Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  I had Cavanaugh send a bird back to headquarters with our coordinates. The army’s instructions were to always send two with duplicate messages in case one bird was killed or became lost, but I wasn’t confident that we had two to spare, and I’d learned to trust pigeons more than the army.

  Cavanaugh sent the white bird. I was glad that he didn’t pick the blue one. I felt better having her with us.

  McKeogh went to muster a scouting party, intending to make use of the twilight to spot German positions in the surrounding hills. That left me, Cavanaugh, and Cher Ami in the bunker. I had little to do at that point but wait, and the valley was eerily quiet, and I was tired and lonely and wanted the company of someone distant in the chain of command, someone with no apparent concerns aside from the welfare of his birds. I wanted the company of Bill Cavanaugh.

  “How did you first come to fancy them anyway?” I asked. “The pigeons.”

  “You really want to know?” he said, smiling to reveal a slight gap between his two front teeth, a metonym for his general openness. “When I was real little, I got sick with pneumonia. A friend of the family sent two squabs in a pasteboard box. I lifted up the lid, and there they sat. Black and shiny, sending up little peep-peep-peeps when I let the light in. I’d been so sad and helpless, and then all of a sudden I was so powerful. Responsible, too—responsible for those little things. There’s nothing needier than a baby bird, Major. In my neighborhood, squab’s said to be good food for a sick kid, easy to digest, but I could never have let Ma make ’em into soup. They were the most wonderful things I’d ever seen, and they seemed to think the same about me. When I got well, I asked the old Irish guy who lived a floor above us, who kept racing homers, if he’d teach me how to train ’em. Old Dan, his name was. He’s dead now. But he showed me how to build ’em a little wooden box on the roof next to his. Those two birds lived there a decade. I got more after that, but that pair would have been my treasures even if they never won a race. Annie’s taking care of my flock while I’m away.”

  As always, I was somewhat at a loss as to how to respond to Cavanaugh. For the hundredth time since the deck of the Lapland, I wanted to write a letter to Marguerite testifying to this man’s miraculousness. But such a letter was an impossible object, a message that could never exist lest it catch the voyeuristic eyes of the censors. I’d have to tell her about him when I got back to the city. When he and I both got back to the city. Maybe she could help make true my cockamamie dreams about the three of us having reason, somehow, to see each other socially.

  “In New York before the war,” I said, “I saw pigeons all the time, of course. I’d often walk to the East River or the Hudson from my office and see them squabbling with the seagulls. But I never paid them much mind. Here I think about them every day.”

  By then it was late enough to feed Cher Ami—for reasons related to their propensity to home, the army insisted that birds away from their loft be given food only once a day, a half hour prior to sundown—so Cavanaugh measured out a dry mix of peas and corn and placed it in the basket. His every gesture made me see how rare true gentleness was in a man, and how mesmeric. I blessed Cavanaugh for existing and cursed love, that joker, for dealing me an unplayable hand.

  “It’s kind of funny, I guess,” he said as he worked. “Pigeons are doves, and doves are symbols of peace. And here we are using ’em to fight a war. Is that what you call an irony? That’s a word I don’t think I ever use quite right.”

  “Maybe better to call it an incongruity. Or a sacrilege, if that’s not strong enough.”

  “Sacrilege is pretty strong,” said Cavanaugh, refilling Cher Ami’s trough from a bottle of German mineral water. “I guess it seems silly to feel bad about the pigeons who get killed in the war when all these men are dying around us every day, but I do. The men’s souls at least have a chance to go to heaven, but the birds’ . . . I don’t know.”

  “The eschatology there is a bit beyond me, I’m afraid,” I said, wondering what it might be like to have Cavanaugh’s deep Catholic faith. He wore a scapular; I’d seen him undress.

  “The first time one of my birds died,” Cavanaugh said, “I asked our priest if I’d see her again when my turn came to go on to eternal life. He said no. He said that to think otherwise would be heresy. That animals have souls but not—how did he say it?—not rational souls. They can’t understand anything that’s eternal, or universal, like divine truth. So when they die, they’re dead, and that’s that.”

