The Flying Dutchess

An Epistolary Story in Dispatches, 1918 – A Note on the Correspondence

What follows was reconstructed from two small oilskin cylinders recovered from a hayloft in Picardy in 1923. The bird had been dead for many years. The paper inside was no larger than a man’s thumb. Someone had rolled each scrap with great care and tied it with thread pulled from the hem of a nurse’s uniform. The archivist who cataloged them wrote in the margin:

Impossible. And yet.

DISPATCH ONE — FRANZ

Tower of London, Prisoner Compound, Sector B 14 September 1918

I have been counting days in scratch marks above my cot. I stopped at one hundred and

thirty-one because the mortar crumbled, and I lost a week. I do not count anymore.

The bird is the only thing I allow myself to care about. A blue-grey homer, a hen, captured with me at the Marne when my battalion collapsed, and the British came over the ridge

looking mildly disappointed. They cataloged her as an enemy asset and recommended

reassignment. She was never reassigned. I believe she bit the man who tried. I would have.

The guards call her Duchess. I find this undignified. I use it anyway.

Tonight, I tear a corner from a British propaganda leaflet and write on the blank side. I have

no reasonable expectation that Duchess will go anywhere useful. She has been in this room

for four months. Her instincts will have blurred. I am releasing a letter into the sky and hoping

the sky is interested.

I write anyway. Sitting and waiting is a form of disappearing, and I am not ready to

Disappear.

MESSAGE — CYLINDER ONE, RIGHT LEG:

Whoever finds this bird — I am not dead. I am a prisoner, age 34. German. I mean no harm. Are you well? — F.R. I read it back. I have written to a stranger in English to ask if they are well. I am a prisoner of war in the Tower of London.

I hold Duchess to the window slit. Eight inches of grey English sky. In German, I tell her, “Go, find someone.”She looks at me with one amber eye. Then she goes. I watch until she is a speck, then nothing. What a fool I am, I think. And then, because it is the truth: What an absolute fool.

DISPATCH TWO — EMILY

Field Dressing Station 7, Argonne Forest, France 19 September 1918

I keep a scratch on the inner heel of my left boot every morning. Harold kept a harvest

calendar the same way — little lines on the barn door for every clean row. Somebody back

home is counting something too.

The bird lands on a Tuesday. I’m rewrapping Hollis — shrapnel in four places, commentary in about forty — when I hear wings and look up, and there’s a pigeon on the tent pole with the patience of someone who has a reservation.

“Army bird,” Hollis says. “Got a cylinder.”

“Hush, I’m counting gauze.”

I finish dressing, wash my hands, and hold out my wrist. The bird steps onto it like it’s

perfectly natural. I unroll the paper, read it, then read it again. What sticks with me is, “Are you well?”

I laugh. A real one, sudden and surprised, from somewhere below my ribs, I’d stopped

expecting to feel anything in. Hollis wants to know what’s funny, and I say “a German,” and he

says to kill the bird, and I tell him to hush.

I sit with her and think about the man who wrote this. I’ve only seen German soldiers dead or in pieces. I don’t want to picture him that way. I decide to picture him as a man sitting still in a room — that’s all I know, and it’s enough. Back home, when a fence post needed mending, and you didn’t know how bad the rot was, you started with what you could see and

worked inward. I find a blank supply form and fill it out.

MESSAGE — CYLINDER TWO, LEFT LEG:

F.R. — I am Emily Walton, an American nurse. I am tired but not dead. The bird seems healthy. She ate my biscuit. I hope you are also not dead. — E.W.

I tie it with a thread from my hem. I carry her outside and open my hands, and she goes,

banking north over the ruined trees, and I watch until the sky takes her. I go back inside and check Bed 14, and he’s breathing, and I scratch tomorrow’s mark in my

boot a day early, because that feels right.

DISPATCH THREE — FRANZ

Tower of London, Sector B, 26 September 1918. She comes back on a Wednesday.

I am eating my morning ration when Duchess drops through the window slit and lands on my

arm, and I knock over my cup. The cup is empty. It doesn’t matter. I am not composed.

She has two cylinders. My right leg, her left leg.

My hands are unsteady while I read the note. I observe this with irritation.

“Tired but not dead. The bird ate my biscuit.”

I read it three times. An American nurse. I did not expect an American nurse. I did not, if I am honest, expect anything at all. I sent the bird as one sends a thought into the dark — not

because you believe the dark is listening, but because the alternative is silence. The silence

has been very long.

I write back before I can think myself out of it. Thinking, in my experience, is how reasonable. Men remain alone.

