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This is the most original, enjoyable, moving and impressive book about the First World War that I have read since the centenary began. It is not a ‘history’ book like Max Hastings’s Catastrophe, say, Peter Hart’s Gallipoli, or David Reynolds’s The Long Shadow, but it opens up a dimension of the reality of the war that, for me at least, is fresh and deeply thought-provoking. I would go so far as to say that if you engage with the existential reality of the Great War, you must read this book.
Perhaps the shortest way to give an idea of its substance is to explain its structure. These are Lewis-Stempel’s core chapters:
II: And the Birds Are Beautiful Still: Avifauna and Men on the Western Front (46 pp.)
III: All the Lovely Horses: Equus as Beast of Burden, War Horse, Comrade (52 pp.)
IV: Of Lice and Men: Trench Pests, Vermin and Disease (46 pp.)
V: The Bloom of Life: Trench/POW Gardens, Flowers and Botanists at the Front (32 pp.)
VI: The Dogs (and Cats, Rabbits, etc.) of War: Trench Pets (27 pp.)
VII: A-Hunting and A-Shooting (and A-Fishing) We Will Go: Field Sports and Poaching
at the Front (19 pp.)
Very cleverly placed around these are the shorter ‘Interstices’. I say ‘around’ rather than ‘between’ since Chapter II is preceded by ‘Interstice 1: Birds of the Battlefield, Western Front 1914-18’ (a list), and followed by ‘Interstice 2: Poems about Birds Written by Serving Soldiers’, making the section about birds actually 59 pages long. After Chapter III you have ‘Interstice 3: Poems about Horses Written by Serving Soldiers’; after IV, ‘Interstice 4: The Statistics of Disease’; after V, ‘Interstice 5: Nature and the Ancre Battlefield, 30 July 1917’; after VI, ‘Interstice 6: A Complete List of Soldiers’ Pets and Mascots’; and after VII, ‘Interstice 7: British and Empire Naturalists Who Died on Active Service 1914-1919’. In a sense, then, the ‘Interstices’ wind round and through the ‘body’ of the book.
Stempel-Lewis’s writing in this body never knows a dull moment, shifting from narrative and explanation through prose and poetry quotation to potted biography, speculation, and a staggering range of war memoirs and personal documents. But it is fair to say that the technique and content of the thinner ‘Interstices’ enhance the variety of the book and the reader’s experience of it even more.
What can one say of the ‘body’ of the book? It is so overwhelmingly rich and challenging that I could quote, paraphrase and discuss it till Kingdom come. One is simply made to feel vividly how close the bond between the British soldier and a vast range of the animal world and Nature became — and how important it was to him.
The skylark’s refusal (‘brave’ was the adjective usually attached) to quit its habitat because of warring man caused widespread admiration. The bird even stayed put on day one of the Somme […] The correspondent of ‘The Times’ informed readers that the skylarks could be heard singing during the battle ‘whenever there was a lull in the almost incessant fire’. […] Skylarks turned the eyes upwards from present problems.
Rooks also became ‘icons’ of resilience, nightingales evoked wonder, swallows building their nests in observation posts and Nissen huts evoked tender solicitation and brought a strange comfort. Some very serious ornithology was done and even published (incidentally, I think the author might have stressed that ‘bird-nesting’, whether by privates or generals, was usually for the purpose of viewing the beauty of the eggs, not stealing them). The golden oriole became ‘the holy grail of bird-watching on the Western Front’, partridges proliferated, carrier pigeons became comrades and heroes, and
In what was simultaneously charming and cruel, ambulance trains were fitted with canary cages, so the birds could sing to wounded troops in transit to hospital. As everyone Edwardian knew, birdsong was a guaranteed cheerer-upper. Caged songbirds were still a common fixture in the back street homes of Britain.
