spending most of a century in a museum has taught me much about humans and flight: how they envy and desire it. Since 1884, when the French invented the dirigible, and since 1903, when the Americans invented the airplane, the sky had changed. All the old myths—the dreams of Daedalus, the hubris of Icarus—had been achieved, then surpassed.
Aerial combat seduced the public. Both sides in the Great War displayed captured aircraft as trophies and morale boosters—much as President Wilson and I have been displayed, though we pigeons are seen as sweet, not scary, never a source of awe, never striking fear into anyone’s heart. Fine by me. You can’t mount a gun on a pigeon.
Each of my flights provided an all-encompassing view that humans could never have, not even generals. All summer long I watched the sweeping away of life’s illusions. The charnel trenches. One man hanging his canteen off a dead man’s foot. Muddy holes, constant floods of mud, mud up to the knees, mud in the bunks, in the food, entire subterranean cities of mud.
Then the summer got hot, and I felt parched after I flew. As the weeks went on, the land grew more sullen. Water carts bogged down in the brushwood. Duckboard tracks spanned the landscape. The earth drank in blood as if thirsty for it.
Each time I returned to Rampont with a message, the villagers seemed more accepting of the heretofore outlandish idea of infinite war, no longer sure that the Americans could end this.
On the battlefield every regiment hummed with the same banal dread. Before each advance—what the commanders called it when they drove the infantry over the tops of the trenches into maws of the machine guns—there’d be a final inspection. The men would put their affairs in order: who would get their pistols, their money belts and any contents, their watches, their compasses, their water, and their scraps of food.
Events that should have been singular and era-defining became commonplace, like an ancient stone bridge blown up, or a church collapsed by the tremor of the guns, or a cedar tree that had stood for four centuries splintered to kindling by a shell. Men’s bodies sustained the same damage, but this ceased to be worthy of remark.
But if I were to narrate all this to the Smithsonian’s visitors, I fear it would fail in its intended effect. I’d be making war sound interesting—or, even worse, sublime. Humans can read glory into the most abhorrent circumstances. They believe that stories help them understand, but in fact they often merely help them pay attention. The idea that the war can be known by way of a few representative accounts of heroism and misery is a falsehood.
Perhaps it’s simpler to give the numbers. Sixty-five million men were mobilized worldwide. Thirteen percent of them died. Thirty-three percent were wounded to the point of disfigurement and/or disability. Twelve percent were taken prisoner or declared missing. The overall casualty rate was 58 percent.
At what point must we consider whether the human species was trying to destroy itself? Or at least—and this is more in keeping with the evidence—to reduce its male population?
“I was prepared to die,” I once heard a private named John J. Munson say, “but not to die in stages.” First you’re a living man, he said, then a writhing animal, wounded and gasping. And then you’re a thing: dead.
I took no offense at his pejorative use of “animal”; he was an ordinary person trying to make sense of something too wide for his mind, or anyone’s.
Munson was a member of the unit to which Corporal Gault assigned me after I flew my tenth mission back home to Rampont, a unit that would soon be known throughout the world as part of the Lost Battalion. That summer it was still simply the 1st Battalion of the 308th Regiment of the United States Army’s 77th Infantry Division, under the command of newly minted Major Charles White Whittlesey.
Before I encountered Whit, or any of the other men whose names would be bound up with mine in the annals of history, my heart leapt into my beak at the sight of Buck Shot, in the same wicker carrier that Gault had popped me into. Though he’d been a bit of a nuisance at Langres, the sight of familiar eyes was a joy, lending a momentary sense of order.
But Buck Shot did not look happy to see me; he did not look happy about anything anymore. His prized white feathers had taken on the dingy hue of city snow, and his eyes were rheumy.
“Buck Shot!” I said, brushing past six other pigeons to join him. In war, I’d found, one had to behave as if one had privacy, though one was never alone, except in the air.
