CHAPTER 11
CHER AMI
Take the thing that bothers you and place it in parentheses.
I’ve told myself that a thousand times since we got stuck in the Pocket. Bracket the death that spatters against you.
But not a day has slipped by these past hundred years that I haven’t recollected my final flight. And now, on the eve of their centenary, here in the darkened museum—Sergeant Stubby asleep beside me, climate-controlled air sighing around us—those events replay behind these glass eyes that I can never close.
“Leaders, get your men up!” yelled Whit on the morning of October 1, his blue eyes metallic in the pewter dawn behind his wire-rimmed spectacles.
Low clouds, an autumn chill—the sky had poured the night before. Many of the men scrambled to reattach bayonets that they’d removed in the night; weary, waiting for the order to go over the top, they’d kept nodding off and almost falling on their own blades.
As we lurched forth again—Buck Shot and I on Bill Cavanaugh’s back, he like all the men already exhausted, covered with cootie bites, feet festering with sores—we understood the orders as the sergeants hollered them: Advance until the last man drops!
We pressed through an apple orchard under heavy sniper fire: fruit exploding, and skulls as well. Somewhere ahead a soldier trilled a jaunty tune as the German bullets hissed through the branches.
“Good grief,” Bill muttered over his shoulder toward our basket, “some ghoul is whistling the William Tell Overture.”
He promised to explain the joke later but never did.
Our advance stuttered and stopped, stuttered and stopped. The trees were too small for hiding, and the bullets seemed to come from everywhere at once regardless. The smell of apples—fresh apples burst by bullets, brown apples stomped into the dirt, no orchard keepers left to harvest them—cut through the battlefield reek, reminding me of the cider mill back on Wright Farm.
The men picked up the wounded and carried them along. In some cases there was nothing left to carry. As we paused on the steep slope of a north-south ridge from the forest into the valley, the officers trying to determine how best to proceed, one soldier struck a match to light his buddy’s cigarette. A shell hit the kid holding the smoke bull’s-eye in the chest, blowing his organs all over the ground, knocking the boy with the match unconscious.
With the conditions too dangerous for us to either keep moving or remain exposed, Whit halted us and had the men dig in along the Binarville Road, a Roman highway made of stone blocks—fifteen hundred years old, Bill told us. An artifact of the dawn of human order in Europe, an order now collapsing. The dense forest that crowded the slope behind it was thick with underbrush, giving the Germans cover to approach by slipping from tree to tree.
A little railroad snaked through the ravine. Log sheds, splintered ties, and a few dead Germans were scattered along a narrow path of open ground. The enemy appointed their outposts in greater luxury than we did ours: this encampment seemed a regular village, complete with an empty mess hall, bathhouses, latrines, and a sort of church for makeshift services. Whit set himself up in a three-room log cabin and put the commander of the supporting battalion, a steady-handed captain named George McMurtry, in a concrete dugout two hundred yards away. If a shell dropped on one, the other might survive.
“Do you sweethearts smell that?” said Bill, finishing a funkhole large enough for himself and the basket of us. “Something stinks worse than a Gansevoort sewer.”
“It is worse than a sewer,” said Larney, pointing to a boxcar on the narrow-gauge tracks.
A decomposing German lay inside, head out one end, feet out the other, his face a purple mass squirming with maggots. In swift unspoken agreement, the men gave the car a shove, Bill making the sign of the cross, as if asking forgiveness for his crassness. The offending odor rolled along about a hundred feet, then tipped off the warped track.
It was comforting during that long night to hear Bill and Larney chat as if they were old friends catching up over dinner, even though their meal was limited to two sticks of chewing gum.
Their topic was wireless telegraphy, as radio was called then. Larney was complaining that the militaries were not wise enough to adapt new technologies as readily as old. “Even naval telegraphy can’t transmit voices,” he said in his low, measured tone, his accent so different than Bill’s. “Only Morse code. No offense to your birds, but I wish they could go both ways.”
“I know,” said Bill. “They probably do, too.” He stuck a finger through the slats to pat my head, and I cooed agreeably, although in truth the idea of homing in two directions was perplexing, and rather disturbing if I thought about it too much.
“Well, they’re a blasted sight better than signal lamps and panels,” said Larney, folding and refolding his empty gum wrapper. “And the telephone cable. You unwind it and it gets instantly broken. I want a portable two-way radio. It’s coming, I know it. But it’s not going to help us in this war.”
