Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden Read online

  TOMMY’S ARK

  Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War

  Richard van Emden

  Dedicated to Paul and Lucy Averley and their daughters, Martha, Alice and Madeleine

  CONTENTS

  Abbreviations

  Introduction

  1914

  The War in 1914

  The Natural World in 1914

  Soldiers’ Memories

  1915

  The War in 1915

  The Natural World in 1915

  Soldiers’ Memories

  1916

  The War in 1916

  The Natural World in 1916

  Soldiers’ Memories

  1917

  The War in 1917

  The Natural World in 1917

  Soldiers’ Memories

  1918

  The War in 1918

  The Natural World in 1918

  Soldiers’ Memories

  Acknowledgements

  Sources and Credits for Text and Photographs

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright Page

  ABBREVIATIONS

  The following abbreviations are used throughout the text:

  Ranks

  Acting Captain – A/Capt.

  Brigadier – Brig.

  Captain – Capt.

  Company Sergeant Major – CSM

  Corporal – Cpl

  Gunner – Gnr

  Lance Corporal – L/Cpl

  Lieutenant – Lt

  Major – Maj.

  Private – Pte

  Quarter Master Sergeant – QMS

  Reverend – Rev.

  Second Lieutenant – 2/Lt

  Sergeant Major – Sgt Maj.

  Trooper – Trp.

  Units

  Army Service Corps – ASC

  Battalion – Bttn

  Battery – Batt.

  Company – Coy

  Division – Div.

  Machine Gun Corps – MGC

  Regiment – Rgt

  Royal Army Medical Corps Lieutenant Colonel – Lt Col – RAMC

  Royal Engineers – RE

  Royal Field Artillery – RFA

  Royal Garrison Artillery – RGA

  Royal Horse Artillery – RHA

  Royal Marine Light Infantry Sergeant – Sgt – RMLI

  Royal Naval Division – RND

  Yeomanry – Yeo.

  INTRODUCTION

  In mid-1915, a medical officer, Lieutenant Philip Gosse, was making his way forward through a communication trench to the front line. Gosse had just been drafted out to France and was being guided to a dugout in which a captain of the Royal Army Medical Corps was sitting on an upturned box. He was working intently at a table but as Gosse and his guide entered the dimly lit room they were at first unclear just what the man was doing.

  When we drew near and I saw what that occupation was, I knew at once that he was a man after my own heart, for he was attentively engaged in skinning a field vole. From this I wrongly jumped to the conclusion that, like myself, he was an amateur taxidermist and collector, but he repudiated any such claims and confessed that all he was doing was skinning a field vole to make a muff for his little daughter’s doll to wear when it took perambulator exercise.

  A few months later and another part of the line: an irregular and hastily convened court martial was under way; two lives were at stake. The trial had been set up with all the attributes of a military court with its appointed judge, prosecution and defence. Witnesses were on standby as the two defendants waited impatiently in the wings, as it were. Jimmy and Jane, a gander and a goose belonging to A Battery, 52nd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, had been purchased in early December 1915 and were being rapidly fattened up for Christmas Day lunch. However, their ‘personalities’ had captured the imagination of some men in the unit who suggested that instead of being eaten they might make excellent battery mascots. After due deliberation, the jury ‘acquitted’ Jimmy and Jane and the pair took up their new role, travelling in the mess cart, heads hanging over the side, to general amusement. They subsequently went everywhere with the unit, enduring not only counter-battery fire but also a brief kidnapping by an acquisitive farmer. Rescued, the pair survived the war and were sent to England and a zoo. Jimmy died in 1920 while Jane lived in retirement on a Berkshire farm until 1931.

  Voles and geese: not the animals one first associates with the Western Front at a time when horses provided the quickest and most reliable form of transport for officers – including the Commander-in-Chief – and when, with mules and donkeys, they remained the primary source of power needed to haul guns and transport to and from the front line. Film and photographs reinforce the view that it was not so much an animals’ war as an equine war, with a few messenger dogs and pigeons thrown in for good measure.

  Nevertheless, look more closely at the images, explore widely the vast photo libraries, and another world becomes apparent, a world in which animals were not just utilised for immediate military requirements but kept as pets or mascots, providing comfort to men who rarely received leave and who were consequently starved of affection. These men, often cautious about making close friends for fear of losing them in battle, could heap attention on a creature. Images of men holding chickens, goats, dogs, cats, rabbits, even hedgehogs, have survived and in greater numbers than might have been expected.

  Many animals were found wandering the battlefield or taken from abandoned farms to be treasured by the men. One officer, killed with his dog on the Western Front, was buried with his faithful friend, while another went on to commission a post-war sculpture of his dog Timmy in honour of the occasion, in May 1916, that it had warned him and his men of a German gas attack. In time a few pets became legendary, going on to receive dedicated burial spots with appropriate headstones, while others were stuffed to ‘live on’ in regimental museums.

  And then, all around the fighting men, there was nature, surviving, finding ways to adapt to the rapidly altering conditions. There were of course the ubiquitous rats and mice that plagued soldiers’ lives, but there were dozens of other smaller mammals and insects forgotten by history, indigenous to the land, that burrowed underground, scurried through the uncultivated fields, or flew, hovered or buzzed around the trenches, creatures that inevitably caught the eye of soldiers as they sat bored in a trench or which were uncovered as saps were dug or trench lines improved.

  This book tells the story of all the creatures, great and small, that inhabited the strip of murdered earth that snaked hundreds of miles from the Belgian coast to the Swiss Alps. In all, sixty-one species are included here and within a few species, such as birds and butterflies, there are also a number of varieties: for example, forty-three kinds of bird are noted. Some species are mentioned once, others on a number of occasions: these include spiders, maggots, canaries, chickens, owls, lions, turkeys, fish, horses, cats, ferrets, wasps and worms. However, just as importantly, this is not a book about wildlife in isolation from man. On the contrary, it is about the human condition in war, explored through the soldiers’ relationship with the natural world around them.

  On the whole, trench warfare was a grind in which time was turned upside-down. Night-time was used for work. Darkness obscured the patrols in no-man’s-land; it provided cover for the men repairing the protective barbed-wire belt in front of the trench, and it masked the work of the limber drivers bringing up supplies. Daytime was for sleep, rest and relaxation. It was a chance to enjoy the sun’s rays and to look around.
Letters were written, and, in looking for inspiration, a soldier needed to see no further than the sparrow that rested on the parapet, or the bees that darted from one trench-top flower to the next.

  Some men had little interest in wildlife and eyed lazily the spider spinning and respinning a thread, persevering while the ground trembled with distant shell explosions. Conversely, others, perhaps keen gardeners at home, men who appreciated town parks and the countryside, could become momentarily absorbed by the trials and tribulations of a mouse trapped in a sump or the clumsy passage of a beetle through a tuft of grass. A few erstwhile birdwatchers, pigeon fanciers or more general amateur naturalists were captivated by the world around them and wrote at length in diaries and letters about what they saw. And then there were a few, like Philip Gosse, who went on to write war memoirs in which the recollection of war became an adjunct to the preferred memory of wildlife in the middle of conflict.

  ‘Some of my readers may find fault with me for having comparatively so little to say about the “horrors” of war and so much about the beasts and the birds,’ he wrote in the introduction to his book, The Memoirs of a Camp Follower.

  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.