  “Since we arrived in Calais,” I said, “and maybe even before, I’ve not seen a great deal to reassure me that the human claim on a rational soul has any stronger basis than the animals’ does. And what can we know of a pigeon’s soul? Or any animal’s, really?”

  Cavanaugh quailed a bit at this, as if in fear that our conversation was leading him out of his depth and away from his faith, but he didn’t retreat. “When something doesn’t talk, I guess we figure it doesn’t think,” he said.

  And that reminded me of a little fragment from my studies at Williams, something I jotted in a notebook and then largely forgot, something I had never returned to because the paths I’d followed—poetry, socialism, law, now war—never led me back to it. It came to me like the memory of a charming street in a strange city, one that I never walked down because it would have taken me out of my way.

  “It’s not exactly doctrine,” I said, “but I read a line once in a sermon by the theologian Meister Eckhart. He wrote, ‘God becomes God when the animals say: God.’”

  Cavanaugh turned his face up toward mine. His blue irises were the two brightest things in the bunker, in the Argonne, in all of France. “I don’t pretend to know what that means,” he said, “but I like it. I’m going to try to remember it.”

  His freckles, I noticed, were of two sizes: seven or eight prominent flecks crossed the bridge of his nose amid a dusting of tiny others in a pattern that seemed artful, deliberate, gesturing toward significance. I shook off the impulse to study them like some antique astrologer, knowing that any meaning I found there would be entirely of my own making.

  From the bunker door, a third voice unfurled into the silence, quiet enough to comply with the order for strict noise discipline that I had issued yet still somehow resonant and clear, as if it had been trained for the stage, which it had. “Major Whittlesey,” said Lieutenant Revnes, entering with a salute. “Did I hear you quoting a Heinie philosopher in the midst of this war? All the hicks and hayseeds we took on from the Fortieth won’t know what to make of you.”

  I let his comment hang in the air, giving him time to appreciate how thoroughly it had failed to amuse me. “Eckhart’s been dead for six hundred years,” I said, “so we probably ought not to assume his endorsement of the kaiser. Much as I am unable to assume that you have a good reason for leaving your platoon unsupervised while it’s holding a vulnerable forward position. Do you have something to report that a runner couldn’t, Lieutenant?”

  Revnes’s unit was part of the 306th Machine Gun Battalion’s D Company; he’d pleaded a special request to quit his safe job with the Argonne Players and take a combat command, landing there after his predecessor was shot through the neck. Marshall Peabody, to whom Revnes became second-in-command, had feared the worst but reported that Revnes had proved surprisingly brave and resourceful on the battlefield, if still self-important and duplicitous in his everyday conduct. Revnes was also known for looking after his men’s interests, and he seemed to be well liked by them, if not quite respected.

  Since I was the senior officer among all the units that had advanced with us, Revnes was circumstantially under my command. He seemed to intuit that in such perilous straits I wouldn’t bother to reprimand him for petty insubordination and in his usual fashion had staked a claim at the edge of acceptable behavior. Now he was watching me with a smug and bright expression meant to suggest that he’d overheard my conversation with Cavanaugh. I had been cautio
us, and Cavanaugh was a complete naïf, and therefore I wasn’t concerned, but I remained on my guard. I didn’t figure Revnes for queer—his appetite for women was certainly pronounced—but he had the air of a man who’d spent enough time around the city’s queer fringes to observe certain signs and gestures. I could feel him assessing me, probing for a disclosure that he could use to his advantage. I wouldn’t be giving him one.

  “Well, that’s just the thing, Major,” Revnes said. “My gunners are holding their position. Given how many have the flu, or the shits, and can barely stand, much less run, I thought it best that I come myself. They know what to do, and they’ll do it. But they’d feel a hell of a lot better with more supplies and more information. I figured I might learn things that a runner wouldn’t.”

