He looked at her, sheepish. “This is probably silly,” he said. “It’s harder than I thought.”
“I don’t think it’s silly at all,” she said. “Look, he’s listening.”
The soldier turned to me and cleared his throat.
“Cher Ami,” he said, “my name’s Lionel Blendheim. From Stockton, California. I’m a private in C Company, 1st Battalion, 308th Infantry. I was with you in the Pocket.”
He stopped, then reached a hand across his chest to his own shoulder, placing it atop the nurse’s.
“I read in the Stars and Stripes that you’d be here,” he said. “Since I’m here, too, I figured I ought to come pay my respects. I guess we both had a rough time of it, didn’t we? But you look like you’re doing pretty well now. And so am I, with a lot of help.”
He was really talking to the nurse, not to me, but that was fine. They were obviously in love, and as a fellow in-love being I was happy for them.
“I wanted to say thank you,” he said, his eyes full, his voice barely steady. “You really saved us that day. And all of us who came through, we all know it. Me and the guys, we took care of each other in there as best we could. And I guess we did okay. But there’s something about getting saved by . . . well, by a bird, no offense, that really gives you a funny perspective on things. I’m not a churchgoing fellow. I don’t think in those terms. But it sure makes me wonder if there’s things in this world I ought to have paid better attention to.”
He was talking to me now. I cocked my head, focused my golden eye.
“They almost missed me when they were evacuating us,” he said. “Those olive-drab army rags sure blend in with mud and dead leaves, which was swell when the Germans were shooting at us but not when the medics were getting the wounded out. I couldn’t hardly make a sound—it’d been so long since we’d had any water—but I kicked up as much of a fuss as I could, and the major, Galloping Charlie himself, he saw me and sent the stretcher-bearers. Now I’m here. Like he promised me I’d be.”
He hunched forward with a grimace, then stretched out a hand to put a finger through the wire. I hobbled closer and gave it a light peck on its tip. The soldier and the nurse both laughed, then cried.
“I wish you could tell us your story, little bird,” Blendheim said. “I’ll bet the newspaper version isn’t quite right. I know what they’ve done to my story. They’re trying to tell me it was the Germans who took my legs, but I know it was friendly fire. All the worst hits we got were from our own guns. I don’t blame those artillery boys—I’m trying not to anyway—but the lying about it sure sticks in my craw.”
He settled back in his chair again. “Anyway,” he said, “thank you. Me and the other fellows, we won’t ever forget you. And as I’m working to get better—to get strong again—I’m going to think of you. Flying again, with your little wooden leg. If it helps, I hope you’ll think of me, too.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, though he could never comprehend it. “And thank you.”
The nurse kissed his forehead as she turned him around. “Lionel,” she said, “I’d swear he understood every word.”
Her low heels clicked as she wheeled him away.
* * *
• • •
In 1918, my last Christmas, Baby Mine and I were cast in the local pageant. The Riviera villages, like many throughout France, followed the tradition of the crèche begun by St. Francis of Assisi, that lover of animals, the first to organize a spectacle re-creating the birth of Christ in Bethlehem.
I can never think of St. Francis—his love and respect for all creatures—without thinking of Bill Cavanaugh.
Some of the village children had befriended us pigeons over the previous weeks. Corporal Gault had taught them how to change our water and feed us, even how to train us to home: to release and time us. When the parish priest began accumulating animals to march alongside the children who were to play roles in the Christmas drama—Mary and Joseph, the angels and the wise men—they beseeched him to include pigeons. A benevolent man beloved by the townspeople, he conceded that while none of the Gospels made specific mention of homers being present at the birth of the Lord and Savior, it would be in the Franciscan spirit to include birds alongside the traditional cows and donkeys.
The French children carried Baby Mine and me in our basket through the candlelit street to the church. While I was as mystified as ever by human religion and its tendency to answer simple questions with long, strange stories, that night I felt almost blessed.
* * *
• • •
It could not last. On an uncharacteristically overcast day late in February, Corporal Gault came into the loft with an announcement.
The army had previously declared its plans to send the American Pigeon Service soldiers home to the States later that spring. Now they’d decided that they needed a few heroes to make the return earlier. “Ceremonial purposes,” Gault explained to President Wilson and me. “Pershing wants to give you a medal, Cher Ami. Plus, the army’s got some scheme about a goodwill tour. It’s still taking shape, and it’ll be a while before the orders make their way down to me. But I’ll be shipping back across the Atlantic next week, and the two of you are coming with me. Well, I guess it’s fairer to say that I’ll be going with you.”
“America!” said President Wilson. “The first time for you and me, eh? Off to the New World! The glorious land we have served with distinction. We shall be paraded through the streets beneath their skyscrapers. Schools shall be named after us. Prepare yourself for fame, my friend.”
For all his knowledge, President Wilson could be oblivious to the feelings of others, and had Gault’s announcement not stunned me so completely, I might have bristled at his enthusiasm.
