Pigeon Post by Judith Allnatt

Communication was no easy matter during World War One. There’s an old joke about a message that originated as ‘Send reinforcements; we’re going to advance’ but which eventually arrived as ‘Send three and fourpence; we’re going to a dance!’ Although admittedly amusing, the joke has a dark side when one thinks of the consequences of inaccurate communication when applied to crucial military messages, and the difficulties of passing on messages verbally were by no means the only ones encountered.

Signallers using flash lamp near Bouzincourt, 10th July 1916.

Where military positions were established, messages could be sent to and from HQs telephonically once Signallers had laid down cables along trenches or buried them in the ground. This was dangerous work in itself and wires often needed repairing, leading to loss of life. However, when attacking, it was difficult to keep pace with an advancing force and impossible to connect sideways to other battalions moving forward in parallel. As a result, some ingenious communication methods were adopted.

In addition to the use of rare and cumbersome radios and runners who may or may not survive a journey fraught with mines, artillery fire and snipers, vast numbers of pigeons were housed in mobile pigeon lofts so that they could be moved around the field of conflict. A smaller number could then be carried in a wicker basket on a man’s back to a position in the line and released to return ‘home’ with messages in tiny cylinders attached to the bird’s leg. 

The Royal Engineers Signals Service on the Western Front, 1914-1918
A former London double-decker bus camouflage painted, used as a travelling loft for carrier-pigeons. Pernes, 26 June 1918.

 Pigeons have a ‘sixth’ sense – the ability to detect and navigate using the earth’s magnetic field. Although the mechanism for this homing sense was not understood during the Great War, in the 1980s researchers discovered tiny crystals of magnetite inside nerve endings in the upper part of the beaks of pigeons which detect the strength of the earth’s magnetic field. Others found that chemical reactions induced by light entering the bird’s right eye allow awareness of the direction of the magnetic field. These two together enable the bird to ‘see’ the magnetic field and find their way home.

As well as taking messages from the trenches to the rear, pigeons were taken up in planes being used for reconnaissance to bear messages from aviators to HQ. Even more ingenious was the practice of fastening a small camera to the bird’s chest and releasing it at a pre-planned time. Aware of the route the bird would take to get home, the camera could be attached to a timer that operated the shutter, thereby collecting aerial images – literally a bird’s eye view!

Sergeant of the Royal Engineers Signals Section putting a message into the cylinder attached to the collar of a messenger dog at Etaples, 28 August 1918. McLellan, David (Second Lieutenant) (Photographer)

Dogs were also used to carry messages or sometimes even to carry other messengers, as pigeon baskets could be strapped onto their backs.

Before basic radio transmitters, communication from a plane, to inform on the fall of enemy artillery for instance, was initially by dropping messages inside weighted streamers over the side. Kite balloons were also used for reconnaissance over enemy lines. Two observers went up in the wicker basket fixed beneath. One cable was used to tether the balloon to a lorry and the other to relay telephonic messages. The balloons made easy targets and, under fire, men ‘bailed out’ with parachutes. 

Disembarking from a kite balloon

Despite these resourceful methods, communication difficulties must have hamstrung officers making decisions on the ground. Once an attack had started there was no quick, reliable way to contact troops to redirect them or to call for reinforcements. There may be other reasons underpinning the epithet ‘Lions led by Donkeys’ but the lack of timely, dependable communication must have been a contributory factor in many decisions that turned out to be bad ones and resulted in an incalculable number of casualties.

WHAT'S IN A NAME? by Penny Dolan.

Last Sunday people stopped, stood silently for two minutes in honour of those who died in World War I and in more recent conflicts. People remembered the names of those who had died: the names carved on War Memorials or told in family stories whether in Britain or elsewhere.

This History Girls post is a personal story about name and identity and the aftermath of war: the subject is my mother’s oldest brother, named Herbert, who was born in India in 1910.

His father was true army, both as an orphaned boy-soldier and as a man. His mother was the sixth of seven children of another Indian Army officer and, in that time and climate, both would have been familiar with death. They brought the boys to England sometime around 1914. Herbert and his two brothers would have been far too young to serve but perhaps they travelled on the troopships bringing the Indian soldiers to Suez and on to France.

