‘Funny about that bird. Made me feel quite braced up. Sort of made me think about my garden of an evening – walking round in me slippers after supper, smoking me pipe.’
Lieutenant Trotter in R.C. Sherriff ’s autobiographical play Journey’s End.
The Western Front was bloody, but it was also birdy. Probably the most common hobby amongst British officers and men in the trenches of the Great War was birdwatching. Writing to the RSPB’s magazine in 1917 Captain Arthur de Carle Sowerby noted:
‘Many of the readers of British Birds will agree with me when I say it is gratifying to find that in spite of the turmoil and stress of war, bird lovers have been able to devote part of their time, at least, to the study of bird life, even in the fighting zones.’
Birds were interesting in their own right - thus antidote to the boredom which was the soldier’s lot for 90% of the time while in the line - but also symbols of life, even spirituality. They were reminders of home too, hence the playwright R.C. Sherriff, who served with the East Surrey Regiment, putting the above words in the mouth of his character Lieutenant Trotter in Journey’s End - a celebrated, marvellous piece of theatre which is simultaneously an accurate, even documentary, and an account of trench life. The Western Front was curiously good birdwatching country. After all, an enormous corridor of it was composed of ‘No Man’s Land’. This area between the respected combatant frontlines could be as much as a mile across, and stretched from the Channel to Switzerland. As the name indicated, humans feared to tread there.
In a letter home to his wife Maude, Captain Charlie May of the Manchesters described the front in frosty March 1916:
Only birds live out there – apparently as happily as ever. A lark trills blithefully somewhere up in the heavens above even as I write, his note throbbing as though ’twould burst his throat, full of the joy of the dawning and the promise of spring.
Since for long periods of the war long stretches of the front were verdant idylls rather than shell-blasted mudlands, the barbed wire enclosed pristine meadows and cornucopian arable fields. No Man’s Land was, effectively, a bird reserve with a barbed wire perimeter. Some bird species discovered man’s barbed wire to be as beneficent as nature’s brambles in providing protective cover. Captain Walter Medlicott, born in 1879 and longer in the tooth than most wearing khaki, noted that ‘Whinchats and Common Whitethroats rejoiced in the wire entanglements and rough grass which grew long amongst them’.
The hell-scape of the Somme
Of the 106 species Medlicott ticked off in the Pas-de-Calais between March and August 1917, most of them were nesting ‘within four or five miles of our front-line trenches’. One soldier observer near Péronne counted nearly sixty different varieties within a two-mile radius. By common consent, the great avian winner of abandoned farmland was the common partridge (Perdix perdix), partly because the lack of harvest enabled undisturbed breeding, partly because the French prohibited game shooting from the first year of the war onwards.
The corncrake and the yellowhammer also thrived where and when it truly was all quiet on the Western Front. When fighting came, and destruction with it, bird numbers and species tended to reduce, but some held on. Lieutenant Christian Carver was amazed at the heron living beside him in the mire of the Somme in March 1917, adding in his letter to his brother: ‘It is the last place I would choose.’
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 never to be forgotten 1st July 1916, the bloodiest day in British military history, with its 58,000 British casualties. The correspondent for The Times informed readers that the skylarks could be heard singing during the battle ‘whenever there was a lull in the almost incessant fire’.
The song of the skylark was the soundtrack of the war on the Western Front wherever, and whenever, and its singing of matins confirmation that the dark night was over.
Lieutenant Harold Rayner of the Devonshires was eloquent in his expression of this post-nocturnal relief:
The larks sing all day here but they are best at dawn. The larks of the morning ‘stand-to’, deserve a poem of their own, they are wonderful aft er a night of doubt and terror in the trenches, they are the returning light transformed to music; they are the renewed blue trembling into song, they sing of the permanence of the joy of life, of the sweets of light and warmth, and the war-indifferent exquisiteness of Nature.
Just as the partridge benefitted from the usual tranquillity of No Man’s Land, there were absolute avian winners when battle came and devastated. The reduction by artillery of agricultural land to quagmire may have appalled soldiers and French farmers alike, yet for waders such as snipe it offered thousands of acres of new habitat. Looking out from his observation post at Arras towards the German lines 2000 yards away, Lieutenant Edward Thomas noted in his diary another bird that benefited from man’s mayhem: ‘The shelling must have slaughtered many jackdaws but have made home for many more’.
The birds were nesting in ruined buildings. During guard duty on the Somme, Private Norman Ellison once ‘counted thirty-one kestrels hovering over a large field of corn stubble all at the same time. Of course everywhere is swarming with rats and mice.’
The rats and mice thrived on the refuse of the soldiery, and the human and horse corpses consequent on battle. With some discretion, Country Life pointed out that the front’s ‘abnormal quantity of insects doubtless formed an attraction to insectivorous birds, and this was particularly noticed as regards Swallows, Martins, and Swifts’.
Despite being a mere twenty miles or so from England, the Western Front had its particular and unusual species. There were birds to amaze British birders, led by the nightingale, which in Britain was restricted in breeding range to the south and east.
On the Western Front in 1914–18 the nightingale was recorded as ‘Very common’ by soldier-birdwatcher Captain Arnold Boyd, Lancashire Fusiliers. Then there was the golden oriole, the male with his bright yellow body and black wings an almost paradisiacal spectacle. A summer visitor from Africa the golden oriole, like the nightingale, is more common in France than Britain. To the joy of Major W. Maitland Congreve stationed near Péronne, ‘Every wood of any size at all had at least one pair nesting in it and they were found occasionally in quite open spinneys’.
An Oriole
No soldier of the war who encountered a golden oriole failed to marvel at its livery. A correspondent for Country Life who signed himself ‘C.W.R.K.’ and served ‘somewhere in Flanders’ was scanning the German trenches when he heard the short liquid call of a bird, and it suddenly dawned ‘that this song was none other than that of the golden oriole – a bird that had been eagerly looked for at home, and never discovered’. To see a golden oriole was, C.W.R.K. considered, worth a risk and he crept with a press-ganged friend to the shell-blasted wood where the golden oriole was singing. Every now and then rifle bullets cracked into the trees above.
‘For a time, though, the war is forgotten.’
There were birds everywhere in the war zone, whether devastated fly-blown ruins or Elysian fields untrod by men. The regard the British soldier had for the birds of the frontline is caught in a cameo in the memoir of Lieutenant Edwin Campion Vaughan. When his platoon a of Royal Warwickshires began their trudge out of the line in 1917 they encountered a dead pigeon in the communication trench.
In silent unanimity, they gently picked up the pigeon and buried it: ‘railing his grave with little sticks and chains of sedge grass, and in his coverlet of pimpernels we erected a tiny white cross’. Neither Vaughan nor his men were overly sentimental. They were time-served soldiers.
But birds were special, and it is not difficult to discern in the Warwicks’ collective oblation the quality of gratitude. As one Scottish soldier said of service on the Western Front:
‘If it weren’t for the birds, what a hell it would be.’
He spoke for millions in khaki.
The above article is based on the chapter ‘And the Birds are Beautiful Still’ in my book Where Poppies Blow, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016