“Lately,” said Bill, chewing his gum slowly to make it last, “whenever I think about it, I can’t imagine anything getting through. To the commanders in their châteaux, I mean. Tooling around in motorcars, surrounded by their yes-men. Oh, sure, the messages get delivered—Company X advanced, hooray, Company Y got wiped out, tough luck—but we can’t ever tell them the most important thing, which is that this entire war is goddamned insanity.”
“I read that Joffre always insisted on a two-hour lunch,” said Larney, his voice rising slightly. “Haig still takes his daily horseback ride. Hindenburg gets ten hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. How can you get men like those to understand cold rations and lice?”
“Here we are at the line,” said Bill, putting the canvas sack over our basket, preparing us to turn in for the night, “and yet not more than a mile or two away, everything is French beauty. Beech forests. Vineyards. Leaves starting to turn. That’s what’s really fucked.”
Larney didn’t blanch at Bill’s profanity but declined, as always, to use any himself. “It reminds me a touch of home,” he said, quieter again. “The trees. Anemones and cowslips underfoot. No sounds of battle, just the whispering of the leaves.”
Their damp uniforms crumpled, yielding up a little smell of sweat as they curled against each other and did their best to pass the night in sleep. I let my own breathing deepen and synchronize with Buck Shot’s and tried to do the same.
Starting the next day, time became featureless, a fever fugue of suffering punctuated by German attacks. Those arterial pulses of horror only underscored our swampy passivity: the routine of the ordeal. By then the battalion had stopped receiving resupplied rations, which meant no mealtimes to give structure to the hours, and so they dragged. It seemed increasingly likely that the men would begin to consider our corn and peas as a source of food—and us as well. But I trusted Bill to keep us safe.
That morning Colonel Stacey sent a runner saying that a one-hour barrage would be followed by the resumption of the infantry attack. “‘You will press on to your objectives at all costs,’” our major read aloud to McMurtry in his reedy voice. “It’s déjà vu, George. Going over again with no blankets, no raincoats, no reserve rations.”
“No coffee either,” McMurtry said. “No rum. No experience, in the case of most of these fellows. My boys who had the best skill at this sort of fighting are all in infirmaries now, or in cemeteries.” He clenched his beefy hands into and out of fists. “You can see what’s happening plain as day, but damned if you can stop it. The krauts are going to maneuver to pinch us off.”
Whit sent the runner back with confirmation that he had understood his orders, along with a request for rations and ammunition that would never come.
The customary barrage flew over our heads: tons upon tons of shells loaded with shrapnel and high explosives, bringing detonations and pandemonium to the territory we’d be advancing through, concussing the men’s skulls. “I hope this doesn’t hurt your bird brains as much as it does mine,” said Bill, adjusting his helmet and hoisting our basket, where I nestled next to Buck Shot. I was touched by his concern, unable to reassure him that our pigeon heads were better insulated than men’s, less apt to be rattled.
Slightly behind us, though we couldn’t see them, we heard sergeants up and down the line saying, Get ready, gang! and then the whistles blew and everyone stumbled forward, men falling everywhere, the air blue with bullets and hung with cries of First aid!
The battalion advanced, sending its wounded to the rear. Every prospective path forward was snarled by underbrush or barbed wire or both, often in tangles deeper than the men were tall. The forms of these sprawling barriers seemed to reflect the madness of the war, antic and perverse and sometimes wickedly clever: one soldier tore his shins on a jagged strand strung beneath the surface at a river crossing. The men cut the wires when they could, but it was slow work and had to be done while they were exposed to fire from the surrounding hills.
Traversing the valley, we came upon a young German soldier, wispy and blond, too young to grow a beard. Surrounded by Americans, he raised his hands and yelled, “Kameraden! Kameraden!” in a cracking voice. Rather than kill him, as I’d seen other commanders do for the sake of convenience or revenge, Whittlesey took him along, keeping him nearby. One of the men, a German-speaking replacement from Minnesota, asked the prisoner how he liked the war. “Not very well,” he replied in listless English, scuffing through the decaying leaves. “But there are more of us quite close. We will destroy you.”
