There were animals, of course. There were the pets and mascots of German units. As the line progressed yard by yard, these were liberated from dugouts and bunkers.
Lt Carrol Whiteside, 7th Border Rgt
On relief, we went back to deep and very fuggy saps in Fricourt Wood – deep dugouts made by the Hun. When the battle was to all intents and purposes over, we had a look through the German brigadier’s apartment down below. The place was 60 feet beneath the surface, down a steep flight of steps all boarded on the walls and roof and moreover distempered white. There were about eight fair-sized rooms, including an orderly room and servants’ rooms. The whole place had been left in a terrible hurry and the only live things left were a cat and a puppy which positively quivered with terror and started looking round apprehensively on each shell burst or gunfire. The puppy finally followed us out to billets and went the unknown way of all other dogs.
The dead, human or animal, mounted on both sides in such numbers that during the summer heat the smell of decay became as natural as it was intolerable. Bluebottles proliferated and over parts of the battlefield a blue hue would descend and rise in an apparently uniform mass. In dark, fetid dugouts, it was often the maggot that held sway in nature’s job of reducing everything that had lived to mere bone.
Lt Edward Allfree, 11th Siege Batt., RGA
Just the other side of the sandbags, about two yards from the entrance to the pillbox, was a dead Boche, lying with his face in a shell-hole; a few yards down the trench behind us was another, and just in front of us was a dead British Tommy. They never got buried – it was not worth exposing oneself to the enemy to perform the task. Each time I went to the Observation Post I saw them rotting away – getting thinner and thinner – till at last they were actually skeletons in discoloured uniforms. In the meantime great green-bodied bluebottles swarmed over them, and it was only with difficulty that one kept them off one’s bully beef or sandwiches, when partaking of lunch. I suppose they rather fancied a change of diet. At night, I think they went to roost in our pillbox.
Lt Lawrence Gameson, 45th Field Ambulance, RAMC
This evening I killed fourteen flies with one swipe with a rolled-up copy of an ancient Times. They are infinitely numerous, leisurely and deliberate in movement, and have large sticky feet. The neighbourhood is an incubator for them. Eggs are laid in corpses of Germans and horses, hatching in the rotting semi-liquid flesh. The rest of their lives, for the most part, is an ephemeral gluttonish revel amongst all that is most revolting in this revolting region of putrefaction and decay. They swarm upon food, they buzz. Night and day this room resounds with their buzzing. The drone becomes a background, it even steals into one’s sleep.
Driver James Reynolds, 55th Field Coy, RE
We had to go up to the top of a little rise, and strewn up the hill, in rows like corn that had been mown, lay hundreds of our chaps that looked as though they had run into a machine-gun nest. It was a warm muggy day and the poor chaps’ faces and exposed flesh were smothered in flies. The smell was awful. They lay so thick we simply could not avoid running over some of them. The horses, of course, stepped over, as a horse, unless absolutely forced to, will not tread on a prone body. But one could not help the wheels going over a few.
Lt James McQueen, Sanitary Officer, 51st Div.
There was a strenuous campaign in the summer time against flies, by the use of wires with an eye at one end which were dipped in a sugary solution and then taken out and deposited at the various cookhouses in the camps. There was a constant circulation of thousands of these wires going on. They were covered with flies when they were brought back, while fresh ones were deposited in their places. The fly-covered wires were burnt clean, and were then ready for redipping. It was a form of fly-paper without the paper.
In this campaign against flies and fly-borne disease, meat safes played a part, because they were given to each camp with instructions that while troops might move on, meat safes might not. Yet so popular were they that it would be more correct to say that in modern warfare battalions marched out of camp not with banners flying but with meat safes concealed, for there was a constant loss of these safes, which had to be replaced as they were stolen by units on the move.
Lt G.P.A. Fildes, 2nd Coldstream Guards
As the myriads of flies had gone to rest, abandoning for the time being the human wreckage in the vicinity, the night was now still. From the fire step of this front-line trench one could see many a grisly tenant of no-man’s-land. Yonder, the body of a corporal had lost its feet, eaten away by rats, and beside an upturned pack the moon shone luridly on a skull.