  “Lieutenant, this may not have been impressed upon you during your time on the stage, but you can say of any man anywhere in this war that he would feel better with more supplies and more information. If your troops are holding their position, keeping quiet and alert, and stretching their rations, then they know all they need to know. And they must be satisfied with that, or you wouldn’t have left them under their own supervision. Which returns us to the question of what you’re doing here.”

  Revnes unveiled a conspiratorial grin. “Oh, they’re satisfied, Major,” he said. “Most of them think we’ve stopped here to rest and regroup, and they’re grateful for it. So long as they stay sharp, I’m not going to tell them otherwise.”

  “But you believe otherwise.”

  Revnes glanced at Cavanaugh, pantomiming doubt that we should be discussing this in front of an enlisted man. “Orders were to pack light,” he said. “No rain gear, two days’ iron rats. That’s how you pack if the plan is to advance and keep advancing. We’re not doing that. And we have no supply line. Which makes me wonder whether we’re cut off.”

  I’m fairly certain I kept the surprise off my face. Revnes’s analysis—which, we’d soon learn, was quite prescient—echoed a concern of my own, one I had barely discussed with the captains. “Lieutenant,” I said, “I strongly recommend that you keep that pointless supposition to yourself. So far as you and your men are concerned, our present situation is as predicted: we are holding this position while we establish lines of communication and finalize plans for an assault on German fortifications. If you’ve nothing further, you are dismissed.”

  “I’ve nothing further, Major,” he said. “I and my men will keep believing that, or acting as if we do.” He saluted and turned on his heel. At the door he paused and looked over his shoulder at Cavanaugh. “Speaking of the mysteries of faith,” he said, “lover boy, birdie boy, those pigeons aren’t giving you kisses, you know. They’re just pecking.”

  He was gone before I could reprimand him, had I been inclined to do so. I firmly believed that disrespectful behavior had a corrosive effect on order and morale and felt that I should say something to Cavanaugh, but he glanced up from his tending of Cher Ami with a reassuring smile. “Something my ma taught Annie and me,” he said. “The punishment for being a guy like that is being a guy like that.”

  As I lay in the bunker that night, I remembered Camp Upton before the conscripts arrived, and the instruction that we officers received. They had told us that success in war was often determined by morale, coming down to the willingness of individuals and units to perform in combat: loyalty to the cause would secure the cause. I fell asleep forcing myself to think of what they had taught us and not what I was coming to know: that battle was not a struggle between opposing wills but a contest between material forces that cared not at all for the character of the humans involved.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next day we moved forward as far as we could—which is to say not far—and dug in again, very near an enemy we could hear but rarely see.

  The newspapers always called our temporary defenses “foxholes,” but we seldom did so. To us they were funkholes. Holding one or two soldiers, they were supposed to be about five feet long and three feet deep, but the conditions under which we dug were hardly ideal, particularly in the root-webbed ground of the Argonne. At camp we had dug them in the soft Yaphank soil with our army-issue shovels. In France we often found ourselves without the proper tools, never having been issued them. We dug with the covers of our mess kits, discarded Boche helmets, our own bleeding fingertips—anything to lower ourselves from the paths of the bullets.

  That afternoon the sun revealed itself for a moment. The rays filtering through the hills and trees seemed almost holy, fairly inviting the men to stand up and bask. A mistake.

  “We look like a town of overgrown prairie dogs!” said one of the western men, rising from his hole to survey our layout. He turned toward me and was stretching with a slightly delirious grin when we heard the shriek of an incoming shell; a burst of blood and he was gone.

  The artillery bombardment crashed around us, and we could do little but cower in our funkholes. I’d jumped into one with a medic, Private Irving Sirota, nicknamed “Baron” by the men, a Brooklyn pharmacist with slick black hair and a clipped voice. He’d spent a year in medical school before getting drafted: not enough training to put him in a field hospital instead of here with us. Sirota could hear the shrapnel tearing men to pieces; he also knew that he couldn’t go to their aid until the barrage had quieted. I watched him crane his neck to survey the damage, figuring where he’d most be needed, whether he could risk a sprint now.

