Mark Smith

ON APRIL 7, 1917, the poet Edward Thomas woke at 6am and noted in his diary that the morning was cold and bright. He also, as he always did, noticed the birds: the larks and partridges, the sparrows and magpies. For a while, he stood and listened to the birdsong until it was interrupted by another, uglier noise: artillery fire from the other side of no man’s land.

That cold, bright morning in April 1917 was just two days before Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras and just a few months after he had written his most famous poem, Adlestrop, with those wonderful, dreaming words that would become some of the most famous in English poetry: “a blackbird sang close by, and round him, mistier, farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire”. Thomas’s war diary makes it clear that the fascination with birds never faded; birds were more important to him than books, he once said.

You might expect war to destroy that – who has time for birds when shells are falling and thousands of men are dying? But the opposite happened. Soldiers like Thomas were fascinated by the wildlife they saw on the front: the wild birds, the pet dogs and carrier pigeons, the horses, and nature and wildlife in general. In fact, the natural world became an obsession for some, a coping mechanism for others, but an absolutely unavoidable part of the war for every soldier. Nature mattered in the trenches; it uplifted and inspired; it infuriated; it helped win the war.

The writer John Lewis-Stempel started to notice all of this as he was looking at Edward Thomas’s life and work, and it has now led to a new book, Where Poppies Blow, which combines two of Lewis-Stempel’s great interests: the First Word War and nature. He has written on both subjects before, in Six Weeks, the superb 2011 work which focused on the life of the British officer at the front, and in Meadowland, his paean to an English field. But this latest book takes the two together and in so doing manages what might have seemed impossible: to find a new perspective on the Great War.

Speaking from his home in Herefordshire, where he farms livestock, Lewis-Stempel says that what really got the new book going was one particular quotation from Thomas. It is said that when the poet/soldier was asked why he wanted to go to the front and fight, he scooped up a handful of English earth and held it in front of him. “Literally for this,” he said.

“It was extraordinary,” says Lewis-Stempel. “We talk about the patriotism of that generation that went to war but I’m not sure we ever really fully get under the surface of what that patriotism is. And I thought Thomas is going to war really for King and Countryside. And then I thought, OK, so he’s a poet and it’s a thing that a poet might say but then I scratched away at it more and realised: no this was part of the mindset of so many young men who went to war in 1914-18, the idea of defending, literally, Britain’s landscape.”

As Lewis-Stempel began to explore the subject further, he discovered its many aspects. For men like Thomas, the natural world could be the reason they were fighting in the first place, but plants and animals could also provide great hope and comfort. Remarkably, no-man’s land proved an attractive place for thousands of birds to nest and the sight of them could raise men’s spirits. One unnamed Scottish soldier said, “If it weren’t for the birds, what a hell it would be”.

“It’s almost religious isn’t it?” says Lewis-Stempel. “You can see from the letters a sense of communion with nature – nature is hope and an inspiration and there’s no doubt that they get a kind of calmness even in the trench and a kind of healing from nature.”

But of course nature has its brutal side, and the soldiers’ experience of the natural world in the trenches could be horrific too. Look at the carrion-scavenging birds pecking away at the dead, or the rats eating the rations or the swarms of flies. And definitely the lice. They hid in the seams of every uniform – the enemy the British army could not destroy – and drove many men into a frenzy. And by causing trench fever, which reached epidemic proportions between 1915 and 1918, the lice seriously depleted the British war effort.

The horse was a different story and was absolutely central to the eventual success of the British army – so much so that Lewis-Stempel believes we would not have won the war without them, although the chapter on the subject in Lewis-Stempel’s book is the hardest to read. He tells how thousands of horses were forcibly removed from their owners; he describes a wounded horse trying to stand on legs that were no longer there and the stallion slowly bleeding to death and he explores how the suffering of horses on the frontline seemed to be particularly disturbing, more so even than the suffering of humans. Private Thomas Hope wrote: “I have long since become accustomed to wounded humanity … but a wounded animal leaves me with a feeling of loathing, loathing towards myself and the civilised humanity which I represent.”

The positive, if there was a positive, was that the horse proved to be a highly effective weapon against the Germans. “We think today looking back that Britain’s secret weapon, almost war-winning weapon, the paradigm shift, was the tank – well, actually, Britain’s war-winning weapon in the First World War was the mule. The Germans thought our importation of horses from North America was so important that they tried to poison the horses on the docks of New York and without them, we would have lost the war”

There were other species that were just as useful – the messenger dogs, for example, which were trained by a Scot, Lieutenant-Colonel EH Richardson; the cats that ratted in the trenches; and the carrier pigeons. But what of the question of the animals’ bravery? Lewis-Stempel tells one vivid story of a dog called Tweed who kept going through a barrage – was he brave? Lewis-Stempel believes so.

“It’s fairly general thread through modern studies of the First World War that it’s nonsense for soldiers in the trenches to have believed animals could be brave, that it’s imagined by the soldiers, and I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s possible for an advanced type of animal like a horse to be brave in ways we would understand. I wanted to point out in the book that animals, without being a mad romantic sentimentalist, did their bit too and that’s a sacrifice that also needs to be recognised.”

Lewis-Stempel believes there are other lessons to be learned by looking at the role of the natural world in the First World War. It reveals the apparent contradictions of the military man, for example – the fact that he could kill mercilessly but also show great compassion. Take Gallipoli, where Sergeant Bernard Gill witnessed a group of soldiers nursing a wounded skylark back to health; or Captain JC Dunn of the Welsh Fusiliers who avoided treading on little frogs in the trenches; Lewis-Stempel also relates in his book how a platoon of Royal Warwickshires came across a dead pigeon in a trench in 1917 and gently buried it, finishing off the grave with a tiny white cross.

But there is a more disturbing lesson to be taken from Where Poppies Blow. Many of the soldiers, he says, fought literally for King and countryside, but did they really win? Lewis-Stempel has his doubts. “In a sense they sacrificed themselves for a landscape that I’m not sure we appreciate the way they did,” he says. “I’m not sure, in our desecration of the environment today, that we are fully honouring their sacrifice.”

Where Poppies Blow, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20