Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  “Gosh,” said one of the players, brandishing a bare forearm, “I lost my wristwatch!”

  “That’s nothing!” said the other. “A major over in the 77th lost a whole battalion!”

  Huge laughs. After an instant of shock, I laughed, too, and then became aware of my own laughter, which as a result began to seem, and then in fact became, forced. I’d known in an abstract way that people had been talking about me—more than that, that I was now a common subject, a topic upon which complete strangers might converse—but to watch it happen was unsettling, like haunting my own funeral. The sarcasm stung, but at least it seemed honest and thus less of a torment than adulation might have been. Go on! I wanted to shout. Be skeptical of my heroism! I don’t believe it either!

  My cheeks grew hot, and my mind flashed on a similar sensation: the inferno that bloomed in the Pocket when the two wounded Flammenwerfer operators incinerated themselves during that final German assault—their strangled shrieks, the smell of burning hair and melting flesh, the pulse of the blaze on our cheering faces through the cold and dirty air.

  I slipped into the night. Passed the hospital tents with their smell of carbolic soap. Walked until the blush subsided from my skin, down by the waterfront. From the doorways of houses, prostitutes—all female—called to me, and I murmured, “Non, merci.”

  Amid the masonry wharves of the harbor, stone beneath my seat, I marveled at how soft I had stayed. Battle was said to harden a man—during my youth I’d heard this stated in the same offhand tones used to discuss First Communions and debutante balls—but in my case there had been no hardening, only a constant effort to hold together despite proliferating cracks.

  Every noise made me jump, and the harbor was noisy, even at night, little creaks and slaps among the boats, along the waterline. We soldiers learned vigilance until our technique was flawless and thoughtless; we learned it or we died. But then what? Once we’d ingrained it so deeply as to make it automatic—stay alert, sleep light, trust nothing—we couldn’t unlearn it when the danger had passed. Through discipline we had put our vigilance beyond our own control, out of the realm of skill, into the realm of instinct.

  The days wore on, and each seemed to bring me more commendations, more reassurances of my unimpeachable leadership. In his official report on the Pocket, Colonel Stacey concluded, There is not the slightest criticism of Whittlesey’s splendid conduct. In a newspaper story that my mother clipped and mailed, Neb Holderman called me—or was quoted as calling me—stout-hearted, and as game as they make them. He seemed to be cool and calm in the Pocket as though we were back at a rest area, and my hat goes off to him for being a good soldier and a true American. Every one of these sincere and well-meant statements helped convince me that I was losing my mind.

  I sailed for New York on Halloween—a relief, because it meant that I was finally doing something, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what.

  * * *

  • • •

  I leaned against the upper deck railing of the transport ship—reading Frost’s Mountain Interval and remembering as I did so my first encounter with Bill Cavanaugh. I was imagining the conversation we two might have had had he been there with me, alive and bound for home—when the news came that the war was over.

  An armistice had been signed, putting to an end those fifty-two months of hubris and idiocy. In light of this announcement, the blue-gray expanse of the Atlantic continued to look exactly the same.

  Eventually American lighthouses came into view—Chatham, Nantucket, Montauk—and then Long Island and the yawning mouth of the Hudson in the dawn light. When the transport ship chugged into the Upper Bay, I saw the Statue of Liberty, her huge turquoise form at dramatic variance from the tiny gold likenesses of her that adorned the shoulders and helmets of the 77th. Here was something else that Alexander had taken from me and portrayed as a gift: the chance to share this with my men, to see their faces as she came into view. Our New Yorkers had worked as clerks, tradesmen, civil servants, chauffeurs for Standard Oil in Brooklyn, engineers at Otis Elevator in Yonkers, electricians in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Western Union messengers, insurance adjusters, detectives with the NYPD, saloon owners, bookkeepers, post-office clerks. The upstaters had been farmers but also machinists, customs inspectors, and college students. The westerners had been rivermen, stock raisers, horse breakers, miners, timber cutters, and railroad brakemen. Some had been lawyers like me, and as I planned on going back to be. I thought of those men as we crept upriver, and also of all those who’d been with me on the Lapland but would never return from France.