I didn’t want to go to America. I supposed I’d been assuming that when the war ended, I’d be sent back to Wright Farm, just as most of the surviving conscripted men would return to wherever it was that they came from. Over the past months, whenever something remarkable happened, I’d imagined how I’d describe it to my family and to John’s other homers when I saw them again. Whenever I flew back to my mobile loft in difficult circumstances or in record time, I’d imagine the news reaching John and how he’d praise me for my achievements when we were reunited. I never subjected these fantasies to an instant of practical thought.
Had I done so, I would have realized that we pigeons were not conscripts like the men. We were matériel; we were property. The army hadn’t borrowed us but owned us. During the war it needed us as messengers, and now that the war was over, it needed us as celebrities.
I would never see Wright Farm again. That realization was a blow, but not the main source of my anguish. What I most wanted in the world was simply to stay in the Riviera with Baby Mine—or, if that wasn’t possible, to go wherever Baby Mine would go when her rehabilitation was complete.
Pigeon handlers, even kindly ones like Corporal Gault, regularly separate birds as it suits them, assuming that they’ll go on to bond with others. They’re usually correct: while pigeons are famously monogamous, most will pair with another mate if parted from a partner. But not I. Such matters were not so simple for me. And I knew I’d never find another like Baby Mine.
President Wilson had realized all this before I had. In truth, he had little more desire for fame than I. But he understood that going to America would cost me more than it would him, and in his graceless way he feigned enthusiasm for the trip to try to keep my spirits up. The fact that such sensitivity did not come easily to him made me appreciate it even more, and I told him so.
“I am glad that we can be frank with each other, Cher Ami,” he said. “Though we have carried our last messages and dodged our last bullets, though we have earned the right to rest and happiness, our duties are not yet discharged, which means our war is not yet over. I fear the two of us shall never run out of applications for the phrase ‘c’
est la guerre.’”
Baby Mine grieved when I gave her the news.
“It’s not fair,” she said, burying her face in my shoulder. “Look at what happens to the men who served. Look at Lionel Blendheim, who lost his legs and found a wife. The army isn’t forcing them to part.”
I didn’t know what to say—but Baby Mine understood that nothing could be said, or done. Though our bird hearts were breaking, it is in a pigeon’s nature to carry on stoically. The morning they put Corporal Gault and President Wilson and miserable me on a train bound for Brest, Baby Mine and I kept our parting dignified. “I will always love you, Cher Ami,” she said.
“And I will always love you, Baby Mine,” I replied.
As Gault scooped President Wilson and me into our travel basket, my remaining eye watched her steadily to record every detail of her pink feathers, my bullet-rattled sinuses strained to capture the last inkling of her white-rose scent. I seized on these sensations as if they were clues that might one day guide my flight home, though my only return to Baby Mine would come in dreams.
* * *
• • •
Honors ennoble those on whom they’re bestowed, but they also ease the guilt of those whose commands made them necessary in the first place. A medal is a mirror, reflecting a glory that we force ourselves to believe in.
Such were my thoughts upon receiving the silver medal from General Pershing.
The army had no official award for valorous animals, but Pershing’s hand had been forced by the French, who’d given me the Croix de Guerre. Like every power that had taken part in the global war, they were terrified of the energies that its horrors had unleashed in their populations: the Russian and German empires had already collapsed in revolution, and every nation seemed susceptible to a similar crackup. The French, however, were quick to notice that public revulsion at the waste of thousands of human lives could somehow be swept away by the story of one heroic animal. In a strange reversal of the tricks men used to depict their enemies as beasts to make them easier to kill, honoring the deeds of birds and dogs and horses made the idea of battlefield sacrifice simpler, more straightforward, easier to enjoy.
So Pershing needed a medal and had an idled silversmith work one up. At the ceremony, as the general held me in his hands, I understood that I was no less a prop than the bogus award, that we were all putting on a show to bolster the morale of the men in France awaiting their return and their even more impatient families back home. Along with the medal, Pershing presented both President Wilson and me with army pensions, a gesture clearly meant to reassure the troops that the U.S. government would keep its commitments. If the army could afford to give pensions to pigeons, then the men had nothing to worry about.
Pershing saluted us at the gangway of our transport ship, the Ohioan. “See that these birds make their journey in an officer’s cabin,” he ordered Gault. Such arrangements had long been settled, but the general had to make theater out of it.
Still, as we crossed the ocean westward, I had to admit that the cabin was one of the finest places I’d ever been. A petted passenger aboard that colossal vessel crowded with American troops, my experience was far more luxurious than our Channel crossing had been, with our basket lashed to an open deck. Our journey to America took over a week, and Gault whistled and smiled the whole way; he was from New Jersey and eager to be home.
I never discussed it with President Wilson, but I had begun to suspect that I was no longer a pigeon. In practical terms I had become something else, akin to a plush horse whose ostensible retirement would consist of being trotted out and ridden hard to the end of the line, with the accompaniment of waving flags and stirring speeches.
I think that that was when I started to become what I am now, here in the halls of the Smithsonian. A piece of suspect evidence. A symbol of something I never really was.
