‘Never such innocence again’ wrote Philip Larkin of an unquestioning British people on the eve of the first world war, and much has been made, not unreasonably, of the trusting frame of mind in which young men of that time accepted the arguments for war in 1914. If they were innocents, even more so were the animals caught up in it all — the countless horses and mules in the transport and artillery service, the pets and livestock exiled from devastated French and Belgian farms, and the wild fauna disturbed from their natural habitats. As Richard Van Emden’s moving anthology of soldiers’ letters and memories shows, the fate of these hapless creatures amid the horrors of the Western Front also played an important part in the lives of many serving soldiers.
As the war progressed the relationship between mobilised mankind and animals altered, but their fates were always inseparable. During the war of movement before trench warfare began, first encounters with the enemy revealed the vulnerability of cavalry to rapid rifle- and machine gun-fire. In fact it very soon became an impossibility thanks to shell holes, machine guns and barbed wire, and with it a particular close relationship between rider and steed declined.
It was more than a year before the destruction at the Front became too extreme for wild nature and stray animals to survive there. Hares, rabbits, pigs, cattle, dogs and cats were a common sight in 1915–16 and a lot of men acquired beloved pets at this time. By 1917 the Western Front was becoming ‘the writhen waste ...Defiled, defaced’, where very little, save rats, lice and humans, could exist for miles on either side of the line. When the British 5th Army was driven back towards Amiens in the spring of 1918, however, the fighting took place once more in undestroyed countryside and, for some soldiers, contact with animal life was restored, including briefly with an aviary of ostriches and emus in a chateau deserted by its owner. Finally during the ‘Hundred Days’ at the end of the war, the British forces overran the undamaged countryside beyond the German lines, and for the first time since the start of the war witnessed effective cavalry action (their own) at the Front. The fighting had come full circle.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.