Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden (2 page)

The title might well have been, ‘A Solace of Birds’, for without the birds I dare not think how I should have got through the war at all. One friend, after reading my manuscript, asked if I could not include ‘more horrors’, even at the expense of some of the birds, but I told him that in any case I could remember no more ‘horrors’, though of birds I remembered so much
.

It was not just the birds he recorded in his memoirs, for in his possibly unique service he toured the front line officially, capturing and stuffing mammals of all kinds to be shipped back to the Natural History Museum in London, where his exhibits remain to this day.

It occurred to Gosse and to many others who served and stopped to think, that, while men on both sides of the line daily bludgeoned each other in the vainglorious pursuit of battlefield mastery, it was in fact the animal kingdom that remained in overall control of the Western Front. For while man hid himself away, digging for his very existence into the ground, wildlife carried on as normal, seemingly adapting without fuss to its altered environment. Corporal Hector Munro, better known as the author Saki, referred to such a state in an article:

The magpie, wary and suspicious in his wild state,’ he wrote, ‘must be rather intrigued at the change that has come over the erstwhile fearsome not-to-be-avoided human, stalking everywhere over the earth as its possessor, who now creeps about in screened and sheltered ways, as chary of showing himself in the open as the shyest of wild creatures.

Walking in Ploegsteert Wood in Belgium, the scene of heavy fighting in 1914, Norman Edwards, a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment, discovered a scene that provided proof of nature’s adaptation as well as some solace for the soul:

In a jagged hole, rent in the base of an oak by a shell, I found a thrush quietly and sanely carrying on its life work. I peeped into the nest and the flawless perfection of those four blue eggs, warm and pregnant with life, diverted my thoughts as perhaps nothing else could have done.

By their very existence, these creatures performed a vital function. They gave men a temporary reprieve, a brief ‘leave’ that reminded them of home. They also reassured many soldiers that there still existed, in all the surrounding madness, a sane order to life that would always override the temporal carnage. Such feelings were never better exemplified than in the last minutes of the classic film
All Quiet on the Western Front
, based on the book by the German Great War veteran Erich Maria Remarque. The German soldier, the last survivor of his class, stretches his hand out to a butterfly and is shot by a sniper. On both sides of the line it was easy to become transfixed by a moment of beauty.

Melville Hastings, a pre-war British émigré to Canada, noted in his letters before he was mortally wounded:

Our abode is amongst the roots of a once beautiful wood. The beeches and elms are hopelessly mutilated, and the beheaded pines are gradually suffocating unto death. Their amputated limbs are everywhere, trunks are riven from head to foot, even the ground itself is twisted and torn. But, thank God, a man can cast his eyes up above this desolation to the sun and the blue sky, indestructible by us puny sinners. The little birds also defy defacement, and their music is the contribution of animate nature to the joyful fact that God’s handiwork can never be utterly marred by man.

Wildlife and nature gave men peace and comfort in their otherwise tumultuous lives but, as importantly, it gave them an escape from the pressures of living constantly with each other. The poet and author Siegfried Sassoon expressed such feelings when, during the Battle of the Somme, he found himself alone standing on a rough wooden bridge staring down into the swirling reeds of a river. Away from his comrades, for once undisturbed by their ‘mechanical chatter’, he wrote: ‘How seldom I get free from them, good people as they are.’

This natural world would inevitably affect the vocabulary of war. Locations were given official designations such as ‘Dead Mule Corner’, a site close to the Somme village of Martinpuich, and unofficial names too, such as an abandoned trench near another Somme village, Flers, where 120 Germans had been hastily buried. It became known by the men as Bluebottle Alley, for obvious reasons. In the same vein, informal directions used to cross the battlefields noted, as a guide, the salient landmarks: ‘bear half left to dead pig, cross stream 25 yards below dead horse’; even a certain familiar stench could be noted: ‘then follow the smell of three dead cows . . .’

Wildlife gave men an outlet by which to communicate to their loved ones something of the world in which they lived and their emotions. Fearful of frightening families at home, they could escape by describing the flora and fauna on the trench parapet, as well as the animals that shared their dugout. Many of these descriptions by articulate young officers are beautifully observed and have provided a rich source of material for this book. Equally, the otherwise indescribable world in which they existed could be ‘translated’ to the civilian through words they all knew. One man, portraying one of the first tanks in action, noted how ‘slowly it rolled and swayed towards us; its motion was not that of a snake, nor of an elephant, but an indescribable blend of the two’. Bullets were described as ‘humming like a hive of bees’, or sounding like ‘cats sneezing’, soldiers reported; rifle-grenades ‘made a noise like an enormous hornet’. Even ghastly events, if they needed to be told, could be illustrated by reference to the natural world: ‘to see men suffering from shock, flopping about the trenches like grassed fish, is enough to sicken one’, wrote an officer to his family.

The story of animals in war has been described in books before, entirely thematically and drawing on tales from conflicts throughout the ages, and not focusing solely on the Great War. These publications are heavily weighted towards animals utilised for the service of man, and the stories told are in an overwhelmingly author-led narrative with an occasional short, pithy quote from the serving soldier. My passion for the 1914–18 conflict has always been rooted in understanding how soldiers withstood the extraordinary pressures of serving in one of history’s toughest crucibles of war. Any under-researched aspect of life, any nuance that affected their experience, is of immediate and profound interest to me.

