Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden (24 page)

It was not quite the only ‘weird experience’ that Frank Richards had. His survival was just as odd. A pre-war regular soldier, he went to France in August 1914 and remained with the battalion for the whole conflict and was never once injured.

Richards had had the dubious privilege of serving under the explosive Commanding Officer Buffalo Bill (Major Clifton Stockwell). There were a number of such officers known for their aggressive personalities, men who could be just as affectionate, even dotty, about a dog or cat, as any other rank. How that affection manifested itself varied immensely from officer to officer.

Pte John Lucy, 2nd Royal Irish Rgt

The major fished his pet from the pocket of his coat – a tiny, mewing kitten. This kitten accompanied him everywhere and was always in a blown-up condition from drinking too much milk. The little animal was a minor nuisance to all except its master, who held up the war in his vicinity whenever the kitten wanted to feed or relieve itself.

He [the major] was transferred from us to another battalion and in a very short time he was shot dead leading an attack. His death was an occasion of outstanding sadness and loss to us all, and those of us who believed in a heavenly host hoped that he had joined the bright company of the angels. We got no news about his little kitten.

Sapper Albert Martin, 122nd Signal Coy, 41st Div., RE

There is no doubt Col. Carey-Barnard is an efficient soldier although he must be a strange sort of man if the tales we hear are true, although these merely give evidence of the military mind. His dog absented itself without leave for a couple of days and on its return he awarded it Field Punishment No 1. It was tied to a tree and fed only on biscuits and water for a prescribed period.

Maj. H.M. Dillon, 1st West Yorkshire Rgt

Our last general has got the push and we now have a hunting, racing, thrusting sort of cove who I rather like – (Bridgeford). If he doesn’t get killed, which he probably will as he walks about quite regardless of trifles like shells, he is going to take on a pack of foxhounds as soon as the war is over. He spends most of his time with two terriers going round the trenches catching rats, quite exciting work as you may go down a 40-foot hole on to a dump of bombs, or a trench mortar or something. He has only broken two ribs at this pastime so far.

Maj. Gen. G.T.M. ‘Tom’ Bridges, CO, 19th (Western) Div.

In the spring of 1916 I got a recruit for the Division. During a short leave, while lunching with Arthur Capel in Paris, I saw something strange in his garden which proved to be a lion cub, won in a Red Cross raffle a few days before. He offered me the beast and I took it away in a champagne hamper in the car to its new home. We called him Poilu . . .

Poilu soon made himself at home, for he was an amiable beast, and never showed temper and he stayed with us, running loose, until September 1917 when I was wounded . . . He was not
persona grata
with the adjutant general, and I had intimations from him that the Commander-in-Chief disapproved and that Poilu should be sent away. But the answer was ‘Come and take him’ or words to that effect. He helped to amuse the men and the legend grew that he was being trained to go over the top as soon as he was big enough. He was not difficult to feed and it was an aide-de-camp’s job to see that he did not go hungry and this officer could be heard sometimes telephoning, ‘Anybody got a dead horse this morning? All right, I’ll send a car down for a haunch.’

My headquarters were then in dugouts in the Scherpenberg Hill, a prominent point where distinguished visitors could come and actually see shells bursting. Such callers were frequent, and they often dropped in for refreshments. Mr Asquith came one day but his climb to the hill-top was interrupted by meeting Poilu face to face. ‘I may be wrong,’ he said, ‘but did I see a lion in the path?’

Eventually sent home by boat in a crate, Poilu managed to break free and briefly terrified passengers until coaxed into a first-class cabin and locked in. At this time, Tom Bridges was convalescing in hospital after a shell burst seriously damaged his leg. The limb was subsequently amputated and, when informed of the medical necessity, Bridges is reputed to have said, ‘Well, I hope they gave it to the lion.’ Poilu retired to a private zoo in Maidstone where he died in June 1935, aged nineteen.

A lion was perhaps one of the more unusual pets-turned-mascots during the war. However, the scarcity or otherwise of an animal was of no significance to the esteem with which it was held. Almost no self-respecting unit would be without one and they ranged from tortoises to goats, from common-or-garden mules to monkeys. They were all loved and fêted.

Pte William Peto, 2nd Cavalry Supply Column, ASC

Some of the mascots amuse us very much. Some colonial troops had a large goat with his name ‘Buller’ and regiment stamped on a piece of shell case which was fixed between his horns. One of the infantry regiments had a goat and its kid which was almost full grown. Some of our chaps secretly used to catch mamma goat and milk her, keeping her very much out of the way of the farmer to whom they judged she belonged. Imagine our surprise when, a few days ago, an infantry regiment came down and claimed her and gave her kid to our Mechanical Transport Workshop nearby.

Last night I saw a field company coming back from the trenches with a blue-grey chimpanzee walking under a limber.

Maj. Graham Seton, 33rd Bttn, MGC

Dunny had completed two years in the line. These were years which had entailed long night drives across wasted fields and dangerous roads, in bitter wind and driving rain, with no other light to brighten the journey into the unknown than that of fog-veiled star shell or the quick-cut flash of bursting cordite: years of endless toil, with short, so-called rests, when he was picketed in a long line among his kicking friends, up to the hocks in freezing mud, or facing a dust storm. What a life! His hide bore traces of shrapnel and his knees were swollen with stumbling beyond his fault. But Dunny never grumbled. He just smiled. Every driver knew his smile, and as he passed carefully down the mule lines, when he came to Dunny, he twisted his tail affectionately . . . The whole brigade knew Dunny, and loved him for his smile. He was indeed our mascot. At times of rest from battle, we made fun of him and dressed him up in trousers, pulled him along backwards by his leathery tail, perched an old hat on his head and led him out as the clown of a horse show, or to be mocked by peasant children in the towns behind the battle zone. And Dunny just smiled.

