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

by Richard van Emden

  ‘Here we are,’ said my sleepy companion as we clattered over the cobblestones and halted in front of the only building with any semblance of a roof. Somewhere in the darkness beyond the open doorway there was a movement which produced a faint rustling noise. There was no mistaking that familiar sound. It was the swish of a cow’s tail.

  There were two cows. One dry and the other giving a bare quart of milk, I was told. The milk was to be taken to the colonel’s dugout . . . Undoing the tethering ropes, we led the cows out of the farmyard and along the roadway to a piece of wasteland behind the colonel’s dugout. Here we fastened them to two long ropes which were pegged into the ground. ‘That’s all they get to eat,’ said my companion, and he pointed to the withered, brown grass which grew between the shell-holes. ‘If it doesn’t fatten it’ll fill,’ he remarked, and with that we left the poor beasts grazing peacefully.

  Back once more in the farmyard, we made our way across to the far side of the ruins where a layer of ice glistened on the surface of a waterlogged shell-hole. Here lay the main source of our water supply for the cows. But one had to be careful, for the spot was overlooked from the enemy’s trenches. ‘Keep your head down. That bloomin’ sniper ain’t a bad shot.’ With these words I received final instructions for my newly acquired job as the colonel’s cowman . . .

  Lt Philip Gosse, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers

  It was sometimes quite pathetic to see how much men liked following again their old peacetime callings. Once while I was acting as temporary medical officer to a battalion, an order arrived from Divisional Headquarters instructing the commanding officer to make inquiries whether there were in his battalion any men with first-hand knowledge of the care of carrier pigeons, because several experts were required to take charge of some mobile pigeon lofts which were being sent out. This news soon spread and caused much excitement. The battalion had been recruited in a Yorkshire town where pigeon fancying and pigeon racing were popular hobbies and sports. Here, it seemed, was a chance to get a ‘cushy’ job well away from the line, near some comfortable estaminet, with no officer, still more no RSM and no parades. Indeed, it seemed to hold out the realisation of the golden dreams of almost every infantry soldier. At noon the battalion paraded, the order was read out and any man who knew about the care of carrier pigeons and how to fly them was instructed at the word ‘Advance’ to take two steps forward. When the order rang out . . . ‘Advance’ . . . the whole battalion moved two paces forward and halted.

  The adjutant had a difficult task before him, to select the two or three required, when confronted by some four hundred carrier-pigeon experts from which to choose.

  Pte Thomas Williams, 19th King’s Liverpool Rgt

  My job as the colonel’s cowman was a pleasant occupation compared to life in the front line. Once, when we attempted to increase the milk yield, the CO demanded that hay should be sent up the line. I got into the transport officer’s bad books for stealing his clover! Otherwise there were few happenings of note. A shell or two now and then and that damned sniper forever trying to knock the last remaining scrap of plaster off the farm buildings. That was about all.

  For nearly two months the battalion journeyed backwards and forwards between Bray and the Carnoy sector. But at length there came rumours of a move. We were going to take over another lot of trenches on the right. This meant, of course, that our headquarters would no longer be at Carnoy. It also meant that our colonel would no longer have fresh milk for his breakfast.

  We are told that all good things come to an end sooner or later. I myself could not grumble, for the cowman’s job had saved me many hours of tedious fire step duty in the front line. We were resting at Bray when news of the move came through and with it came orders for the colonel’s cowman to be returned to his old company.

  I saw no more of the Carnoy cows and can’t even say what happened to them. It may be that the German sniper put an end to their precarious existence, or perhaps they were killed in that tornado of shellfire which heralded the Somme attack. On the other hand it is quite possible that they may have lived on to greet the astonished eyes of the old farmer when he returned to his ruined village.

  One thing, however, I certainly do know and it is this. During the rest of my stay in France, when we were experiencing all the hardships and horrors of the fighting on the Somme, at Arras and in the Ypres Salient, my thoughts were constantly returning to the snug little dugout at Carnoy and the happy days spent with Headquarters’ Company as the colonel’s cowman.

  In early autumn, as the British settled on the Somme, another Allied offensive was launched at Loos. The battle began well but the wider objectives were not met and so after several weeks the campaign was allowed to peter out as the troops settled in for the winter. For men looking after horses, it would be another testing time.

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

  The authorities had been so convinced that our September ‘Push’ was going to alter the whole position of the firing line that they had not taken the first step towards building stables in this quarter. The transports and artillery of some twenty to thirty British Divisions were left, for the most part, without overhead cover or standing for their horses until the second winter of the war had well set in; and then, under pressure, the authorities thought about it and sanctioned building stables.

  Lt Reginald Hancock, Veterinary Officer, 61st Howitzer Brigade, RFA

  The weather had by now broken. To keep the horses from bogging down on their lines in the open, many batteries started to tie their horses round the bases of the numerous slag heaps round the mines. The clinker-like material made a good solid standing. Unfortunately, due to what we should call mineral deficiency, the majority of the animals started to eat large quantities of this slag. The result was the large bowel became completely occluded by a cement-like mass of clinker, and substantial numbers died from an incurable obstructive colic. Authority decreed that the horses must go back into the boggy fields and live in a foot of liquid, evil-smelling mud, compounded of the rich alluvial soil in the district, dung and urine. The result was enormous festering sores round the heels and fetlocks, and our horses were being evacuated as fast as they could be taken to base hospitals with ulcerated extremities beyond the powers of us poor mudlarks to heal.

