Birds on the Western Front

I'm recording this episode over the weekend of the Big Garden Bird Watch projects organised each year by the RSPB to get the people of the United Kingdom to record what birds they see in their garden And this important report, crowdsourced information from people right across Britain, enables the RSPB to look at the bird population, to look at changes in that population, and to see what species are in danger.

For ordinary people, it's a good way to connect with nature, to connect with the wider natural world around them, and help produce information that is vital to our understanding of the bird's Birds on the Western Front Kind of did the same. And this is something that we see recorded in letters and memoirs and newspaper accounts and veterans accounts as well.

But before we get to what that really means, Birds on the Western Front, listening to this podcast and perhaps following me on Twitter you'll know about my own deep connection to birds in the wider natural world and for me that began when I was 10.

I'd always kind of grown up in the countryside although I lived on a council estate it was on the edge of a new town and surrounding us were fields and forests where I spent a lot of time as a child and walking that ground with my mum who'd grown up in the Essex countryside and And she and my grandmother gave me a deep, deep connection and understanding and love of the wider natural world.

around us and when I was 10 we were on holiday in Wales and I got for my 10th birthday a proper pair of binoculars and a fantastic book of British birds which I still have on the shelf beside me as I record this tucked in there a few feathers that were picked up in different places over the years and I suppose it really stemmed from there and I had an aunt and uncle who were managers at an Essex bird reserve and I used to go and see them and go out to the reserve and go in a bird hide and watch

the birds from there and I think really that young version of me imbued in me was this connection to birds something that stays with me to this day and will stay with me always I suspect and when I think about my time growing up in Sussex this marvelous chalk landscape full of bird life full of wildlife I And as a child and a young man, as a student, I walked probably almost every square inch of the South Downs.

So when I began to visit the battlefields of the Great War, I obviously saw them from the perspective of their history, but I couldn't ignore that other part of me that also looked around and looked at the birds.

And When I lived on the battlefields I suppose that was probably an even more intense connection to it because I saw the seasons change on the Somme and on the wider landscape of the Western Front and each year I would mark the arrival of the Swifts and the Swallows and then see their departure in late summer as the autumn approached and of course for Most of the year, as I walked the lanes of the Somme, as I wrote my books about walking that ground, above me, almost ever above me, was the

Skylark, which is why we use the Song of the Skylark in this podcast so much. And then... I realised as well, living there on those battlefields in northern France, that the bird life was in itself different to Britain. I saw species of birds that I'd never seen in Britain. The golden oriole in Thiepval Wood, this amazing bird with its golden colour sitting in the trees there.

I never knew it even existed until I saw it sitting on a tree above those crumbling trench lines where the Battle of the Somme had begun on the 1st of July 1916. But so what, you might say. Birds are around us all the time, no matter where we go.

But what I realised from the moment I began to visit and then research the battlefields of the Great War, that it wasn't just me in the new world seeing those birds, that in that old world of the Great War, the men who had served in the trenches of the Western Front, they saw them too. And they recorded them, they wrote about them, they sketched them, they mentioned them in letters home.

And during that period when I interviewed veterans in the late 80s and 90s, quite a few of them were bird enthusiasts like me. Malcolm Vivian was typical of that kind of middle-class generation, obsessed with the countryside, obsessed with what later writers would call deep England. And He saw things differently as well. This was I think The Great War generation, a generation much more connected to the landscape and to nature in a way that we aren't now.

I mean, there's an increasing interest in that, which we see through social media, with Spring Watch and Winter Watch on British television and so many other things. And there's a fascination and organisations like the RSPB, they are on the rise and that can only be a good thing.

But I think that generation of the Great War, they were much more directly connected to it because they lived in the environment and the landscape in a way that perhaps we don't now and perhaps notice these things more now. And I think what this element of our great war understanding does, it doesn't shed light on the history or the tactics or the weapons. It's all part, it's intertwined in my view, in the human experience of war.

Because amongst all that shelling, amongst all that destruction and amongst all that killing, men could die. be human and look to the wider natural world around them and still be moved by it. And I think it helps us see those battlefields beyond just the history. If we're interested in the landscape of the Western Front, its wartime landscape, its post-war landscape and its modern landscape as we see today, surely the birds are just as much a part of that.

And I think it links, if not echoes really, the experience of those men who were there on that landscape more than a century ago. But how to discover more about what men saw and how they experienced bird life on the Western Front, on the battlefields around them, memoirs are a good way of doing this. I often say on this podcast, you can never read enough memoirs.

There are so many classic memoirs of the Great War, many of them long out of print, but not difficult to find on book lists from people like Tom Donovan, or on eBay, or on eBooks.

Search out those older volumes, read those 20s and 30s accounts, and there is a resurgence of publication of memoirs in the 70s, and they're And in all of those, really, you find reference to the natural world, the soldiers' view of the natural world that they saw during their army experiences, whether that was behind the lines when they were out on the rest or whether it was in the trenches. And there have been some recent publications on this as well.

John Lewis Stemple, a farmer, a writer, historian, written several books on the Great War, published a book about the soldiers' connection to nature called Where Poppies Blow. And a recent book by Nicholas Milton is called The Role of Birds in World War I, and we'll mention those again. But there was an immediate post-war book on this subject of birds and the Great War called Birds in the War by Hugh Gladstone. Hugh Stuart Gladstone was born in 1877.