  At the North River Piers, they didn’t discharge me immediately, but they did send me home. With the Armistice signed, there would be no spring offensive and thus no training for one. Major General Alexander would soon have to vacate his lavish German-built quarters. Unlike my comrades, who would languish in France for weeks, then months, as 1st Army, unprepared as ever, grappled with demobilization, I was free.

  Or so I thought.

  Mrs. Sullivan—overcome with joy to see me, insistent on furnishing me with a seemingly limitless breakfast—didn’t have my room ready yet, so I took the train to western Massachusetts to visit my family. I’d carried a photo of my mother in the upper-left pocket of my uniform all through the war, and the face that greeted me at the door was unchanged, which didn’t seem possible. I reminded myself that I had been gone only seven months.

  As soon as she finished hugging me, my mother handed me an invitation to appear at a “War Night” celebration of the Williams College Club in Manhattan the following week. “You’ll go, won’t you, Charlie?” she said. She seemed to understand my combat service as dangerous and demanding but otherwise not essentially different from times I’d spent away at school. It occurred to me that my letters home had never given her any reason to think otherwise.

  While at that moment the prospect of addressing fellow alumni in the familiar confines of the Williams Club seemed as alien as sprouting wings to frolic in the clouds or gills to root through the unlit abysses of the sea, I could not think of any polite way to decline. The exercise of trying to invent a plausible conflicting engagement made me aware of how devoid of order my life had just become, and the resulting panic convinced me that renewed sociability was the wiser course to pursue. I wrote my reply with my mother looking on, and she mailed it before I could change my mind.

  The announcement of my appearance packed the club with over three hundred Williams men. Even shifting the event into the main hall from the small clubroom left spectators spilling into the vestibule and clustering on the stairways. My fellow speaker, Alonzo “Zo” Elliot—the evening’s original main attraction, who’d composed “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” a song every British and American soldier knew by heart, and who had then gone on to Stateside service in the Signal Corps—was gracious about being upstaged, and indeed seemed honored to share the bill. With a chorus of six doughboy veterans, he sang his own beloved composition, as well as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Williams College fight song.

  In that unruly atmosphere, more evocative of a football game against Amherst than a reception in polite society, the club president gave me an introduction built entirely around my famous fictional reply to the German request for surrender. “It was a command, a malediction, and a prophecy combined!” he cried.

  The crowd cheered for what the bulletin of the alumni society later assured me was a full five minutes; to me it felt like weeks, akin to paralysis in a nightmare.

  This was not the event I had prepared for. Had I known that I ought to prepare for it, I still wouldn’t have done so—peppy patriotism was not my style—but at least I wouldn’t have been caught by surprise. In my speech I spoke not a word about the ordeal in the Pocket. I could feel the audience grow restless as I praised the kindness of the French civilians. I fear that my face must have looked quite melancholy as I sat down again.

 
As I did, Zo Elliot, a natural cheerleader with the best of intentions, attempted to rescue me by yelling, “But did you tell those krauts to go to hell?”

  I’m ashamed to admit that I nodded. By then I was prepared to do anything to get the night over with. A whoop went up, and several men hollered, “But did they go?”

  And three hundred voices answered, “They sure did!”

  I resolved to be more careful about my engagements in the future.

  After respectfully declining a few invitations to serve as a jingoistic prop, I agreed to appear at the opening of the Union Peace Jubilee at the Sixty-ninth Regimental Armory, an audience and occasion that I hoped would be better suited to my demeanor. Six thousand Episcopalians attended to hear remarks from me and Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo, President Wilson’s son-in-law. Few in the crowd recognized me—with my slender build, my stooped shoulders, my scholarly mien—as “the foremost American military hero of the Great War” until McAdoo introduced me, calling me “a modern Cincinnatus who had laid aside his sword to go back to the pursuits of peace.” But they gave me a three-minute standing ovation. Fidgeting, waiting for the cheers to subside, I could tell that the speech I’d prepared wouldn’t be any better received than the one I’d given at the Williams Club. But that, I reasoned, just meant they needed all the more to hear it.

