Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  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 lan
ded 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.