Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden (19 page)

Capt. Charles McKerrow, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers

I wish I could describe how the sun rose this morning as I walked the half mile to my Aid Post. Facing me, and some two miles away, were the German lines. Over them brooded, dark and heavy with rain, a mass of cloud. Its upper edge, torn and ragged with the wind, took on a warmer glow. Fanwise across the sky the radiance spread. The eastward face of every little cloudlet warmed to life. The great spaces of windswept void softened from green to blue. Lost in the growing day, the moon and stars faded and were gone. Each twig, each furrow, every half-frozen pool softened in expectancy. Then, like a giant refreshed, the sun leapt into the sky, and in one wild rush of gold and crimson the day arrived. Far overhead three carrion crows flap in deliberate, noiseless flight towards the firing line. Even they, members of the grey tribes who feast on decay, gleam with borrowed glory.

Capt. Lionel Crouch, 1/1st Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry

The men have made a garden on the side of a communication trench. It is labelled ‘Kew Gardens – Do not pinch the flowers’. All our spirits are reviving under the influence of the better weather. The trenches are beautiful and quite like old times. The apple trees and hedges are budding; some of the hedges are quite green . . .

I have started a garden at my company headquarters. Will you please send as soon as possible two packets of candytuft and two packets of nasturtium seeds? My daffodils and hyacinths are topping. I told you about ‘Kew Gardens’. The men have now put on the grass two bones labelled, ‘Here lieth all that remains of the last man who walked on the L’hawn’.

Such peace was only ever temporary and ‘reality’ would come back with not so much a bump as a single well-targeted shot, a belt or pannier worth of machine-gun fire or a shattering series of explosions. It was to be expected. This said, a callous, unnecessary act of violence by one’s own side was never appreciated.

Pte Albert Conn, 8th Devonshire Rgt

A small bird sang on a stunted tree in Mansell Copse. At the break of dawn we used to listen to it and wonder that amongst so much misery and death a bird could sing. One morning a corporal visiting the fire posts heard the bird singing, and muttering ‘What the hell have you got to sing about?’ fired and killed it. A couple of the lads told him to fuck off out of it. We missed the bird.

2/Lt Wilfrid Ewart, 1st Scots Guards

Occasionally through the night a terrific explosion causes the atmosphere to reverberate and everyone to start. It is a Minenwerfer bomb bursting somewhere away on the right, and it is followed by a succession of sharp reports and heavy explosions from one of our own trench guns retaliating. In the silent pauses between these sounds may be heard the harsh cry of some bird – I know not its name – which haunts the coarse grass and secret places of the Salient. Occasionally a distant rattle and a harsh grating sound becomes audible – the German transport on the roads beyond the ridge . . . Every now and again, too, in silent pauses, the barking of dogs may be distinguished – these are the German pets which they keep in their trenches.

Pte F.J. Field, 15th Warwickshire Rgt

Sunday began in brilliant sunshine. A bright blue sky, visible from the depths of our trenches, and a lack of gunfire lulled us into a momentary peace of mind. Our heightened awareness of spring compelled us to a new appreciation of the yellow charlock and red poppies that peeped downwards at us where a trench had been undisturbed. And how we envied the soaring skylarks their airspace!

Then the enemy bombardment broke loose with the sudden violence of an earthquake. A tornado of shells of all calibres struck at us with mad intensity from four till seven in the evening. Those of us who survived felt like chaff in the wind. We were choked by dust and acrid fumes and deafened by the inferno of noise. B Company, in the centre, apart from sentry groups, was sheltering in a deep dugout ready to rush out and man the defences as soon as the barrage lifted. But all were killed when a heavy shell penetrated the depths.

Trench warfare remained the physical manifestation of a static war and the ground between opposing forces had been named no-man’s-land for a very good reason. Other than going over the top or simply lobbing shells at one another, there was only one route by which to wage war: underground. Highly experienced miners drawn almost straight from the pits at home were brought to the Western Front. Here they conducted an increasingly sophisticated campaign underground, tunnelling their way towards the enemy trenches to lay explosives that were subsequently detonated. It was a highly dangerous occupation, with mining and counter-mining as each side sought to gain an advantage. Fighting could break out underground if two opposing tunnels met, and, as if that were not bad enough, there was always the risk of a natural build-up of lethal levels of poison gas. As at home, men took both mice and birds underground to act as an early warning system.

2/Lt George Eager, Second Army Mines Rescue School

A mouse used in a cage generally crouches motionless in a corner, and apart from the fact that it passes a very small volume of air into and out of its lungs, it is very difficult to say when it is affected by small percentages of gas . . .

The best method of using mice is to have them thoroughly tamed and accustomed to handling. They can be carried in a button-up pocket or little pouch and pulled out in the air to be tested. If a mouse is made to exercise by making it crawl from hand to hand, it takes a great deal more of the tainted air into its lungs, and it will usually collapse more rapidly than a bird sitting on a perch will show symptoms of distress. A mouse used in this way rapidly loses the use of its legs and lies helpless on the palm of the hand.

Lt Frederick Mulqueen, 172nd Tunnelling Coy, RE

Early in mine warfare, it became important to find a means to quickly identify its [carbon monoxide] presence and white mice were used for this purpose. Colonies of them were kept at tunnelling headquarters in the front line and many amusing tales were told of them. The British miner is an inveterate gambler and it was common practice to run pools on the different colonies, i.e. which could produce the greatest progeny within a given time. You have no idea of the amount of interest and discussion this created among the different shifts.

On occasions some of the mice would escape and, while their life expectancy under such circumstances was low due to the large rat population, nevertheless they did find their way into extraordinary places such as the dugout occupied by the colonel commanding the battalion in the line. Whether that officer thought he had had too much war or that the Scotch was more potent than advertised, the record does not say. In any event it was a relatively short time before the mining officer was seized upon as culprit.

