Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  Whittlesey seemed perplexed by the question. “I say whatever they would have me say,” he replied.

  “That’s all well and good for the fellow who’s dead, I suppose,” McMurtry said, “but what about you? Let’s be honest: we say these things to hold ourselves together as much as to safeguard anybody’s immortal soul. What do you say to yourself?”

  Now Whit understood, and he nodded and blushed a bit. “It’s not something I’d expect everyone to adopt,” he said, “but I sometimes think of a line from Catullus, the Roman poet. ‘Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.’ That’s ‘So forever, brother, hail and farewell,’ more or less. It’s held up for two thousand years, so I suppose it’ll carry me through this.”

  I’ve returned to it often. It doesn’t promise the comfort of heaven, and it doesn’t evoke the glory of war. It doesn’t assert that the death was necessary, or valuable, or just. It just declares admiration for the dead and grief at the loss.

  Best of all, it addresses the dead as “brother,” thus erasing nearly all the distinctions that might have separated Whit from the fallen in life: rank, class, background. Even species, I like to imagine.

  I don’t know where Whit went—where he is now, if he can be said to be anywhere. I stretch myself out into the cold darkness toward him, but I get no reply.

  While I’m hesitant to apply my own experience to Whit’s, I draw on my memories of homing: of the intense, convulsive need to return to my loft and the translation of every sensible thing into routes and impediments. Once I was launched into the air, the world in all its plenitude seemed no more than a thing to be traversed and endured on my way home.

  I think that may be how Whit felt about the world before he found his route out. Bill Cavanaugh, whom we both loved, used to say, Pigeons fly faster to a happy home. Wherever Whit is now, I hope he’s happy.

  Hail and farewell, brother. I salute you, and good-bye.

  CHAPTER 18

  CHARLES WHITTLESEY

  I remember in the Pocket hearing one soldier ask, “Hey, buddy, what time is it?” and another soldier answer, “What the fuck do you care? You’re not going anywhere.”

  Both that desire to know and the dismissal of that desire are relatable now. These past three years, I’ve tried to keep my life precise and circumscribed, even as I have remained as attentive as a metronome to the passage of time, the days ticking by in excruciating sameness.

  But today the moments rush past like a cataract, and I am going somewhere. The Toloa—newest and largest of the United Fruit Company’s Great White Fleet—churns beneath my feet, carrying itself south. I am making my trip in luxury. “Only one class, sir, and that’s first class,” the agent said when I bought my ticket.

  The weather was wet and chilly in New York the morning we left, but this afternoon the sea is calm and the weather clement. After the Toloa makes its stop in Havana, it’ll proceed on a two-week cruise. The deck, though hardly crowded, is meandered over by people set on enjoying their vacation—“five thousand miles of sunshine among the quaint countries of the Caribbean,” the poster in the American Express office had promised, along with “many delightful shore excursions.” They stroll and gaze, alone and in pairs.

  One of them approaches, clearly having recognized me as Charles “Go to Hell” Whittlesey. Broad of shoulder and dark of complexion, he wears an impeccable slate suit with a red pocket square. As he gets closer, I see that he has eyes of cobalt blue, like a perfume bottle, glinting in his deep-brown face. I recall my first glimpse of Bill Cavanaugh’s eyes aboard the Lapland, and for the first time since the Pocket the memory is sweet, not agonizing.

  “I’d heard a rumor that we have a war hero on board,” the man says, extending a hand, warm and dry. “But I didn’t expect to have the good fortune to run into him this very afternoon.”

  Up until a few days ago, being recognized would have made me irritated and anxious, but now it doesn’t trouble me; I’m already feeling freer.

  The man’s name is Maloret. “I’m from Puerto Rico originally,” he says, “but my father was American. I’m a veteran, too. I fought in the Spanish-American War. On the U.S. side, if that’s not clear.”

  Those eyes flash again, scattering light like a semiprecious gem. Maloret is older than I am but seems younger than I’ve ever felt. He’s not really my type, but he has an endearing guilelessness and a misshapen charm, a languor of gesture.

  “What brings you aboard the Toloa?” I ask.

  “I have business in Havana,” he says. “Exceedingly boring business, I promise you. What are you doing for dinner?”

  “Dining at the captain’s table.”