He was a Scottish ornithologist, a veteran of the Boer War and who served again with his regiment, the King's Own Scottish Borderers, on the Western Front in the Great War and was mentioned in dispatches. I tried to find out a little bit more about his military service but he never claimed his medals. A lot of officers did not do that after the war.

But what he did do when he came back from the conflict, he published this book in 1919, bringing together his own notes on ornithology on the battlefields, and the notes of others and things he'd seen in accounts and newspapers, and he produced... an ornithologist's role of honour at the back of the book, listing those who were forthright in the school of ornithology, the study of ornithology, who had died in the Great War. And it's a kind of starting point.

And I've been after this book for a very long time. It's quite a rare title. I suspect that it probably wasn't a bestseller in 1919. And finally, thanks to Tom Donovan, that great purveyor of military books, I was able to get a copy. And I've based a big chunk of this podcast on what Gladstone puts in his book. And his love of birds did not just stop with the war, did not stop with the publication of that book.

In 1920, he was appointed chairman of the Wild Birds Advisory Committee and later he helped formed the British Trust for Ornithology, which is still going to this day. You'll find them on Twitter. So that's kind of our starting point, something a bit different with this podcast, beginning with my own interest and connection to the natural world, but also referencing the men who were there and their own connection and the studies that have been done since.

And what we're going to do is... look at birds in world war one because men didn't just look at birds watch them birds were a part of the war we'll look at that we'll look at birds on the battlefields so what the men saw from the trenches or from observation posts or when they were behind the lines and what i want to do is kind of bring that all together on the landscape of the western front as it is today by visiting a place that i think brings together the strands of this subject into one

place In looking at birds connected to the First World War, the most obvious one to begin with is the pigeon. Now, of course, as soon as I say pigeon and First World War, most people will be thinking of Blackadder, Speckled Jim and the Flanders pigeon murderer. Now, that's great comedy. But it's not an historical documentary, Blackadder. But what it does do, of course, is highlight the fact that pigeons were used as a mode of communication in the Great War.

So what's the real history of pigeons in World War I? Pigeons were a very important part of signals. on the battlefields of the Great War signals communication, the ability to communicate between different units, different groups of troops and headquarters and the battlefield itself and vice versa. Because this was an era of a modern war advancement in technology but lacking in radio technology. They couldn't just get on the blower and get on a radio and speak to HQ miles behind the lines.

It relied very heavily on fixed communications so telephone lines laid in the trenches which of course could be broken by shell fire damaged by soldiers snagging themselves on it pulling the wires off the side of the trench all of which happened it relied on signalers with signaling equipment whether that was lucas lamps flashing back to locations to morse messages back to headquarters back to relay posts or whether they use flags or other types of signaling equipment And pigeons were a part of

that signals chain, if you like, the ability to communicate. Runners were also another aspect of this, to deliver messages. So these were all the ways in which a battlefield soldier or battlefield commander could talk to his own troops and men on the ground could talk back to headquarters to deliver the intelligence that was needed to make decisions about what was happening on the ground.

It's, of course, antiquated, and this was one of the great problems of the First World War, a modern war fought in the 20th century with cutting-edge 20th century technology, but operated with what was essentially 19th century or before communications. And this is something that we always really have to take into consideration when thinking about the Great War.

and the use of pigeons to fly from a battlefield location with a message pod on their leg with a message inside that would then fly back to a loft and then be delivered to a headquarters. That was one way of conveying intelligence from the battlefield And when you begin to study the Great War and you look in the war diaries of units that took part in the battles on the Western Front, for example, you'll find a lot of examples of this.

A few years ago when we were making a documentary about the Battle of the Anques, the end of the Battle of the Somme for Channel 4 for the Somme centenary, we looked at the story of Tank 544, which was a tank used in the operations at Saint-Pierre-d'Ivion on the 13th of November 1916 that came down past Thiepval Wood and assisted the infantry in the advance on St Pierre village and then got stuck in a German second line position and was surrounded by the Germans and we discovered that the crew

had pigeons on board which again was standard practice for tank crews to have pigeons to relay messages from the tank and they sent a pigeon back to headquarters with a message that they were surrounded and they needed assistance and this pigeon message was recorded in the divisional war diaries and gave the information that was relayed from the tank which resulted in the headquarters sending forward men from the Sherwood Foresters, the Knots and Derby Regiment to go and relieve the tank and

take away some of the pressure of these German attacks that were surrounding the tank threatening to overrun it. So you come across this kind of thing quite frequently in the contemporary archives, the messages and the war diaries and the battle reports of the First World War, moments in time, moments in the war in which the flight of a pigeon had a great effect on the outcome of an action on the ground. By November 1918 there were over 100,000 pigeons in service with the British Army.

Now many thousands of course had served on top of that in the previous years of the Great War and And their importance in the early stage of the conflict, when it became static and it was no longer a mobile war, it was the war of the trenches along the Western Front, it resulted in the formation of the Carrier Pigeon Service in the British Expeditionary Force in those first few months of the static part of the conflict. And this was formed by an officer called Alec Wally.

He was an intelligence officer who had an interest in pigeons and he recruited men who were familiar and understood pigeons to work with them on the battlefield and train others to do the same. And by the end of the war his unit alone had trained over 90,000 soldiers to care for and fly pigeons on the battlefields of France and Flanders. And by that final phase of the Great War, they were operating lofts where the pigeons were with as many as 20,000 birds in them.