As the battalion advanced steadily along the river, the men’s trepidation seemed only to increase. “We’re getting close to the spot where the Argonne and Charlevaux ravines meet,” Bill whispered to us as we hunkered behind a dead oak, waiting for the signal to move. “There’s a hill there. You can probably see it if you look. From that hill the Germans can hit anything in the valley. And we have to get around it. So when we advance, keep your little heads down. A lot of us aren’t going to make it through the next few hours.”
But toward the end of that second day came unexpected good news: one of Whit’s scouting parties had found a hidden path to the hilltop and cleared the German defenses there with little resistance. When Whittlesey and McMurtry ascended to take a look, they expected to find a machine-gun nest; what they found instead was a wide double trench that stretched farther than they could see. This was the vaunted line of fortifications that they’d been dreading for weeks, apparently abandoned.
The men’s spirits were high, but so were their casualties, and with night falling, Whittlesey and McMurtry ordered their companies to dig in. We proceeded down the hill’s steep opposite slope toward Charlevaux Brook, where the men established a perimeter near a small grove of pines—a box about three hundred fifty yards long and seventy yards deep—as the sun began to set behind the fat gray clouds and the bald white hill of La Palette. The trees on the hillside had begun to take on their autumn colors. As Bill dug and Buck Shot and I ate our evening meal, I noticed a mossy wooden footbridge that spanned the brook a short distance away; then the dusk swallowed it.
Our spot was well chosen. The brook provided a source of water, and the stony bulk of the hill that we’d descended shielded us from the arc of the German artillery. Though death and injury had thinned our ranks, the losses were offset slightly by the addition of troops who’d wandered in after being separated from their parent outfits: a company from the 307th Infantry and two from the 306th Machine Gun Battalion. Whittlesey finished the day with about seven hundred able-bodied troops, perhaps another hundred too ill or badly wounded to function, and a handful of German prisoners.
Just as he’d been taught at Camp Upton, Whit set up machine guns and rifles to cover the flanks, then sent a water detail to fill and lug back canteens. He sent a runner—a man—and a messenger—a pigeon, one I’d never seen before and would never see again—to relay our coordinates to Colonel Stacey. He ordered the men who still had them to eat their iron rations and to share with those who didn’t. He did everything right.
As night wrapped around us like a gray German uniform and the men made their usual jokes about digging their own graves, McMurtry squatted at the edge of the major’s funkhole, a short distance from where Bill had dug us in. “Well, Whit,” he said, “we seem to have broken the Giselher Stellung as if it were paper!”
“‘A steel band’—isn’t that what their propaganda calls it?”
“Not so steely without anyone to man it.”
“Evidently not. You suppose they’ve all turned tail back to Luxembourg?”
McMurtry smiled. “Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”
“Something’s amiss.” Whit took off his glasses to rub his eyes, then replaced them, studying his map before the light vanished.
“A tactical withdrawal,” McMurtry said, looking over Whit’s shoulder. “But to where? And to what end?”
“It looks like we’re half a kilometer from Charlevaux Mill and the Binarville Road. If we’re lucky, then they’ve fallen back that far and will be waiting for us in the morning.”
“But we’ve probably used up our luck for the day.”
“Probably,” Whit said, folding the map. “Which means they’re all around us. And that we’re out by ourselves. Just as we were at l’Homme Mort.”
Had I been the pigeon chosen to fly back to Rampont that afternoon, I could have looked down to see that the battalion had created what’s known as a salient: a line of attack that projects into enemy territory. Yet again the troops under Whit’s command had been the only ones on the entire Western Front to advance as planned. Despite the clear orders given by every Allied commander—anyone who retreated would at best be court-martialed, at worst be summarily shot—the French who were to protect our left flank had collapsed at the commencement of the day’s advance, and the American troops to our right fell back by midafternoon. None were so devoted as Major Whittlesey’s battalion was to him, none of their commanders so bound to duty as he. Whit engendered such pride and confidence that his men routinely achieved impossible results and did so without ever quite realizing the difficulty. In this they found their ruin.
The last message we received from headquarters—a runner sent by way of Colonel Stacey—relayed a curt and uncomprehending response from General Evan Johnson, the brigade commander, about our self-destructive advance: Congratulations.
McMurtry had a good laugh at that, and he and Whit exchanged sarcastic handshakes and backslaps. Then McMurtry retired to his own funkhole, puffing an imaginary cigar as he stepped into the night.