  “The American soldiers are not going to come back hating the Germans,” I told them. “No man who has been out in the frontline trenches facing the enemy is going to return with malice in his heart. The paramount trait of the American soldier is kindness. If he met the kaiser on the road, he would be as willing to share his cigarette with him as with anyone else.”

  In the pauses where I had left space for applause, I detected only coughs and the shifting of posteriors in seats. Peace Jubilee or no, no one had come to hear a call for compassion. When I sat down without delivering the rousing war story all had been anticipating, the Episcopalians sat baffled until McAdoo’s headmasterly clapping goaded thousands of pairs of hands to join in.

  And yet at the reception afterward, I was inundated by further requests to speak. Why would they want me, having seen me for what I was: an officer who’d failed as a tactician and was failing as a rhetorician, a man who’d lost his battalion and now couldn’t find his voice?

  What these smiling, handshaking people wanted, I decided, was simply someone with a famous name—or, more precisely, they wanted to be the sort of people who could get someone with a famous name—to show up at their events. They didn’t care how well I spoke; it didn’t matter if I spoke at all. I could sit quietly, on display, like a hunter’s trophy or an exhibit in a museum. I was proof of something.

  Still, didn’t I have some responsibility to testify—even if only mutely—on behalf of my men? How might I assist them? What would they have me do?

  On Thursday, December 5, at Fort Dix in New Jersey, the army gave me my honorable discharge: I was a civilian again.

  But my life and my name no longer belonged to me and never would.

  I resolved to agree to appear at Liberty Loan drives and Red Cross fund-raisers, but only if I could remain silent on the topic of the war. I vowed to take every opportunity to deflect attention from myself in the direction of those who were more deserving or in greater need.

  On Boston Common on Christmas Eve, snowflakes floating down like feathers—Cher Ami, I wondered, where are you now?—Major General Clarence Ransom Edwards, Commander of the Department of the Northeast, pinned the Medal of Honor to my chest. When the journalists hit me with their usual barrage of Lost Battalion questions, all I said was, “I don’t know what I would have done without Captain George C. McMurtry.”

  McMurtry was also among the first to receive the medal, but his was awarded with little fanfare. Holderman wouldn’t get his until 1921, following years of humiliating pleas from me.

  After the ceremony, alone in a city that was not my own, it occurred to me that I could quite easily find a place to change out of my uniform, then stroll through the crowds, pick someone up, and end my many months of celibacy. But I was being watched too closely. I was watching myself.

  Instead I took a train to my parents’ home in Pittsfield.

  The snowflakes shivered outside my window. I found it unbearable to think about the fact that so many people were thinking about me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking.

  CHAPTER 15

  CHER AMI

  Patriotic parades are for politicians and civilians, not for soldiers, not for pigeons.

  My early-spring arrival in the United States had been disheartening in ways I’d expected—Baby Mine and I had been parted for good—and also disorienting in ways I hadn’t. At first America had seemed particularly but not essentially different from Europe: new trees, new birds, new insects, new flowers, all behaving as such things behaved. But the difference in the human sphere was more profound. Certain smells that I had always relied on to lead me toward civilization—the weathering of quarried stone, ancient metal tools buried in the earth, soil that had been tilled and retilled since before history began—were all but absent here. The cities felt provisional, contingent, and frankly fake, as if everything I saw had been assembled to fool me. Or someone. Or everyone.

  In those joyous days after the Armistice, the Americans seemed to move in impromptu rhythms, agitated and poorly fitted to my own dark mood. My thoughts, if I let them, took up a drumbeat of death and loss, loss and grief. Humans, particularly groups of humans, prefer their cadences and their abstractions to be upbeat. Heroism. Democracy. Peace peace peace.