So it gives you an idea of the amount of pigeons that were being used and this network of communications that the pigeons had built up on those battlefields as the war went on. And in the static nature of the Western Front, pigeons particularly were useful under those conditions because they were being sent from fixed points, frontline trenches, Positions captured from the enemy back to another fixed point behind the lines. So it worked very well.

The pigeon lofts that were set up and operated by the pigeon service included mobile ones that could be moved around when fronts moved forward. They were set up behind the lines, so they're not actually on the battlefields themselves because then they would be under shell fire and gas and everything else, and the pigeons could be killed under those circumstances and that vital intelligence link lost. So they were a little bit away from the front.

So in 1915, for example, there were large pigeon lofts that placed like Balliol and Bethune. Now these were two towns that were then crucial points behind the British line. In 1915 Popperingham was still run by the French so lofts were not established there. Probably French ones were but not British ones.

The British set theirs up at Balliol which was the main conduit town into the battlefields south of Ypres where the British line was at that point and down in northern France Bethune acted as the same sort of conduit to the front line there so there were pigeon lofts in that location.

And how it operated is that the men on the ground would dispatch a pigeon with its little pod attached with a message inside, and it would fly back to this fixed point, back to the loft at Balliol, let's say, or Bethune, wherever it was. And there, they would receive it, they would take the message out, and they would have Donars, dispatch riders. Donar was the army nickname for dispatch riders. It was the phonetic alphabet they used for signalling.

D was Don, I And the initials of Dispatch Riders DR was Donar, that's how the name came about. So when the message was received by Pigeon, those at the loft would hand that message to a dispatch rider, a member of the Royal Engineers Dispatch Riding Team, and they would get on their motorbike and then take that to headquarters and the message would then be delivered to those who needed to know what was in it.

And when you look at the huge number of birds that were being used and the frequency of use, what you begin to understand really is that the pigeons really were the email of the First World War. The rapidity in the way that messages could be delivered was an important part of this and it enabled a rapid flow of intelligence from the battlefields to headquarters.

For example, just to give one example, there is a record of a pigeon being used at the Hohenzollern Redoubts during the fighting there in 1915. The pigeon was dispatched from the battlefield at 10 past 12. The times were noted in the messages that were sent, and it arrived at the loft behind the lines nearer to Bethune at 12.35. So that's 25 minutes between leaving the battlefield and arriving at the loft, being handed to a dispatch rider, and then going off to headquarters.

So it was pretty... quick now obviously if there was a direct telephone line between that point on the battlefields and a relay point back in the British trenches and then from there to brigade to division and whatever beyond that's another way but the conditions on the battlefield often meant that those fixed lines of communication were broken signalers got killed trying to use their Lucas lamps trying to use their flags to deliver messages in open exposed positions on the battlefields and

runners as we We saw from the film 1917 dispatched out to deliver messages could be killed or wounded en route. The birds got there pretty quickly and it meant that there was that rapid flow of intelligence which was vitally important in those battles. It didn't make up for the fact that radio communication would have been so much better but radio did not exist and these were the methods that had to be employed in those battles of more than a century ago.

And records for one pigeon loft at Popperinger when that was an important town behind the British line in Flanders and this dates from 1916 during that long period of static trench warfare at Ypres. It shows just how efficient the pigeon service was. It records and they kept records of this obviously to show how efficient it was. It shows that 39% of the birds brought in their messages from the battlefield within 15 minutes.

Now if you think at that time the front line ran from Bozinger in that kind of curved line across to Hoogh on the Menin Road and swung round from there via Observatory Ridge, Hill 60 and down to St Ellawar and that Popperinger was about a dozen or so miles where the lofts were behind the lines the pigeons could get from one of those battlefield positions back to the loft at Popperinger in a quarter of an hour.

Now that's pretty incredible, and when you look at the losses in birds, and of course there was shell fire going off, shrapnel, machine guns, gas, the records for that loft show that only 2% of the birds went missing, never returned. So the casualties actually were pretty low.

So what's clear then is that the British use of pigeons as a means of communication, we can laugh at it through Blackadder, but it was an incredibly effective method of delivering information from the battlefield back to the rear echelon, back to headquarters. But the British, of course, were not the only ones that used it. The French had a pigeon service.

I recently picked up a really nice photograph of French mobile pigeon lofts showing the men caring for the birds in a position behind the front, somewhere, I think, on the Champagne sector of the Western Front. But one of the most famous photographs Examples of a pigeon being used as a bird to deliver a message during a battle was at Verdun in June of 1916 at Fort Vaux.

As Fort Vaux was about to fall, completely surrounded, running out of ammunition with no water for the troops and the men inside in a desperate condition, Commandant Reynal, the commander of Fort Vaux, made the decision that all he could do for his men was to surrender. And he sent a final message from the fort attached to the pigeon called Valiant. Yes, they gave the pigeons names. It's a very human thing to do.

And sometimes in some of the contemporary records, you see lists of the birds with the different names that they had. A fascinating study in its own right. But Pigeon Valiant flew with this message from Commandant Raynaud from Fort Vaux across the battlefields, through the smoke, through the gas, through the shell fire, got back to the lofts in the Verdun sector, in the city itself, close to headquarters, delivered its message and, to quote, stupefied by gas, it died at the dove cot.

