CHAPTER 19

CHER AMI

No flowers are laid upon my grave, but I’m not complaining. I have no grave. I am my grave.

No flowers are laid upon Charles Whittlesey’s grave either, and neither is he complaining, for he got what he wanted.

“He was a victim engulfed in a sea of woe,” said one of the partners from White & Case by way of eulogy. The extent to which this metaphor was unintended or simply in poor taste is not clear, but it was true enough at any rate.

Humans have no monopoly on grief. Dolphins carry their dead on their backs for days. Giraffes refuse to eat. Elephants cry.

Whit carried the dead on his back for years. For life. I’ll carry him on my flightless wings always.

Back on Wright Farm, John once told us that hummingbirds are the only birds who can fly backward. Here in the museum, backward is, in a sense, the only way I fly.

Through the years of my stay here, the quantity of material that surrounds Sergeant Stubby and me has accordioned, growing longer and shorter according to what the culture deems most important. The Great War exhibit stretched long and expansive through the twenties and thirties. In the forties the curators compressed us into less and less space. The defeat of Hitler and company can be presented as a quest far more noble and necessary than the First World War, the obscure origins and anticlimactic end of which are befuddling even to superlative armchair historians.

The tenor of the exhibit on our war material has changed over the years. For a while the wall bore a quote from a letter that General Patton sent to General Pershing: “War is the only place where a man really lives.”

I would look at it and think, Please let that not be true.

In the seventies I heard a reporter interviewing Great War veterans for a television documentary. One of them was Zip Cepaglia, wrinkled but dignified, still with the trace of his Italian accent. “What are your feelings about the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne?” the reporter asked.

“Well, I think it was a fucked-up mess,” Zip said. “And that’s a very generally held opinion among the guys like me, the guys who been there.”

That didn’t make it into the museum.

The army stopped using pigeons as message carriers in 1957. Fifteen living heroic birds were donated to zoos, and about a thousand of the others were sold to an eager public that was then still enthusiastic about breeding and racing us.

When people believe in animals, what do they believe?

Whit goes unmentioned in my display.

James Larney—the signal-panel carrier who kept a diary during his days on that hillside above the brook in the Pocket, who collected the soldiers’ jokes and songs in the belief that they would reveal something about the war and those who fought in it, something hidden to themselves—had a hard time dealing with Whit’s death. He had by then become a political bigwig in upstate New York: very civic-minded, active in the American Legion, a real stand-up citizen.

But when he heard the news, he took a break from all that and he bought a ticket on the Toloa to Havana. The same ship, the same route, even the same cabin that Whittlesey had taken, all to try to comprehend what had happened to his beloved commander. A pilgrimage of sorts.

He stood at the railing all night, staring up at the moon and down at the waves.

But when the sun rose over the ocean, he still couldn’t understand.

Maybe you can?