Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and their Animals in the Great War by van Emden Richard

Author:van Emden, Richard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2010-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Lt G.P.A. Fildes, 2nd Coldstream Guards

A glance in any direction revealed merely a fresh vista of devastation. Here and there, patches of colour claimed attention by reason of their rarity. On all sides undulated a monotonous expanse, in places relieved only by yellow patches of high explosive.

But it is not by its awful sordidness alone that a visitor remembers Bernafay [Wood]. The mind was assailed to an equal degree by what the wood hid but did not obliterate. Our burial parties had already done their work, but it called for no effort of imagination for one to realise what the tumbled ground contained. Death encumbered the grisly spot: Nature above, slaughtered Man beneath.

Stumbling onward, I presently came to a halt. Nearby, a skinny hand and arm protruding from a mound of mud seemed outstretched in silent pleading, as if dumbly beseeching the prayers of the passer-by. Gazing in meditation on this relic, one beheld an answer given. There, hovering on the grave, lustrous in the golden sunlight, flitted a fellow pilgrim to this shrine of Valour – a snow-white butterfly.

Capt. Charles McKerrow, RAMC attd. 10th Northumberland Fusiliers

The battle rages, but I have found another Hun Aid Post and dwell undisturbed beneath many tons of chalk. I regard this Aid Post as my very own as I was there first and had to clean it out. The chief amusement was the removal of a very dead Hun in a waterproof sheet. He was of a piebald hue and dropped maggots wherever he was carried. He would insist in sliding out of the sheet, and the scooping of him back was not only difficult but at times impossible. It was not the whole of him at all when we got him outside.

Lt Lawrence Gameson, 45th Field Ambulance, RAMC

On a preliminary investigation in the dim light I could see only his field boots. I had come without my torch. Subsequently, on looking closer, I found that his flesh was moving with maggots. More precisely, I noticed that portions of his uniform were heaving up and down at points where they touched the seething mass below. The smell was pretty awful. None of the men would touch him, although troops as a rule are not noticeably fastidious. The job was unanimously voted to me, because it’s supposed, quite wrongly, that doctors don’t mind.

I went down the stairway with a length of telephone wire and lashed it round the poor fellow’s feet. We hauled him up and dragged him away for some distance. The corpse left behind it a trail of wriggling sightless maggots, which recalled the trail in a paper chase. Having moulded a shell-hole as a grave, we erected a board at the man’s head, ‘An unknown German Soldier’, with date of burial.

Lt G.P.A. Fildes, 2nd Coldstream Guards

The day of our relief had dawned in auspicious fashion, a common knowledge of our impending rest calling forth a general light-heartedness. A company from a battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment was expected to make its appearance about 2 p.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.