He shrank from my affectionate peck. “What’s wrong, my friend?” I asked. For an instant I took his watering eyes for tears of sorrow—I had certainly seen plenty of those from the men.
“Gas,” he said. “Mustard. The pigeoneer didn’t get the canvas over us in time. The other birds died. The pigeoneer was killed by flamethrowers. Smelled like roast meat.”
“Oh, Buck Shot,” I said, carefully preening his wings, wanting to restore him to his pristine dove-self. “You’re lucky to be alive!”
“You think so?” He didn’t reciprocate my preening but didn’t pull away either. “I’ve been with the 308th before. They have one decent pigeon man. I hope we end up with him.”
“I hope so, too,” I said, “but we’ll pull through regardless. I’m just happy that Gault has thrown us together again.” My confidence was overstated for Buck Shot’s benefit; he needed reassurance. Some pigeons, like some men, are able to meet the demands of war while others crumble. There’s no way to predict what you can stand until you stand it.
“All summer,” said Buck Shot, not meeting my eyes, “flying all those missions, when I’d look down, what I saw reminded me of the Chicago Stockyards. Soldiers waiting in the trenches while other soldiers went over the top, like they were livestock waiting for other animals to be hung and skinned and gutted.”
“I’ve never seen a stockyard,” I said. “But I’ve heard some of the men make the same comparison.”
“No matter how high I fly,” said Buck Shot, “I can’t stop smelling it. The rotting flesh in these fields makes the slaughterhouses seem like rose gardens. Slaughterhouses are organized, after all. They get cleaned. They don’t waste. When I first saw one, I couldn’t believe it, never thought killing on that scale was possible. I thought humans were monsters. Then I thought about their cities and how they need to feed all those people, and I accepted it. But now I see them doing it to their own kind, and for nothing. So I was right. They are monsters.”
Not being of a mind to dissuade him, I finished preening him in silence, trying to imagine how my unstoppably optimistic brother Thomas Hardy might respond. But it was impossible to imagine Thomas Hardy being here at all.
I was hardly the only new member of the 308th. As the summer tipped into fall, the regiment received replacements from the 40th Infantry Division, known as the “Sunshine Division”: strapping men—boys, really—from the ranges and ranches of the western United States. Their tanned faces were to supplement the conscripts from the Midwest who’d arrived earlier to fill out the depleted ranks of the original New Yorkers. The regiment needed to be at full strength, for it was about to take part in a massive offensive that would span the war’s entire Western Front.
A lot of the new boys hadn’t been supplied guns. The Ordnance Department had told the commanders not to worry: so much of the regiment would be killed in the first few minutes of the offensive that the survivors could take their pick of the weapons of the dead and keep advancing.
I noticed that even when they weren’t in the trenches, the veterans of the 308th held themselves like hunchbacks, their muscles remembering the low ceilings and the need to stay down.
With one exception: a tall, thin man who walked upright and with a self-possession that incandesced at the dim edge of the Argonne Forest.
I saw him the evening we arrived but didn’t realize who he was at first. His eyes hid behind his wire-framed spectacles in the gathering gloom. His build was gangly, his mien that of a friendly owl, his air scholarly and introspective even as he sat on a stump eating his rations and speaking softly to another soldier. His adjutant was a tiny, spry man with the appearance of an impish child. The vision of the two of them together—even seated, the former was taller than the latter—seemed designed to illustrate the surprising diversity of the human species.
“Before we go over the top again, Major,” said the adjutant, “shouldn’t you swap your captain’s bars for your gold oak leaves? We don’t have to make a big show of it. I can do the honors now.”
“I suppose it’s wise to wear them,” he said, sticking his fork into his can of beans. His voice was higher than I’d expected, flat and reedy. “Does a major get better treatment than a captain in the hospital? But it’s so dark you’d pin them on crooked. Let’s wait.”
“Whatever you say, sir,” said the adjutant. “Major Whittlesey.”
