Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden
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Authors: Richard van Emden
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
Sources and Credits for Text and Photographs
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.
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
.