Memory heaps hindsight, but I swear I really did have a sense of foreboding looking across the valley toward that opposite hillside.
“I am going to die here,” said Buck Shot, his demeanor evoking a handkerchief soiled and washed too many times. “This is a place of death.”
“Buck up, Buck Shot,” I said, looking up at the witch’s cloak of broad-leafed trees. Between the looming hills and the encroaching clouds conspiring to mute the moon and stars, the ravine was profoundly dark. “Every place we’ve been has been a place of death. There’s no reason to think this spot’s special.”
His once-shiny eyes gazed dully across the Pocket, now pockmarked with funkholes and small berms of earth. “I can see it coming for me,” he said. “I can feel it. I won’t get out of this place alive.”
I didn’t try to dissuade him further. There was a decent chance that he might be right. No birds sang; even our fellow pigeons in their dispersed baskets fell silent, waiting. The forest was exceedingly peaceful, still in a way that nature never is.
A couple of hours after darkness had fallen, one of the sentries woke Major Whittlesey up with a half-panicked report that he’d heard voices only a few yards from him, voices speaking German. The sentry had been stationed at our rear, up the slope of the hill we’d passed over late that afternoon.
Whit took in this account groggily, told the sentry that he was probably imagining things and that he should return to his position and keep on his toes. The major’s instructions were clearly meant to give courage, not to show doubt. The sentry saluted and padded silently back up the hill.
Star shells sparkled us in white light that night: we were being watched.
The next morning an airplane circled, buzzing like a mosquito before flying off.
“German?” said Bill, removing our canvas cover in anticipation of Whittlesey’s call for a messenger.
“German,” said Larney. “We’re in for it.”
We were. Within half an hour, an enemy barrage raged like a lethal thunderstorm. Because Whittlesey had dug us in on the reverse slope, most of the large shells missed us, flying loud and close above our position, exploding in the dirt road beyond. But somewhere nearby, the Germans had a small trench mortar—a Minenwerfer—that hurled high-angle shells unimpeded into our close-packed funkholes. “Flying pigs,” the men called those shells: fat and gorging on human targets.
A wounded boy babbled again and again for hours, “What is this war? What’s this war for? What is this damned war?” his voice growing weaker over the warren of men until he died.
The speech of the mortars: “loud” doesn’t do it justice. The sledgehammering booms came across distances so vast that we half expected them to knock a hidden star or two from the daylit sky.
Whit called for a pigeon, and a brown-and-white bird named Antoinette carried the message: We are being shelled by German artillery. Can we not have artillery support? Fire is coming from the northwest. I’d find out later that Antoinette made it but the army made no effort to oblige until the following day.
Human language inevitably organizes as it communicates, and thus the hell of the Pocket sounds tidy when I describe it. It wasn’t. Events that my account sets down straight-edged were jagged as they happened. I can list the major episodes: A private’s teary report that our runner chain had been broken and all the men along it killed. Whit’s order to Captain Holderman of Company K to reestablish communications with the 77th Division, Holderman’s failure and frustrated return. Whit’s optimistic charge to Lieutenant Schenk of Company C to take out the German trench mortar, his staggered expression when Schenck came back to report all his outfit dead and the mortar still in action. But these were only incidents, and taken together they fail to capture the quagmire of feeling that was our actual experience of that day.
The men were so brave. Whit was as struck as I was by what he would later describe as the heroic fortitude of the bleeding soldiers whose stifled moans floated over the dark hillside. These words bridged the chasm between the horror of the events and the prideful grief of the families of the fallen, words that he and only he would regard as insufficient, compromised, unworthy.
The wounded men strove to grit the little devils of anguish between their teeth, for cries provoked sprays from the German machine guns. I heard McMurtry stop to check on one who’d been shot through the guts, who looked up and said, “It pains like hell, Captain, but I’ll keep as quiet as I can.”
I can say without hesitation that those dragging days were worse for the men than for us birds. Men can’t bear time the way pigeons can. We pigeons were used to being kept on a light diet, since the army knew that hunger made us more likely to home.