Broken and mangled, dauntless men of the New Army had vainly crossed this intervening stretch of no-man’s-land, and also the ground beyond. Rifles, bombs, helmets and packs were still scattered in wild confusion among the dark silent bodies. Clutched in a mortifying hand was a canvas bucket containing Lewis gun magazines: the carrier had been shot in the act of clearing the parapet and lay sprawling in a heap where he had fallen.
The place was a Golgotha, a charnel-house, amidst which, even at this moment, one could hear the sounds of trench rats as they revelled at their ghastly work. Then a step in the trench behind diverted attention. It was Sergeant Gill, of the Lewis guns.
‘Good evening, sir. I’m thinking things look pretty quiet tonight.’
‘Let’s hope they will continue so, sergeant.’
The vast swarthy figure stepped up beside me on the fire step and sniffed the air.
‘Strewth!’ The involuntary remark was cut short by the sound of a hearty expectoration. ‘Them stiffs are horrible, sir!’
A silence fell between us, broken at last by his hoarse whisper.
‘There’s a deal of harm comes from them poor chaps, sir; one can ’ardly figure the amount. It’s a wonder to me we don’t all catch a fever. These trenches must be swarming with microbes and bacilluses. A bullet’s all right – I’ve no objection, scientifically speaking, to that sort of thing – but swallowing dead men’s germs is ’orrid. Lice are all right, too; but microbes are different.’
‘Where have you found out all this, sergeant?’
‘Oh, I’m a reading man, see, in a way of speaking.’
Lt James McQueen, Sanitary Officer, 51st Div.
I got a wire to send up four men to assist the Sanitary Section in the spraying of dead bodies over the top of the line . . . It is a brutal business, is war. To spray dead bodies with disinfectants is no assistance in wartime. After lying in positions that it is not safe to go out and bury them, the best that can be hoped for is that nature should not be retarded in its process of bacterial dissolution, and nothing should ever be placed on a dead body to prevent a rat eating it. If it cannot be buried, get it down to the state of bleached bones as soon as possible.
Lt G.P.A. Fildes, 2nd Coldstream Guards
A glance in any direction revealed merely a fresh vista of devastation. Here and there, patches of colour claimed attention by reason of their rarity. On all sides undulated a monotonous expanse, in places relieved only by yellow patches of high explosive.
But it is not by its awful sordidness alone that a visitor remembers Bernafay [Wood]. The mind was assailed to an equal degree by what the wood hid but did not obliterate. Our burial parties had already done their work, but it called for no effort of imagination for one to realise what the tumbled ground contained. Death encumbered the grisly spot: Nature above, slaughtered Man beneath.
Stumbling onward, I presently came to a halt. Nearby, a skinny hand and arm protruding from a mound of mud seemed outstretched in silent pleading, as if dumbly beseeching the prayers of the passer-by. Gazing in meditation on this relic, one beheld an answer given. There, hovering on the grave, lustrous in the golden sunlight, flitted a fellow pilgrim to this shrine of Valour – a snow-white butterfly.
Capt. Charles McKerrow, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers
The battle rages, but I have found another Hun Aid Post and dwell u
ndisturbed beneath many tons of chalk. I regard this Aid Post as my very own as I was there first and had to clean it out. The chief amusement was the removal of a very dead Hun in a waterproof sheet. He was of a piebald hue and dropped maggots wherever he was carried. He would insist in sliding out of the sheet, and the scooping of him back was not only difficult but at times impossible. It was not the whole of him at all when we got him outside.
Lt Lawrence Gameson, 45th Field Ambulance, RAMC
On a preliminary investigation in the dim light I could see only his field boots. I had come without my torch. Subsequently, on looking closer, I found that his flesh was moving with maggots. More precisely, I noticed that portions of his uniform were heaving up and down at points where they touched the seething mass below. The smell was pretty awful. None of the men would touch him, although troops as a rule are not noticeably fastidious. The job was unanimously voted to me, because it’s supposed, quite wrongly, that doctors don’t mind.
