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

by Richard van Emden

  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.

  Soldiers’ Memories

  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.

  The partridges fed on and then disappeared round the end of the garden hedge and one by one the grouse rose, flew over to the rough park, and then stretching out their wings softly landed – calling as they did so ‘Go-way-back-back-back-back’. Little did they dream that they had had a very narrow escape. Had I fired, I might have got a bird and frightened the others away from the vegetables, but then, apart from breaking any vow, I might have defeated the very object I had in view in placing the bird board there – namely to add to the happiness of the birdies by feeding them, and to our, and our friends’, delight, in seeing these beautiful creatures – the handiwork of God – constantly enjoying themselves in our view.

  Capt. D.P. Hirsch VC (post.), 1/4th Yorkshire Rgt (Green Howards)

  The snow seems to change the whole landscape. The old landmarks stand out sharply. You recognise the well-known tree or skeleton of a tree. But otherwise everything is the same. It’s very weird and wonderful, this wide and practically unbroken expanse of snow, covering the numberless shell-holes, with hardly a sign of human life visible to the eye.

  There are a lot of moles here. I saw a corporal catch one the other day. Then he dropped it and it was out of sight in the hard ground in a moment. They are wonderful wee beasties. I never dreamt they could burrow at such a rate.

  The great battles of attrition at Verdun and then on the Somme had severely eroded the fighting capacity of the German forces in the west. The German army had too few men to hold a front line that bulged into enemy territory so, over the autumn and winter, a new defensive position was constructed, known as the Hindenburg Line. This line, charact
erised by deep belts of barbed wire and concrete bunkers, was felt by the Germans to be impregnable. Then, in late February, they suddenly withdrew to their new strategic position, relinquishing the Somme battlefield to the Allies almost overnight.

  The following month a young officer, Lieutenant Fildes, returned to the front. His service on the Somme had ended in sickness and a spell of recuperation in England. Once more he was on the Somme battlefield but this time he was free to look around him and he was stunned by what he saw. The weather had improved, and the deep frost that had covered the land had finally gone.

  Lt G.P.A. Fildes, 2nd Coldstream Guards

  Setting forth once more, by a route that passed through the heart of the Somme country, we had been gradually confronted by a terrible panorama. From the open door of our goods van, we were able to realise more than ever before the magnitude and fury of the struggle of the previous autumn. In every direction, as far as the horizon stretched, a desert of brown shell-ploughed slopes and hollows, and scattered upon the face of this landscape, clumps of splintered poles, gaunt and blackened by fire, marked the sites of former woods and copses . . .

  Such a region as this, exceeding the limit of our vision in every direction, presented a scene surpassing human imagination. It haunted one like a nightmare. Neither of my companions accompanying the draft had served in France before, but, like most people, they had read newspaper accounts of the Western Front. Now, however, they were amazed. Seated beside them in our van, even I was enthralled by the passing spectacle, but it did not prevent me from noting their murmurs of astonishment. Their feelings were hardly to be wondered at, for, though familiar with the Somme, I, too, had not realised until now the degree and extent of its awful ruin. Life – human, animal and vegetable – had been engulfed; not a leaf, hardly a blade of grass, no sound of bird, greeted us; all was done and finished with. Here indeed was the end of the world . . .

  Everywhere around us a wild confusion seemed to have upheaved the land, leaving behind it an ocean of rubble heaps. French helmets battered to shapeless lumps, and Lebel rifles red with rust, lay in the stiffened mud, scattered among the countless refuse of the British and German armies. In many craters lay great pools of bright-yellow water, whose stagnant surface disclosed many a rotting corpse. Coils of wire, like bramble thickets, ran in and out of the sun-baked hummocks, fluttering bleached tatters from their barbs. Close at hand, the mangled fragments of a machine gun protruded from a reeking mound, and beside it lay a human skull, picked clean by birds. Everything was encased by a monotone of mud. Here, as we turned from side to side, odours assailed us at every breath, while a profound silence intensified the dreadful melancholy of the scene.

  A/Capt. Eric Mockler-Ferryman, 29th Brigade, RFA

  The whole country was a series of large crump holes touching one another. Most of the holes were full of slimy green water, and here and there we came upon human skeletons. With the exception of a few salvage parties there was not a soul to be seen. It would be impossible to live in such an uncanny place. It made me wonder if it was worth losing so many lives to gain these expanses of mud and desolation. One felt just as if one had been through a prehistoric country, and expected to see weird birds and animals, mammoths, pterodactyls and the like.

  As Lieutenant Fildes reached the furthest extent of the 1916 battlefield, he climbed a low ridge. What he saw was nothing more than he had seen in England or from the train that had brought him up from the Channel ports, but in comparison with what he had just crossed, the sight of nature, or rather normality, undisturbed and seemingly peaceful, was almost unreal.

  Lt G.P.A. Fildes, 2nd Coldstream Guards

  North and south, the monotony of the ridge merged into an obliterating atmosphere, wherein the devastation, subdued and toned by the sunlit vapour, was not so much in evidence.