But the message that Fort Vaux had fallen was delivered. And when you go to Fort Vaux now, on the outer walls of the fort, there is a big memorial to the pigeon valiant and to this episode. And inside is a stuffed pigeon. I'm never so sure it's the original valiant, but who knows. And it's an interesting thing to do.

I visited the fort with a German friend of mine, Alex, some years ago, who felt quite irate that given what had unfolded at Fort Vaux with the terrible casualties amongst the French and the terrible casualties amongst the Germans trying to capture the forts, there at the centrepiece of a memorial to the events there of 1916 was a memorial to a pigeon, something that he couldn't really understand. But Again, it shows the importance of communication.

There at the fort, all of the fixed lines of communication were broken. Conditions on the battlefield meant that they couldn't signal from the fort with their own lamps or flags back to any friendly forces and that the pigeon was the only way to communicate what was happening on that part of the battlefield. The Germans used pigeons too.

They had a German pigeon school at Spandau in Berlin, which I came across by accident some years ago when I was there on a battlefield recce with some of my fellow ledger battlefield guides. And we could see this stone with these bronze pigeons on. We had a look at it. and it's a memorial that commemorates more than 120,000 pigeons that were used by the German armed forces who had died in the Great War.

It's called the Brief Tauben Denkmal and it was originally unveiled in 1939, melted down in 1942, presumably the bronze was required for other things for the Nazi war effort, and then it was rebuilt in 1963. It was on the place where a pigeon school had been established within the German armed forces as early as 1901. And when we were there, we went for a coffee in a nice looking little cafe directly opposite in this old building.

And in that part of Spandau, because of the Second World War and the bombing and the fighting and everything else, there's not a lot of older buildings, but this one was obviously of some age. And when we went in there, it's not only a nice little restaurant and cafe, it was the building used as the school of the pigeon service that was set up there.

And there were illustrations and photographs inside showing the building used as a pigeon loft and a place where they train pigeons to be used on the battlefield. So if you're in that part of Spandau, worth having a look at that. So the Germans used pigeons in the same way that the British and the French did, and later with the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force, they used them in exactly the same way as well.

But with the Germans, they went on to develop gas-proof pigeon lofts, and one account I was reading said that they, by 1918, even camouflaged pigeons by painting them. Extraordinary. And to get an idea how pigeons could make an impact on the battlefield, we've got two quotes from men who were there describing their experience of pigeons and using them as messengers. Captain A.L.

Binfield, during the Third Battle of Ypres, wrote, It was observed that the enemy were assembling for a counter-attack, and as a last resource, our last pigeon was sent up asking for artillery barrage to be put down. To our dismay, the pigeon disappeared over the German lines, but, in spite of this, the barrage came down in 14 minutes after the release of the pigeon, as a direct result of the message we sent.

The German counter-attack was launched, but failed to reach the shell holes we were holding. A very fortunate matter for us, as small arms ammunition and Lewis gun ammunition was practically exhausted. So that quote from Binfield shows that the release of a bird with a message calling for help and seeing it disappear over the German lines and thinking that's the last they'll ever see of it and our fate is sealed.

In fact it got back to its loft, delivered the message and it was reacted upon so quickly that in less than a quarter of an hour that supportive fire from the artillery came down and saved their position. Colonel A.F. Thompson also during the 3rd Battle of Ypres wrote In October 1917 the forward area was a sea of liquid mud and pigeons in their journey up to company headquarters were apt to get so plastered with mud that they were unable to fly when released.

One day a pigeon that had been dispatched from the front line of shell holes with a test message failed to put in an appearance at the core loft and all units in the area were asked to report whether the pigeon in question had been found. A succession of nil returns was at last broken by definitive news from a battalion headquarters which reported as follows Pigeon number X101 passed here travelling due west, walking and going strong.

And you might think of that where it says Pigeon number X101 passed here travelling due west, walking and going strong. Was that a joke?

pigeon was walking but no when you study pigeons and the history of the use of pigeons if they can't fly because their feathers are damaged their wings are damaged or they're caked in mud they will walk instead they carry on with that homing instinct to get back to where they should be and that probably was not a joke that the pigeon was walking its way back to its loft So pigeons were not infallible, they could get killed, they could get stuck, they could be delayed, but what's clear from the

records that we have is that they were essentially a very efficient way in that static period of trench warfare to deliver messages to pass intelligence back. When the war became more mobile, obviously that became a bit trickier, and mobile lofts came into their own, that they could be brought forward and the pigeons would fly back to them. So that was addressed, but it was not as easy, I should as the static nature of those long years of trench warfare that the bulk of the First World War was.

But it wasn't just pigeons that did their bit in the Great War. Canaries did their bit too. Canaries were used by tunnellers, men from the Royal Engineer Tunnelling Companies and no doubt on the German side in their pioneer units that did the tunnelling operations on their side of the battlefield. And this was something that went back to the days of coal mining when miners would take canaries down into the coal mining tunnels and use them. What for?

Well, in underground tunnel systems, whether that's coal mines or tunnels dug under the battlefields of the Great War, carbon monoxide builds up very quickly and is a great danger to the men working there because they can't smell it and it can potentially kill them. So small animals like mice, for example, but also canaries were used because they were susceptible to carbon monoxide fumes.