“Sleep well, Lieutenant McKeogh,” he said. “Tomorrow could be the day.” He squeezed the adjutant’s shoulder, then strode away, tall as a sunflower.
I have always been fascinated by the human obsession with naming things. I have a vivid memory of John back at Wright Farm reading to us from one of their myths about the beginning of the world: “Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.” In the wild, birds generally get by without them, but those of us who live among humans tend to find the names they give us useful and to use them among ourselves.
The army was particularly interesting in this regard, because each of the commanders had at least two names. Every time I joined a new regiment, figuring out which man went by which code name—names I’d hear as the messages I flew back Rampont were read back—felt like completing a puzzle. The Seventy-seventh Division, for instance, was called “Dreadnaught,” and all their code names began with D. Its new commanding officer, Major General Robert Alexander, was “Dreadnaught One,” and the commanders of the 308th were all variations on “Detroit,” with Captain Kenneth Budd as “Detroit White” and Captain William Scott as “Detroit Blue,” which left “Detroit Red” for Whittlesey. Humans usually name pigeons based on physical features or to evoke abstract concepts, so these code names confused me—Whittlesey was not red at all, but serene and pale, long and stately—until I caught the reference to the colors of the Americans’ national flag.
The morning after our arrival, I met a man who lacked the tactical importance to be issued a code name but who would be the most important man in the regiment to me: the best pigeon man of whom Buck Shot had spoken, Private Bill Cavanaugh.
The 308th had three pigeoneers, but Bill was the nonpareil. The others were Omer Richards, who’d been with the regiment from the start, and Theodore Tollefson, known as Nils, who’d joined them that week, a youth from Minnesota who might as well have had a sign on his back reading FODDER, so ripe was he to be plucked by the guns.
Before I was sent to the front, I hadn’t fully appreciated a key trait shared by my first caretakers, John and Corporal Gault: they had chosen to keep homing pigeons. In the trenches I and my fellow birds were in the custody of men who were feeding and protecting us because they’d been ordered to. Like us, they had been conscripted into service, to a greater or lesser extent against their will. Unlike us, they were performing tasks for which they had no innate aptitude and very little training.
Omer was trying to show Nils how pigeoneering worked on the battlefield, and I state without malice that it was a case of the dumb leading the dumber.
“What you want to do,” Omer said, yanking Buck Shot’s white wing in his hammy hand, “is pull ’em out and look for where to attach the message canister.”
Nils looked on with a squint, as if perplexed by bird-handling that did not involve the wringing of necks and the plucking of feathers. “Kill me quickly at least, you oafs,” Buck Shot said with a resigned groan.
“What have we got here?” said a firm but inquisitive voice, its accent that of the surviving city men who made up the core of the regiment.
“I’m trying to show Tollefson how to use these birds,” said Omer, flabby-cheeked and grimacing as he pulled Buck Shot through the opening of the basket. “But I still don’t trust ’em not to fly off and get lost.”
“You can’t lose a homing pigeon,” said the voice. “If your homing pigeon doesn’t come back, then what you’ve lost is a pigeon.”
The speaker stepped around Omer and leaned in for a clearer look, and there was Bill Cavanaugh. His striking blue eyes had the intense forward focus of a predator’s—the kind that produces instant alarm in us side-eyed pigeons—but they were set in such an open and sympathetic face that this initial effect was swiftly dispelled, then reversed. Bill’s eyes were those of a self-taught naturalist. His movements were quiet and exact. Calm and bright.
With the air of a born teacher, Bill sought to improve the other pigeon men, not arrogantly but kindly, giving advice without giving offense. “May I make a suggestion?” he said, eyeing Omer’s fumbling grasp on Buck Shot.
Omer was clutching my poor white friend too tightly. Buck Shot bulged his eyes, partly in jest, partly in earnest. “See?” said Buck Shot. “Bill’s the only one who’s worth a damn.”