  The chain of medical treatment given to animals broadly replicated that afforded to soldiers. Initial treatment was given by veterinary officers such as Hancock, serving with a mounted unit or infantry brigade, before further more intensive treatment was offered by the Mobile Veterinary Sections. If required, the horse could then be transferred via the Veterinary Evacuation Hospitals, of which several dozen existed in France and Belgium, to large Stationary Veterinary Hospitals, similar to base hospitals for men. Here as many as two thousand wounded horses or mules could be dealt with at a time. The front-line conditions were such that there was no shortage of patients. If the horses had a difficult time, for those looking after them it was unremitting hell.

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

  You turn out and wade through this sea [of mud] with rain coming down, and visit your poor horses, who are stuck fast. You undo their head ropes, all soaked with the sloppy mud: the ends are frayed and they flick a stream of mud into your face. After an effort you get the horses out and take them for a short walk, ending up at a stream, where you water them. Then you enter the morass again, where their hoofs splash your mackintosh right up to the neck. You tie them up and get a spray of mud again, put on the nosebags – which are more like wet mud swabs – and receive biffs in the face with them, leaving you with a face and neck of Flanders soil.

  After breakfast you do your best to remove some of the mud on your face, but without proper washing arrangements this is a somewhat difficult matter. At nine o’clock it has probably left off raining for the moment and we set forth again to saddle up the horses for exercise. To do this, we first remove the horse rugs, great
heavy things which are quite a respectable weight to lift when walking on hard ground, let alone in such a field as this when the rugs themselves are sodden. The tabs and cords trail in the mud: you tread on them and probably drop your load. In stooping to pick it up, your mac and coat have a new mud bath, both inside and out, just to keep them wet and heavy. You get the saddle blanket which, needless to say, is dripping wet from the day before, and the saddle, which is caked with mud, and a pair of nice red rusty bits, and put these on your animals, finally filing out on to the road for a two hours’ walk and trot. This is the best part of the day’s routine.

  Midday ‘stables’ mean, of course, a continual standing in and trudging through mud and it is such a difficult matter to extricate your feet that nearly everybody is suffering from sore heels, for the mud seems to drag the leather off the boots so that a ridge forms about an inch up the heel. You come in at dinnertime in an even bigger mess than before. Some of you have to leave for the trenches with rations and fuel limbers in the afternoon, which will return about ten o’clock at night. If you are luckier you possibly have to go with a limber to a coal dump or the brigade post office: in either case you turn out soon, after a plateful of skilly, to put your harness on. Squelch, squelch, squelch go your socks. It may be raining, but off the horse rugs have to come again; you put them on some turnips – the driest spot. Then you lead your horses up to the limber, tie them up with their sopping head ropes and carry your harness across to them piece by piece. To hook in, you back one horse each side of the limber pole and then, plunging your hands into the deep morass where you think the end of the pole may be, retrieve both pole and pole bar from their submerged resting place, lifting them up with the greatest difficulty. Harnessing up, hooking in, getting the horses’ feeds ready to take with you, putting on your leg iron etc, taking anything up to three-quarters of an hour under these conditions. Then you start off and, although the knees of your breeches feel wet and your hands are in a nice old state, you are glad at last to have your feet out of the mire. You probably get back after teatime, in the dark, unharness, water the horses, search for the blankets, tie the horses on the line, give them their nosebags and finally flop into the tent again.

  Lt Reginald Hancock, Veterinary Officer, 61st Howitzer Brigade, RFA

  The number of units a veterinary officer had to visit varied, but rarely less than fifteen hundred horses came under my care at any given moment. The chief duty was to teach sound stable management. The way a line of horses was tied up could, if the natural habits of horses were not appreciated, lead to a crippling number of wounds or even fractures from kicks. The obvious way to tie up horses in a long line stretched between two wagons or trees seemed to be, on a windy wet night, to put them facing the direction of the wind. But the student of animal behaviour knows that a horse always turns his rump to the wind, for his nasal region cannot bear more than the gentlest breeze, so sensitive it is. It took all my time to inculcate this elementary point into the minds of officers and men. All too often I arrived at a wagon line after a wet night to find a number of casualties, some of which could only be shot forthwith, all because the animals had reversed or attempted to reverse their positions, become entangled in their ropes and with each other, and started kicking matches.

  Then there were the horses that went thin and became too weak to work. In nine cases out of ten, observation during feeding hours showed that these were negative characters tied alongside a bully. The dominant animal lay back his ears, showed the whites of his eyes, and so terrorised his nervous companion that he dared not take a mouthful of hay after the hay nets were hung up . . . These things were not taught or to be found in military manuals; few veterinary officers, even, knew them; thousands of unnecessary debility cases were sent down to base hospitals every month from front-line units.