To everyone’s utter dejection, Dunny was eventually killed bringing up ammunition during the fighting at Arras the following year. Dunny had survived two years ‘in action’. The longer and more exotic the service, the greater the prestige an animal could attain within the unit. Special honours were bestowed upon hiem, to the extent that a mascot became almost the titular head or embodiment of the unit. It sometimes got out of hand.

Rifleman Aubrey Smith, 1/5th London Rgt (London Rifle Brigade)

The companies were going by train or bus the following day, when the horses would make their way down as best as they could. The programme was upset, so far as the LRB were concerned, by the horse Julia breaking loose the next night and eating up practically all the oats that had been left for the other horses. Julia was a decrepit old horse that had served in the regiment in the Boer War as the colonel’s mount, and had been brought over to France in 1914 as a mascot: she rarely had a stroke of work to do, but on certain occasions reverted to the position of officer’s mount. The sudden disappearance of all the rations meant that the grooms would have to get back to the transport as soon as possible, and as we had already started our second day’s trek, there was nothing for it but to trot the chargers for about thirty miles. The hungry one did not experience much difficulty, but Julia, completely blown out and never, in the ordinary way, trotted even for a few yards, had the worst day of her life and almost succumbed at the end of it.

Capt. J.R. Tibbles, RAMC attd. 1st East Kent Rgt

I was told the medical officer’s servant wasn’t coming up but was staying at the transport to look after Joe, the battalion mascot, Joe being the most important person in the battalion after the Quarter Master. He had some retriever in him but beyond that he was unplaceable. He was black with a rough coat but his most distinctive feature was his tail which was always erect. He had a tail like a scimitar with the concavity forward. He was a great ratter and a great fighter but he wouldn’t tackle a dog much bigger than himself. He had his battle honours on brass plates fixed around his collar – Ypres, Somme, Loos, Givenchy. Oh, he was a great dog. As the brigadier once said, ‘If he was any breed at all that you could put a name to, everyone would want a dog like Joe.’

In mid-September, the British launched their new wonder weapon, the tank. A slow, cumbersome vehicle, liable to break down, it nevertheless terrified the enemy when it was first used. To those far-sighted enough to see, the tank would inevitably eclipse the horse in warfare, for, while the horse remained the fastest means by which to exploit a breach in the line, it was terribly vulnerable to machine-gun fire and high explosive. As far as horses were concerned, the tank was yet another new, noisy object at which to get spooked.

Rifleman Aubrey Smith, 1/5th London Rgt (London Rifle Brigade)

On the evening of the 14th [September] it was obvious that we meant business, for on my way back from a water-cart job, coming along the Maricourt road, I heard a clanking, snorting sound and the next instant recognised a tank worming its way slowly along with the upcoming traffic. Every pair of horses that saw it had varying degrees of fright. The road seemed to be a kind of circus. My own pair made a dive for the side of the road and ran among some tents. A little way behind me, Butt – one of our water-cart drivers – somehow or other got thrown from his horse, kicked by a mule and squashed flat by an empty limber which passed over him. He had to be taken to hospital, much to our regret, but fortunately rejoined us a few weeks later.

It was not untypical of horses to become fixated on an object to which their response was out of all proportion to its threat.

Rifleman Aubrey Smith, 1/5th London Rgt (London Rifle Brigade)

I found the grey horse was exceedingly nervous and shied almost at his own shadow. His pet aversion was an ordinary pushbike. He scented these half a mile off in the daytime, then pricked up his ears, dilated his eyes, snorted, and did his best to edge away from them; motorcycles did not seem to trouble him so much. Lorries and motor cars he disliked, broken trees he regarded with suspicion, limbers he accepted with equanimity. But let him catch sight of a milestone and watch the result! I tried to make a mental note of where the milestones were placed, in order to be prepared for any antics that might ensue. Then again: wheelbarrows! If I induced him to proceed past one, it was only done with his head twisting round, regarding it, and then a short trot to put distance between himself and the object when once he had passed. These fads of his kept me on the
qui vive
the whole time, for he would think nothing of shying to either side and attempting to scale the bank, limber and all, if he caught sight of anything unusual.

As the autumn rains set in and the ground became a quagmire, the horses required for transporting supplies to the front line began to break down. The larger the horse, the larger the hoof, and the Somme’s alluvial mud had a glutinous pull that made it difficult for horses to lift their feet, let alone pull a wagon. Mules were swapped for horses in the traces but even these became mired in the swamp and so ammunition was taken off wagons and placed across the backs of mules.

Horses and mules suffered sores, galls and infections. For those horses that did not become sick or hopelessly stuck in the mud, there was a multitude of dangers from flying shards of metal, dropped nails and shrapnel balls. One risk that was rare but for which it was impossible to prepare was the effect of artillery shells fitted with time-delayed fuses. These shells burrowed into the earth and destroyed dugouts; they also created a thin crust on the ground and a crater beneath, through which a number of horses fell, dragging them almost certainly to their deaths.

Maj. Neil Fraser-Tytler, D Batt., 149th Brigade, RFA

The rain started a few hours after we had reached the new position, and continued without a break for three days and nights. For twenty-four hours the road was absolutely impassable, being completely blocked with about 80 vehicles stuck in the mud, many with their teams and drivers lying dead beside them, the Hun having shelled the road practically without cessation. In fact, the state of the track after the rain necessitated putting ten horses in a limber carrying only 20 rounds, which a battery can fire off in 60 seconds. Very soon it became impossible to get limbers up at all, and all ammunition had to be carried up on horseback, four rounds on each horse.