Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden (18 page)

Soldiers’ Memories

Only in the spring did the opposing armies, like nature, emerge from an enforced hibernation. The soldiers and their animals had shivered throughout the long, dark days, all desperate for warmer weather. Even though the intensity of the war had increased dramatically towards the end of 1915, soldiers continued to see civilians working close to the opposing trenches, ekeing out a living, unwilling and perhaps unable to leave. Their admiration for those who struggled on was at times as obvious as it was heartfelt.

Lt Harold Hemming, 84th Brigade, RFA

I remember one gallant and very tough old lady who lived in a tiny cottage in a little depression about half a mile behind our front line, halfway up the Vimy Ridge. She used to waddle up and down the long communicating trench that wound its way back almost to Mont-St-Eloi to buy her food. The speciality of this old lady was bee-keeping and the sale of honey.

‘You see,’ she explained to me, ‘no-man’s-land is a mass of wild flowers and it is really beautiful. It’s so wonderful for my bees, and I am so near no-man’s-land that they don’t have to fly very far. That is why I have so much honey to sell.’ So we all used to buy her honey. Then one day when I went up to buy some more, she was gone and so was her cottage which had been hit by a crump (a German 5.9 shell). But the bees were still there and as busy as ever. I tried to find out what happened to her and whether she was still alive, but nobody knew.

2/Lt Wilfrid Ewart, 1st Scots Guards

Two fields away a peasant is ploughing stolidly, heedless of the shells which now and again scream over his head. The greatest battle in the world’s history may be raging a mile and a half away, but that is no reason why he should not finish his spring ploughing. Nearby, a little stream eddies through reeds and water plants, making tinkling music, and its sunny banks are agreeably warm. Skylarks rise and sing not less vigorously, not less merrily than on any quiet morning of an English springtime, though their outpourings are drowned at times in the whirr and buzz of circling aeroplanes.

Signaller Cyril Newman, 1/9th London Rgt (Queen Victoria Rifles)

I have just returned to billets – a barn – from a lonely but enjoyable stroll across fields in the stillness of the evening to the hills above the town from which there spreads a beautiful view of the long valley lined with trees threaded by a large river [the Somme]. Directly below where I was, there were the stone walls of an old windmill and further on, the white-washed houses and barns of the town nestling round its church. I stayed long enough to see all but the spire vanished in a white mist rising from the river. On my way back I came across an old French peasant pulling up turnips and carrots from a field. Women in France do much outdoor work on the farms. Yesterday I saw one ploughing. This peasant was shrunken and wrinkled like most peasant women I have seen. We talked – more than once I had to gasp ‘Ne compries’ – and I carried her large bundle of vegetables to a house for her. I felt glad at doing a ‘good turn’.

2/Lt Robert Vernede, 12th Rifle Brigade

It’s a beautiful day, and I’m sitting in the remains of a huge cellar of a farm not far from the front lines. We got here yesterday after being shelled for about half an hour when at the farm. The old farmer’s wife and a girl hand spent the time trying to drive their cows into a shed – mostly under shrapnel fire.

I never saw such coolness and stupidity. Of course whenever a shell fell near, the cows scattered, and the women, after a shriek, chased them and got a shell on the other side. Meanwhile the British Army crouched under a wall, sensibly enough. Two cows and a calf were hit, and I expected to see both the women laid out, and shouted in vain to them to leave the cows. They simply would not.

Capt. John Marshall, 468th Field Coy, RE

The Frenchman who farmed the land was either a lunatic or a spy. Two of my men found him pulling up my marking tapes, which were not even on his land. I had him brought to me and told him that if any more tapes were touched, I would shoot him off-hand. The man’s actions were strange in many ways. He always ploughed with three horses, a black, a bay and a white. At times he would leave them tethered to a fence but always at the top of a certain field, in full view. I often wondered whether any special arrangements of the three distinctive coloured horses conveyed any information to the enemy.

