Rediscovering 'Cher Ami' And The Lost Battalion: Questions For Kathleen Rooney

In London's Hyde Park, there's a heartbreaking series of sculptures called the Animals in War Memorial — heavily laden bronze donkeys struggling through a gap in an enormous curved wall. It honors creatures from elephants to glow worms, who served alongside humans in war; as the memorial says, "they had no choice."

At the head of the animal parade carved on the wall fly three birds — I like to think they're homing pigeons like Cher Ami, the real-life bird who, though terribly wounded by German guns, carried the message that helped save a trapped battalion in World War I.

Cher Ami (who was a hen, despite her masculine name) is the inspiration for Kathleen Rooney's novel , which imagines the parallel lives of both the pigeon and the commander of what became