I went down the stairway with a length of telephone wire and lashed it round the poor fellow’s feet. We hauled him up and dragged him away for some distance. The corpse left behind it a trail of wriggling sightless maggots, which recalled the trail in a paper chase. Having moulded a shell-hole as a grave, we erected a board at the man’s head, ‘An unknown German Soldier’, with date of burial.
Lt G.P.A. Fildes, 2nd Coldstream Guards
The day of our relief had dawned in auspicious fashion, a common knowledge of our impending rest calling forth a general light-heartedness. A company from a battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment was expected to make its appearance about 2 p.m., so it was arranged that the work of cleaning up should be completed by the men’s dinner hour. This was done accordingly, and by 12.30 all was reported correct in the front line.
Scattered in gossiping groups about the fire bays, the men abandoned themselves to their own devices, some arguing over a venerable newspaper, others, pipe in mouth, basking lazily in the sunshine. The air hummed to the sound of flies, and, emerging from their myriad nooks, beetles and other insect life paid homage to the summer’s day. To and fro, winging their course around the parapet, flitted elusive butterflies, whose satin wings contrasted brilliantly with the background of sky. Blending with the voices of nature, countless chirrups arose from invisible grasshoppers, who, from their forest glades, now raised their hymn to heaven, thereby humbly endeavouring to rival the melody of a lark high overhead. Rising and falling in an endless torrent of sound, this seemed to pour forth the utterance of a fairy world.
2/Lt Wilfrid Ewart, 1st Scots Guards
For the first time in many months one seems to leave the war behind, and as we march out into the country – a merry, chaffing, laughing column of schoolboys – no stench of motor lorries and petrol or swarms of troops greet us, but only the heavy silence of the woods and fields and villages, dreaming away their midday rest. A yellow cat strolls across the village streets, dogs lie basking outside the unsubstantial looking inns – peculiar looking dogs and very sleepy. Barely can they raise the energy to wag a tail at the flies which everywhere buzz and hum, creating with the drowsy heat an indescribable languor and murmur of summer. We halt in a shady oak wood, and the men, recklessly happy, throw themselves down amid the long grass, the convolvuli, the straying honeysuckle. Yes, we are happy now, we who have suffered much!
Large tracts of the Somme battlefield resembled a moonscape, for without any great elevation it was hard for the ordinary soldiers to glimpse the distant villages and woods that were yet to be targeted in the battle. For those who could remember them, the battles of 1915 were a distant memory, when farm implements, semi-derelict farmhouses and abandoned crops still gave the battlefield an earthly feel. No more. Villages and woods were likely to be identified by a wooden signpost stuck in the ground. Such sights threw the world behind the lines into the starkest relief imaginable.
2/Lt Wilfrid Ewart, 1st Scots Guards
It was almost pitch-dark, and when after a mile or two we emerged, twilight had descended upon the world, and one could barely distinguish the hillside opposite. Here a halt was made, and it was pleasant to rest upon the bank in the cool dusk, watching the last embers of a gorgeous sunset die out of the sky. Close at hand, on the edge of the forest, no sound could be heard but the ceaseless chirruping of grasshoppers and crickets, the occasional croaking of a bullfrog in some distant pool, and the whoo-twhoo-whoo-whoo of an owl coming from the depths of the woods. Not far off was a railway, and the one lone lamp which stared out of the middle distance and the occasional whistle of an engine only served to emphasise the remoteness and solitude of the place.
Now it was completely dark, a thousand summery scents rose from the earth, the sky was bejewelled with stars, low down on the horizon a golden-coppery harvest moon, not yet at the full, sailed in the heavens. The night was indescribably contemplative; many and strange thoughts came to the mind. It is from this, this pageant of peace and plenty and beauty, that one goes into the bloody nightmare of battlefields . . . What do the stars say, those stars so wise, so inscrutable? What do they say to each man who in such quiet moments asks himself whether, after all, this is not the end – of a life? Of how many lives? For many must travel the same road before the trees have lost their leaves . . .