“If you can help it,” Bill said, “it’s best to hold the birds against your body or your forearm. Try to hook your little finger into the joint of their wing, then put your thumb and other fingers around the body.”
He picked me up with ease in a warm, clean hand—no dirt under his nails, which given those conditions seemed as heroic an achievement as any battlefield victory—and brought me to his chest. “Hey there, pal,” he said. “Hey there, Cher Ami. Corporal Gault tells me you’re a brave one. Ten missions behind you and still ready to fly for us.”
Nils smirked. “Now I guess you’re gonna tell me it can understand you,” he said, his rounded vowels laden with doubt. “They sent me on a snipe hunt or two back at camp. I know when I’m being hoodwinked.”
“Oh, they understand us well enough,” said Bill. “I read somewhere that in the Philippines they say that of all the birds in the world only the dove understands the human tongue.”
I cooed and rubbed my head against his chest in affirmation, the fibers of the green wool coarse against my feathers.
“Whether Cher Ami understands the words or not,” said Bill, stroking my back with his index finger, “she can hear the tone and the intent. See? We need to treat these little birds well, so they can do their job.”
She. Bill had called me “she”—the only human to get that right. I wished I could thank him.
“If you grab them by the wings or the tail,” Bill told Omer, “like you’re grabbing Buck Shot now, then their muscles strain, which might keep them from flying well.”
“Got it,” said Omer, relaxing his hold on Buck Shot, who breathed an extravagant sigh. “I’m used to carrying chickens. When a chicken can’t fly, that’s not really a problem.”
“I figured you’ve been around birds,” said Bill. “I can tell by the way you feed them. Pigeons just take a little adjusting. Tollefson, let’s see how you do.” Bill took Buck Shot from Omer and put us both back in the carrier. “What’s your pigeon know-how?”
“We raised ’em on the farm back in Minnesota,” said Nils. Hovering uncertainly beyond the wicker, his face was as square as a block of wood. “But only for food. We didn’t race ’em.”
“That’s too bad,” said Bill, and then he seemed to drift into a reverie of wonderment typical of him. “How do they do it?” he asked, his question directed at me as much as the other soldiers. “Find their way home from places they’ve never been? Well, they figure out where they are. But how? Blindfold one of us, throw us in a truck, drop us somewhere in the forest with no map or compass—I couldn’t find my way back. Could you? And these birds don’t just fly home, they do it by the shortest route at the fastest speed. They don’t quit till they get there.”
Nils’s squint had grown more contemplative. “I never looked at ’em that way.”
“Have a go,” said Bill, patting Nils on the back. “Take Cher Ami out of the basket. Smooth and gentle. She’s a good bird, she’ll play along.”
Nils’s hands were smaller, neater, and less shaky than Omer’s, no doubt because he hadn’t spent time yet on the front. Adept, he gripped me as Bill had shown him.
“There you go,” said Bill. “Put her back in and try with Buck Shot. That’s it, you’ve got him. Isn’t he a pretty bird?”
“I suppose he’s fine, on account of his plumage,” said Nils. “He’s like the kind they send up at fancy weddings. But no matter the color, they’re dirty, ain’t they? You see ’em in the cities, eating trash off the street.”
“They keep themselves pretty clean,” said Bill, diplomatic but passionate. “You see ’em in cities—where you don’t see peacocks and parrots and penguins—because they’re smart, and adaptable. They’re there because people brought them there, and they learned to get by on their own.”
“If they were plants,” said Omer, “they’d be dandelions.”
Bill laughed. “That’s not far off,” he said. “I happen to like dandelions, too. But keep in mind that while the birds we’ll be carrying may look like those feral pigeons, they’re modern racing homers, with the best qualities of eight different breeds. We’ve got hundreds of years of trial and error at our disposal. Now, let’s take a crack at putting on the message canisters.”