Also, we could groom ourselves without accoutrement, though Buck Shot had stopped doing so, too depressed. Among the men, only Whit kept his face clean-shaven; how he did it in the absence of privacy and clean water, I’ll never know. I also knew that our major kept up a strong front during the day, his cheer unflagging, but wept uncontrollably while asleep in his funkhole. By that time I had learned much about the courage of men, and this sound frightened me more than the explosion of any weapon. If Whit’s men heard it, I felt sure, their faint hope of survival would gutter.
Noticing everything, as homers do, Buck Shot and I looked at sunset toward the Charlevaux Valley: marshy at the bottom, deep green and brown up the opposite slope, and beyond that La Palette’s bare hill, protruding blue in the west, with a gray streak of road across it. The scene might have been charming if not for the war and the weather.
“Rain, rain, rain,” Buck Shot chanted. “Slanting rain, sideways rain, misty rain.”
He was shaking and skinny. No matter that Bill slipped us extra corn, Buck Shot couldn’t eat. I didn’t know what to tell him.
“At least we’re not horses,” I said, and thought of the animals I’d seen in other battles, their screams even louder than the men’s. Their dilated nostrils and stringy manes. Their viscera trailing like the soldiers’, long and crimson. Little in their plight seemed to offer encouragement, even its contrast with our own. “The horses need blankets,” I said. “All we need is our canvas sack.” It was the best I could do.
“I know, I know, I mustn’t mope, Cher Ami,” he said. “You really are a friend, a dear friend, my dearest friend, and I’m sorry I can’t take this the way you can.”
“No,” I said. “You’re right. It’s a mess. It’s less strange to get upset by it than not.”
If Buck Shot was still listening, he didn’t reply but only kept watching the dusk through the basket’s gaps as the crescent moon rose to blur the deepening blue.
When the morning came, I could hear the buzzing clouds of blackflies above the bloating remains of men and beasts. One of the crates of pigeons, the one Tollefson had carried, had been smashed by an unexploded flying pig, all the birds crushed.
I could smell the miasma of men relieving themselves wherever they could, despite Whit’s strict orders to use the latrines he’d had them dig. Excrement mixing with the rot and the gas. I could see the soldiers’ skin taking on a claylike pallor.
I could sympathize with the men who fell asleep with their faces against the actions of their rifles. Fluffed in my little basket, at least I had relative warmth and shelter. The rainy vapor of France chills you to the hollows of your bones, then works its way into your marrow, and you’re colder than you’ve ever been, a cold of wretched permanence, like you’ll never be warm again.
I did not fancy myself invulnerable, though. The roar of the fighting that morning became a kind of synesthesia, a gray and obscuring cloud of sheer noise. I could feel the quivering of the ground and the spatter of flying dirt, and if one of the shells hit our basket, then we’d die, too.
During a brief break in the German assault, one of the western replacements spoke, seemingly to no one. “It seems like we ain’t nowhere at all,” he said, “but slugging along through some kind of black dream what don’t have no end.”
The major looked up from his trench map, and for a moment we all thought he might reprimand the westerner for complaining. But Whit just nodded, in that way he had of showing someone that he’d truly been heard. “Keep slugging, soldier,” said Whit.
“Yessir, Major,” said the westerner, blinking as if snapped out of a trance. “Wouldn’t dare to quit.”
Some of the men, it must be said, really were very daring. Private Philip Cepaglia, for instance, a tiny, tan Italian who bore the nickname Zip. Fiery-tempered and impulsive, he found the wounded’s moans for water unbearable. Wiry and athletic, he could move like a shadow—silently, swiftly—and twice that morning he strung a dozen canteens together and made his way through sniper fire to Charlevaux Brook. On the second trip, some of the canteens got hit, their precious contents fountaining out, but Zip himself came through untouched.
Whit refused a drink, told him to take the water to the injured. “You’ll get a medal for that trick, Cepaglia,” he said.
“No, Major,” said Zip, shaking his statuesque head—large eyes, beaked nose—beneath his helmet. “It’s good to have something to do that’s not sit here and wait to get whacked.”
But Whit, as always, later did as he said he would, and Zip got a Distinguished Service Cross for feats of valor in water-fetching.