Herbert was the oldest son: however he did not want to be a soldier. Studious and sensitive, he took a clerical post and became interested in the church and books and amateur dramatics.

Then, aged around twenty, along with a close friend, he converted from Anglicanism to the Catholic Church and took a new name: Michael.

Saint Michael the Archangel, venerated in Christian and other faiths, is depicted with the sword he used to defeat Satan. In another role, as the Angel of Death, he offers redemption to dying souls and is therefore a rather useful devotion for anyone involved in battle.

A good soldierly name, but his father did not welcome the religious conversion. Herbert’s mother wanted to follow but that caused so marital trouble that she took it no further.

Not long after, Michael chose to pursue his vocation. He went to Begbroke Priory in Oxford, the Novitiate House of the Servants of Mary. I do wonder what had happened in his life that had made him so devoted to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows? 

Had he seen disabled soldiers on the London streets? Or lost friends in the Flu Pandemic? Had his mother's and little sister's illnesses driven him to a deeper faith? Was any unknown sibling lost on the way? Something made Herbert Michael take a different direction but I do not know what.

On his ordination to the priesthood, he chose another military name: Martin.  

Saint Martin was a soldier in the Roman army. As he approached the gates of the city of Amiens, he met a half-naked beggar. Martin tried to give him his thick army cloak, but the beggar refused, saying that would leave Martin without one. Martin declared he could not leave the beggar to face another cold night. Impulsively, Martin slashed his cloak in two, gave one half to the beggar and went on his way. That night Martin saw a vision of Jesus, wearing the half-cloak he had given away. Martin became a revered priest, bishop and saint and his half-cloak was kept as a precious relic in Tours cathedral.

His order sent Father Martin to Salford during the war years, working in the Manchester slums. He was rarely able to visit home. On his annual visit to the Servite Mother House in Fulham, London, Father Martin could visit his mother for an afternoon. Sometimes he brought a troop of Scouts south to a Jamboree in Gilwell Park, near Epping so we could visit him there. But mostly he stayed away.

He led what seemed to me to be an odd but culturally rich life. We had some of his now unwanted books around: books of poems and plays and Lake District walks and watercolours. He sent me letters with amusing drawings and introduced me to the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum. I adored him from an awkward distance, for he could have a terrifying temper.

A sense of separation was inevitable, I suppose. Despite various vicar-detective tv fantasies, strict religious observances kept faiths apart during those decades.

Catholicism was seen as a faith of foreigners, with sins told in secret. The Church liturgy was not straightforward but recited in Latin with bells and even the daily practice was full of precise rituals and prayers. Communicants fasted from the evening before Mass, both the rich and those who had little food in their bellies in those hungry times and there was all that fuss about fish on Fridays. Divorce was impossible and Catholics could not attend any service – even a marriage or a funeral – in the church of another faith without permission, and those who entered the religious orders were encouraged to view the order as their family, rather than real relatives.

Maybe more than all that, as I grew older, I picked up another problem. His younger brother fought in the Second World War and came back from Dunkirk with his hair turned white. My father, who flew in bombers, returned with headaches and violent mood swings. 

Whenever they got together, and Uncle Michael was mentioned, there was a slight, silent accusation in the air that, for all his soldierly names and his good work in the slum parishes, the beloved man was a soldier’s son who never served in the war.  It was one of those unspoken silences that echo on and on in the wake of war.

Penny Dolan

'The Private Life of Pawns' by A L Berridge

We all know soldiers have private lives. Novels about war naturally devote space to characters’ back-stories, thoughts, feelings and relationships, and everyone knows a manly war hero can be given a softer side by bunging him the obligatory love interest. Yet there’s another, even more private side, and I’m beginning to realize it’s more important than I thought. 