Bill scooped me out again for a demonstration, and Nils followed along, attaching a metal cylinder to Buck Shot’s leg. “I won’t do it now, of course,” Bill said, “but if this were the real thing, I’d take Cher Ami and toss her. If you’re sending both birds with a duplicate message—not a luxury we’re likely to have on this offensive coming up—then wait sixty seconds between tosses. You want to give them every advantage of not getting shot and making it back to Rampont.”
“I think I’ve got it,” said Nils. “I guess I’ll find out after we go over the top.”
“Hey, Cavanaugh?” said Omer, consulting a battered scrap of paper. “That bird. The one that’s just pigeon-colored.”
“Cher Ami,” said Bill.
“You keep calling it she and her. But the Signal Corps’ waybill says it’s a cock.”
“Does it?” said Bill. “That’s wrong.”
“Huh,” said Nils. “How the hell can you tell the difference?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” said Bill with a wink. “You just ask ’em. They’ll let you know.”
He took Buck Shot from Nils and returned us both to the basket. Omer stepped over and peered in with his topaz eyes, not unlike a goat’s. “They’d be dandelions if dandelions lazed about in a basket all day,” he said, tapping the roof of our carrier. “Eating peas and corn while we’re being fed biscuits made of weevils and old straw.”
Bill fixed him with a look, friendly but reproachful, as he finished securing our door. “Sometimes we look at animals and think they’re doing nothing,” he said. “But in fact we really have no idea what they’re doing. Somebody who saw us sitting in our trenches would probably think that we’re doing nothing, too.” He stood, deftly tossed an empty message canister into the side envelope of the wool cap atop Omer’s head, and walked away with a laugh.
Wait, don’t go! I wanted to say. I hadn’t felt so well understood since Baby Mine and I got separated. I don’t know whether the men felt the same way, but for me, as bad as the danger and discomfort and privation could get, worst of all was the absurdity, the desperate impression that everything had careened out of control. Simply being seen and appreciated felt like a glimpse of blue sky through a squall line.
Bill was right: we pigeons were never idle but watched our humans always. We listened, too. To stave off boredom, I kept my collection of animal metaphors that I heard them use. A veteran soldier had called the Baccarat sector a sleepy old lion who only rarely awoke to stretch his claws—by contrast to the Vesle, a monster hellcat who scarcely ceased to spit and scratch. As they went about their work at night, the men often described themselves as ants, busy but insignificant. They dehumanized their enemy, too. Pigs, they called them. Dirty.
I shared these discoveries with Buck Shot, who didn’t really care but humored me all the same.
The men said the gray uniforms of the Germans made them look like wolves. Both sides were so defensive in their tactics that the violence had no resemblance to the predator—prey dynamics of the animal world; it was more like prey—prey. Pray, pray you don’t get hit by a shell: I heard many men under fire offering panicked prayers to a god whom, I gathered, they believed to reside in the sky. But I had spent a great deal of time in the sky and had never seen evidence of any gods there.
The men said machine-gun bullets chirped by like meadowlarks.
Sometimes they renamed animals as different animals. They called the canned corned beef in their rations “monkey meat” and referred to their body lice as “shirt rabbits.” They’d pick the insects off one another, comparing themselves to apes grooming in some great gray zoo. I could tell that many of the men felt terribly lonely, helpless and estranged from their fellow soldiers, but they were never alone and never powerless thanks to all the life that depended on them, the lice and the rats and the mice. Each man was the miserable monarch of a kingdom that squirmed with vermin, one that consisted of the dirt and the bit of sky each one could see from the dirt, of their feet in their boots, of their boots in the mud—a kingdom all but indistinguishable from a grave.
On the morning of September 26, we quit the trenches for the forest. Well before dawn we had been awakened—as it seemed every sleeping thing in Europe must also have been—by the roar of an artillery barrage of unprecedented scope and severity directed at the German positions. We all knew then that the time had come to advance.
Major Whittlesey, his oak clusters now affixed, prepared us to go over. Outwardly he set about his command with utter conviction, but I could sense inward doubt about what the generals had demanded that he demand that his men do.
