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41 " My youthful excursions into socialism had fostered sympathy for the workers of the world but had given precious little guidance when it came to encountering them in person. "
― Kathleen Rooney , Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey
42 " But not a day has slipped by these past hundred years that I haven’t recollected my final flight. And now, on the eve of their centenary, here in the darkened museum—Sergeant Stubby asleep beside me, climate-controlled air sighing around us—those events replay behind these glass eyes that I can never close. "
43 " Later, on the battlefield, I would come to see soldiers befriend the field mice and wrens who ventured into the trenches seeking morsels of food. Even the smallest creature—a spider on her web—could give a man the mercy of taking his mind off the violence raging at all hours, reminding him that the earth still retained some forms of order even within the catastrophe. Attunement with another creature feels magical, a brief stay against dread. It’s true for humans, and it’s true for us pigeons. "
44 " 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. "
45 " Whenever they occupied Belgian or French territory, the Germans would order all pigeons in the region destroyed. "
46 " Unlike some species—crows, cowbirds, cuckoos—pigeons are not vengeful. But some part of me was eager to take to the air on behalf of these slaughtered birds, if not to avenge their deaths then to fly for the side that hadn’t committed such an atrocity. "
47 " Like my fellow hero Major Whittlesey, I had expected the Great War to be a temporary interruption. I’d settle back into my original orbit once the guns fell silent. Instead, within eight strange and painful months of my famous flight, I was dead. Three years after he and his mutilated band of survivors were freed from the Pocket, Whit was, too. Well prior to our respective deaths, he and I both realized—and suffered considerably from the realization—that after a war there can be no getting back to the original plan. "
48 " When he was still in here with me, my pigeon buddy President Wilson would rag me, joking but jealous, about all the ink committed to Whit and me in newsprint, magazines, the pages of books. But so much of it was wrong, and so much of it was terrible. "
49 " The worst thing about Farrington’s poem is that it presents the vast obscenity that was the Great War as a jolly adventure—but in fact any war story, no matter how unsparing or how true, warns against war only if its audience wants to be warned. "