After what would have been lunchtime—had there been any lunch—Whit had McMurtry circulate the message to all his commanders: Our mission is to hold this position at all costs. No falling back. Have this understood by every man in your command. Amazingly, the men followed the order with vigor. Sirota, the medical officer, who had long since run out of bandages, figured out a method to handle the casualties strewn across the hill after the latest onslaught. The men’s uniforms had wraparound pieces that started at their feet and spiraled over their trousers—surely provided by the quartermaster because they looked smart, and kept debris from going up the pant legs, and because whenever washing was possible, the pieces could be washed. Sirota took them off the dead—and eventually the living—because the wool wraparounds soaked up gushes of blood and could be wound tightly about torsos and the stumps of legs and arms.
“That’s the kind of resourcefulness that’s going to get us out of this, Sirota,” said Whit. “Hold our boys together a little longer. Remember, two million Americans are pushing up to relieve us.”
“I just hope I’ve gotten the wool clean enough—that I’m not wrapping them in infections,” Sirota said, and hopped grimly to the next funkhole.
In the lulls Whit detailed men to bury the dead, partly out of respect but also because leaving the bodies where they lay threatened to murder morale. “These men,” he said, “deserve a last earthly tribute.”
Not to mention that aboveground they began to stink.
But the Germans took to targeting the burial parties with machine guns—“Very unchivalrous,” remarked Whit to the young German prisoner, who shrugged—so even this observance soon became impossible.
Though any catalog of events must misrepresent how baggy that extended passivity in the Pocket felt, one incident in particular was so grotesque as to give shape to the rest.
On the afternoon of Friday, October 4, our own artillery, the Americans who Whit had promised were pushing up to relieve us, began firing. The hail of shells started at the top of the hill that sheltered us—Hill 198, I’d later learn they called it back at Rampont—before crunching down to the Charlevaux Brook. The men loosed expletive-heavy cheers, including some in Italian from Zip, as the bombs chomped their way through a few German snipers.
When the fire crossed the brook, the water erupted in geysers of liquid and mud, as if an invisible giant were trying to skip stones. But these were missiles filled with shrapnel and high explosives, and they didn’t stop at the water but crept up the other side of the valley and into our own hill.
The cheers turned to cries of “No!” and “Stop, stop, stop!” but the shells kept coming, digging into our funkholes, unburying our dead, flinging shards of steel as they burst. The spot that Whittlesey had picked to dig in might have been well protected from German shells, but it was quite exposed to American ones.
Nils Tollefson was struck by shrapnel while conferring with Bill, his square-as-a-block-of-wood face splintered bang apart. Buck Shot hunched as far as he could to the back of our basket, but there was nowhere we couldn’t see Nils lying in the mud, his head half gone, never again to return to Minnesota and his family’s farm.
Splashed with gore, Bill crouched for an instant in mute horror and then with a single desperate cry began to move, snatching up our basket to take us to the major. We were the last two homers remaining in the Pocket.
“It’s friendly fire, Cher Ami,” said Bill, maintaining his own grip on the situation by explaining it to us. “Buck Shot, our own artillery is firing on us.”
“Wrong coordinates,” said Omer Richards, the third pigeon man, flat-eyed, staring at what was left of Nils.
The soldiers always said that you can’t avoid the shell with your name on it. The shells fell and fell and fell and fell, ruining brawny bodies and scrawny ones alike.
Then the shell with Bill’s name fell.
A yellow cloud burst overhead, and he toppled. Buck Shot and I reflexively belled our wings and raised our feet as our basket twisted, dropped, and crashed to the ground, coming to rest on its side; we bumped hard against the wicker and each other, but weren’t badly hurt. I knew right away that something awful had happened. Once I’d found my footing, I cocked my head sideways to peek through the gaps in the weft.
A half-inch shrapnel ball had hit Bill in the stomach. The impact knocked him backward; had he not managed to pivot in his fall, he’d have landed atop Buck Shot and me. As it was, his shoulder struck the mud alongside us, and he rolled free, ending faceup at the trench’s midpoint as more projectiles shrieked overhead. Slippery pink guts bulged through the hole in him.
Panicked, I began to keen—a high, harsh sound I hadn’t made since I was a fledgling, begging food from my mother’s throat. “No! This can’t be!” I said. “Someone help him! First aid!”
But Buck Shot, in shock, ignored me. And the men could not understand.
Omer ran to grab our basket, then stood over Bill, looking sick and helpless.
“Get away,” said Bill, his hands, which had held me with such gentleness, now slick and sweating and clutching his abdomen. “Get the birds to the major. They’re the last ones. Send the message before they kill us all. Go!”
