Forty kilometres. That is roughly the distance a wounded homing pigeon covered in October 1918 with a bullet in her chest, one eye gone, and a leg hanging off, carrying the message that stopped an American artillery barrage falling on American soldiers.
How a battalion gets lost
In the Meuse-Argonne offensive, a mixed force of around five hundred and fifty men from the 77th Division pushed into a ravine, got further than the units on their flanks, and found themselves encircled. They became known as the Lost Battalion, which is not quite accurate. They were not lost. Everyone else simply could not reach them.
They had no working telephone line, no way through the German positions, and no means of correcting the map reference that headquarters was working from.
The system
The communication system was birds. Homing pigeons of the Signal Corps, carried forward in baskets, with a small aluminium capsule fixed to one leg.
The first was released and shot down. The second was released and shot down. There was one left.
Cher Ami
She was hit almost as soon as she rose. A round through the breast, an injury that blinded her in one eye, and a leg reduced to a tendon with the capsule still attached to it.
She completed the flight anyway and reached divisional headquarters. The message read, in substance, that the barrage was landing on their own position and asking, for the love of God, that it stop.
It stopped.
What survived
Fewer than two hundred of the original force walked out. The others were killed, wounded or captured over five days.
Cher Ami was treated by army medics. The leg could not be saved, and someone carved her a small wooden replacement. She was shipped to the United States and died in June 1919 of her wounds. She was preserved and is held by the Smithsonian.
Why it goes on a wall
Because this collection is about improbable numbers that belong to one subject and nobody else, and this is as literal as that idea gets.
There is no second Cher Ami. There is no shared credit, no team, no committee. One bird, already shot, made a decision that pigeons are not supposed to be capable of making, and roughly two hundred men went home.
Forty kilometres, one eye, one leg, one message that arrived.