Lt Philip Gosse, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers
It was a hot sunny day and on the top of one of the haycocks I spied a little owl fast asleep. I approached slowly and quietly, until I stood within a few yards of it, and still the owl slept with eyes tightly closed, oblivious of its mortal enemy.
For a good ten minutes I stood there watching the slumbering owl, when at last he woke up, frowned angrily at me for disturbing him, and flew away. Within an hour he was back again on the same haycock.
It might be wondered how a grown-up man could sit down in a hayfield and do nothing for a whole hour, but the truth is that after being in or about the line for several months, one was content to sit in the sunshine and do nothing at all, beyond admire the flowers and listen to the song of the birds and enjoy the quiet. It was medicine for the mind and solace for the soul.
On such rare occasions and at such a place, it was blessed, after the noise and the alarms, to sit in the sunshine, forget the past and the future, and revel in the present.
Lt James McQueen, Sanitary Officer, 51st Div.
My men lived in tents and bivvies in the field. The life was excellent and living in tents in the summer time is very pleasant, provided you are not billeted next to an ammunition park with restive mules. Mules appeared to me to have a wonderful faculty for breaking loose in the middle of the night and when one is wakened by them charging between your tents, it is not the danger of a mule crashing with your tent that worries one; it is the danger of a mule being tripped by the guy ropes of the tents that gives the sense of insecurity.
2/Lt Wilfrid Ewart, 1st Scots Guards
Already the birds were awaking, and there was that deliciously fresh feeling in the air which comes just before dawn in summer. Already the cool grey light had begun to peep in through the open doors and windows of the barn.
That barn! It was a place of unknown horrors which in due course the glaring midday sunshine revealed. Black beetles were crawling everywhere – black beetles that fell from the wooden partition; black beetles that crawled into and out of and under one’s sleeping bag and – yes, over one’s prostrate body; black beetles that did company or battalion drill upon the floor under one’s very nose.
Rats: for some men the reaction to their presence could be extreme and bordering on the phobic. For others, they were a nuisance that could be disregarded, annoyance at their company reduced by careful protection of uneaten food and by prudent sleeping arrangements. What could not be eliminated was their noise, their scurrying feet and their incessant squealings.
Driver James Reynolds, 55th Field Coy, RE
We were billeted in a dilapidated old farm just outside the village. That first nigh
t Jock Frazer woke us all up by throwing his blankets off him and hollering like blazes. When we asked him what was the matter, he told us he was wakened by a rat running over his face and though, as I found out subsequently, he was a brave chap, he could not stick rats at any price. He packed up his kit there and then, right in the middle of the night, and went over to the house where most of the other drivers were and of course his pal went too. That dugout was rather infested with rats though. I’ve laid down sometimes of a night with just a candle burning to have a read, and on looking up seen as many as ten or a dozen pairs of bright eyes watching me, no doubt waiting for me to put the light out before going on the scavenge.
Lt Leonard Pratt, 1/4th Duke of Wellington’s Rgt
I found out last night where a rat starts eating when he finds a corpse. I was just dozing off in my hammock when I felt a sharp pain in the knuckle of my middle finger, right hand. Evidently a rat had mistaken me for a dead man. Two nights ago I found a similar cut on the knuckle of the same finger of the other hand. It is badly swollen now. Why the rats should start there I cannot imagine.
L/Cpl Arthur Cook, 1st Somerset Light Infantry
Where we are is the worst we have struck for rats, there are thousands of ’em. You cannot put a mouthful down but what they won’t pinch it. We have to suspend our food in sandbags from the roofs of our dugouts, and wake up in the night, to find them having a swing on the bags, cheeky rascals. We have to cover our faces at night as several men have been bitten, and we only have our greatcoats for cover, we keep our boots and putties on to protect our legs. They crawl over you at night, and we give the thing a biff from under the coat and send him squealing in the air, there is a short silence, then a thump as he reaches the ground, a scuffle, and he is gone. If you walk along the track near the reserve trenches with a torch at night you can kick a rat every two paces.
Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden Page 16