If mice were not used, the alternative was to take a cage down with one or more canaries inside. Tunnels were narrow and inspecting officers were often forced to crawl, wearing such protective items as kneepads and gardening gloves. In one hand they carried a torch or candle while between their teeth they suspended a small cage containing a canary. It was not good to be claustrophobic.

Men had been taught to watch out for the first signs of poisoning: typically the bird rubbed its beak on the cage wire or perch followed by a vigorous shake of the head and a bringing up of seed. The second stage saw the bird panting, its body crouching, before the final stage when, after swaying backwards and forwards in an effort to keep its balance, the bird would collapse to the bottom of the cage. By this time the men should have already evacuated the tunnel. That was the theory.

Lt Frederick Mulqueen, 172nd Tunnelling Coy, RE

I remember on one occasion I was making a tour during the night shift and in one heading I found the men working although the canary was flat on its back with its feet in the air. I wanted to know what they meant by continuing to work under such conditions and the sapper in charge expressed the view of the shift when he said ‘That bloody bird ain’t got no guts, sir.’ Needless to say the shift was quickly chased out.

Lt Geoffrey Cassels, 175th Tunnelling Coy, RE

One night when I was in Mademoiselle’s bar in Armentières, a signaller arrived with an urgent message for me to return to Erquinghem. I was drinking gin and Italian and had had a convivial evening. I mounted my motorbike and returned. There I was told that the Germans had blown in one of our galleries near Armentières and as I understood rescue apparatus I was to go and get the men out.

Near the front line I met the men who had attempted rescue but were overcome by the fumes from the explosion. The MO was one of them and he whispered to me, being practically speechless, ‘carbon monoxide’.

The gallery was about 3 feet high and 2 feet wide. It had duckboards covered by mud and water, leaving only 1 foot 6 inches to 2 feet of headroom and air space. There was a blacksmith’s bellows and tubing available. This was manned and my batman and I descended, taking turns with the air supply from the tube and holding our breath in between.

After crawling some considerable distance we came to a junction and turned right, and there we saw a face of a man almost completely buried by sand and obviously dead. The second man lying nearer to us was also dead, by carbon monoxide as he was rigid and had the telltale pink marks under the armpits and in soft spots. Before attempting the hard effort of extricating them, I decided to obtain canaries from Armentières to test the fumes. Two in a cage were purchased from a barber’s shop. He was shaving a customer when a shell fell nearby. Without stopping his shaving, he waved his razor in the air and exclaimed, ‘Ecoutez, monsieur, encore une bombe.’

We floated the canaries on a board before us. One died and the other survived. We ourselves still shared the air tube. On reaching the first man, we found it impossible to move him with one hand; the other was needed to hold the air tube. Rigor mortis had set in and his left foot was stuck fast in the duckboard. Only one of us could work as there was no room to pass each other. For the same reason we could not reach the face man until the first was out of the way. We reluctantly decided that it was no use risking further lives, so we tied the end of the air tube to some casing and left it there to clear the air until the next day when it would be safe and two hands could be used.

On my way out without an air supply I took a breath of foul atmosphere and nearly succumbed. The second canary died. I was assisted out of the shaft but bemused by gas. I had a splitting headache and was nearly deaf but got to the road and mounted my motorbike to drive home. On the way I heard a faint cry of ‘Halt’ bang in front of me, and then louder and louder, so pulled up sharply, but not before I had run on to a sentry’s bayonet levelled at me. Luckily it only cut the skin over my Adam’s apple, but had I gone another few inches I would have had it.

I must have presented a sorry sight – dripping wet, covered in mud, no cap, no tunic, unrecognisable as an officer. The sentry would hear none of my tale of woe and I was detained in a guardroom while contact was made with the tunnelling company’s CO, Major Danford.

Underground or overground, man’s abundant industry entrapped any number of animals and insects by both accident and design. Sumps dug to release water or pits excavated for latrines captured any number of unwary creatures, and even trenches themselves were the recipients of animals that had failed to negotiate a jump across and subsequently had neither the strength nor intelligence to find a way out.

Lt Bernard Adams, 1st Royal Welsh Fusiliers

I take a long mazy journey down the communication trench, which is six feet deep at least, and mostly paved with bricks from a neighbouring brick field. There are an amazing lot of mice about the trenches, and they fall in and can’t get out. Most of them get squashed. Frogs too, which make a green and worse mess than the mice. Our CO always stops and throws a frog out if he meets one. Tommy, needless to say, is not so sentimental. These trenches have been built a long time, and grass stalks, dried scabious and plantain stalks grow over the edges, which must make them very invisible from above.

Capt. Archibald McGilchrist, 1/10th King’s Liverpool Regt

One curious thing about the Epéhy trenches was that they appeared to have attracted to them all the frogs in France. The battalion had long looked on rats as a necessary evil but frogs were a new experience and nearly as unwelcome. By day they remained hidden in the trench drains and in out-of-the-way corners but at night they swarmed into the fire-bays and communication trenches and became a general nuisance to all who had to walk the duckboards after dark . . . it is as slippery as a banana skin and makes an unpleasant plopping sound if solidly stepped on which is distinctly unmanning. One hypersensitive subaltern when on trench duty always insisted on his runner preceding him at night to clear the frogs from his path. When, one day, he found a frog in his newly completed dugout he gave orders for the floorboards to be lifted and the frog removed . . . When his batman shortly afterwards produced the result of his labours, one hundred and fifty frogs in a sandbag, the subaltern was noticeably shaken and his friend declare that he has never been the same since.