  “I am as well. I was just going to invite you. Farquar is an old chum of mine,” he says, using the captain’s first name to show the depth of their friendship, or simply that he’s the sort of person who prefers first names. I still don’t know his. “I’ll look forward to seeing you there and to making more of your acquaintance.”

  Mr. Maloret, of Puerto Rico, who has business in Havana. He walks away, leaving behind the peppery scent of his cologne. He seems as though he might be interested in an assignation. This journey has suddenly taken on the cartoonish dimensions of a classic temptation narrative.

  I never miss the Army-Navy game, I’d said to the captain’s man when he invited me to dinner—it was a rivalry that continued to interest me despite all the misery the army had inflicted—so could the captain arrange for me to listen to the broadcast on the wireless? It was uncharacteristic of me to make requests like this, selfish and unnecessary, but as a war hero I knew they’d never say no. I listen to the game alone in a small lounge, not another soul around. It is bliss. Navy wins, seven to nothing, but that’s okay. That success can manifest itself in the right kind defeat is one of the underlying premises of my voyage. I rise, prepare my room, and wash up for dinner.

  When I emerge from my cabin, gaiety suffuses the early-evening air. We’re now beyond the reach of Prohibition: U.S. law extends only three miles out to sea, the length of a cannon shot. We’re well past that now.

  I make my way to the captain’s table and enjoy every bite of food, from the iced celery and assorted olives to the stuffed lamb cutlets to the vanilla blancmange. We talk easily, the captain and I, the captain and Maloret, the handful of other honorary guests whose names I luxuriate in forgetting the instant I hear them.

  As the dessert plates are cleared away, the captain excuses himself and returns to the bridge, cigar in hand, leaving me with Maloret, who suggests that we head to the lounge. I see no reason to disagree. It’s early yet.

  We sit in the smoking room of the steamer and talk a little about the war. We have a drink and then another. We speak of his time as a soldier in Puerto Rico and of the time he spent in Paris as a supplier of the American Expeditionary Forces, the extent of his role in this most recent conflict.

  I feel remarkably self-possessed.

  “I don’t much care,” I say, swirling the ice in my glass, “for how some journalists have already started to call it the First World War. As if they’re already eager for the next one.”

  “I must say I am impressed,” he says, “given the extreme difficulty of what you endured in the Argonne, that you have remained so easy in your bearing and able to speak of the war with such calmness.”

  I want to tell him that he should not assume the presence or absence of another being’s pain simply because it is not being manifested in a manner that he recognizes. I remember Bill Cavanaugh saying, after Lieutenant Revnes made one of his frequent references to the pigeons as “dumb animals,” that while he couldn’t say how exactly how his birds felt, he was sure that they preferred comfort and safety over pain, like any of us, and that it wasn’t hard to respect that.

  What I say instead is, “Thank you.”

  After an hour or so, the conversation lags, and I don’t seek to rev
ive it. My watch says eleven fifteen. “It struck me suddenly how weary I am,” I say, rising. “I apologize, but I must retire to my room.”

  “I hope to enjoy the pleasure of your company again,” says Maloret, blue eyes holding mine for an extra beat. “If not aboard the ship, then perhaps I can show you a good time in Havana.”

  “Perhaps,” I say.

  On the starboard side of the upper promenade deck, a few shreds of fog blow along the ship’s rail, much as it did those mornings in the Argonne Forest. The night is partly cloudy, and there are a few people about, either gazing out to sea or into each other’s eyes. Filtering starlight and international romance.

  I look up at the stars, and in my relative good cheer I feel like the teenager I once was, poetic and romantic and excited about the world.

  The railing feels cold in my hands. My service pistol is in my pocket just in case, but I’m not going to need it. Its weight—a bit over forty ounces on the scale—will help to pull me down.

  The wind picks up. We are too far out to sea for there to be any gulls. With my face in the air, I feel like I’m flying.

  I try to picture the face of every man in the 308th. Hail and farewell, brother. I salute you, and good-bye.

  Then I jump.

  I fear that as I fall—a dark blur against the ship’s white hull—my mind will spill over with every horror that I witnessed during my brief life, but this does not occur.

  Instead I think of feathers, and then nothing at all.

  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?