And if the tunnellers or the miners saw a canary in its cage suddenly fall off its perch dead, they knew that there was carbon monoxide and it was time-consuming. to get out. And it was said, in fact, and I remember reading this some years ago, that the life of a tunneler in the Great War was dependent on the length of a canary's claws.

They had to clip the claws very short on a canary so that it didn't grip the perch in rigor mortis and therefore didn't fall off the perch, because if it was dead, stuck to the perch, it would be no indicator that it was carbon monoxide. So the claws had to be kept short so that the canary would topple off and the men working beneath the battlefield would know that carbon monoxide was their greatest danger, not the enemy tunnellers around them. But canaries were birds. just like pigeons.

They gave them names. The men loved them. They're very attractive birds, canaries, and kept in a little cage. What happened, and when you read the accounts of tunnelling officers, they refer to the fact that the men became greatly attached to the canaries and didn't want to take them down into the tunnels in case the carbon monoxide killed them. So they would leave them up top in the trenches or in the dugouts and they wouldn't bring them down.

And in some units there were casualties as a consequence of this. But it's certainly an interesting aspect of the use of birds on the battlefield in the Great War and something that was recorded, memorialised in two places. At the Scottish National War Memorial, as part of the carvings on that, there is an image of a canary in a cage and also at the Peace Tower in Ottawa. And these little birds were often referred to as the tunneller's friend.

And finally, it's not just birds that serve, but birds provided food. Obviously, as with Speckled Jim, yes, we could shoot a pigeon down and you'd have a decent meal. I don't think that that happened very often because men realise the importance of pigeons And although, as we've discussed in a previous podcast, Tommy Tucker could be pretty boring and monotonous, it was pretty continuous, so you weren't always short of something, even if it was only tins of MMV, meat and veg, or bully beef.

Anyway, we'll put myths aside. What we mean by food from birds, of course, is eggs. Eggs in the trenches? No. I don't think delivering eggs in a little basket to the trenches with shellfire and Minnenwerfers and everything else coming down, I don't think that was a practical or sustainable food solution. What we mean is eggs given to soldiers behind the lines.

So for example by 1919 it's recorded that 41 million eggs valued at more than £430,000 in old money had been distributed to soldiers at base hospitals in France to aid in their recovery from all kinds of injuries. And the kind of eggs that were sent to the base hospitals were not just eggs from chickens But they were eggs from gulls, from coots, from mallards and even puffins.

And of course the harvesting of these eggs from other birds aside from chickens had a great effect on bird life, on the breeding of birds. and of the development of bird colonies in the areas from where the eggs were taken. And in that respect it links us into the next part of the podcast where we'll look at the birds that the soldiers saw on the battlefields of the Western Front and how the war affected them.

We've seen how birds contributed to the war effort and of course that's an important part of our understanding of the history of the Great War. But did it really matter what bird soldiers saw on the battlefields of the Western Front? This is a subject really not about the history of it, it's about the landscape and the connection to the landscape.

A connection we feel when we visit that landscape today and which the men who were there more than a century ago, they felt a connection to it as well, in all kinds of different ways. Those who survived and came home never forgot the places where they fought, would often focus on a place that had particular meaning to them, a place where they lost comrades, or where they had a particular experience, or a place that they remembered fondly as being a way out of the war.

And I think that's where the connection to birds and observing birds and noting down what birds they saw whether that's through letters or diaries or notebooks or even photographs there are photographs of soldiers holding birds magpies in particular is quite a common thing where they'd tamed magpies to become pets almost But what is clear is that this isn't just a kind of fanciful 21st century modern connection to nature, looking back to the Great War and imagining soldiers watching birds from

the trenches as some kind of great fantasy. It actually happened, and we know this from the contemporary accounts. We mentioned John Lewis Stemple's book on nature and the Great War, and in that he quotes a Scottish soldier, a former miner, who said... If it weren't for the birds, what a hell it would be. And Captain Arthur Sowerby wrote...

And there we have a clear indication of someone interested in ornithology and interested in birdwatching who was writing home to fellow birdwatchers, fellow ornithologists, and telling them what they could see and that they were able to see despite the hand of war going across that landscape. And the new book by Nicholas Milton, and we'll put details of all the books that we've mentioned onto the podcast website.

This new book, The Role of Birds in World War I by Nicholas Milton, published in conjunction with the RSPB, is a new way into this subject that looks at those like Sowerby who wrote accounts, who recorded birds, and the wider aspect of birds in the Great War. And it's a really good starting point for this subject. Glad to 1919 book being a bit more difficult to find.

What Nicholas Milton states in this new book is that he says that the generation that went to the western fronts was in his words the best bird watching army ever sent to war and what does he mean by this? Well this was especially true of British soldiers and especially, I suspect, of middle class soldiers and those who were officers. That generation felt a connection to the English, the British landscape.

And nature writing was very popular amongst that class that went on to serve in the war and in particular became officers in that early period of the Great War. And men who would be consumed by the war, like Edward Thomas, were nature writers that were beginning to become popular in their own right.

