Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden (26 page)
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Authors: Richard van Emden
Plucked geese and turkeys appeared in large numbers, suspended from the ceilings of billets, and several large barrels arrived on the scene and were duly placed under lock and key in the canteen, awaiting the auspicious day. Much competition took place between batteries for the possession of the only two live pigs in the village, which eventually went to the highest bidders, while the remainder procured their joints in the form of pork from Doullens. One of the batteries meanwhile grew so attached to its prospective Christmas fare that it was almost decided to spare his life and adopt him as a mascot. His fate was sealed, however, when one day it was discovered that he had disposed of several parcels of food which had, inadvertently, been placed within his reach by some of the men.
Capt. Charles McKerrow, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers
A very funny thing happened yesterday. One of our transport mules turned up in the transport lines of another battalion, covered with mud. It appears that this mule was affected with colic, right up near the line, three days ago. Llewelyn went out from our HQ and gave it a bottle of whisky. With tears in his eyes he returned to the others and said that the mule had drunk the whisky, given a groan (presumably of satisfaction) and died. He described very graphically how its eyes glazed and it shuddered. A burial party was sent out, but, as it was very dark, could not find it. They went out next night and again missed it. Meanwhile, the mule recovered and went home. Probably, being tight, it thought it had better go to some other transport lines. We are all roaring with laughter at the story.
Two days after writing this letter, Charles McKerrow was critically wounded by a shell burst. His great friend Lieutenant Gosse went to see him and neither man was under any illusion as to the severity of the injury. ‘It had been the sight of McKerrow skinning a vole for his little daughter in the trenches by Armentières in 1915 that put it into my head to collect small mammals for the British Museum,’ recalled Gosse later. ‘Whenever McKerrow and I met, which we did as often as we could, we used to talk about animals and birds, and there was no one in the whole division I liked better or admired more.’
Captain McKerrow died on 20 December and was buried the same day.
Throughout 1917 the Germans fought only a defensive war in the west. It was a considered policy but dictated by necessity. In Germany, economic mismanagement and an Allied blockade caused industry to falter through a lack of raw materials. Civilians, too, were becoming heartily sick of the war as food shortages caused widespread hunger and little good news arrived home from the front. The Allies were also tiring of the war. The unrestricted U-boat campaign was causing shortages in Britain as well, and meat rationing was introduced in April 1917. However, Britain’s capacity to wage war was still sound, and troop levels on the Western Front were reaching their zenith.
April 1917 was a significant month. On the 6th, America officially joined the war against Germany, a boost to Allied morale. Three days later an Anglo-French offensive against the enemy met with mixed results. The British attack, as with so many previous offensives, saw initial success but slowly lost momentum as German resistance stiffened. The French offensive was a dismal failure, leading to a mutiny in French ranks and a near-fatal collapse of morale among its forces. For the rest of the year it would be British and Empire troops who would carry the war to the enemy, first at Messines where the Allies had remarkable success in a battle of strictly limited objectives. Then, at the end of July, an offensive was launched at Ypres, but in rapidly deteriorating weather it quickly became bogged down. The scope of this battle was far larger than that at Messines, but such grandiose schemes had so far failed to bring the results expected and once again a monumental battle of attrition ensued, in which losses on both sides were broadly comparable.
The final offensive of the year, in November at Cambrai, saw the British deploy almost five hundred tanks in the initial assault. The Germans were thrown back and church bells pealed in England in celebration. It was somewhat premature. After ten days a German counter-attack threw the British back to their start lines and beyond. The fighting ended, as did the year. It had been the most difficult one of the war for everyone.
Any notion that the war could be won in one great strike had been scotched for good on the Somme. The high hopes and ideals with which Kitchener’s Army had embraced the opening of the battle had suffered their own form of agonising attrition. The war would be won by grit, determination and grim endurance. And with that awareness there was nurtured a dull hatred of those species that made profit out of man’s loss, a loathing of all the creatures that made life a misery for men already in torment. The bloated rats and lice, the disgusting maggots and bluebottles, all tugged relentlessly at the soldiers’ morale. Rats that stripped the carcasses of man and beast alike; lice that goaded soldiers into a frenzy of bloody scratching; maggots that wormed their way out from the eye sockets of the dead; and the flies that settled in a great blue cloud on any dead flesh – the same flies that also thrived on faeces and food. It was enough to revolt any man. The maggots would have their way, but the flies were exterminated with flypaper or a rolled-up newspaper, lice by the pressure of two thumbs or a candle run up the seam of a shirt, and rats bayoneted, shot, clubbed and kicked. Not that any of these schemes brought anything but the mildest relief, but it gave soldiers enormous satisfaction to get their own back; even enemy gas shells might almost be welcomed if only to see the rats slowly stagger and die, eliminated for at least a few hours.
In contrast to the soldiers’ loathing of these creatures came a love and pity for their own animals. Many men marvelled at their own indifference to the suffering of fellow soldiers, but they could not abide the inevitable yet grotesque cruelty meted out to animals press-ganged into service. Despite the work of the Army Veterinary Corps and a number of animal welfare charities working on the Western Front, 1917 was by far the worst year for ‘wastage’ among both horses and mules. Losses among these animals had been a little over 14 per cent in 1916. This figure jumped to 28.5 per cent in 1917, with the suffering greatest during the fighting at Arras, when unseasonably cold weather continued well into April. As one anonymous officer of the artillery wrote of that battle, ‘Horses perished like flies. You could count them nearly by the score on the road – fanciful word! – and the battery to which I was attached lost seventy fine horses from exposure alone, apart altogether from shellfire. One bitter morning, eleven were reported stone-dead in the lines.’ It is a sobering statistic that only a quarter of all horses lost in the war died from enemy action. The biggest killer was ‘debility’, which in the majority of cases meant exposure, exacerbated by hunger and disease. In April alone ‘debility’ was the prime reason why 20,319 animals were evacuated to veterinary hospitals.
