Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey by Kathleen Rooney

Author:Kathleen Rooney [Rooney, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

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• • •

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.

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