But much earlier writers, in particular the work of Richard Jeffreys, a great nature writer of the 19th century, was hugely influential on young men who went to war in 1914 Henry Williamson is a good example of this who himself eventually became a nature writer And we mentioned before how I think that that generation compared to us now had a much deeper direct connection to the landscape and nature around them and not just the middle class ones that could go off into the countryside and spot

birds and climb up trees and look in birds nests but those who were working class would have had a direct connection to the land as well it was part of the job that they did to understand the natural world and see the natural world not through rose-tinted spectacles through the reality of what their lives were but it still gave them that deep connection and understanding and I remember this from my grandmother who grew up in rural Essex in those years before the Great War and all that she

learned as a child she imparted to me as a child when we used to go out blackberrying in the Sussex lanes and she'd teach me to recognise bird call and understand why plants grew in certain and what different plants and flowers were. So I think that that connection to the landscape and the wider natural world was certainly very much a part of everyone's lives in that generation that went off to the Great War.

And I think as well that it tied into a period as the Victorian world became the Edwardian world and entered into this new Georgian period with George V. In Britain, there was a development of bird-related organisations, the Royal Ornithological Club, the RSPB, the British Ornithological Union and so many others.

And this brought together people from different groups to study birds, to understand birds and record species that were already, even then, more than a century ago, no doubt in decline for all sorts of reasons. And the war gave different parameters to this because it created a unique situation on the battlefields where the hand of war, the hand of man, had destroyed a landscape and how would that affect the birds who lived and bred and existed upon it.

And then during the war, the existence of these organisations gave the men who were interested in looking and recording birds a vehicle by which they could send this information back and it be recorded in a proper place.

And going back to Milton's statement that it was the really decent optics to be able to look at these birds because binoculars and periscopes and telescopes and other types of optics were used extensively by the British Armed Forces for example in the Great War and although officers bought their own kit and they had fancy binoculars ordinary soldiers got access to this kit if they were in specialist units like the Royal Engineers Survey Unit for example or if they were in a machine gun unit they

would have had binoculars or even if they were in the scouts and snipers section of an infantry battalion they would have had this kind of stuff. So there was access to that in a way that an ordinary working class lad who lived in the streets of Barnsley would not ever have been able to afford to go out and buy a decent pair of binoculars but here in the army part of his kit was binoculars or was periscopes and he could use these to observe the birds that he loved.

So that's an aspect of this as well I think. Now of course we're not claiming that every soldier was a birdwatcher and why were soldiers really even bothered that the birds were there or even bothered to observe and record them and I think that If you look, as we've said, the nature of trench warfare being static meant that they were in these places for a long period of time, and we tend to think that men in trenches were fighting all the time, firing their weapons, engaging the enemy.

But there were long, long periods of static trench warfare, particularly in places like Ypres, where from mid-1915 to mid-1917, the lines did not really move, and unit after unit, process through there holding the line in the different sectors of what was called the Ypres salient that bulge that went around the city of Ypres and that meant as an ordinary infantry soldier you could be what was in essentially a fairly quiet sector holding the line for long periods of time whether that was in the

front line or the support line or the reserve line or in a village behind the lines you were rotated through there and you did your period of service and some units like the 49th West Riding Division the Yorkshire Territorials they were there for nearly a year the 14th Light Division whose memorial we see on Hill 60 another good example of that they were there from early 1915 right through to early 1916 in different parts of the line around Ypres so it meant that they had protracted periods of

service in one sector got to know it and got to know it during periods where there was not heavy fighting going on so when the men were in the line they were not firing their weapons they were not engaging with the enemy but Mostly they were doing digging or manual work to keep the trenches from collapsing or repairing the trenches. And although boredom is not a word that we would associate with the First World War, during those long periods of static warfare, there was a degree of boredom.

There wasn't much going on and the soldiers had to sit there in their trenches, no matter what the weather, and get on with it. And for some, bird watching was a way to cope with that, to look for the birds around them because while the war was static, nature went about its daily business and the birds went about theirs, searching for food, searching for nesting sites.

And so I think that the soldiers' observation of this and recording of this and noticing of this was part of their own coping mechanism for this alien landscape, this alien experience that they now found themselves in. So there's that aspect to it. I think, too, it was a link to the old world. Henry Williamson, that nature writer, soldier who fought in the Great War, he called the Christmas of 1913 the last Christmas of the old world.

And I think many, once they were in the trenches of the Great War, thought back to that world before the war and fondly remembered that in all sorts of ways.

And perhaps seeing a bird in a tree, a robin on the wire, whatever it was, reminded them of something from their other life, from their childhood and that was important too and living in the open country which essentially they were with trenches is ditches carved into fields in an open landscape they couldn't really avoid nature it was around them everywhere as the seasons changed the landscape and nature around them changed too and And they watched the seasons, perhaps in a way that the town

workers had never done before, or the country boys would have done, because the seasons dictated the way in which they worked on their landscape. But for others, it was the first time in which they noticed how the seasons properly changed, and probably noticed all the facets of that that they perhaps hadn't noticed before.

And it was, I think, really as well, a way of taking your mind away from the realities of the war, of what was coming, the next offensive, the next turn in the front line, the next trench raid, the next wiring party, whatever it was. And I think it gave soldiers some kind of light relief. And although we imagine the battlefields of the Great War being this continuous roar of shells and gunfire, and of course at times it was, particularly in big battles, there were quiet periods.

Quiet periods in which, even if they didn't see birds, they could hear birds and their bird song. And the skylark, which sings above the landscape for most of the year, if not all of it, is a good example of this, a bird noticed by many soldiers who were there.