My journey began while working on my present novel of the Crimean War. In ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ my hero is placed for good dramatic reasons with the 34th Regiment of Foot, but I was depressed to discover that the best primary sources are a digest of the Regimental log, a handful of officers’ letters, and a portion of an officer’s journal. Those are all very helpful, but my characters include several private soldiers and a particularly crucial Colour Sergeant, and none of those documents showed much interest in such lowly souls. The log didn't even give names of anyone below the rank of ensign, and casualty lists record them only as numbers of 'Sergts' and 'Rank and File'.

Then came the miracle. A delightful lady called Anne Beal wrote to me about the Crimean Memorial Appeal, and mentioned in passing that her interest in the war arose from the fact her great-grandfather George Clarke had served in it. He was a Colour Sergeant, as it happened. In the 34th Regiment of Foot. And she had a dozen of his letters sent from the Siege of Sevastopol.

We all know those moments when the words ‘Holy Grail’ dance in golden specks before our eyes. I shall draw a decent veil over my embarrassingly slavering response, but fortunately Anne was kind as well as god-sent, and she sent me not only photographs of the letters themselves, but perfect clean transcripts with explanatory notes from her own research. Eleven of the letters were to George’s wife Mary Anne, who’d been left behind with the rest of the regiment at Corfu, one was to her parents, and the whole set covered the exact period of my book.

Original envelope of one of George Clarke's letters - by kind permission of Anne Beal

They were everything I could have hoped for. What I needed most were everyday details of life in the regiment, and George’s letters were pure research gold. How much did it cost to send a letter home? What kind of ‘souvenirs’ did soldiers loot from dead Russians, and what could they expect to sell them for? There were so many of these gems that I’d noted the first six letters before it really occurred to me what was missing.

The war.

After a year’s research I probably knew more of what was happening than poor George did, but I still found the omission intriguing. War is a pretty big thing for a soldier, this was almost certainly George’s first, and yet he seemed hardly interested in it at all. There are dutiful references, of course, but even these are mostly concerned with how soon the siege will be over and he can be reunited with his wife. At first he thinks the siege won’t last long ‘for the Russians are actually eating their horses for want of food’, but later notes sourly that despite the constant firing he doesn’t see ‘the slightest alteration in the place’. A month later he still doesn’t know when he’ll be coming home, but thinks ‘there will be no more fighting’. Two months later he writes with endearing honesty: ‘I shall be very glad when this affair is over for I am getting tired of it.’

There could be many reasons for this reticence. The siege was in stalemate, there was little real progress to report, and George himself points out that the regiments were so widely spread that general news was thin and unreliable. Yet even when his regiment is actually engaged, George’s accounts of the action are the briefest I’ve ever seen. Writing on the day after the Grand Sortie of March 1855, he doesn’t even mention it until his third paragraph when he’s already discussed domestic details of money and his wife’s health.

George Clarke's signature - by kind permission of Anne Beal

That’s what’s fascinating. It’s not that the war isn’t worthy attention, but that George is far more concerned with his own quiet little private life. He writes about sick friends, relays news of his brother in the Rifle Brigade, gossips cheerfully about lapses of behavior among fellow NCOs, and is desperate for real newspapers from home. He worries about money and frets about the unreliability of the post, but most of all he is anxious about his wife, and how well she’ll be treated by the regiment without him there to look after her:

I received your two letters dated 11th & 12th December in which I find your face and throat to be much better which gave me much pleasure to read but on the other hand I was sorry to hear of the ill treatment of Sgt Howfield to you. But my dear, don’t have anything to say to him only what you cannot help for I am sure he would do you an injury if he could.

Of course he worries. Anyone would, and the more I read the more I understood how natural George’s approach really was. The famous letters of Timothy Gowing of the Royal Fusiliers might be full of patriotic wishes to ‘strike a blow for good old England’, but Gowing was a young man with no dependents, and those with adult lives outside Crimea were bound to have a different perspective. George’s ‘outside life’ wasn’t just his ‘back-story’, it was pretty well his whole story, to which war was only the backdrop.

And as a writer, that made me think. My job is to keep a story moving forward, to keep attention focused mainly on the action in foreground, but is that really a realistic way to show war? I’ve dealt with a soldier’s all-engrossing home life before in the character of Woodall in ‘Into the Valley of Death’, but that was a significant story, and often the reality is in the sheer ordinariness of everyday life. Shouldn’t I be doing more to show that?

