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Horses dominate this book — it is estimated that over a million horses and mules were purchased or mobilised by the British Army in the Great War, invaluable for hauling supplies and guns over boggy and rough terrain. The Veterinary Corps, much needed, grew from just over 500 men to 18,000 by the end of the war. During the fighting, 225,000 horses and mules were killed by gas and gunfire, but many more succumbed to illness and exhaustion. Their drivers were devoted to them:
I remember only too well working with several others for hours in the darkness in a desperate effort to save a pair of beautiful draught horses who were gradually sinking in the mud [wrote Corporal Robert Evans of the Royal Engineers]. As this was happening well within range of the German machine gunners, we had to work in darkness while their driver spoke quiet endearments to his horses, to encourage them. It was a heartbreaking, horribly long-drawn-out, losing battle, and gradually we knew they were doomed. Poor tragic driver! I have never forgotten you; you, who had looked after them for so long and loved them so much, now wept, heartbroken, and who shall wonder that you wept?
Apart from a few, later rescued in the 1920s, only 62,000 horses and mules returned home. The rest were worked to death on foreign farms, or sent to the knacker’s yard.
Other animals were put to use at the Front: dogs and pigeons as message carriers, and mice and canaries to warn sappers of gas attacks:
I found the men working, although the canary was flat on its back with its feet in the air [recorded a subaltern]. 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.’
On the whole, however, birds were treated with more respect. To many soldiers they seemed free spirits, flying high or sweetly singing, regardless of the misery, death and explosions around them.
Regimental mascots at the Front were common. ‘Sammy’, a terrier, came over with the Northumberland Fusiliers to France in 1915. He was wounded and gassed during the second battle of Ypres, always accompanied the battalion into the trenches and was several times buried by shellfire. Soldiers also became extremely fond of stray dogs and cats they adopted. One dog, Thélus, who had lost his paw, had a wooden leg made by the brigade MO and became the battery pet, completely acclimatised to the heavy guns they fired. The sharp hearing of such animals could be useful in distinguishing at once between types of shell and the direction from which they were coming.
Some unusual pets showed up at the Front, including several monkeys. There were numerous goats; one, attached to an artillery battery, had a mania for tobacco and would snatch cigarettes from soldiers’ mouths and devour them.
Such eccentricities lightened soldiers’ lives. An animal with an unusual personality would be treasured, such as the horse who feigned illness to avoid night duties or the cat known as ‘The Landlady’, who used to parade up and down in no-man’s-land in search of rats, in full view of both sides.
Anything that spelt death for rats was of course welcome. Soldiers may have found consolation in looking at the heavens at night, or in contemplating butterflies and moths — even earwigs and daddy-long-legs — in spring or summer, hopeful that nature would survive the war in the end and life would go on; but rats, lice and flies remained the soldier’s enemy.
One could not ask for a more dramatic and entertaining selection on a little known area of Great War history by an experienced chronicler and anthologist of that cata- clysmic event. A few more specific dates for the extracts, which are often from long out-of-print and forgotten works, would be helpful, though these might be difficult to find. I look forward to a further volume on the topic ranging further afield to Mesopotamia and beyond, and the British navy.
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