MESSAGE — CYLINDER ONE, RIGHT LEG: E.W. — I am glad you are not dead. I am in London. It is cold and grey. I was a teacher before the war. What were you before? — F.R.

I almost don’t add the question. It feels presumptuous. I add it anyway and send her back

into the grey sky, and then I notice I am smiling. I touch my face the way one checks a window for rain. Yes. Smiling. I sit with that for a while. It is a strange thing to rediscover in a stone room — like finding a coin in a coat you thought was empty.

DISPATCH FOUR — EMILY

Field Dressing Station 7, Argonne 4 October 1918

The bird comes back during a shelling. Hollis and I are under the supply table — he’s philosophical about shellings now, which is either wisdom or what comes after it — and when the barrage lifts and we climb out, Duchess is on the tent pole, neat as anything, like she’s been waiting.

“Your bird,” Hollis says.

“Not my bird.”

“She comes to you.”

He’s not wrong. I take her behind the medical tent, where I keep five minutes for myself each

evening — I protect those five minutes the way you protect seed corn.

“I was a teacher,” I add it to what I know: a man in a room, a man who taught children, who

asks questions and waits for the answers as though they matter. My father said you could

tell everything about a person by whether they asked questions or just waited for a pause to

talk. Franz asks questions. The guns are quiet tonight.

MESSAGE — CYLINDER TWO, LEFT LEG:

F.R. — I was a farmer’s daughter. I can fix almost anything that isn’t a person. I am learning to fix people. What did you teach? — E.W.

She goes. I watch the dark where she was. He asked what I was before, and nobody here asks before. They ask what I can do right now, today, with these hands, in this light. Before, it was a different world. It’s kind of him to believe in it.

DISPATCH FIVE — FRANZ

Tower of London, Sector B, 12 October 1918. There was a discussion about the Duchess. I heard it through the door — carrier pigeon, should have been logged — and then a long silence, and then: “She’s just a pet. Leave it.”

I breathe again.

I have been thinking about her answer. “I can fix almost anything that isn’t a person. I am

learning to fix people.” I find this more affecting than I can account for. I taught geography for

nine years — the measurable world, distances between named places — and I was

competent at it, and I understood none of my students. I knew where everything was. I knew

nothing about who was sitting in the room with me. She has named the same problem from the other side.

MESSAGE — CYLINDER ONE, RIGHT LEG:

E.W. — Geography. The shape of the world. I knew where everything was. I no longer know where I am. Do you have family? — F.R.

I send her and stand at the window with my hand flat on the cold stone. The Thames is

somewhere beyond the walls. I can smell it sometimes. I think about rivers — the Rhine at

Koblenz, the Moselle, the Marne, where they took me — and how they all end somewhere

without asking anyone’s permission.

DISPATCH SIX — EMILY

Field Hospital 12, Argonne 22 October 1918

We got shelled out of the station. Nobody killed — the kind of miracle you write home about, and nobody believes, because they’re waiting for the dramatic kind. We moved three miles east to a farmhouse with a collapsed barn. It reminds me enough of home that I try not to

Look at it directly.

My first thought: Will she find me?

I write the note before I know if she’ll come. On the farm, you plant before the rain, not after.

MESSAGE — CYLINDER TWO, LEFT LEG:

F.R. — Brother Harold. Parents. Two sisters, both younger. The farm goes to Harold. That’s right. I will go somewhere else. I don’t know where yet. Do you have family? I moved. I hope she finds me. — E.W.

She finds me. I cry when I see her. I am sitting on an ammunition crate, watching the sky go pink over the ruined tree line, when Duchess drops out of the dusk and lands on my knee, calm as a Sunday. I put my hand over her. I can feel her heart going — fast and steady, the way a good engine Runs. “Good girl,” I tell her.

DISPATCH SEVEN — FRANZ

Tower of London, Sector B, 31 October 1918. There is talk of an armistice. I do not allow myself to engage with this possibility. Hope is a liability until it becomes a fact.

I have a sister, Marta, in Cologne. I do not know if she is alive. I have not told Emily this. I have not told anyone. Naming a thing gives it weight, and I have been trying to travel light. But tonight I am sitting on the floor of this cell — the floor, not the cot; the floor is colder and more honest — and I decide it is time to set something down.

MESSAGE — CYLINDER ONE, RIGHT LEG:

E.W. — Sister Marta. Cologne. I don’t know if she’s alive. Parents had gone before the war. I have been alone a long time. You are the only person who has written to me. I don’t know what to do with that. — F.R.

Duchess turns and looks at me before I send her. “I know,” I tell her.

