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

for appropriate stories. This was an entirely scattergun approach, inevitably fruitless in many cases but productive in others, sometimes exceptionally so. It was a necessarily slow process. ‘Weasels’ or ‘sparrows’ were rarely logged as searchable words in an index even if the author had a particularly interesting story to recall. Some exceptional memoirs made almost no reference to wildlife, in part as a result of when they were written. A memoir produced fifty years after the event is unlikely to contain the minutiae of animal life, simply because such stories would inevitably remain unlogged in the mind whereas the loss of friends, or injuries, barrages, gas attacks and going over the top were seared into the consciousness. Letters written at the time were always a better source for ‘here and now’ stories.
    Most of the illustrations in this book come from the archives of the Imperial War Museum, and from friends within the Great War fraternity who have generously lent me images to reproduce here. All remaining photographs are taken from my own collection. Few have been published before. While gathering images for the plate sections, I was aware that many stories would be almost impossible to illustrate. Fishing by means of a hand grenade thrown into a lake or river appeared to be one such story. However, since the advent of online auction sites almost anything is obtainable with perseverance, and a recently acquired set of original photographs taken by an officer in France yielded the only example I have ever seen of a grenade-induced fountain of water. The original caption, ‘Obtaining a variety of food by bombing fish at Potijze!’, established the veracity of the image.
    As this book complements my previous work, The Soldier’s War , it seemed sensible to follow a broadly similar format. This, in effect, is the animals’ war. The book is divided into five chapters, each covering one year of the conflict and beginning with a short overview of the current military situation. This is followed by a description of how, each year, wildlife adapted itself within the zone of conflict and how soldiers’ perceptions of animals and wildlife changed. There are a few German photographs, reflecting the shared relationship to wildlife; indeed, there are several instances of animals, particularly dogs, crossing no-man’s-land to be looked after by both sides, as well as another occasion when both British and German soldiers shot at the same flock of geese flying overhead.
    The natural world in France and Belgium was not unlike that at home in Britain. Nevertheless, the copious horrors of war threw nature’s beauty and complexity into the sharpest relief imaginable and therefore it has its own unique validity. The soldiers who understood that stark contrast left records which, when collected and distilled, have given us an insight into the Great War that has not been explored before.
     
A week since, I was lying out in no-man’s-land. A little German dog trotted up and licked my British face. I pulled his German ears and stroked his German back. He wagged his German tail. My little friend abolished no-man’s-land, and so in time can we.
Lt Melville Hastings, killed in action, 3 October 1918

The War in 1914
     
    By the standards of the Great War, the Battle of Mons was little more than a skirmish. The small Belgian town had, simply by chance, become the place where British forces, moving north-east from the Channel ports, met the German army marching south-west. In fact, it was one German army, one of three that had ignored Belgium’s sovereignty by using her territory as a back door to an invasion of northern France. It was partly to uphold the rule of international law that Britain had gone to war, or so it was claimed. However, in a series of secret pre-war agreements and informal understandings between the different European nations, Britain had privately agreed, in principle, to support France in a conflict