Tommy's Ark: Soldiers and Their Animals in the Great War. Richard Van Emden Read Online Free PDF

so industriously made spick-and-span! Pigs grunted their defiance at us, while chickens filled the air with their derisive and triumphant cacklings. An old sow stood looking a pathetic picture of absolute boredom, while she slowly disposed of the last mouthful of my bed. An aged and decrepit old roué of a donkey, possessed of only one blasé eye, which he fixed on us disdainfully, leaned carelessly, with an air of utmost abandon and indifference, against the billet wall, ruminating on the doubtful flavour of a lump of the material torn from a haversack.
    A wild melee ensued, which resulted in the invaders being driven from the position, and we worked hard repairing the ravages our struggle had caused, and eventually arranged things more or less shipshape once again.
     
    On the morning of 22 August, a squadron of cavalry sent forward to reconnoitre the ground ahead had come back with unmistakable and worrying news. Tens of thousands of enemy soldiers were converging on the lightly defended Belgian town of Mons. The last hours of peace were ebbing away.
    As a precaution, Lance Corporal Vivian was sent with six men to a cottage a hundred yards ahead of his battalion. There, early the following morning, he finally saw the enemy.
    L/Cpl Alfred Vivian, 4th Middlesex Rgt
    Coming carelessly along the road towards us was a Uhlan patrol consisting of seven or eight men, then a scanty eighty yards away. The surprising nature of the sight robbed us of our breath and wits, and left us standing in a row gasping and looking like a lot of codfish. The scene impressed me so strongly that it will always remain vividly engraved on my memory.
    A short and vicious burst of rapid fire from us completely annihilated that little group with an ease that was staggering. In a second, the only living survivors were five poor chargers, that, rendered riderless and being unharmed, turned and galloped back with snorts of terror towards the direction from whence they had appeared, until they gained the sanctuary of a wood, and disappeared from our view.
    Immediately the excitement abated, and we stood aghast, overcome with horror by the enormity of the thing we had done.
    Lt Malcolm Hay, 1st Gordon Highlanders
    Somewhere hidden in the memory of all who have taken part in the war there is the remembrance of a moment which marked the first realisation of the great change – the moment when material common things took on in real earnest their military significance, when, with the full comprehension of the mind, a wood became cover for the enemy, a house a possible machine-gun position, and every field a battlefield.
    Such an awakening came to me when sitting on the roadside by the White Estaminet. The sound of a horse galloping and the sight of horse and rider, the sweat and mud and the tense face of the rider bending low by the horse’s neck, bending as if to avoid bullets. The single rider, perhaps bearing a dispatch, followed after a short space by a dozen cavalrymen, not galloping these, but trotting hard down the centre of the road, mud-stained, and also with tense faces.
    L/Cpl Alfred Vivian, 4th Middlesex Rgt
    Church bells chimed sweetly in the towns and hamlets about us, and dimly, from the distance, we discerned faint strains of music being poured out at the service being held in the convent in our rear.
    A lark hovering immediately above our hole in the roof [of the cottage] trilled out a glorious burst of song, and we craned our necks the better to view it. A strange and indefinable sense of unreality stole over me and, for some extraordinary reason, I became attacked by a strong desire to cry. I endeavoured to impart my sensations to my colleague, and I said to him: ‘There is something so extraordinary hanging in the air, that I feel that the thing I would most enjoy would be to visit a church. I don’t like this quietness and –’
    ‘Smack!’ the tile within two inches of our heads was shattered into a thousand fragments, and the two of