Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden (22 page)

Cpl Hector Munro, 22nd Royal Fusiliers (City of London Rgt)

Unlike the barn owls, the magpies have had their choice of building sites considerably restricted by the ravages of war; the whole avenues of poplars, where they were accustomed to construct their nests, have been blown to bits, leaving nothing but dreary looking rows of shattered and splintered trunks to show where once they stood. Affection for a particular tree has in one case induced a pair of magpies to build their bulky, domed nest in the battered remnants of a poplar of which so little remained standing that the nest looked almost bigger than the tree; the effect rather suggested an archiepiscopal enthronement taking place in the ruined remains of Melrose Abbey . . .

Cpl G.W. Durham, 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade

Recently I saw one of the most extraordinary things I have seen out here. One of our planes went over and spotted a new trench packed with Germans, and the two [French] batteries started in to destroy the trench and its garrison, with the plane doing the observation work. They got on to the target quickly and were blazing away, getting direct hits. The French were firing salvoes under the direction of the Battery Commander, who stood on a barrel. I never saw a man so pleased. They were getting a sweet revenge for a 75 Battery’s crew, still lying dead nearby, when over came a huge covey of partridges, about 30, and dazed by the firing, settled about 50 feet in front of the guns. The French officer, who was directing his battery like a cheerleader with shouts and arm waving, held up his hands, ‘
Tenez. Tenez
’ [‘Hold it. Hold it’], and sent a sergeant to drive the birds to the left, lest the concussion of the guns should destroy them. I shall never forget his rolling tongue as he shouted what seemed to me like ‘
le bruit des canons les écraserait
’ (literally, ‘the noise of the guns would crush them’). They then continued the slaughter of mere men.

Lt Philip Gosse, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers

Starlings were always the first civilians to reoccupy shattered strips of Picardy won back by our advancing troops. Whatever they found to attract them I do not know. Had they been carrion feeders it would have been explained, for there were feasts spread out for vultures. But starlings prefer a diet of fruit and insects. Of the first there was of course none; of insects there were flies in plenty as well as other crawling ones, which thrived and multiplied on the clothing of living men. As for animals, these seemed to have all disappeared, even if trapping had been practicable. Nothing could live in that horrible poison-drenched shell-ploughed waste but man, and his chances of survival were but slender. Even the obsequious trench rat had disappeared. But I did get one addition to my collection in the battle area, which turned out to be a specimen of the very rare subterranean vole,
Pitymys subterraneus
, which burrows to a depth of four or five feet in the earth. It was picked up dead in a trench at Contalmaison by a soldier who gave it to me.

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 undisturbed 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.