I sit on the floor with my back against the stone wall until the light is gone. I am not sad,

exactly. Sadness implies a comparison to something better. This is more like: I am a man

who has been carrying something in his coat for a very long time and has finally set it on a

table. The table improbably shows an American nurse in France. I find, against my will, that I am curious what she will do with it.

DISPATCH EIGHT — EMILY

Field Hospital 12, Argonne 7 November 1918

Hollis lost an arm on Thursday. I held his hand through it and kept my face exactly right.

When it was done, he looked at me and said, “You’re not going to tell me it’ll be okay,”

I said, “No, but it’s done, and you’re here,” and he said, “Okay. That’s usually enough.

Duchess is on the crate outside when I come out for air. I read his note in the dark by lantern light. I read it twice. Then I sit on the farmhouse step, and I cry — not because the note is sad, though it is, but because it is eleven o’clock on a cold November night. There is a man in a stone room in London who has been alone a long time, and I am the only person who has written to him. He is one of the only people who has thought to ask how I am, and the world arranged all of this by being catastrophic, and I am so tired of catastrophe doing the work that people ought to do for each other.

I wipe my face. I write.

MESSAGE — CYLINDER TWO, LEFT LEG:

F.R. — I didn’t know how to write to you either. I still don’t. Writing anyway. I hope Marta is alive. I hope you get to go home. When you do, will you write again? Not by bird. — E.W.

I watch her go into the dark and think: that is either the bravest or the most foolish thing I’ve written in my life. On the farm, you don’t know if the rain is coming until it comes. You plant anyway.

DISPATCH NINE — FRANZ

Tower of London, Sector B, 11 November 1918. The bells begin at eleven in the morning. I hear them first as an anomaly — too many, too coordinated, wrong time of day. Then the guard opens my cell door without a second guard present, which has never happened, and

says:

“It’s over.”

I sit on my cot.

It’s over.

Duchess is on her bar above the window. She tilts her head. I already have the note written. I wrote it last night, after she came back with Emily’s message, because I knew — I cannot explain how — that something was shifting, and I wanted to be ready before the map changed shape. I am a geographer. That is what I know how to do.

MESSAGE — CYLINDER ONE, RIGHT LEG:

E.W. — Yes. I will write again, not by bird. My full name is Franz August Reichter. I am from Koblenz. The Rhine. Where are you from? I would like to know. — F.A.R.

I carry Duchess to the window for the last time. The bells are still going. Below the walls, out in the city, I can hear people deciding they are allowed to be happy. It is an enormous sound.

I had forgotten what it sounded like.

She looks at me — one amber eye, steady and ancient and utterly without sentiment. She

has carried every word between us across a sky full of war. She has found her way back

every single time. I don’t know how. I never knew how. Some things work without

Explanation.

I put my face close to hers.

“Thank you,” I say in German.

I open my hands.

She goes.

EPILOGUE Hook of Holland, Rotterdam Docks, February 1919

FRANZ - The crossing from Harwich takes seven hours in winter. I stand at the rail most of it, the cage in my hand, Duchess inside, riding the swell with her usual composure. I did not plan to bring her. But when the guards unlocked Sector B for the last time, and I collected my coat and my single bag, she was simply there on her bar, watching me with one amber eye, and I thought: she carried every word between us. She should see how it ends.

The Rotterdam docks in February smell of fish and coal smoke. Men move around me in the slow, uncertain way of people recently told they are allowed to stop. I move with them, the cage at my side.

I am not looking for her. I have an address, a plan, and I am a reasonable man.

I see her anyway.

EMILY - Grey wool coat, too big — army surplus, cut for a man. Kit bag at my feet. I am reading the address of a pension near the Rhine when something makes me look up.

There is a man across the dock standing still inside the crowd. He is holding a birdcage.

Inside it: a blue-grey hen, watching me.

I know that bird.

FRANZ - She tilts her head. Just slightly. In the same way, I will learn later that Duchess used to look at her from a tent pole in the Argonne.

I pick up my bag.

EMILY He walks toward me across the wet planking. I do not step back.

When he is close enough, he says one word.

“Emily.”

I smile.

“Franz.”

We walk together into the morning mist, the cage swinging lightly between us, Duchess perfectly still, her work done.

FINAL NOTE

From the archivist’s log, Imperial War Museum, 1924:

Further inquiry has located a Franz August Reichter, formerly Hauptmann, 212th Infantry,

now resident in Koblenz. And an Emily Walton, formerly Staff Nurse, U.S. Army Nurse Corps,

of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

They declined to be interviewed.

The record is closed.

*~ END ~*