  Historical Note

  World War I has always saddened and fascinated me with its colossal scale and the destruction it wrought, and the way it opened the door to the subsequent horrors of the twentieth century. But my inspiration for this book came from an unexpected place.

  I teach a class at DePaul University called “Drift and Dream: Writer as Urban Walker.” Back in 2013, one of the students in that workshop, Brian Micic, turned in a poem that contained an almost throwaway line about pigeons: “This was no Cher Ami story. (Look it up!)” I appreciated the good-natured ribbing—I am forever reminding my students to look things up—so look it up I did.

  What I found astonished me—despite my years of reading books and watching films about the Great War, I had never heard of this bird, nor had I heard anything at all about the Lost Battalion, the nickname of the group of American soldiers she helped to save from a friendly fire incident in France’s Meuse-Argonne Forest in October of 1918. I also knew nothing whatsoever of that group of men’s commander, Charles Whittlesey, a person who gave his all not only in that ordeal but also in his civilian life upon returning to the States.

  The size of their bravery in life and the depth of their forgottenness in death made me realize that I needed to tell their stories. I went to see Cher Ami in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and was stunned by how small and smart she looked, even stuffed, and I kept her picture as the wallpaper on my computer as I wrote.

  Cher Ami really was one of the many highly decorated homing pigeons to be deployed by the United States Armed Forces during World War I, thanks to these birds’ reliability and accuracy in relaying information from the front lines to the rear. She really did receive grievous wounds while carrying the message that saved Charles Whittlesey’s Lost Battalion. And she really did manage to live on for a few months after that, stitched up by army medics and using a tiny wooden leg. Taxidermied after her death in honor of her high level of service, her body really does remain on exhibit at the Smithsonian in their “Price of Freedom” exhibit.

  Charles Whittlesey, the courageous and compassionate commanding officer of the Lost Battalion, really did receive the Medal of Honor for his leadership during that harrowing incident. Sadly, upon his return to the States, he really was unable to adjust to the demands of serving as a high-profile war hero and took his own life by leaping into the Atlantic from an ocean liner in 1921. His body was never recovered.

  To be clear, this is a work of fiction and not a biography of either Cher Ami or Charles Whittlesey. Though largely based on newspaper reports and other published accounts, the specific circumstances of the novel are invented and the attitudes and opinions expressed by both pigeon and soldier are entirely imagined.

  That said, I encourage everyone interested to learn more about this once famous and now largely unsung episode in American history, perhaps by visiting the Smithsonian in DC and the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, and by reading the
following books, which were indispensable in the writing of this one:

  Cher Ami: The Story of a Carrier Pigeon by Marion Benedict Cothren (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1934)

  Finding the Lost Battalion: Beyond the Rumors, Myths and Legends of America’s Famous WW1 Epic by Robert Laplander (Waterford, WI: Lulu Press, 2006)

  Five Days in October: The Lost Battalion of World War I by Robert H. Ferrell (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005)

  History and Rhymes of the Lost Battalion by Lee Charles McCollum (Chicago: Buckley Publishing Company, 1919)

  History of the 308th Infantry: 1917–1919 by Louis Wardlaw Miles (New York: G.B. Putnam’s Sons, 1927)

  The Lost Battalion: A Private’s Story by John W. Nell (San Antonio, TX: Historical Publishing Network, 2001)

  Last but not least, unrelated to World War I, but very much related to Cher Ami, I recommend The Pigeon by Wendell Mitchell Levi, published by the R. L. Bryan Company in 1941, for being a marvelous compendium of pigeons and all the remarkable things that they—like humans—can sometimes be capable of.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks beyond measure go to:

  Lisa Bankoff, Abby Beckel, Logan Breitbart, James Charlesworth, Christen Enos, Elisa Gabbert, Virginia Konchan, Caro Macon, Eric Plattner, Mitchell Rathberger, Beth Rooney, Martin Seay, Rachel Slotnick, Kimberly Southwick, Margaux Weisman, and Becky Wills; my family, especially my mom and dad for instilling in me a lifelong fascination with history; all the poets who do Poems While You Wait; the staffs of the National World War I Museum and Memorial and the Smithsonian Institution; my students and colleagues at DePaul University; and anyone who has ever talked with me admiringly about birds in general and pigeons in particular.