Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden (11 page)

What a desolate country, such squalid people, such squalid straggling towns and tenements! Opposite was a house with a gaping hole in the roof where, a few days before, a German shell had burst. This was our first taste of the war. Henceforth many of the houses by the roadside were similarly damaged, albeit they seemed to be occupied; for besides soldiers, women and children swarmed in the streets . . . Surely this could not be a real war, I thought repeatedly. Surely this must be a dream, or an exhibition, or some kind of excursion, or a moving picture! Yes, no – it was war right enough.

I am writing this now in a farmhouse a mile from the German trenches. An occasional gun goes off, otherwise nothing comes out of the damp mist but the bark of a dog or the sound of our men chopping firewood outside. It is the strangest thing to see life running its normal course within a mile of the fighting line – children playing outside the cottages, peasants ploughing and threshing.

Rifleman Aubrey Smith, 1/5th London Rgt (London Rifle Brigade)

The battalion was billeted in various big farms which were dotted round the neighbouring country, the one with the muddiest field being allotted to the transport section . . . When we had disposed of our horses, we turned to see what billet had been provided for us and were directed to the farmhouse at the entrance to the field, one of those three-sided Flemish farmsteads with an evil-smelling midden and refuse heap in the centre.

Up a rickety ladder we climbed, emerging in a low-roofed loft filled with straw, situated over the pigsties. This was our billet. There was loud abuse of our dear Lance Corporal Hurford, who acted as transport Quarter Master Sergeant, for not having secured a better residence, but he merely grinned and informed us that the NCOs’ billet was a glorified dog kennel.

2/Lt Alexander Gillespie, 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

The farms here are fortresses in themselves; they are built all round a square courtyard, the middle of which forms a manure heap, the size of which I never saw equalled, in any part of the world . . . Three sides of the square are given over to horses, cows, calves, pigs, sheep and goats; and the fourth side is the house proper, where the old farmer, his whole family, and all his labourers seem to live. You can imagine the confusion, when 500 soldiers have to find their way in, too. They lie down in the stalls beside the cows, climb up hen ladders to roost in the lofts, and curl up in any corner where they put a bundle of straw. I found four horses in the place allotted to my men and had a tremendous argument with the farmer and the farmer’s wife, who refused to put them in beside the cows.

2/Lt Wilfrid Ewart, 1st Scots Guards

The British soldier is lounging about with all his accustomed insouciance, the stump of a cigarette in his mouth; the cocks and hens (with crested heads) and one or two fat black pigs are scratching and burrowing in the somewhat pungent and very plentiful manure of the farmyard. Madame, wizened and old, with two rubicund daughters, is heavily committed in the matter of washing linen outside the kitchen door. Monsieur le père, who has a short white pipe which he never ceases to smoke, leans contemplatively on the door of a cowhouse regarding the unwonted scene. Who would think that the opposing lines of trenches, locked together in the grim death struggle, are so near? Yet hardly has the thought occurred when in the middle distance a gun booms ominously.

To escape the farmyard animals and their associated smells, even for a short while, men would leave their billets and head towards any local estaminet for a change of scenery, the chance to relax in a warm and convivial atmosphere and the chance to buy eggs and chips.

Pte Horace Smith, 1/8th Worcestershire Rgt

A little way along the village street was the Café du Nord, to which we often went in the evenings to play cards or drink wine and coffee.

I can see every part of the public room of that little café now: the entrance from a narrow passage leading on to the street; the long French stove at the far end of the room on which usually stood a pot containing hot coffee. Most of our party sat round the table playing some card games, while I usually sat by the stove with the cat on my knees. The animal took a fancy to me at once, and I think for this reason Madame always had a soft spot in her heart for me. Her husband was away serving in the French army, and she had three young children.

Occasionally we held impromptu concerts, and although the good woman of the house could understand but a few words of English, she listened with evident interest to the songs or to the recitations by myself and joined heartily in the applause. Occasionally, when we had just returned from the trenches, she would inquire where so-and-so was, and if we had to tell her he had been killed or wounded she was always greatly upset and sometimes wept.

Cpl William Watson, RE, 5th Div.

A dog of no possible breed belonged to the estaminet. Madame called him ‘Automobile Anglaise’, because he was always rushing about for no conceivable reason.

The war was never far away: you could see it, hear it, and, what was more, smell it too. For men going up the line in the dark, it was possible to find one’s way as much by the sensitivity of the nose as by strength of sight. For soldiers new to the line, like Wilfrid Ewart, all the senses were employed to come to terms with this new world.

Lt Denis Barnett, 2nd Prince of Wales’ Leinster Rgt

It is a very difficult journey from here to where we are digging, and the sailing directions are like this. Across field to haystack; bear half left to dead pig; cross stream 25 yards below dead horse; up hedge to shell-hole, and then follow the smell of three dead cows across a field, and you’ll arrive at exactly the right place!

The best of these landmarks is that you can use them on the darkest night. I brought my lads back by a short cut I devised for myself, including a couple of dead dogs and a certain amount of one German. It is a much better way, and I got the bearing so well that I walked right up to the last cow without even smelling her, so strong was the wind blowing the other way.

2/Lt Wilfrid Ewart, 1st Scots Guards

I see a wide and shadowy country. The moon is rising out of the calm night. A little wind whines and whispers among the sandbags. I see dimly a land of poplars and small trees (dwarf oaks), orchards, and plentiful willows. I see flat fields and ditches and stagnant water, and red farms whose roofs are gone, stark skeletons in the moonlight. I see broad flat spaces and then a ridge – the ridge of Aubers. Only the German lines are hidden from sight.

