Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden (12 page)

Nine months later when we were in Béthune, two old soldiers of A Company were having a stroll around the town when a large dog came running up to them, barking and wagging his tail with delight. They recognised him at once and took him back with them. He was given a permanent home with the transport. In the autumn of 1917, when we were around the Ypres sector, he was killed by a shell splinter when the transport lines were shelled. He had survived four or five months in a front-line trench but was killed miles behind one.

Lt Denis Barnett, 2nd Prince of Wales’ Leinster Rgt

There is a little grave about 2ft by 3ft in the middle of a bust-up farm, and on the cross there is this: ‘Here lies Tim, a little brown dog, killed by a shell during the bombardment of this house by the Germans on April 23, 1915. RIP’. That was the end of our mascot. He went out of the trench into the farm to see why the bricks kept jumping about. He did his bit all right. The RBs [Rifle Brigade] had a kitten, but she was shot by a sniper while walking on the parapet with her tail straight up in the air. Hermann the German must have been riled by pussy reminding him of his poor chance of going that way when the RBs lay him out. Hope they have by now.

The adoption of a mascot was widespread among units serving overseas. Unlike ‘Tim’, many seemed to have shown remarkable levels of intelligence.

Lt Denis Barnett, 2nd Prince of Wales’ Leinster Rgt

I’ve lately made the acquaintance of a great character here, the machine gunners’ goat. She’s a most extraordinary beast, and has taken to machine-gun tactics in a wonderful way. She will fall in with the gun teams; you can pull her away by main force, but she comes back at the double. She gets awfully excited at the command ‘Action’, and helps the gunners by running between their legs, and standing where they want to mount the gun; she’s never more than a yard out at most. When the guns are mounted she stands in front and licks their nose lovingly – an unwise thing to do with a friend of such habits. But we’re all very fond of her, and the gunners have adopted her entirely; and she now bears the mystic sign MG on the side of her, in emerald-green paint.

The onset of spring brought the trenches to life. All of a sudden the natural world woke up: flowers and foliage grew with unrestricted vigour. It was a time of wonderment for men, as creatures other than the ubiquitous rat and mouse paid regular visits to the front lines, particularly in those parts of the line where there was little enemy activity, such as Armentières and Ploegsteert, quiet backwaters in comparison to Ypres when the second battle for the town opened in April.

2/Lt Alexander Gillespie, 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

We still have April sunshine, so that, in spite of the cold winds and frosty nights, the hawthorn hedges are quite green, and the desolate cabbages in among our barbed wire are sprouting vigorously. We have leeks there too, and every night a party goes out to gather them, so that at all hours of the day and night there is a fragrant smell of frying leek from various corners.

Capt. Lionel Crouch, 1st Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry

I am pestered here with a plague of midges which bite like the devil. The days are frightfully hot, but very pleasant. The trees and hedges are coming out beautifully. I have got some rather pretty flowers in my dugout. Wheeler picks them for me. Today he got two very nice narcissi which smell ripping. From the gardens of this ruined village we get potatoes, rhubarb and spinach. This is very good for the men, and I encourage them to go at night to get garden stuff.

2/Lt Alexander Gillespie, 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

I watered our garden; the pansies and forget-me-nots are growing well; the other plants are not so happy after their transplanting, and the Middlesex, being townsmen, do not seem to understand about gardens, and when they water the plants at all, they do it at midday, under a blazing sun. I found a nest full of young hedge sparrows too beside the stream which runs through our breastwork, and saw the very father of all the water beetles at the bottom. Remembering how hard these large water beetles can bite, I left him severely alone.

2/Lt Cyril Winterbotham, 1/5th Gloucestershire Rgt

It is a perfect night after a lovely May day and my heart has been at home with the dear English countryside and the dear faces in England. The country has changed wonderfully with the spring and now the may is out in the hedges and the beans and corn crops are well up and ‘All the land in flowering squares smelt of the coming summer’.

The buttercups are a sight and the trees too. Every year I wonder at the beauty of just a hedgerow elm against the blue spring sky. One amusing feature of the spring here is the frogs. I watched one with great interest the other day. He had his head out of water and was singing fit to burst himself. Each time he did it a large white blister swelled out each side of his head as if he had a hideous attack of mumps. I hope his inamorata appreciated his efforts.

The beauty of the landscape and the vitality of nature affected men differently: some were able at least temporarily to set aside the predicament they were in and enjoy the sights and sounds, while for others the stark contrast between the burgeoning natural world around them and the reality of shellfire and sudden death was sometimes almost too much to bear.

Pte Norman Edwards, 1/6th Gloucestershire Rgt

Sick at heart, bodily and spiritually, I wandered into the wood. [Friedrich von] Bernhardi [Prussian general and military historian] wrote of the elevating influence of war, but what I had just seen made me curse war and the people who had started it. The sun shone, birds sang joyously, flowers blossomed in profusion, and nature with amazing prodigality was at work covering the evil work of man with a garment of green. Death lurked in this quiet place, for I had to drop flat as a machine gun sent a stream of lead back and forth, clipping off branches and quelling the heavenly melody of the birds with its hellish din.

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.

This horror which had come down upon the world was, after all, but a transitory thing and would presently depart. That small bird stood for the eternal and changeless things that will emerge again . . .