There was little the men could do. For those in close contact with horses, the artillery, the cavalry and Army Service Corps, their responsibility to the animals was not only institutionalised in military law (their animals’ needs came before their own), but was forged in the depths of their shared adversity. The death of a horse brought men to their knees, tears coursing down their faces. Theirs was a bond that might be broken but never forgotten.
The terrible unremitting hardship felt by soldiers in 1917 meant that wildlife, when seen, was enjoyed with undiluted delight. Birds in particular gave them great joy, and utterly disproportionate efforts were made by some men to protect nests, eggs and any newborn young from predators such as rats, and from any unnecessary disturbance by fellow soldiers. Only damage inflicted by shellfire was left to chance.
The winter of 1916–17 was one of the coldest in living memory, frequently touching -20º Centigrade. Almost everyone was exhausted by the interminable bad weather. Wild animals eked out a living from anything they could find, but they too were weak and often became easy pickings for the troops billeted nearby; partridges especially could be too exhausted even to fly. For men brought up in the countryside, like Private Davies and Trooper Clouting, hunting food had never been easier.
Lt Bernard Adams, 1st Royal Welsh Fusiliers
Private Davies appeared with glowing though rather dirty face holding up a large hare, that dripped gore from its mouth into a scrunched-up ball of
Daily Mail
held to its nose like a pocket handkerchief.
‘Look here, Dixon,’ I said.
‘Devil’s alive,’ exclaimed Dixon. ‘Then you’ve got one. By Jove! Splendid! I say, isn’t he a beauty?’ And we all went up and examined him. He was a hare of the first order. Tomorrow he should be the chef d’oeuvre in B Company mess at Morlandcourt.
‘How did you get him, Davies?’
‘Oh! Easy enough, sir. I’ll get another if you like. There’s a lot of them sitting out in the snow there. I was only about fifty yards off. He don’t get much chance with a rifle, sir.’ (Here his voice broke into a laugh.) ‘It’s not what you call much sport for him, sir! I got this too, sir!’
And lo! And behold! A plump partridge.
‘Oh! They’re as tame as anything, and you can’t help getting them in this snow,’ he said.
At last the dripping hare was removed from the stage to behind the scenes . . .
‘Wonderful fellow, old Davies,’ added Dixon. ‘In fact, they’re all good fellows.’
‘He’s a shepherd boy,’ I said. ‘Comes from Blaenau Ffestiniog, a little village right up in the Welsh mountains. I know the place. A few years ago he was a boy looking after sheep out in the hills all day; a wide-eyed Welsh boy, with a sheepdog behind him.’
Trp. Benjamin Clouting, 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards
Several of us used to go down to the river for a walk, and it was there that we watched a Frenchman catch ducks, with snares made of horse hair. These snares caught the ducks that walked along the embankment, but far more roamed closer to the river, and could easily be picked off with a rifle. There were so many that at times it was possible to dispatch two or even three in a row, if we got down low enough to the ground.
At first we shot ducks close to the river’s edge, picking them out of the water at arm’s length. However, it was clear that richer pickings would be had if we could get out on to the river itself. By this time the ice was too thin to walk on at the edges, so we improvised a canoe out of three barrels scrounged from a farm. Cutting them in two, we placed three halves in a line and, with two planks along the side to keep everything sturdy, nailed the boat together. A lance corporal sat in the front, and I sat in the back, then with two spades to paddle the craft out into the river, we collected the ducks we had shot, dropping them into the middle compartment.
As we did this, the Military Police turned up and called us in, arresting us as we landed. There had apparently been several casualties from bullets ricocheting off the ice and wounding soldiers. An order banning such actions had been posted, but no one had told us.
Pte Arthur Alexander, 1/14th London Rgt (London Scottish)
Our observation post was in a farmhouse some distance from the front line and we had a shelter just behind it. I helped to build this with sandbags and logs. We kept a fire going continuously and made ourselves as comfortable as was possible under field conditions. The wood we scrounged from round about the farm and even pulled up the floorboards to keep ‘the home fires burning’. Corporal King shot a blackbird here and gave it to me. This I plucked and cleaned and then roasted over the fire. Not much of it, but it was tasty nonetheless. Between four of us it only amounted to a taster each, and we wished it had been a chicken.
Lt Andrew McCormick, 182nd Labour Coy
This morning we are again back to wintry conditions. There has been a light shower of snow, followed by a hard white frost. Silver is now the contrasting colour in place of gold and, of course, that spells starvation and misery for the poor birdies. Our bird board is becoming increasingly popular. Birds arrived in the following chronological order –
1. Robins
2. Chaffinches
3. Hedge sparrows
4. Blackbirds
5. Thrushes
6. Yellow yorelings and
7. Bluebonnets.
For some time past I have noticed pheasants making inroads on our all too rapidly disappearing artichokes and green vegetables. I ordered a pea-shooter to be sent to me. It has arrived and little spitfire things which deal out dastardly sudden death to birds have also reached me. This morning, on looking out of the window as I dressed, I noticed three grouse feeding amongst the cabbage and nearer me – almost under the window – a covey of six partridges, driven by stress of weather to risk their lives in close proximity with the homes of men, crept warily along the pathway picking up whatever edibles they could find. Had the pea-shooter been at hand, up it would have gone to my shoulder and one bonnie birdie with blood staining its pretty feathers would have tumbled dead on the frost-bound ground. But the pea-shooter was downstairs – the window could not have been opened without giving warning to them – and moreover I recalled that on the last occasion I killed a bird – a beautiful woodcock – when I saw the blood dripping from its speckled breast I vowed that I would never kill a bird again.