  I could have answered that—a dead medic had no value to us—but I opted to distract rather than scold. “How are you holding up, Sirota?” I said, crouching next to him.

  “I’m all right, Major,” he said. “But after this a lotta guys ain’t gonna be.”

  Cries of “First aid!” had begun to rise from every side, and I felt him flinch in frustration. “Sit tight, Private,” I said. “Any man whose wounds won’t wait for the shells to stop falling probably isn’t going to pull through, no matter when you get to him. Wait till it stops.”

  “You’re right, sir,” he said. “I’ll wait. But, sir, a minute here or a minute there can decide whether a fellow goes home with both legs or both eyes. So it matters, sir.”

  One has strange thoughts while immobilized in a funkhole, and in that moment of stasis my mind began to assemble inopportune citations to refute Sirota’s argument—John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant—only to cast them aside. “True,” I said. “But everyone here knows what he’s risking. Remember that a medic doesn’t cost anyone anything or take anything away. The shells do all the taking. You’re just giving these men back some of what they’ve lost. So go easy on yourself.”

  Sirota didn’t respond, but his breath slowed and he settled into the dirt, his helmet low above his eyes.

  When the shells finally slackened, he clambered out and set to attending the wounded with little more at his disposal than white gauze bandages; the recipients of his ministrations looked like pathetic partial mummies. I didn’t see him again until after sundown, when he reported the casualties: dozens killed outright or too badly injured to move. I passed the night mostly sleepless, hearing their moans and pleas for relief, drifting off now and then only to be awakened by a renewed onslaught of shells.

  The following day, September 28, brought a reversal of fortune, or seemed to. We advanced under our artillery’s morning barrage only to meet little resistance, closing easily to within one kilometer of the dépôt des machines. Our scouts reported much German activity behind their lines but little incoming fire: they were falling back. Best of all, rations and water had arrived from the rear, along with stretchers and bearers to carry away the casualties. We were no longer alone: by midmorning McMurtry’s Company E had joined us, and although we remained dispersed along the line, it was immediately reassuring to know that the old Rough Rider was with us. Suddenly it seemed as though the generals’ improbable scheme might actually work.

  But by th
e afternoon our luck had not held. We took artillery and machine-gun fire, fought hard to dig the Germans out of their nests, and then halted in a sudden, uncanny stillness. Although we could hear hard fighting some distance beyond our flanks, the hill of Le Moulin de l’Homme Mort just ahead had fallen silent: no sounds of other battalions, friendly or hostile. We knew that the Germans were out there, waiting. The whereabouts of the relief forces with which we’d rendezvoused that morning remained a mystery. We’d learn later that the 2nd Battalion had advanced too quickly and been ambushed in a ravine: B Company had become entangled with McMurtry’s men, the line had gotten muddled, and McMurtry had been forced to fall back. The offensive will be complete in under seventy-two hours, headquarters had said. It was complete, all right, with us isolated in deadly circumstances, victims of our own success.

  It began to rain. McKeogh, his face red and raw and drawn, reported that none of our runners had returned from any direction, a sure sign that our chain and been broken. “At least our pigeons have most likely gotten through,” he said. We’d been sending birds to reinforce our runners and were down to three, including Cher Ami, the blue one that was Cavanaugh’s favorite.

  “I wish we had more pigeons,” Cavanaugh said.

  McKeogh and I looked at each other. Cavanaugh’s remark was of a sort apt to draw a rebuke, or worse, from many a sergeant: the battlefield was not a place for wishes—the first cousin of complaints—but rather for making do with whatever one had. Yet Cavanaugh was a good soldier, apparently incapable of both despondency and stiff-upper-lip posturing. And Mac and I weren’t sergeants.

  McKeogh’s ears stuck out like wings beside his cherubic cheeks; soaked and filthy, he was the very likeness of an urchin whom one might see outside Grand Central Station, palm outstretched. “I wish they’d let us take our rain gear,” he said with a sly grin.