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

  The wants of man are of secondary importance to those of beast. A driver’s primary consideration was his horses, for on those poor dumb brutes fell the heavy burden of the day’s work, and they relied faithfully upon their masters giving them drink and oats as soon as possible at the end of their journey. Never in my experience did a transport man – however weary or hungry he might be – defer his horse’s meal in order to satisfy his own wants and these were pressing enough at times.

  1916

  The War in 1916

  The introduction of conscription in January 1916 supplied the British Army with guaranteed reinforcements at a level required to prosecute the war with an intensity unimaginable just months before. But as the regular army and Territorial Force had had to await the arrival of Kitchener’s Army, so it would be many months before conscripts would arrive in enough numbers to make a difference.

  In February, the Germans launched a massive offensive against the French at Verdun. It quickly dissolved into a war of attrition on a hitherto undreamed of scale in which both sides fought themselves to a standstill.

  The arrival of British forces on the Somme demonstrated to the French that Britain’s commitment to the war was unquestionable. To further cement relations, an agreement had been made to launch a joint Anglo-French offensive in the region in 1916. Preparations were well under way when the Germans attacked at Verdun. The French compulsion to defend the city that was so much a symbol of national pride meant that not only were they forced to reduce their involvement in the proposed battle on the Somme but they appealed to the British to bring forward the start date so as to force the Germans to draw off their reserves from Verdun.

  Once again the British complied with French wishes and on 1 July they attacked. The disaster of the first day and the casualties inflicted on the New Army battalions were heinous but it was one day, and one day only. The British, after drawing breath, resumed the offensive two days later. The Germans were forced to withdraw artillery from Verdun and although fighting continued at Verdun until December, the Germans could not maintain such an enormous effort on two fronts and so scaled back their campaign against the French.

  On the Somme, the Germans were once again forced to contest each wood, each village, each sunken lane. Losses on both sides mounted remorselessly, but it was the Germans who could no longer afford the cost in both human life and munitions. Britain’s military strength on the Western Front continued to grow while the enemy’s waned. In September 1916 the British Army introduced a new weapon of war, the tank, but while the machine had the desired effect of shocking the enemy, it was not a weapon that, on its own, would change the course of the conflict. The British learnt much from the offensive, but the ability to utilise all available facets of the army and air force in a combined operation was still some way off.

  The Natural World in 1916

  The Allied offensives of 1915 had been relatively brief affairs, lasting as little as a day at Aubers Ridge in May to nearly three weeks during the heaviest assault that year, at Loos. They had little in common with the rolling battle that would so besmirch the once picturesque farmland of the Somme, a 138-day battle of almost ceaseless attrition. Shellfire was becoming not only more accurate but far heavier in concentration, and while the land was not obliterated overnight, each new objective was given a thorough pounding by Allied guns. Then, if the position fell after heavy fighting, an almost equally heavy counter-barrage by the enemy churned up the land once again.

  The horses and mules on which the war effort depended were driven to the extremes of hardship. In the summer, shellfire and poison gas were but two of their afflictions; broiling heat and raging thirst afflicted horses and mules in a land in which access to fresh water was limited. Both man and beast were reliant on army-constructed pumping stations, pipes, water butts and troughs, for no horse would ever drink water from a shell-hole. Watering the horses and mules could mean a long trek along rutted roads, festooned with shards of metal and discarded nails, any of which could put paid to a horse’s life with one false step. And then there was the winter, one of the harshest in living
memory, the cloying mud that was typical of the region, the weeks of snow and ice and the shortage of winter stabling and food. The suffering was immense.

  In the natural world, many species were seemingly eradicated from the fighting zone as natural habitats were lost. Nevertheless, some animals stayed and adapted to the conditions, and it was with a different sense of awe that men looked upon them, no longer entranced by their simple beauty but rather lost in an admiration for their perseverance in adverse conditions. Diaries and letters from this time seem to agree that some species, particularly birds, appeared more accommodating than normal, living in very close proximity to soldiers, even becoming tactile when hunger and cold drove them to find food and warmth among the men. In response, men came to look upon wildlife as proof that the natural order would one day re-emerge, that the carnage was but a moment in time. For some, the presence of these creatures was more than a help to get through the day; it could help save a man’s sanity.

  Soldiers’ Memories

  Only in the spring did the opposing armies, like nature, emerge from an enforced hibernation. The soldiers and their animals had shivered throughout the long, dark days, all desperate for warmer weather. Even though the intensity of the war had increased dramatically towards the end of 1915, soldiers continued to see civilians working close to the opposing trenches, ekeing out a living, unwilling and perhaps unable to leave. Their admiration for those who struggled on was at times as obvious as it was heartfelt.

  Lt Harold Hemming, 84th Brigade, RFA

  I remember one gallant and very tough old lady who lived in a tiny cottage in a little depression about half a mile behind our front line, halfway up the Vimy Ridge. She used to waddle up and down the long communicating trench that wound its way back almost to Mont-St-Eloi to buy her food. The speciality of this old lady was bee-keeping and the sale of honey.