  And so the powers-that-be decided that shortly after its return home—and despite its weariness after languishing in France, despite its soldiers’ freshly cultivated distaste for marching on pavement—the 77th Infantry Division would parade through the streets of New York City. On the appointed day, over a million people gathered along a five-mile route in beautiful spring weather, amid dogwood flowers and the scent of lindens.

  With a whistle blast signaling a rattle of snare drums, Major General Alexander started the cavalcade up Fifth Avenue, leading astride a shining black horse, looking as proud as a conquering caesar. Twenty-five thousand soldiers poured from the side streets behind their commander into a column massive and precise, coordinating by invisible signals, like a shoal of minnows or a murmuration of starlings. I imagine that the soldiers and onlookers alike were almost unanimously thrilled by this display and felt themselves to be part of something noble and unstoppable.

  Those among us who did not experience this thrill felt very lonely indeed.

  We pigeon veterans occupied a position of honor near the front. Corporal Gault carried us—President Wilson and me—in an elevated ceremonial basket with a gapping weave that ensured we could be admired. Behind us stretched a living river of gleaming steel and olive drab, the men marching with a swing and a snap through the brisk, clear morning in canyons walled with claps, tears, and cheers.

  Before us marched the surviving ambulatory remnants of the 308th Infantry Regiment, at least those who hailed from New York or who’d stayed in the area after being officially deactivated; most of the westerners had gone back west. But it was the hometown fellows—the Liberty Boys, New York’s Own—whom the crowd really wanted to see, the men who’d grown up in the nearby tenements, who’d been expected in their lives to amount to little or nothing of significant value, who’d trained and traveled and fought and finally kicked the kaiser hard in the hindquarters, showing the French and the Brits a thing or two in the process. If the lowest of New York’s low could do that, then what might their best be capable of?

  Walking in front, as if promising an answer to that very question, was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Whittlesey, fully a head taller than most other marchers. I saw him before he saw me: the flash of his round glasses, then his features in profile as he glanced at the crowd, features
somehow made more mature by lines of tragedy. He appeared as alert and intelligent as always, shy and mild, the unlikeliest of warriors. He also seemed uninjured, which made me glad but also aware of the stitched-up wreck I had become. I watched his long stride until I was almost hypnotized.

  The men did an eyes-left at a reviewing stand on the steps of a grand public library dripping with red-white-and-blue decorations, then continued north to the edge of Central Park, where bands played cheerful tunes from temporary platforms. In the lulls between their brassy blasts, I heard the two-note spring calls of male chickadees going about their business in the trees; they sounded slightly taunting.

  A delicate breeze riffled the petals off the cherry blossoms, and the men looked snowed on. I thought of Buck Shot, his feathers fluttering to the mud.

  The parade’s initial tidiness had begun to relax, the soldiers becoming individual men again. Ruddy and suntanned faces aglow, they were happy to be home and glad to show it. I noticed them noticing the younger adult male spectators in civilian clothes, wondering—perhaps with resentment, perhaps curiosity—why they had not fought.

  As we passed a reservoir at the park’s north end, a tottering man—probably a vagrant, certainly a drunk—stumbled from the crowd to point at the Statue of Liberty patches sewn on the shoulders of the men’s uniforms, gold against a field of blue. “Is that Lady Liberty?” the man shouted. “Or a French mademoiselle with a candle, huntin’ for your Lost Battalion?”

  “If I weren’t hauling you two,” Gault said through a clench-toothed smile, “I’d haul off and sock him.”

  The parade concluded in Harlem, where the abundance of brown faces in the crowd prompted grumblings and muttered slurs from some of the men. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that we pigeons, a species characterized by dramatic individual variation in color and form, find the human preoccupation with small differences in skin color very confounding. Throughout the war I noted with disappointment how frequently soldiers would use sex and race to shore up their own fragile concord, as if any acrimony might be smoothed over through agreement that women and darker-complexioned persons are weak, stupid, and unreliable.