Omer staggered with us to the major’s funkhole. Though calm as a lake of incalculable depths, Whit was bleeding considerably from a wound on the bridge of his nose.
“Good man, Richards,” he said, wiping blood from his lips and chin and dictating his message to Larney, his even voice faintly fissured with emotion. We are along the road parallel to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake, stop it.
Larney rolled it up and handed it over. “A bird, Richards, and quickly,” Whit said, holding the scroll with his usual fastidiousness so as not to obscure the message with blood.
Omer reached in to scoop me out—which Bill would never have done, wanting to keep the best for last—but he faltered.
Buck Shot, from the corner, rose wild-eyed to his feet. I saw what he was about to do, but pinned tight by Omer’s filthy fingers, I couldn’t make a sound.
“Madness!” Buck Shot screamed. “I have to get out of here!” With a lunge and a frantic clap of wings, he vaulted Omer’s arm, flying up and away, the container on his orange leg empty.
Now out of the basket myself, clutched too tightly against Omer’s ribs, I joined the men in watching the white daub of Buck Shot go, though I alone could see how his getaway would end. Wings cramped from his scrambling takeoff, he was fighting the air, flapping hard but moving slowly. His panic had driven him too high and too far over the German positions; now he turned toward home, which made him nearly stationary relative to their rifles.
Usually a pigeon’s release produced a hail of bullets from the enemy’s side, but this time we heard only one shot, from a sniper who’d been eyeing our trench.
It was enough.
A great cloud of small feathers showed that Buck Shot had taken a direct hit, and with an abrupt drop of altitude he was gone. In his interrupted flight, he’d looked like a shuttlecock struck badly in a game of badminton—an image I remember vividly but that strikes me now as strange, as if only through comparison to a man-made bird could I accept my friend’s death in this man-made war.
Sorrow I felt, but not surprise. Buck Shot had prophesied his own demise, and like many such prophecies made in war, his had fulfilled itself.
I was the last. Whit glared wordlessly at Omer, who continued to crush me against his side. Our major affixed the message himself and said, “Cher Ami, you’re our final hope.”
I cocked my head to look into his light blue eyes and blinked in understanding.
Richards gave me an awkward toss.
It’s odd, the things you notice in a crisis. As I flew up, I saw a blood blister, small and black, on Whit’s finger from where his pistol had pinched him; it looked like a poppy seed. This was the last I’d see of him for a long, long while.
I flew a short distance, keeping low, and then perched in a walnut tree to smooth the feathers that Omer had disheveled. The men began to yell, throwing sticks and rocks between shell bursts to get me to leave, but I only shifted from one branch to another.
I’d flown eleven missions prior to that day. I’d survived them by being patient and by having excellent judgment of speeds and distances. I was cautious and quick-thinking, mature and coolheaded, and I’m not bragging—just explaining the facts. The American fliers, Eddie Rickenbacker especially, were said to possess these same traits, and I like to imagine that they would have understood what I was doing on the walnut tree. My infantrymen, however, assumed that I was dawdling because I was an idiot, or afraid. That’s not why I stopped. I was thinking.
Poor Omer began to climb the tree, an undertaking that seemed likely to get him killed—with some justice, perhaps, since it was mostly his manhandling I had to recover from. But ready at last, I took to the sky.
At once the sky betrayed me. A massive explosive shell struck the funkhole directly beneath me, blowing the five men there to pieces and wrecking the cushion of air beneath my wings; I dropped like a stone through the plume of hot gas.
For a moment I lost all sense of myself. When feeling returned, I was huddled on the edge of the fresh crater, well speckled with mud and ash, my vision blurred, my hearing gone. For what seemed a very long time, I sat unmoving as my perceptions returned to me: the shouting men, the falling projectiles, Bill lying pale on the earth.
I shook mightily, casting the grime from my feathers. Then I rose, bringing my wing tips together with a terrific burst of claps. The air above me was deformed, chaotic, utterly disordered by the detonating shells. I found still air, and I dug my wings into it. I found billows of heat, and I rode them up.
I circled to get my bearings—feeling out the cleaner air seeping through the blood and the gun smoke, alert for the dark smell of fungus and fallen leaves from the deep forest to the south, the tang of years-old manure in the fields farther on—and I soared above the maelstrom.