One anecdote found in the memoirs of an officer, Lieutenant Fildes, is such an example. It is a small but nevertheless illuminating insight into an aspect of life in the wild that I had never thought of before or attributed to the life led by soldiers. Men’s antipathy towards vermin, rats in particular, is taken for granted, but how about the dislike, even the phobic fear, of other creatures, fears that were naturally prevalent among civilians? His is a rare example in that he noted his hypersensitivity to insects, an instinctive response to ‘creepy-crawlies’ that must have existed to a greater or lesser extent among other soldiers but which has gone largely unrecorded:

Four in the morning, a chilly damp one too – this was a pretty dismal start for a day in May. Where was I this time last year? In a comfortable bed, wherever it was. Something tickled my neck, and with a quick motion I carried my hand to the spot. I hated insects, always had; this I disliked above all others as I was unable to see it . . . Ten minutes later I crawled into my shanty, reflecting that for one night at least the rain would have driven the spiders away.

Tommy’s Ark
takes an entirely different approach from any other book on the subject of animals in war. First, it is chronological in character. This establishes the animal kingdom firmly within the context of the human war, showing how the animal world was changed and shaped by the conflict that itself altered dramatically as time passed. This has certain strengths. As the war changed, so did the position of animals, irrespective of whether they were servants of the war effort or no more than inadvertent bystanders. The battlefield of the Somme, for example, to the men who arrived there in the summer of 1915, when the area was little more than a backwater, looked entirely different from the landscape witnessed a year later, after the battle. Likewise the Ypres Salient in 1914 and 1915, with its untended farmland and abundance of wildlife, was profoundly altered once the Allies and the Germans both unleashed the heavy and sustained bombardments to which the ground around the town was subjected in 1917.

Secondly, the animals’ stories are described by the soldiers through their letters, diaries and memoirs. The diversity and richness of the quotations used is testament to the fact that wildlife was never eradicated from the battlefield, no matter how muddy or how pitted the ground appeared to be. Soldiers remained ever conscious of its presence so that, even in the act of going over the top, men wondered at the song of the skylark overhead or became excited at a hare zigzagging through the shell-holes.

Although a simple chronology is at the heart of this book, I have nevertheless sought to highlight a number of themes and ideas. For example, soldiers sometimes took animal life senselessly and then repented, reflecting often bitterly on their actions. They themselves drew the appropriate comment. On the spur of the moment, Private Thomas Hope killed a mole. ‘Poor little inoffensive mole, its life was as precious to it as mine is to me,’ he wrote, after ‘tapping’ the mole over the head with a stick. ‘I must be a bloodthirsty brute,’ he decided.

Other stories are grouped together because dates and the passage of time are irrelevant. An interesting snapshot of one creature’s predicament in war can result, such as that of frogs: frogs squashed on the communication trench duckboards; frogs heard croaking in the night air as the guns temporarily fell silent; frogs gently carried out of harm’s way by a commanding officer, or eaten as a novelty.

Wherever possible, I have tried to keep the stories broadly within the time frame in which they were written although, as with all anthologies, the stories are not necessarily chronologically sequential. Nevertheless, no memories of times before the soldiers concerned arrived in France or after they were removed from the fighting by injury are used. Likewise, references to animals and insects are aligned as closely as possible to the seasons in which they appear; it would not do to have bees or butterflies in winter.

The quotations used are taken from various sources, primarily the Imperial War Museum, the Liddle Archive at Leeds University and archives housed in regimental museums. Other stories were taken from published books, many long out of print but full of relevant anecdotes. Especially productive was the little-accessed goldmine of officers’ memorial books, most published during or very shortly after the war. These were privately published in small numbers by grieving families who sought to come to terms with their loss by saving for posterity the letters sent home from France and Flanders.

These letters and diaries, along with those of other officers fortunate enough to survive, are numerically out of proportion to those written by other ranks, at least in relation to their serving numbers – around one officer for every forty men served in a battalion. However, in the preparation of this book, seventy-four officers are cited, seventy-two other ranks, with officers’ quotes, on the whole, being the more substantial in literary quality and length. Literacy rates among pre-war soldiers were poor, much as they were among the civilian population that volunteered or were conscripted. This is especially clear when their writing skills are contrasted with those of the young university undergraduates who applied to serve in the officer corps. These young officers’ powers of description were often excellent, and furthermore they had more time and more opportunities to write. They worked in dugouts that were reasonably dry compared with frequently wet and windy trenches, and access to paper was easier for officers than for other ranks.

Fortunately, where a quotation comes from is largely irrelevant. If an earwig happens to pass across the hand of an officer or other rank as he writes, the description is what is important; it does not affect the understanding of the war, how it was fought, how it was won, how that war is now judged and interpreted by historians. Everyman saw the weasel scampering along the trench parapet, the cow trapped in the barbed wire, the kitten stuck in the rubble of a house; it is just that not Everyman chose to make a physical note of the observation.

During my research, many books were ‘mined’ by speed-reading the text looking for appropriate stories. This was an entirely scattergun approach, inevitably fruitless in many cases but productive in others, sometimes exceptionally so. It was a necessarily slow process. ‘Weasels’ or ‘sparrows’ were rarely logged as searchable words in an index even if the author had a particularly interesting story to recall. Some exceptional memoirs made almost no reference to wildlife, in part as a result of when they were written. A memoir produced fifty years after the event is unlikely to contain the minutiae of animal life, simply because such stories would inevitably remain unlogged in the mind whereas the loss of friends, or injuries, barrages, gas attacks and going over the top were seared into the consciousness. Letters written at the time were always a better source for ‘here and now’ stories.