Many of those veterans that I interviewed in the 80s and 90s recalled the skylarks and said how the skylarks always took them back to the trenches of the Great War, in particular that moment on the first day of the Battle of the Somme when there was a pause in the bombardment and the noise of the barrage ended and they remembered the skylarks singing The larks sing all day here, but they are best at dawn. The larks of the morning stand too. They deserve a poem of their own.

They are wonderful after 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. They have to be experienced in much-strafed trenches, where the night is hideous to be understood.

Punctually, as we stand to at about 3 a.m., hark, and their sweet voice, in tensening with the growing light, droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. And that's Harold Rayner's rather lyrical account of the skylards singing above the trenches.

He was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the 1st of July 1916 in the attack on Mametz, when the 9th Devons moved forward from Mansell Copse, and after the action the dead were brought back for burial in what is now the Devonshire Cemetery, and he lies there amongst the others of his company and his fellow officers Duncan Martin and William Noel Hodgson, and I'm pleased to say that the Skylark still sings above that trench.

above that copse where Rayner and the others lie for all eternity. So the evidence shows us that men did observe the birds that were around them on those battlefields of the Great War, but what did they see and discover? The war didn't wipe birds out, which is something that you might think it would. With the bombardments and the machine guns and shrapnel and gas, there must have been casualties, but it didn't extinct them. the life that was there.

Birds were everywhere when we read the accounts of the soldiers who experienced that war. And it's clear that many birds thrived almost in the environment that the Western Front created. A letter from an officer in the trenches to the Times stated, When I was up in the trenches recently, I saw numerous owls. They used to flap about amongst the trenches at night. quite regardless of shells and snipers, getting a fine harvest of rats and mice with which the trenches literally swarm.

They were big brown owls. They always disappeared two hours before dawn. I never could make out where to, but I suppose to the woods behind the lines. And given the frequency of accounts that we have of bird life, and the extensiveness of that life across these battlefields. It's clear that gas and artillery didn't stop the bird life of northern and eastern France and Flanders from going about its yearly business in the same way that it would have done in the period before the war.

Nature adapted and the war itself created circumstances in which birds could thrive in a way they couldn't before the conflict. So if we think of the landscape of the Western Front, with the trenches cut across the great open fields of France, for example, farmland, which would have been tilled every year with crops planted and cattle, now there was none of that. And in between the area dug by man where the trenches were was that strip of no man's land.

And when we think of No Man's Land, perhaps we think of the crater zones of the First World War, of the endless shell holes. But in most parts of the front, it was essentially overgrown fields with a huge abundance of wild flowers and high grass. If you read the account of men walking out into No Man's Land on the Somme on the 1st of July 1916, they describe it as elephant grass, with the grass so high it reached their waist.

And of course, all of that created circumstances which birds had not perhaps seen before this was wilding as it's now called on a big scale 450 miles of the western front 450 miles of no man's land which was just left to overgrow with wild plants and insects and everything else and despite the gas despite the explosions that survived and the birds had food and ground nesting birds had places to breed and have their nest. No man's land perhaps contributed to bird life during the Great War.

And if we think of the villages behind the lines which became depopulated because of the war, civilians moved back, only the army in place and buildings abandoned, that too created circumstances in which birds could nest undisturbed. And many species no doubt utilised that and flourished as a consequence of those circumstances.

Many soldiers' letters, for example, talk about seeing far more sparrows in the villages and on the landscape that they saw in northern France compared to what they'd seen back home, something that resonates today in the way that sparrows as a species here in Britain has almost been under threat in recent years.

And while we have these scattered reports in newspapers and the journals of bird organisations at the time, kind of all of this is brought together for us in that 1919 book by Hugh Gladstone. And he describes what most soldiers probably thought when they first entered the war zone. If they loved birds and expected perhaps to see birds or not see birds, he has this description of going in to weep.

It was the birds, writes an eyewitness who was at Ypres in the summer of 1918, that gave one the greatest surprise. Probably Ypres has been more shelled than any other place, particularly as regards gas shells. It was inconceivable that any animal capable of leaving such an apparently inhospitable and dangerous neighbourhood should remain, especially as the night was worse than the day, for then our guns added to the tremendous racket.

But yet that observer found birds everywhere he went, in and around Ypres, carrying on regardless of the guns, regardless of the conditions. Another observer noticed that And another observer noted that Great tits, doubtless of the continental species, could be seen exploring the broken tree stumps, which were the only indication of the sight of Thiepval wood, in spite of 77mm shells which were bursting nearby.

And we heard about skylarks from Rainer, but another observer noticed that skylarks could be heard singing on the Somme, well in advance of the large guns whenever there was a lull in the almost incessant fire and they might often be seen soaring to heaven's gate when aeroplanes above were being vigorously shelled by anti-aircraft guns.

And Gladstone noted that the call of the cuckoo so reminiscent of the promise of spring was eagerly awaited by our fighting men and on the Somme its familiar note was heard whenever the almost incessant gunfire died down. cuckoos were seen within 300 yards of the first line trenches. And all of that really, all of what those observers saw during the war is what links us to what they saw and what we can see today.

If I think just back to last year as travel on the old battlefields became easier and easier and I was over there more often, I heard my first skylarks above the vast open fields on the Loos battlefields in northern France singing high above the battlefield cemeteries there and the place where the men went into action in 1915.