No sign of life. Silence and desolation reign. But here and there the faint glimmer of a fire indicates the presence of the enemy. Afar off, rockets, red and green and white, shoot up to the sky; star shells bursting above our trenches cast their baleful light around. Strange twisted figures of trees stand out against the horizon. There is no sound but an occasional home-like mating call of partridges in the fields and the peculiar laughing cry of the little speckled owl which here, as in England, dwells among the orchards.

2/Lt Alexander Gillespie, 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

This day began for me about midnight, as I lay in my dugout in the breastwork watching the Plough swing slowly round. [It was] still, that is, except for the snipers’ rifles, and the rattle of the machine guns, and sometimes the boom of a big gun far away, coming so long after the flash that you had almost forgotten to expect it. The breastwork which we held ran through an orchard and along some hedgerows. There was a sweet smell of wet earth and wet grass after the rain, and since I could not sleep, I wandered about among the ghostly cherry trees all in white, and watched the star shells rising and falling to north and south.

Presently a misty moon came up, and a nightingale began to sing. I have only heard him once before, in the daytime, near Farley Mount at Winchester; but, of course, I knew him at once, and it was strange to stand there and listen, for the song seemed to come all the more sweetly and clearly in the quiet intervals between the bursts of firing. There was something infinitely sweet and sad about it, as if the countryside were singing gently to itself, in the midst of all our noise and confusion and muddy work; so that you felt the nightingale’s song was the only real thing which would remain when all the rest was long past and forgotten. It is such an old song too, handed on from nightingale to nightingale through the summer nights of so many innumerable years . . . So I stood there, and thought of all the men and women who had listened to that song who were once so strong and active, and now are so quiet.

Some of the best prose of the war would come from these young highly educated officers, so many of whom, like Second Lieutenant Gillespie, would not survive the war.

Gillespie’s gentle flights of fancy were not ones that Private Frank Richards would have ascribed to his Commanding Officer, Buffalo Bill, the bullying major who had, the previous year, threatened to shoot a man for losing the company’s milk-giving cow. The cow had now been forgotten and instead a dog had captured his perhaps over-fertile imagination.

Pte Frank Richards, 2nd Royal Welsh Fusiliers

Buffalo Bill bought a large and powerful dog with harness and got the pioneer sergeant to make a little cart. All over Flanders it was a common sight to see dogs in harness working and pulling little carts about, which in England is against the law. Buffalo Bill calculated that the dog would be able to pull as much trench stores to the front-line trench in one journey as six men could carry, thereby saving six men who could work repairing the trenches. He appointed a man to take charge of the dog, whom he afterwards called the Dog-Major on the lines of the Goat-Major, the lance corporal who has charge of the regimental goat. He told this man he would hold him responsible for the dog’s safety.

The idea was all right but the dog had other ideas. On the first night that it made the trip, it was deemed advisable to send another man with the Dog-Major. I was detailed off to accompany him. We loaded the cart up with reels of barbed wire and other small trench materials and set off for the trench. The dog strode out resolutely along the road and the Dog-Major remarked that we would put a little heavier load on for the next journey. I replied that we had not completed this one yet, and that it was time to talk when we had safely landed in the trench with the load we had got.

As soon as we left the main road and got on the track our troubles began. We had not proceeded very far when the dog left the track, the cart upset and everything was in the mud. We cursed, got the dog and cart back on the track, loaded up and got going again. We had not proceeded very far when a small shell exploded some distance from us. The dog gave a leap off the track, pulling cart and stores into a shell-hole which was knee-deep in mud and water. It took us about an hour to get the dog and cart back on the track and load up again. This happened a couple more times, and then I carried as much as I could of the load whilst the Dog-Major tried to guide him. But it made no difference. He would have left the track even if the cart had been quite empty. I tried to persuade the Dog-Major to let me shoot the dog or bayonet it, and he could report to Buffalo Bill that a piece of shrapnel did the trick. But he wouldn’t agree to it. Just before dawn we landed in the trench thoroughly exhausted. We reported to Buffalo Bill the trouble we had had, but he said that the dog was strange to that work, and after a few nights would be making six or eight trips a night.

The next night another journey was made, with a similar result. The dog was not popular with the men. A sandbagged kennel had been erected close to the officers’ billet and in the morning six bayonet thrusts were found through the sandbags into the kennel, no doubt, according to Richards, as the men had passed up the trench. The news was reported to Buffalo Bill.

Pte Frank Richards, 2nd Royal Welsh Fusiliers

The Dog-Major was now struck off all trench duties and ordered to take up his abode in the kennel with the dog. Buffalo Bill warned him, pulling out his revolver, that if anything happened to the dog something just as serious would happen to him.

Then the cart, which used to be left some yards from the kennel, was blown to pieces. I don’t know whether the dog knew that his troubles were over for the time being but for the rest of the day he was yelping and barking with delight.

When Buffalo Bill left us, the dog stayed with the company but never did any more work. He got used to shells and rifle grenades when they were coming over, and it was very funny to see him flatten his body against the wall of a trench when he heard the whine of a shell which he knew would be falling somewhere near him. He used to wander around the trench, but he would never attempt to jump on top during the daytime. He seemed to sense that it was not safe. We all got to like the dog, which used to go in and out of the line with us. About a month before we left the Bois Grenier sector, and during one of our little spells out of the line, he got lost. I expect a Frenchman pinched him.