Capt. D.P. Hirsch VC (post.), 4th Yorkshire Rgt (Green Howards)

I’ve learnt quite a lot of French. I’ve also billeted the battalion twice, each time without an interpreter and once with a population that could only be mildly described as hostile, as they had suffered rather heavily from close billeting and slack supervision of hungry and cold troops, a fact that resulted in the disappearance of eggs and chickens, vegetables and bee hives, butter and milk and in the burning of anything wooden up to window frames.

Capt. Charles McKerrow, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers

I have just been asked by the mess cook to pass judgement on a fowl for which the price demanded is five francs. It was hard and old so I told him to tell the farmer it was ‘no bong’ [no good]. This evidently has enraged the farmer as I can hear him expostulating from afar.

Despite these frictions and suspicions, British troops on the whole rubbed along well with French civilians. There were grouses on both sides, of course. Spy mania had swept the army in 1915 with farmers working near the line coming under suspicion, especially if their property remained curiously unscathed by war. On more everyday matters, Tommies occasionally accused French farmers of removing handles from water pumps, and most felt the estaminets charged too much for food. Likewise, there was the feeling among the French that, while the British liked the idea of ‘scrounging’, they, the French, preferred to call it ‘stealing’.

Stealing or legitimate scrounging was, perhaps, a matter of opinion. Yet, when it came to the treatment of animals, the British soldier was in no doubt. The Frenchman’s behaviour was at best odd and at worst utterly reprehensible, with farm dogs in particular suffering at the hands of their masters.

Trp. Benjamin Clouting, 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards

In France, the dog was an integral part of village and farm life and was not a luxury. Animals earned their keep, those that did not, or were surplus to requirements, had harsh and usually short lives. On the Mont des Cats, as with many villages we came to during the war, it was common to see the local milkman going round not with a pony but with a large dog as his main mode of transport. This dog would plod along, harnessed into a cart, on the back of which stood the village’s milk churn. When not pulling the milk, the dog worked the butter churn. To the encouragement of ‘
vite, vite!
’ the dog ran on a wheel like a treadmill, the motion of which turned the churn over and over, forming the butter.

2/Lt Andrew Buxton, 3rd Rifle Brigade

I suppose there is no licence fee for keeping dogs, hence every one keeps them, and in many cases two or three, and they are most abominably thoughtless. For the most part dogs are continuously tied up, sometimes in a little kennel, sometimes just to a wall, sometimes to a little round brick place; one such place where we were two nights ago had an entrance at the bottom of a slope in the yard, so that the water ran down into it, and a poor little shivering dog lying in the sodden bottom of it.

It is interesting to note in different parts how the same habits prevail among the people over different things. Here everyone feeds their dogs on diluted-looking milk, with just the suspicion of bread in it, and a few beans.

I found one tied to a wall, a most charming looking fox terrier, but so painfully starved, and with claws quite worn down. I gave it an old box as some shelter, and let it out this afternoon, such terrific joy at getting a run round.

A brute of an old woman in a little house just by has also a nice little fox terrier, tied short to a fairly decent kennel, but so that it has three bits of heavy chain to its collar, and so that it can only just get its head into the entrance of the kennel, and cannot curl itself up, or get to the back. A real terror of a woman, who says she never gives it ‘promenade’, and feeds it on milk and bread. The poor little dog is frightfully starved.

Yesterday I gave a little terrier here some dry bread, and a tiny bit of meat – all I had – and really too awful to see its intense hunger . . . I may be wrong in thinking they suffer as I do, but it is very wretched to see this treatment on every hand. It puts me off
my
good meals badly!

When Andrew Buxton was killed, in 1917, a fellow officer wrote to Buxton’s parents describing how their son was forever arguing with civilians over their treatment of animals. One lady had threatened to throw Buxton out of her home after he objected to the way her dog was tied up with barely room to turn around. That night Buxton returned, climbing over a fence and lengthening the dog’s chain. He only narrowly escaped detection.

