HISTORY: FERGUS MULLIGANreviews Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and their Animals in the Great WarBy Richard van Emden
Bloomsbury, 339pp. £16.99

THIS BOOK IS about first World War soldiers who tried to come to terms with the horrors they faced by befriending animals. It consists of a collection of pieces recounting their involvement with every sort of animal: horses, mules, dogs, cats, goats, pigeons and rabbits. It was better to adopt an animal with a fair chance of survival than to befriend a comrade who was likely to be killed in the next assault.

Each section opens with a year-by-year overview of the military campaign’s pendulum progress. Many pieces are beautifully written, with descriptions of the flora and fauna that somehow survived on the battlefield. Soldiers found it easier to write home about odd tranquil moments and the delights of nature than terrify loved ones with the truth about the war.

Nature is resilient, and some dogs fraternised shamelessly with the enemy, wandering across no-man’s-land to be fed by either side. One spirited black terrier in a Scots regiment was known as Satan Macpherson. Humans are resilient too. While the Battle of the Somme raged three kilometres away, a farmer calmly sowed his crops in the shaking earth, another picked vegetables and a third gathered honey.

Several hundred thousand horses and mules were pressed into military service, and usually they were as well looked after as the troops. Horses were valuable, costing £37 each – two years’ wages for a soldier. Like their minders they suffered from hunger, thirst, exhaustion and constant terror.

Some of the most moving extracts express the shame individuals felt at subjecting noble creatures to such suffering. The description of two frantic horses fleeing an artillery barrage only to impale themselves on lines of barbed wire would melt a heart of stone. A private from Liverpool wrote in 1917: “I have long since become accustomed to wounded humanity. Their plight evokes pity and the desire to help, but a wounded animal leaves me with a feeling of loathing . . . towards myself and the civilised humanity which I represent. We may understand; they never can.”

The notion that as late as 1918 the British army still launched cavalry charges against machine-gun positions would be laughable if it weren’t so desperately sad. These fine horses were an easy target for machine gunners and suffered terribly in the carnage. Yet only a quarter of all the animals were killed by enemy action; the remainder died from exposure, hunger and disease.

Other creatures were less appreciated. Lice were a scourge for every soldier and virtually impossible to eradicate. In rest periods the men would strip off their clothes and run the flame of a candle up tunic seams, to try to remove the source of the maddening itch. Rats too were everywhere and grew enormous feeding on the human detritus of battle. The soldiers hated them and shot them, bayoneted them, clubbed them and gleefully held ratting contests to kill as many as they could, but they too were impossible to eliminate.

It was usually too dangerous to bury the dead; to overcome the prevailing stench, rotting corpses were sometimes sprayed with disinfectant. One army sanitary officer (who must have been busy) deplored the practice, saying it was far better to allow rats and natural decomposition to dispose of a body, however unpleasant the notion. “If it cannot be buried, get it down to the state of bleached bones as soon as possible,” he wrote somewhat starkly.

There are repetitions in the extracts from letters and first-hand accounts, and occasionally the connection between passages appears tenuous. Likewise, the title of this book is a little odd, for most of the animals featured were not saved but forced into military service on the front line. Their great gift to the troops was that they formed a slender link with a civilisation far removed from a brutal, pointless war.

Fergus Mulligan is the author of The Trinity Year, published by Gill Macmillan, and Trinity College Dublin: A Walking Guide, published by Trinity College Library