  But now we had arrived upon the summit. The skyline before us lurched lower at every step; still all that we could see was a wide expanse of blue sky. Then the ground fell away, and the distant landscape confronted us. For an instant the prospect held one spellbound, so thrilling was its revelation, so placid its majesty. At first I was only conscious of the exclamations of those nearby, for even the attention of the men was centred on what lay ahead. Stretching for miles, bounded by the far horizon north and south, a glorious vision rose to greet us, a riotous pageant of shimmering colour. The low ridges opposite blazed under a mantle of sunlit grass, and scattered upon them, trees, flecked with vivid shoots, spread forth a lacework of slender boughs. Wheeling in a multitudinous swirl in the middle distance, a flock of crows flapped slowly on its way, while at the foot of our slope, a group of mottled roofs was half concealed by branches. Behind all these, displaying a widespread carpet of unblemished pasture land, glowing in the full radiance of the sun, the country undulated into the distance, luxuriant with verdure, scattered spinneys, and a patchwork of fields, and revealing at every point the freshest tints of an awakening world.

  Greedily we feasted our unbelieving eyes, scanning the far perspective of the land until baffled by the distant haze. So suddenly had it appeared that it seemed at first only a mocking mirage. But no – still it lay there inviting contemplation. There lay spring in all her vastness and all her splendour.

  On 9 April, the Allies launched their spring offensive close to the town of Arras. 1917 was to be the year when, on one front or another, the Allies slowly ground down the enemy’s will to fight. The battle opened just as the weather turned. Winter was back with a vengeance.

  Capt. James Dunn, RAMC attd. 2nd Royal Welsh Fusiliers

  7 April

  I sat on a tree stump in the peaceful park of a big white château, with the sun just looking over the tree tops, and a few small deer grazing, and some blackbirds and thrushes singing from the purple undergrowth. Nothing was there to remind me of the war except the enormous thudding of the guns 12 miles away. We had been told that we should move into our final concentration area tomorrow – Easter Sunday! Sitting there alone I felt happy, contented and confident. And the men, I thought, have seemed cheery, and almost elated, the last day or two. But they were always at their best when they knew they were ‘for it’. There was a chance of a ‘Blighty one’ for them, anyhow.

  The air turned chilly, and the sun was a glint of scarlet beyond the strip of woodland. And away on the horizon that infernal banging continued . . . ‘The sausage machine’, I think we used to call it.

  Sgt Rupert Whiteman, 10th Royal Fusiliers (City of London Rgt)

  Breakfast was ready to be drawn from the cookers by 3.30 having been brought en masse to platoons. Here was another hopeless business trying to distribute boiled bacon to every man by the light of a miserable guttering candle, with hands stiff with cold and the wretched candle being blown out by the chill wind every few minutes.

  Hot tea made everyone feel twice the man he was before, and by the time breakfast was finished, dawn was breaking – a very cheerless sort of dawn, however. What a strange feeling there seemed to be in the air that morning, a lull before a terrible storm, for it wanted just one hour before the opening barrage – the 4.50 ‘Zero’.

  It was inexplicable, this nervous tension; even the horses and birds seemed to be imbued with the knowledge that hell was to be let loose before very long. There seemed to be a strange hush hanging over every living thing, man, bird and beast . . .

  It was perhaps 4 o’clock [in the afternoon] and the sun sinking low when we received the order to open out into artillery formation, and to advance over the ridge. On the true summit of the slope at last! But where was that inferno of crumping shells and smoke indicating the firing line? It was certainly far from being obvious. The ridge turned out to be a plateau some 400 yards across and beyond that a gentle downward slope. The country was open in front, undulating, and covered with long grass – yes, real grass and some real live trees here and there. Very few shell-holes seemed to be visible.

  Where on earth were the troops supposed to be in front of u
s? Not a living soul was to be seen, not a single shell burst.

  Directly in front and ¾ mile away could be seen a line of strongly constructed trenches and just this side and running parallel with them, a roadway with a line of trees on each side. This trench system, we soon learnt, was the ‘Brown Line’, into which we were to stroll, reassemble, and from there start our part of the business. It did not look like a battlefield but more like a piece of peaceful countryside. Here and there a hare could be seen coursing through the grass, evidently wondering what had brought such a host of Cook’s tourists to that region.

  We wondered just as much as the wretched hares. ‘What is happening?’ everyone asked his neighbour. Two miles off, over the undulating grassy country and beyond the Brown Line, could be seen a village crowning the summit of a circular hill, with its red-roofed cottages peeping out from amongst the green foliage of trees, altogether a very picturesque view. This village was Monchy – our objective.

  These pleasant scenes would rapidly alter as artillery from both sides set to work. It was close to the village of Monchy-le-Preux that one of the last cavalry charges was made on 11 April. Whereas tanks could withstand machine-gun and rifle fire, horses were no match for entrenched artillery and infantry.