Sapper Guy Buckeridge, 37th Div., Signal Coy, RE

The farm people had two Great Dane dogs and for two hours each day they ran round a big wheel which was used for churning. The dogs were hard and fit and in good condition but surly in temper like all dogs used for work in Belgium. It used to irritate me to see ordinary companionable animals used as beasts of burden and spoiled in temper. The shell dogs were the only friendly ones. They were always glad of a snack and a game. Their breed was a mystery to me. Generally they resembled Irish terriers but were black in colour. They were uncannily efficient and intelligent, very pally with me, but with their owners always appeared cowered and browbeaten.

On the whole the French and Belgians were not friendly with their animals, as we are, and their lives seemed pretty miserable in consequence. Their cows were always on a rope and tied up to feed and I never saw a horse out to grass. In consequence they too seemed miserable in temper and flabby.

2/Lt Stephen Hewitt, Royal Warwickshire Rgt

It is possible to be very miserable in a great city, and it is possible to be very happy in a single field, literally, for I have only once been out of a single field this week, except on duty and for meals, and that once was to a neighbouring town for ‘some fun’, where I spent a thoroughly dull evening. You see, we live in little canvas huts, rather like bathing boxes, two officers to each hut, pitched along a flowering hedge in a field carpeted with daisies and already sprinkled with buttercups. On every side of the field are the tall thin trees with shapes of perfect gracefulness, for which I believe France is famous; five days ago they were lightly feathered with a transparent foliage which softened their outlines without hiding them, today they are already becoming dense and losing their individual shapes under the unfolding green. The huts have many little windows as well as their doors, and can be opened out at the sides: so they are always fresh even in this burning weather, and every morning I wake up after a deep slumber unbroken by watches or orders to turn out at 3.30, with a breeze on my cheek, sunshine in my eyes and the sight of the green trees shimmering, and in my ears the hum of a yellow bee, or the cropping of the old mare who shares the field with us. Never have I felt the spring more: and this is the perfection of the year.

There was ‘rest’ and then there was ‘rest’ in the British Army. Out on rest but still close to the lines meant nights of heavy work carrying trench materials and food up to the men in the line or perhaps supplying a party to mend roads. Rest, perhaps twenty miles back from the trenches, meant a complete rest from the dangers of war, although normal duties, route marches and the cleaning of equipment still went on. Consequently it was always a difficult time to leave a camp or village in the back areas and make the slow, winding journey back up to the trenches.

Lt Bernard Adams, 1st Royal Welsh Fusiliers

Farewell to Montagne. All the fellows were dull. Even Sawyer the smiling, who had been prominent with his cheery face in the loading-up, was silent and dull. No life. No spirit. A mournful lot, save for the plum-pudding dog that galloped ahead and on either flank, smelling and pouncing and tossing his mongrel ears in delight. He belonged to one of the men, a gift from a warm-hearted daughter of France . . . It was a fifteen-mile march. At the third halt I gave half an hour for the eating of bread and cheese. Then was the hour of the plum-pudding hound; also appeared a sort of Newfoundland collie, very big in the hindquarters, and very dirty as well as ill-bred. Between them they made rich harvest of crusts and cheese . . .

We marched, two deep now, and I felt most strongly that strange glamour of unreality . . . The rain beads on the red-brown birch trees; the ivy, the oaks; the strange stillness in the thick wood after the gusts of wind and slashes of rain; especially the sounds – chattering jays, invisible peeping birds, the squelching of boots on a wet grass track – everything reminded me of a past world that seemed immeasurably distant, of past winters that had been completely forgotten. Then we emerged into a wide clearing along the edge of the wood, full of stunted gorse and junipers. Long coarse grass grew in tussocks that matted underfoot and now I could see the whole company straggling along in front of me, slipping and sliding about on the wet grass in their curious kilt-like costumes. Everyone was pleased with life. A halt was called at length, and while officers discussed buying shotguns at Amiens, or stalking the wily hare with a revolver, Tommy, I have reason to believe, was planning more effective means of snaring Brer Rabbit. Next day appeared an extract from corps orders re prohibition of poaching and destruction of game. It was all part of the dream that we were surprised, almost shocked, at this unwarranted exhibition of property rights! Not that there was much game about, anyhow.