Within days it would be clear that his misgivings were warranted.
While Whittlesey was committed to following orders, as any successful officer must be, he was also quick to recognize the extent to which those orders were callous or unfair, and he’d try to bridge the gap between what was required and what was right through his own exceptional effort. The morning of the advance, he had had to close the company kitchens early in order to get the regiment into position, even though some men were still in line for breakfast. As we stood massed in the trench awaiting the signal to go over, he raced up and down the line handing out hunks of bread and cold meat; when he ran out, he stood directing the anxious mass to their places with his own dry slab of bacon as a baton.
Then, like some gaunt referee, he blew the whistle that sent us forward, leading the way with a pistol in one hand and a set of wire cutters in the other. The dawn was vaporous and dewy to the point of opacity, but he kept calling out through it, tall as a lighthouse, his confidence and good cheer shining like a beacon, drawing the men forward. He might have doubted his orders, but he believed in his men, and in turn they wanted to please him. That was another metaphor I’d collected: Whit, they said, was a lamb who fought like a lion.
The green darkness and tangled undergrowth through which we advanced convinced me that Whit was correct to be suspicious of his orders—not because they were ill-conceived but because the Allied commanders who’d ordered us to advance into the Argonne probably didn’t believe that success was possible in the first place. The land was fissured with rises and ravines that were all but invisible beneath the thick woodland canopy. “‘Copse’ is only one letter off from ‘corpse,’” said Buck Shot, his only comment as we proceeded through the trees: a fortress made of forest, snipers in the leaves.
The one bit of happy news was that the basket containing Buck Shot and me had ended up on Bill Cavanaugh’s back. Whenever the guns would fire and everyone would pancake flat onto the ground, Cavanaugh would protect us, finding us cover, keeping us low. The men were dispersing into the mist like mist themselves, losing one another, losing their way—something that was not supposed to happen, which seemed to be the theme of the campaign.
The only thing that went right was that we succeeded in breaking through the German defensive line. And then even that turned out to be bad.
By the afternoon of the first day, we’d made it close to the stated objective, the dépôts des machines, a mostly abandoned but still-defended German railhead in the shadow of the inauspiciously named Moulin de l’Homme Mort, or Dead Man’s Windmill. The troops seemed to be in bright spirits as Whittlesey sent word down the lines that they’d done well and would dig in for the night, falling early due to the steep hills and sinister trees.
Characteristically, Buck Shot did not share in the good cheer, but in this case his dread proved unnervingly prescient. “We did too well,” he said. “We’re too far in front. We’re going to get stuck here.”
There was an abandoned bunker to shelter in, done up in legendary German splendor, complete with left-behind bottles of mineral water. Bill used some to fill the pan in our basket, and we were drinking it in, parched and shaking from the long day’s advance, when Whittlesey angled his tall frame through the door, followed closely by McKeogh, his diminutive adjutant. In the weird atmosphere of the erstwhile enemy stronghold, the two looked even more than usual like a marionette act.
Bill rose and saluted. Whit noted the mineral water and our basket’s full pan, and he failed to suppress a smile. “At ease, Cavanaugh,” he said. “Lieutenant McKeogh has set up a runner chain to report our position and establish communications with HQ. But I’d like to send one of your trusty birds as our insurance policy. Though I’m concerned we haven’t enough daylight left for them to navigate by. If they won’t make it to Rampont tonight, then I’d just as soon wait till the morning.”
“Oh, they’ll make it, Major,” Bill said. “The manual says to release them at least an hour before sundown. Once they get aloft they’ll have twice the sun they’ll need.”
Cavanaugh opened his message kit and began to write according to Whit’s dictation, the three men deploying ciphers and ellipses as the contents demanded. As he spoke, Whit slipped a long finger through a gap in the wicker to stroke my back. By then I had been with the army long enough to know how unusual it was to be touched by so lofty an officer. “Buck Shot!” I said. “Look! The major is mad for pigeons!”
