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

Soldiers remained ever conscious of its presence so that, even in the act of going over the top, men wondered at the song of the skylark overhead or became excited at a hare zigzagging through the shell-holes.
    Although a simple chronology is at the heart of this book, I have nevertheless sought to highlight a number of themes and ideas. For example, soldiers sometimes took animal life senselessly and then repented, reflecting often bitterly on their actions. They themselves drew the appropriate comment. On the spur of the moment, Private Thomas Hope killed a mole. ‘Poor little inoffensive mole, its life was as precious to it as mine is to me,’ he wrote, after ‘tapping’ the mole over the head with a stick. ‘I must be a bloodthirsty brute,’ he decided.
    Other stories are grouped together because dates and the passage of time are irrelevant. An interesting snapshot of one creature’s predicament in war can result, such as that of frogs: frogs squashed on the communication trench duckboards; frogs heard croaking in the night air as the guns temporarily fell silent; frogs gently carried out of harm’s way by a commanding officer, or eaten as a novelty.
    Wherever possible, I have tried to keep the stories broadly within the time frame in which they were written although, as with all anthologies, the stories are not necessarily chronologically sequential. Nevertheless, no memories of times before the soldiers concerned arrived in France or after they were removed from the fighting by injury are used. Likewise, references to animals and insects are aligned as closely as possible to the seasons in which they appear; it would not do to have bees or butterflies in winter.
    The quotations used are taken from various sources, primarily the Imperial War Museum, the Liddle Archive at Leeds University and archives housed in regimental museums. Other stories were taken from published books, many long out of print but full of relevant anecdotes. Especially productive was the little-accessed goldmine of officers’ memorial books, most published during or very shortly after the war. These were privately published in small numbers by grieving families who sought to come to terms with their loss by saving for posterity the letters sent home from France and Flanders.
    These letters and diaries, along with those of other officers fortunate enough to survive, are numerically out of proportion to those written by other ranks, at least in relation to their serving numbers – around one officer for every forty men served in a battalion. However, in the preparation of this book, seventy-four officers are cited, seventy-two other ranks, with officers’ quotes, on the whole, being the more substantial in literary quality and length. Literacy rates among pre-war soldiers were poor, much as they were among the civilian population that volunteered or were conscripted. This is especially clear when their writing skills are contrasted with those of the young university undergraduates who applied to serve in the officer corps. These young officers’ powers of description were often excellent, and furthermore they had more time and more opportunities to write. They worked in dugouts that were reasonably dry compared with frequently wet and windy trenches, and access to paper was easier for officers than for other ranks.
    Fortunately, where a quotation comes from is largely irrelevant. If an earwig happens to pass across the hand of an officer or other rank as he writes, the description is what is important; it does not affect the understanding of the war, how it was fought, how it was won, how that war is now judged and interpreted by historians. Everyman saw the weasel scampering along the trench parapet, the cow trapped in the barbed wire, the kitten stuck in the rubble of a house; it is just that not Everyman chose to make a physical note of the observation.
    During my research, many books were ‘mined’ by speed-reading the text looking