On 4 October 1918 about 550 American soldiers of the 77th Division were cut off in a ravine in the Argonne forest. The newspapers called them the Lost Battalion; they were not lost, they were surrounded. That afternoon their own division's guns began shelling them. Major Charles Whittlesey wrote a message asking for it to stop, and at about 3 pm the last of their pigeons was let go with it in a capsule on its leg. Men saw it hit, fall and fly on. At 4:05 the message was at the mobile loft at Rampont. By then, the records say, the shelling had already stopped. Four days later 194 men walked out.
The Army credited the flight to a pigeon named Cher Ami, who came in with his breast shot through and a capsule hanging from a leg held on by a ligament, was shipped home in 1919, died of the wound that year and stands today in the Smithsonian; in 2021 a DNA test showed Cher Ami was a cock bird. Whether Cher Ami was the bird of 4 October is still argued over: the Signal Corps found no record of it in 1920, and its own record has Cher Ami wounded later that month. The film does not name the bird.
Told the way Ferenc Rofusz's The Fly (1980) tells its story: one unbroken flight, seen through the flyer's eyes.
Who carried something home for you when it mattered?
Sources: the National Archives (the message of 4 October 1918, with the times it was sent and received), the National Museum of American History (its record of Cher Ami and its 2021 DNA finding), Frank A. Blazich Jr. in the Journal of Military History (2021), Robert Laplander's research for the US World War I Centennial Commission, and the 77th Division's citation of April 1919.
Film and music: ours, an homage made independently of the makers of The Fly. Sounds: recordings by Kinoton, TOC1, Beskinsky, Fsu2001, cognito perceptu, craigsmith, felix.blume, CHallSmith, bruno.auzet, 5ro4, JonasTisell, Joseph Sardin and nvmbky (CC0) on Freesound and BigSoundBank. Piano samples: Apple Logic; orchestra: Apple GarageBand; cello: University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios. Font: Courier Prime (OFL).