Chapter II, which is prefaced by Elgar’s words about the iniquity of horses being pressed into war (see Paul Johnson’s Comment on my post of 12 July 2016), proves me utterly wrong in assuming that Warhorse was a sentimental confection. Soldiers did live, sleep and die with their horses. They became so close to them that they felt their horse could read their thoughts. Some even wished to be killed and buried with their horse, and were. When at the end of the war scores of thousands of horses were to be sold for meat rather than be transported back to Blighty, their riders ‘disappeared’ them, or even took them away and shot them themselves. There is no sentiment in this key chapter, just remarkable stories of comradeship and love to which Lewis-Stempel brings a sober vision. It is encouraging to read that after public outrage at the treatment of horses in the Boer War, the Army Veterinary Service was improved and expanded into the Army Veterinary Corps, and ‘effectively, humane treatment of — and kindness towards, indeed — animals [became] institutionalised in the army’. The war could not have been won without the horse, the donkey and the mule.
But Lewis-Stempel’s consummate touch was to enclose the ‘body’ of his book in chapters that seek to interpret the whole phenomenon, viz. ‘Chapter I: For King and Countryside: The Natural History of the British’ and ‘Chapter VIII: And Quiet Flowed the Somme: War’s End’. He is so right to speak of the participants as ‘Edwardians’ and those who returned — indeed British society after 1918 — as something else.
‘For the generation of 1914-18’, he writes, ‘love of country meant, as often as not, love of countryside.’ He prefaces Chapter I with Edward Thomas’s words ‘Literally for this’, which were uttered when a dismayed Eleanor Farjeon asked why he was joining up and Thomas showed her a handful of English soil. ‘Edward Thomas died at Arras for Adlestrop’, Lewis-Stempel ventures, referring to Thomas’s poem encapsulating the Gloucestershire countryside on 24 June 1914. The Edwardian countryside was ‘full of birdsong’; it was ‘countryside worth fighting for’; it was ‘God’s Own Country’; ‘an Edwardian childhood was conducted outdoors as much as it was within the confines of the house’; as George Calderon’s friend Ford Madox Hueffer, 9/Welsh Regiment, wrote on an embarkation train to Southampton as he watched the countryside roll by: ‘It is for the sake of the wolds and the wealds/That we die,/And for the sake of the quiet fields…’
Conversely (Chapter VIII), ‘on return to Britain, soldiers took to nature as a cure for the wounds of the mind’, a massive smallholding movement was launched for veterans, and the cemeteries on foreign soil became English gardens:
To preserve a special British feeling snowdrops and crocuses were allowed to push up through the grass. In the cemeteries, where memory was planted, the French countryside was sequestered and remodelled to become little bits of Britain. Unambiguously, the cemeteries are corners of foreign fields ‘for ever England’. The dead are not buried in France; they lie in English scenes. They are interred at home.
A wonderful book, written in a vibrant personal language.
I greatly enjoyed this post – yet another book added to my must-read list. But it does raise the GC question. Was George Calderon a nature lover? I know he once lived on a farm, and was proud of his horsemanship, but he still gives the impression of an essentially urban type. All those cafes and theatres! Your description of him encouraging his men to pick and chew ‘the leaves of a certain shrub’ as they went into battle is extremely powerful (Calderonia 4 June 2015); but I can’t help thinking this relates more to psychology than to botany.
Then there’s the other GC… John Lewis-Stempel’s strikingly beautiful cover implies that his study is confined to the Western Front. So what about the Gallipoli Campaign? Did British countrymen find any comfort or inspiration in those arid Turkish dunes? Or were the landscape and wildlife just too different from home?