The obvious answer has to be – only with caution. A commercial novel needs to be reality with the boring bits missed out, and if I devote pages to my characters worrying about whether a cake will still be all right after a long voyage then it’s going to play havoc with the pace. But reading George’s letters have made me wonder if there isn’t a greater danger in exploring the real ‘private lives’ of soldiers, and if I need to be very careful about going there at all.

Because ordinary life is universal. Have a character shot in the leg and readers will sympathize in an intellectual way, but have him get cramp or have a stone in his shoe and the reader is instantly there with him. George’s worries are ‘real’ to most of us in a way that war is not, and as I read his letters I completely forgot about research and saw him only as a human being.

That's what trivia does. It's absolutely the truth of soldiering, but it has a power like no other to humanize and make real. Look at this little video, for instance, made by the Donbass volunteers in Ukraine, where from 4’40” the footage is rough video shot at a rebel checkpoint. The English subtitles are delightfully dreadful, but enough key words are translated to tell us what these men are talking about.

From 5’31” the men are actually sitting under fire, but still the conversation drifts round important topics like cigarettes and socks. Trivia, laughter, the stuff of normality, and at once their Russian nationality is lost in the human nature of the universal soldier at war. This is what soldiers are like, this is their real private life, and even if it's a 'front' to help them deal with stress then the 'front' is part of the reality of who they really are.

That kind of trivia we can write. Not too much of it, or we'll destroy the pace of action sequences, but we need to see men talking about the things that really interest them rather than those things the plot demands. They don't talk about the war because they're living the war, and what they really want to think about is everything else.

As George Clarke does. His isn't an epic adventure story, but the letters give an insight into his real life outside the borders of war, and it was impossible to read them without personal feeling. George died of cholera on 30th June 1855, and when I read his last letter of June 23rd I'm afraid I even cried. His poor wife! They were obviously a very close couple, and at the time of his death she was even expecting his child – the baby he so much wanted to see christened. I wondered how on earth the poor woman would cope alone.

George Clarke's last letter

That's a good reaction, exactly the one I would hope for in a reader, but what made this situation dangerous is the fact that I found out. Anne herself told me the expected child was born in August 1855, and since the father was not listed as deceased it seems likely poor Mary Anne didn’t yet know she was a widow. That child was Anne’s grandfather, and it was from him that she learned that Mary Anne had always kept George’s letters with her, and carried them about in his old cutlery holder.

This cutlery holder, to be precise.

George was real, his loss was real, and I felt with full force the personal impact of war. I’ve been campaigning for over a year to erect a proper memorial to our fallen in Sevastopol, but this one man who died there was suddenly proxy for them all.

So perhaps that's the one part of a soldier's life that needs to stay private - at least in an action adventure historical. If I’m writing ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ then of course I must make the reader feel every human shred of the cost of war – but if I want my readers to enjoy the fight then I need to keep back something of what that cost really is.

That sounds like a cheat, but I think it's a necessary one. Generals can't think of their soldiers on so personal a level, or how could they send them to death as disposable pawns? Soldiers don't do it either, and one thing I've learned from veterans is how they condition themselves to laugh and joke even about each other's deaths. It's the only way a soldier can do his job and stay sane.

Maybe the same is true of writers. I admit I take a possibly rather warped pleasure when a reader berates me for killing a character they loved, but I don't want the loss to be so unbearable that they can't enjoy the book at all. I'll go into the 'private life' of my characters, I'll make them as real as I know how, but unless it's absolutely essential for the story then I'm not going to explore their loss beyond the grave.

Perhaps that's a cop-out. Perhaps I even know it is, but I'm beginning to think that when it comes to commercial fiction about war then T.S. Eliot had it absolutely right: 'human kind cannot bear very much reality'.


***
A very, very big thank you to Anne Beal for allowing me to write about her great-grandfather, and for giving permission to show her photographs. There is much more to the story, and I very much hope that one day she'll publish it herself.

Meanwhile the much duller A.L. Berridge's website is here.