“Not so fast,” said Buck Shot. “Cavanaugh is mad for pigeons. And I think Whittlesey may be mad for Cavanaugh. Before you arrived, he’d talk and talk with Bill about us, as must anyone who talks to Bill for any length of time. He’s a real poetic type, the poor man.”
Whittlesey had taken barely a glance at Bill since he and McKeogh had walked in, and his voice remained crisp and official, but it was easy to see a softening in the set of his face, a warmth that I hadn’t noticed before. It reminded me of my time with Baby Mine, of whom I tried not to think too often. What would be the point?
“You may be right,” I said. “But I don’t think the feeling is reciprocal in quite the way the major might like.”
“Whit’s in for a disappointment,” Buck Shot said. “But then who among us is not?”
Whittlesey signed the message and slipped it into its canister, and Bill unlatched our door and reached in. “I’ll send Buck Shot,” he said. “He seems the more agitated by what we’ve been through today. If he can make it home to rest, it’ll be good for him and good for us.”
“I defer to your judgment, Private,” said Whit, laying the metal tube in Bill’s palm. Bill affixed it to Buck Shot’s right leg opposite the identification band on his left, then smoothed his creamy feathers.
“So long, friend,” said Buck Shot. I wished him good luck and promised to see him back at Rampont. Bill carried him out the doorway and tossed him two-handed into the sky.
We spent a miserable night in our funkholes, the rain and the cold clinging to us like an ooze. The next day we advanced negligibly, pinned down by German machine guns. No reinforcements arrived.
By the next morning, our situation unaltered, it became clear that our runner chain had been broken—which is to say that the runners had all been captured or killed—and furthermore that few of us pigeons remained. Buck Shot had been correct: we had advanced too far ahead of the rest of the 77th Division, and as a reward we’d been cut off from any hope of assistance.
If I may be forgiven for stepping back from my tale for a moment—for increasing my altitude, as it were, to provide a more expansive view of its landscape—I would like to add emphasis to a point that my casual visitors in the Smithsonian tend to miss. While most of them learn that the Lost Battalion was thusly named when it got cut off from the rest of the Allied forces, and while a few of them understand that this occurred because Whittlesey’s men were uniquely successful in advancing as they’d been ordered to do, almost no one seems to grasp that this happened to the battalion not once but twice in the span of a week. The incident that I have just described was the first—the “Small Pocket,” they would come to call it, in order to distinguish it from the larger one that lay ahead.
As Whittlesey’s reports of success and requests for further instructions flew away on pigeon wings and received no replies, as his brave runners saluted smartly and charged into the forest and disappeared forever, the realization began to spread like an infection among the officers that we were trapped, that we had trapped ourselves, that our success was failure, that we’d been doomed not by our bad luck or poor performance but by a systematic deficiency within our own army, and that we were now living through a nightmare.
This was wrong. As we’d soon see, a true waking nightmare requires full knowledge that a disaster is about to happen—indeed, that it has happened before—and that this knowledge will do nothing to stop it from happening again.
Even as the extreme peril of our situation clarified, Whit never once let it show, on his face or in his words. Even, perhaps especially, under those circumstances his speech remained cool, with an anachronistic formality. Uniquely among the men, he never flinched or crouched when under fire; he wasn’t foolhardy or reckless but simply seemed to accept his fate and to know that it would encourage his men to see him upright and unafraid. Best of all, he was funny—not rollicking but droll, an emperor of understatement. When a German machine-gun unit located us that afternoon and strafed us until their ammunition was spent, his equipoise remained uncracked. “Most unpleasant,” he said to McKeogh, as though remarking on an inferior cup of tea.
The rain continued into the next day, with no word from headquarters. Without support we couldn’t move forward, and without guidance we couldn’t fall back, so we had to stay put and keep our cover, though there was no doubt that the Germans knew our position. Predictably, we came under attack again that morning, this time from artillery.