In moments of extraordinary difficulty, one rises above oneself; one becomes an aura, overcast and vaporous. Above the ooze and above the bursts, above the horizontal hailstorm of bullets from the hills.
The German snipers had had plenty of time to take aim. Each bit of lead that caught me sent me tumbling, then rebuilding the cushion of air that kept me aloft. My movements became gooey; I tried not to think about why. Kept flying. Wing bones, long feathers still intact.
They shot out my eye. Head wrenched to the side, I blacked out, arced back toward the mud like one of those hateful shells. Then snapped awake, half the world gone. Kept flying.
I heard a despairing shout from bucktoothed Omer, bumbler to the end. “They’ve got him! He’s done for!”
They had gotten me. But I was not done for.
In my intact brain echoed the voice: Cher Ami! Home to your loft by the airway! Home to Rampont! A vista opened in front of me, almost as if I’d willed it. I thought of everything I could to not think about dying.
Flying over fields, thinking of the peasants not there to harvest, the harvest itself not there, the earth out of which it would grow blown to smithereens. Thinking of the heads of the men, like stalks of wheat themselves, chopped by the reaper.
The mist rising and falling dove gray over the fields. No, not over the fields but over my surviving eye. The hollows of my beak, gore-clogged, caught no odors beyond those of my own wounds. I thought I really might be dying. I did not want to hang in the air, then meet eternity. I wanted to make it. I hurtled forward, following the voice. Over the familiar sites to Rampont.
Grim farmhouses, bare and hard, frugal and efficient to the point of starvation. Everything once pure now besmirched, everything sordid. The hens in the henhouses distressed, brooding. Roosters and rabbits. Very few cows. The sheep and bigger animals all eaten. I was not going to die; no one was going to eat me.
Wrecked churchyards. Graves upturned, old bones mixing with the new, and me starting to feel like a corpse myself. I thought of Bill, and of Buck Shot, and of Larney and Whittlesey, and President Wilson and Wright Farm, John and the soldier son he wanted me to save, and my parents and my sweet vain sister Miss America, and my lost Baby Mine. I was not going to die; no one was going to bury me.
Though my pain was so overwhelming that I hardly recognized it as pain, I made it. Me, NURP 615, back to my loft, alighting on the board—a graceless landing, since I could only put weight on my left claw, while my right wiggled uselessly.
I pinged the little bell with my beak to announce my arrival, just as I’d been trained. In my state of complete collapse, I showed no signs of panic. Behavior of the highest order. Major Whittlesey would have been proud.
Corporal Gault was on loft duty, thank whoever should be thanked for such things. “Cher Ami!” he said. “What have they done to you?”
He spoke to me, low and comforting. He said he’d been worried ever since he’d learned that I was attached to the Lost Battalion—that’s what they were calling us already, the Lost Battalion—and that he’d feared he’d never see me again or, by probable extension, ever hear from Whittlesey. He did his best not to hurt me, a blood-smeared fluff of feathers. The message holder hung by a few shreds of flesh to what was left of my right leg, and he took some of the tendon when he lifted the canister off. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he kept saying. I could see him holding back tears. I must have looked quite bad.
“My God, no,” he said when he’d unrolled and read the thin paper note. He could hardly hold the telephone as he relayed it to Division Headquarters. “Major, listen to this one,” he said, and read the message aloud, in code, only to have whoever was on the other end tell him to repeat it in plain English, no matter who might be listening.
Within a minute the clamor of the guns had died down. The division had phoned the artillery and ordered a stop.
I had no way of knowing whether any of the men had survived.
“I wish we could figure out which triple-distilled idiot authorized that friendly barrage,” Corporal Gault said, turning back to me, his eyes aggrieved and determined. “Come on, Cher Ami. You’re going to be all right.”
I had seen enough men die to notice that this was a thing that soldiers always told those who were surely dying. It never seemed convincing, but it seemed to make them all feel better, and that was worth something.
Long afterward, glowing with patriotic pride, Gault and a number of his commanders would tell me that I had flown forty kilometers in twenty-five minutes that day.
In war it is difficult to know anything beyond your immediate surroundings. As Gault worked to clean me up, even those became unknowable to me. My mission done, my brain emptied at last of all but Gault’s soothing voice, I let myself slip into a restful blackness, with no expectation that I’d ever emerge.
It would be quite some time before I learned what happened after that.