I witnessed my first swifts arrive last May and then saw my final ones dart across the fields close to the Thiepval memorial to the missing on that high point on the Somme and then In the trenches of the Newfoundland Park, where the crumbling remains of that troglodyte world of the Western Front sits grassed over with trees surrounding it, I stood there on a warm day and heard the call of the cuckoo.

All of this now, all of this happening in our lives, but echoes of what they saw too, more than a century ago. And because of that, I think, It feels as if that distance of time between us now and them in the landscape of the Great War is but a heartbeat. And when we listen to these birds and notice them, just as they notice them, there is a connection there. And if it's something you've never thought about yourself, perhaps this podcast will inspire you to do so next time you're there.

But let's end with a place that somehow brings all this together. We're ending our journey on the Somme in the village of Varennes, behind what was the front lines of 1916. This was a village where British soldiers were billeted, where there were medical facilities to receive the wounded, ammunition stockpiles and gun positions.

And in the early years when the British first took over this sector, French civilians still living in the houses and running the estaminets, the places where soldiers could find food and drink. The village really, despite the hand of war, it was touched particularly by bombardments in 1918. It wasn't destroyed in the same way that other Somme villages were. So there's a lot of original buildings that were here at the time of the Great War.

And when we walk past those old houses and we see the vast barns where soldiers slept and where birds made their nests, we begin to see this connection. to the birdlife, to the birds on the Western Front that the soldiers saw when they were here. Walking out the village along a track that takes us out into the open fields, we see sparrows in the hedgerow. We come down to the communal cemetery. No doubt if you walk down here at dusk, your chances of seeing an owl was pretty high.

I've seen more owls on the Somme than almost any other place I've ever lived because of the dilapidated barns and buildings where they can nest, no doubt. But as we come through the fields and past the communal cemetery, we come to a bank. Above us, no doubt, will be the Skylarks. And on that bank, we begin to see the white splash of stone of the headstones of a British military cemetery. This is Varennes Military Cemetery.

with over 1,200 burials, particularly from 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. This was a place where soldiers were brought back wounded from the front line and died in casualty clearing stations and were buried in this cemetery. There are many interesting graves here, from senior officers to Russian staff officers. Those are tales for another day, but it's not them that we've come to see. were walking up the steps into the cemetery and over to a plot on the far side to a single grave.

A single grave in a row of graves of men who died at the tail end, the fag end they would have called it, of the Battle of the Somme. Private Edward Arnold Frederick Allen, 10th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, died of wounds on 21st November 1916, aged 22. When we open the cemetery register, it says he was born in China, the son of Edward Lancelot and Blanche Adelaide Allen of Narbertha, Pembrokeshire.

And when we look below the cross engraved on his headstone, we see a personal inscription chosen by the family, and that inscription reads, Behold the birds of the air. Behold the birds of the air. And from that we see this is a man connected to those birds of the Western Front that we've spoken about in this podcast. But who was he? I wish we knew more about Edward Allen.

He was born, as we've said, in China, and that was because his father was vice-consul in Southeast China before the Great War. By 1901, the family had returned to Wales, to Tenby.

It was a middle-class Edwardian upbringing in a rural location that gave the young Edward no doubt chance to go off and explore that landscape, that coastal landscape, observe the gulls, record the birds he found in the hedgerows, develop a love of birds, which undoubtedly he had because the little we know of him is that he went to Beadle School after his mother died, aged only 46 in 1907.

He arrived there in the autumn term of that year, and although there's not much in the school records about him, it does record that he was given awards for photographing and writing about birds. And we can only a bit speculate here, but given the inscription on his grave and given the records that show he had a connection to birds... What would he have gone on to do beyond the war? Would he have become one of Britain's greatest ornithological experts?

Would he have been the author of many books? Would he, like Gladstone, have written his own books about birds on the Western Front? He'd left school in 1912 and became a bank clerk in Cardiff, and again I can speculate that that job that gave him money and security, also probably at weekends, enabled him to get out into the countryside and walk and observe and record and photograph and do all the things that he loved.

And when war came in 1914, he joined, because of his public school background, the Public Schools Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers in November 1914 and then was transferred to the 10th Battalion and served with them in northern France and on the Somme and was mortally wounded in the fighting for Munich and Frankfurt Trench in November 1916 near to the village of Beaumont Hamel, dying of his wounds here at Varennes a few days later.

We've only a snapshot of Edward Allen, a snapshot of his love and connection to birds, but even more of an indication of what that meant to him is found in a unique memorial close to his grave. The Imperial War Graves Commission says did not want families building monuments on graves. They knew that the ones that had money would do this and the ones that didn't, there would be nothing. And essentially, we could say it was banned, but there were examples of memorials being built.

And here, because this cemetery is well off the tourist trail of the Somme, few have ever seen this, but close to Alan's grave is a memorial, a memorial to him, paid for and placed there, by his family. Not a statue, not a column, not denoting great triumph of will or military conquest, but a large stone bowl with his name around the rim. A bowl, a birdbath, a place for birds to drink and feed and wash, a perpetual connection to the birds he loved.

His grave overlooks the gift they gave them, a gift that I trust will be there forevermore, a place for the birds to gather, those birds who flew high above the Western Front and continue to fly above the old front line. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Front Line with me, military historian Paul Reid. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor. You can follow the podcast at oldfrontlinepod.

Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash oldfrontline or support us on BuyMeACoffee at buymeacoffee.com slash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our websites. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.