When the shells began to fall, Whittlesey, Cavanaugh, and Larney, the signalman, had been out in the open, puzzling over routes that might take runners back to American or French territory. With a combination of shouts, whistles, and gestures, Whittlesey directed the platoons into defensive positions as explosions rained splinters of stone and wood from the hillsides. Larney had the good sense to rush from the funkhole where we were sheltering to retrieve Whit before the Germans adjusted their trajectories; tugging on the major’s belt, he looked like a mariner trying to strike a tall sail in a high wind. Whittlesey barely managed to fold his long limbs alongside Cavanaugh’s and Larney’s as a shell obliterated the spot where he’d been standing and buried his protruding boots in gravel and mud. “Why didn’t God standardize me?” he wondered aloud once we could all hear ourselves again.
By that afternoon I was the last pigeon, all others having been dispatched with their terse but urgent messages. While I awaited my inevitable flight, I watched with interest as a gray mouse approached our funkhole, in search of the cracked corn that had slipped through the weave of my basket. Little four-fingered hands, little sniffy pink snout.
We did not speak, but I was grateful for the distraction. I had to occupy my mind with something or I’d have gone mad there in my basket, passive, unable to move—which is how the men must have felt as well.
As the shadow of the ridge inched toward the bunker door, Bill broke my reverie. “Come on, Cher Ami,” he said, slipping a message into a canister. “I’ve saved the best for last.”
I flew with all my usual alacrity and then some, because this time Bill was the one who had tossed me. Cher Ami! said the voice, Home to your loft by the airway! Home to Rampont! as I flew above the horror, noise and smoke and screams made more eerie for their filtering up through the crowns of the trees. Still, I was glad to have my flight hidden from any marksmen and falconers who might be below, alert for the telltale clap of pigeon wings.
My eleventh mission. I made it back with no difficulty. How close Whit’s trapped men were to Allied territory! On the ground the distance had seemed extreme and insurmountable, when in fact it was only insurmountable.
I slowed by flapping forward, stretched out my legs, and alighted on the landing board, then gave the bell a hard peck. Corporal Gault appeared instantly to collect my message, leaving me with fresh food and water and, as always, the smell of chocolate.
A flash of white beside me and a familiar morose voice. “Welcome home, Cher Ami.”
“Buck Shot! You made it! When reinforcements didn’t come, we were afraid that something terrible had happened to you.”
Buck Shot fixed me with a look that said he was very happy to see me but that I was being very dense. “We all made it back,” he said. “The pigeons did anyway. The runners were lost, I think.”
“Well, if the generals had our position,” I said, “why couldn’t they send relief?”
“They could have,” said Buck Shot. He gave me an affectionate peck and fell silent, leaving me to my thoughts.
By that point in the war, I had spent so much time with men—next to them in foxholes, carried on their backs—that I’d come to see us as part of the same flock, so much so that I’d sometimes forget the crucial differences between us. The greatest, perhaps, was that we pigeons had no choice but to perform the task we’d been assigned: when our baskets were opened and we were hurled into the air, we heard the voice and flew home, no matter the danger, even if we were wounded or sick. I do not mean to diminish my accomplishments; not all birds flew equally well, and I did what I had to do with effort and skill.
But men seemed to have a choice of whether to fight or not. They’d face consequences if they didn’t, but it was hard to imagine that any could be worse than death, particularly the deaths I saw them suffer. Yet the majority followed all orders, no matter how stupid. Even when it became clear that they might be sacrificed at any time, whenever it was necessary or simply convenient.
I don’t know whether my message helped Whit and his men in any way. One could never quite tell in the mess of the war when things happened for a reason or just happened because they happened.
But a few days later, Whittlesey, Cavanaugh, and the surviving men of the 308th Infantry Regiment were finally rescued. Not long after that, I was reattached to them, and we went into battle again.