As it happens I have recently been reading the letters of another Trinity College graduate who fell at Gallipoli – the brilliant young physicist Henry Moseley, who was born in the year that George Calderon came up to Oxford. (See J.L. Heilbron’s excellent biography, H.G.J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist 1887-1915 (University of California Press, 1974).). Harry, as his family called him, was very keen on the natural world, and gives a flavour of the plants, birds, and animals that George might have encountered. He arrived on the Gallipoli peninsula in early July, 1915, and in his first letter home noted that the ‘centipedes 8 inches long and very fat look terrifying’. Stationed on the coast, he admired ‘a gorgeous blue and red heron’, but informed his mother there were ‘no flowers left here except a few purple cistus and various heath like shrubs’. Moving inland, there were ‘large land tortoises… The birds are very interesting, lots of them, nearly all strange except nightjar and plentiful turtle dove.’ His attempt to introduce a pet to the mess was a failure – ‘the local tortoise is a very brisk walker.’ The men soon started collecting specimens for their lieutenant’s inspection – ‘a land crab…insisted on departing before my arrival… So did a large hedgehog brought in by one of my linemen. Then there are frogs that sing all night, mantises that v. seldom pray and grasshoppers innumerable. If I was not rather busy I could spend all my time examining the local fauna… The sage and thyme and many other herbs smell delicious.’ Henry Moseley’s last surviving letter was dated 4 August, and the only wildlife mentioned is flies. He was killed by a sniper at Chanuk Bair on 10 August 1915.
Dear Clare,
It never crossed my mind that Moseley too was an amateur naturalist! Many, many thanks for telling us. It bears out Lewis-Stempel’s observation that birdwatching was the most popular hobby of officers in WW1. And the detail in Moseley’s letters is fascinating; some of it, e.g. the herbs, echoes George’s own references in letters to Kittie, and this is actually the first time I’ve seen tortoises described at Gallipoli. My grandfather told me he had seen them run over by armoured cars there and then get up and walk away, but I was beginning to wonder whether he meant Mesopotamia.
I should have said that, although Lewis-Stempel’s book concentrates on the Western Front, there is full coverage of the others too. For Gallipoli, there are references to flowers, birds, flies of course, and there’s a particularly full record of butterflies by Private Denis Buxton. But the point is made that the wildlife was rapidly being depleted in the bridgehead. To answer your question, I am sure British countrymen found comfort amongst those Turkish dunes, principally from the scents of herbs that were brushed and crushed, some exotic birds and butterflies, and the sheer beauty of the landscape with bright blue sea to left and right and usually a ‘cerulean’ sky above. In his letter to Kittie that I quoted in my post on 30 May 2015, George wrote that he’d just experienced ‘one of the most beautiful nights I ever saw: a full moon shining on the waters to right and left of us; a clear starry sky; a landscape of hills and woods and distances like an early Victorian steel engraving’.
As ever, though, you are spot on with your question about how much of an urbanite and how much a countryman George was. He was born a Londoner, of course, and in many ways was a Londoner through and through (he only moved out to Eastcote — then ‘the country’ — when his father died, the family had to vacate Burlington House, and he could not afford to take digs in Town). But he and Kittie greatly enjoyed staying in the country for long periods, and George made cross-country treks in England, alone or with male friends, that lasted several days and involved sleeping rough. It’s difficult to think he didn’t do bird-watching and nature-watching at the same time, especially as he was a friend of the Chris Packham of the day, Hampstead naturalist W.H. Hudson. But I think that, as so often with polymath George Calderon, what it came down to was knowledge. He had to know the correct names of birds, flowers, butterflies etc, but he wasn’t passionately interested in them. (He was arachnophobic and big-furry-mothophobic, by the way, and on Gallipoli particularly revolted by the giant centipedes.) Thus he could savage a spectacularly incompetent English translation of Korolenko for mistaking sedge warblers for ‘sparrows’ and aspens for ‘mountain ashes’, because he knew precisely what species the Russian words referred to, but on Gallipoli he had to inform Kittie that the bird he’d told her was a corncrake calling was actually a nightjar… The calls of these birds are fundamentally different, so this suggests that his knowledge wasn’t, perhaps, entirely ‘hands on’.
This was a lovely Comment. Thanks again! Can anyone else out there contribute snippets of grand-/great-grandparents’ memories about wildlife, equines and pets in WW1?
Patrick