How can I describe the spell at Ploegsteert Wood, not the horrors of which I have just written, but the living impalpable beauty of the place? To the men of the 4th Division who captured it and held it in the winter it was doubtless a place of evil memory, but to us who were fortunate enough to occupy it in May when the earth was warm with spring and the enemy comparatively quiet, it was a peaceful spot. To turn one’s back to the parapet and watch the edge of the wood take on the pale golden glow of dawn, later to lie down amid the forget-me-nots in the warm sun or stand naked and bathe in a shell-hole filled with water, were experiences that aroused one’s aesthetic facilities to a high pitch. One realised how close one was living to nature, closer perhaps than ever before, and the thought that possibly each dawn might be the last accentuated the delight.

The dawns at this time were particularly beautiful. Before any definite light appeared, the larks would soar up and a faint twittering in the wood grew to a buzz of noise as the birds stood-to with us.

Lt Richard Talbot Kelly, 52nd Brigade, RFA

To me, half the war is a memory of trees: fallen and tortured trees; trees untouched in summer moonlight, torn and shattered winter trees, trees green and brown, grey and white, living and dead. They gave names to roads and trenches, strongpoints and areas. Beneath their branches I found the best and the worst of war: heard nightingales and smelt primroses, heard the scream of endless shells and breathed gas; rested in their shade, spied from their branches, cowered in their roots. They carried our telephone lines, hid our horses, guided us to and from battle and formed the memorial to many efforts of our arms.

For most men, interest in nature and wildlife was a passing pleasure, a transitory moment when a tree, a hedgerow, an animal or insect attracted their attention before more pressing concerns took over and the moment was forgotten. Not so Philip Gosse. In contrast, pressing concerns were interruptions to his love of animal life and, although he undertook his work as a medical officer with absolute professionalism, any opportunity to pursue his personal interests was taken. Indeed, it would be his passion for wildlife that would, in the end, lead to promotion and an end to trench life.

In mid-1915 he had only recently arrived in France and was being led up to the front line to meet another medical officer, Charles McKerrow. McKerrow was in the act of skinning a vole when Gosse entered a dugout. Gosse, an amateur taxidermist, felt an immediate affinity with his superior officer, although he was a little taken aback to discover that McKerrow was in fact using the skin to make a muff to send home for his daughter’s doll.

Lt Philip Gosse, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers

From that morning McKerrow and I became fast friends, and whenever we could we would meet and talk of all sorts of matters not connected with war or medicine, such as birds and flowers . . .

It was the sight of McKerrow skinning a vole that prompted me to write to my old friend Oldfield Thomas, the Keeper of Mammals in the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road, to ask him if the Museum was well provided with specimens of the small mammals of Flanders, and if not, whether he would like me to procure some. Thomas, who was always ready to encourage amateurs to collect, wrote back to say that they were in great need of specimens from Western Europe, and he sent also some of the museum labels and some arsenical soap for preserving their skins. I then asked my mother to send me a dozen ‘break-back’ mousetraps, and as soon as they arrived I set about collecting and skinning mice and shrews.

Collecting animals for the Natural History Museum was not an alternative full-time job, but to some it might have looked like one.

Lt Philip Gosse, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers

In the evening I would go out with my haversack full of traps and a piece of ration cheese for bait. Creeping about in the wet ditches and hedgerows, I would look out for the tiny beaten tracks of my small jungle game: wood mice, voles or shrews. Setting traps for even such small game as this calls for a certain amount of skill, or at least, hedge-cunning, for a dozen traps placed anyhow and anywhere will catch nothing . . .

On returning to the dugout, each specimen was carefully examined and measured. These measurements had to be written on the labels and recorded in millimetres, the length from point of nose to stump of tail, the length of tail, which must not include any hairs at the tip, and the length of the ears and paws. Then the place where the specimen was caught, the date, and its sex, had to be noted down . . .

This hunting of small mammals was all very well in the back areas, miles away from the line, but in or just behind the trenches the risks were not only on the side of the small mammals. Sometimes the hunter became the hunted. Well-intentioned sentries and other armed patriots, seeing a suspicious person, dressed – more or less – in the uniform of a British officer, skulking in waste places, or creeping about in water-logged ditches, were apt to jump to the conclusion that he was an enemy spy. When challenged, I found that the simple truth that I was only setting traps for field mice failed, in most cases, to allay suspicion, and on one occasion I was hurried, under an armed guard, to explain my suspicious actions to higher authorities.

Trapping and skinning so many small mammals left a surplus of flesh and bones. With so many larger carcasses around, most smelling to high heaven, Gosse’s search for a hygienic method of disposal was hardly worth bothering about. In fact he needed to look no further than a friendly cat known to all as Félicité.

Lt Philip Gosse, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers

Up here in Flanders I was sorry to find cats were all too few, and those I did see were poor skulking specimens of a noble race. But there was one exception: Félicité. She was a small and rather scrubby white-and-tortoiseshell cat, but very intelligent and affectionate. She was the most confidential cat I ever knew, and was forever whispering something in my ear which I could never quite catch. While I was writing she would come and sit very close beside me and read what I wrote and purr loudly. Every night after I had gone to bed she would stroll in and leap up on to my bed and sleep curled up beside me. This adoration was, I fear, largely cupboard love, for each day after I had finished skinning a mouse or a vole I would give her the carcass, for I only wanted the skin and Félicité would oblige me by disposing of the corpse, and nobody was more concerned than she over the success of each night’s trapping.