The ship was so vast that I had trouble understanding it as a thing rather than a place. The watery expanse we crossed was so featureless that my homer’s mind failed to grasp it. Instead I thought of doves and the sea, of doves and boats, of pigeons and Noah, of pigeons and olive branches. A little piece of a tree, a little piece of peace. I felt lonely and unwell, not only in my heart but also in my body, which had never ceased hurting. Even in the midst of our cosseted journey, I felt that death could not be far from me and that I’d be at peace sooner than anyone might think.
As it happened, I was right about death, if not about peace.
CHAPTER 14
CHARLES WHITTLESEY
In my first dream after the Pocket, I dreamed of a cemetery without name or end and its tall columbarium, those memorial structures modeled on dovecotes, with small drawers set into the mausoleum walls: little crypts for the ashes of the dead.
Each box was printed not with a dead man’s name but with the same graven gold label:
SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY
SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY
SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY
When I pulled the looped brass handles, the boxes wouldn’t slide open, wouldn’t budge. My little sister, Annie, came in, the same age she was when she died, though I was grown, thirty-four. She said, Charlie, don’t cry, and opened one drawer, and Bill Cavanaugh emerged to stand behind her. He put his hand on her shoulder and said, You don’t need me to, but I forgive you. Annie touched his hand with her own and said, History will forgive you, then forget you.
I woke to McMurtry shaking me, saying, “Rise and shine, Major. You were muttering in your sleep. Come on, it’s breakfast time. Bet you never thought you’d hear me say that again.”
Stiff and cramped, I rose from the ground, and the lingering uneasiness of the dream soon gave way to relief at our rescue and unaccustomed hunger for the hot chocolate and greasy potatoes that awaited us.
In the hours immediately following the arrival of the 307th, the realization that I was no longer about to be killed routinely jumped from hiding to startle me like a roguish child. The most mundane sensations—the smell of food, the crunch of dry leaves, a puff of wind—would leave me near laughter or tears simply because I was alive to experience them. On being rescued, our main priorities had been distributing water and food and arranging the evacuation of our wounded, but I had also assigned soldiers to gather and secure our remaining weapons and ammunition. That night they confirmed with ghoulish amazement what I had already suspected: we were down to two working machine guns, no grenades, a handful of rifles and pistols, and so little ammunition that our few functioning weapons would have consumed it in a few minutes of hard fighting. “Couldn’t have cut this any closer, Major,” they said.
The previous night had provided the first sound sleep that most of the men had gotten in seven days, since we’d begun our advance on October 2. Many of us, including McMurtry and me, chose not to avail ourselves of the opportunity, instead waking periodically to keep the wounded company, repeating the whispered incantation, Hang on, buddy. A few more hours. Hang on, hang on. We did so from a sense of duty—and of responsibility, which is not the same thing—but also because, at least in my case, deep sleep didn’t seem trustworthy, or earned, or even particularly desirable. It seemed decadent, like breaking a fast with cake instead of bread.
The morning light revealed that many of the men had died anyway, before the stretchers and bearers reached them. I had thought that knowing relief was on the way would sustain them, but the body quits when it must, regardless of the mind’s exhortations. I’d soon learn that the reverse also applies: the body will go on living against the mind’s wishes and will.
Even then, heartless as it may sound, I had an inkling that for the most mangled and irreparable it was better to die than to live on in agony. What has surprised me in the years since is my own inability to predict these outcomes. Some of our most grievously disfigured men went on to lead full and happy lives. Whereas I, who came through with only wrecked lungs and a few scratches, am now her
e on the deck of the Toloa.
But on that Tuesday morning, as I gulped my first coffee in a week, the sickness that had infected me was still dormant and life seemed incalculably rich, incalculably fragile. The morning air was frosty, and whenever anyone exhaled, his breath escaped in a white cloud, like ectoplasm at a séance or spirits leaving a body. I had to remind myself, No, these men survived.
The valley came alive with the engines of trucks and the calls of ambulance drivers. McMurtry, Holderman, and I worked with the officers of the rescuing companies to prepare the men for departure. The YMCA distributed chocolate.
Holderman, his cheekbones so sharp against his sallow skin that they threatened to slice through, kept refusing food, passing it to the hungry men. “Captain,” I said, standing next to him in the clearing where they’d parked a water truck, “don’t make me order you to take sustenance. You’re no help to me or the army if you faint.”
“I’ll get something for myself shortly, Major,” he said with a grin that was meant to be reassuring and was anything but. “For now it’s a sight for sore eyes to watch the men.”
I couldn’t disagree. I hadn’t seen my men eat since the first day in the Pocket, when I’d watched Larney and two other privates sit at the edge of a funkhole and debate with the gravitas of congressmen whether they should eat one cracker apiece then or half a cracker each and share a cigarette. Judicious, they settled on the latter. Then Larney unrolled a copy of Adventure magazine from inside his signal panel—he had carried the flimsy publication through the entire advance—and read his fellows a story about pirates on the coast of New Guinea.
A familiar Brooklyn voice jarred me from the recollection. “Major! I made it!”
Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Page 25
