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Where Poppies Blow
The natural history of the Western Front during the First World War
'If it weren't for the birds, what a hell it would be.'
During the Great War, soldiers lived inside the ground, closer to nature than many humans had lived for centuries. Animals provided comfort and interest to fill the blank hours in the trenches - bird-watching, for instance, was probably the single most popular hobby among officers. Soldiers went fishing in flooded shell holes, shot hares in no-man's land for the pot, and planted gardens in their trenches and billets. Nature was also sometimes a curse - rats, spiders and lice abounded, and disease could be biblical.
But above all, nature healed, and, despite the bullets and blood, it inspired men to endure. Where Poppies Blow is the unique story of how nature gave the British soldiers of the Great War a reason to fight, and the will to go on.
'If it weren't for the birds, what a hell it would be.'
During the Great War, soldiers lived inside the ground, closer to nature than many humans had lived for centuries. Animals provided comfort and interest to fill the blank hours in the trenches - bird-watching, for instance, was probably the single most popular hobby among officers. Soldiers went fishing in flooded shell holes, shot hares in no-man's land for the pot, and planted gardens in their trenches and billets. Nature was also sometimes a curse - rats, spiders and lice abounded, and disease could be biblical.
But above all, nature healed, and, despite the bullets and blood, it inspired men to endure. Where Poppies Blow is the unique story of how nature gave the British soldiers of the Great War a reason to fight, and the will to go on.
400 pages, Paperback
First published November 3, 2016
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February 2, 2020
Lewis-Stempel has written books about the natural world and about the First World War. Here he combines these two interests and looks at the natural world and the war. There are chapters on birds, horses, vermin (four legged and six legged), flowers and gardens, pets (dogs, cats and the like) and hunting and shooting. Between each chapter is an interstice, some contain poetry, others lists of mascots, statistics about disease, lists of battlefield birds and lists of naturalists. There is a good deal of poetry in the book. Lewis-Stempel also uses a large number of journals from soldiers and officers.
There’s a lot of what you would expect in this, but there are some interesting observations. The corpses in no man’s land attracted huge numbers of birds like crows and magpies which fed on them. Rats and mice also did the same, which meant there were large numbers of raptors and owls feeding on them. The corpses also accounted for the millions of flies on the western front. Horses were also vital for moving things around, but there weren’t enough in Britain to meet the need and so many were brought across the Atlantic, especially mules, which were better adapted for the mud on the front. Over half a million horses and mules were used throughout the campaign. The soldiers also needed feeding and I wasn’t aware that by the end of the war, most of the fresh food the army needed was grown near the front; celery grew particularly well in trenches!
There are the usual stories about hunting, shooting and fishing. Fishing sometimes supplemented rations. The penchant of the English aristocracy and upper classes to go into the countryside and shoot anything that moves didn’t change at war. There is also a good deal of sentimentality when it comes to pets and animal companions.
The journal extracts and poetry are interesting (some of the poetry is good, some not so). Ivor Gurney stands out and one of his phrases is striking:
“The amazed heart cries angrily out on God”
Note that he is not crying out to God, but “On God”, in a poem about pain: animal and human.
Another thing to remember is the relationship of many people at this time to the countryside. The Church of England, away from its evangelical and Anglo-Catholic extremes had (and has) a tendency to pantheism. The theologian Thomas Traherne said:
“How do we know but the world is that body; which the Deity has assumed to Manifest His Beauty”
The countryside he loves is not the handiwork of God, it is God. There is a good deal of this evident in poetic and journal form. Yearning for home is inevitable amidst the suffering and dying. This poem illustrates the feelings of those who got home, it is by Will Harvey:
“For I am come to Gloucestershire, which is my very home.
Tired out with wandering and sick of wars beyond the foam.
I have starved enough in foreign parts, and no more care to roam.
Quietly I will bide here in the place where I be,
Which knew my father and his grandfather,
and my dead brothers and me.
And bred us and fed us, and gave us pride of yeoman ancestry
Men with sap of Earth in their blood, and the wisdom of weather and wind.
Who ploughed the land to leave it better than they did find,
And lie stretched out down Westbury way, where the blossom is kind;
And lie covered with petals from the orchards that do shed
Their bloom to be a light white coverlet over the dead
Who ploughed the land in the daytime, and went well pleased to bed.”
This is interesting, informative and well researched. There is some sentimentality and some stomach churning moments. There are plenty of lesser known poets and a few of the usual suspects. The glimpses of the front at Gallipoli are also of interest.
There’s a lot of what you would expect in this, but there are some interesting observations. The corpses in no man’s land attracted huge numbers of birds like crows and magpies which fed on them. Rats and mice also did the same, which meant there were large numbers of raptors and owls feeding on them. The corpses also accounted for the millions of flies on the western front. Horses were also vital for moving things around, but there weren’t enough in Britain to meet the need and so many were brought across the Atlantic, especially mules, which were better adapted for the mud on the front. Over half a million horses and mules were used throughout the campaign. The soldiers also needed feeding and I wasn’t aware that by the end of the war, most of the fresh food the army needed was grown near the front; celery grew particularly well in trenches!
There are the usual stories about hunting, shooting and fishing. Fishing sometimes supplemented rations. The penchant of the English aristocracy and upper classes to go into the countryside and shoot anything that moves didn’t change at war. There is also a good deal of sentimentality when it comes to pets and animal companions.
The journal extracts and poetry are interesting (some of the poetry is good, some not so). Ivor Gurney stands out and one of his phrases is striking:
“The amazed heart cries angrily out on God”
Note that he is not crying out to God, but “On God”, in a poem about pain: animal and human.
Another thing to remember is the relationship of many people at this time to the countryside. The Church of England, away from its evangelical and Anglo-Catholic extremes had (and has) a tendency to pantheism. The theologian Thomas Traherne said:
“How do we know but the world is that body; which the Deity has assumed to Manifest His Beauty”
The countryside he loves is not the handiwork of God, it is God. There is a good deal of this evident in poetic and journal form. Yearning for home is inevitable amidst the suffering and dying. This poem illustrates the feelings of those who got home, it is by Will Harvey:
“For I am come to Gloucestershire, which is my very home.
Tired out with wandering and sick of wars beyond the foam.
I have starved enough in foreign parts, and no more care to roam.
Quietly I will bide here in the place where I be,
Which knew my father and his grandfather,
and my dead brothers and me.
And bred us and fed us, and gave us pride of yeoman ancestry
Men with sap of Earth in their blood, and the wisdom of weather and wind.
Who ploughed the land to leave it better than they did find,
And lie stretched out down Westbury way, where the blossom is kind;
And lie covered with petals from the orchards that do shed
Their bloom to be a light white coverlet over the dead
Who ploughed the land in the daytime, and went well pleased to bed.”
This is interesting, informative and well researched. There is some sentimentality and some stomach churning moments. There are plenty of lesser known poets and a few of the usual suspects. The glimpses of the front at Gallipoli are also of interest.
September 15, 2020
Where Poppies Blow by John Lewis-Stempel
The Great War was fecund in its antimonies. Some relationships between man and fauna/flora were friendly and pleasant, others were hateful and vile.
This is the 94th book that I’ve read on WWI and it is certainly one of the best ones. It enjoins the flora and fauna of the natural world with the battle lines of WWI. The perspective is almost entirely British although most of the action takes place on the Western Front in France. We already know of trench-foot, the endless shelling, no-mans land, machine gun fire, the loneliness and so on - the commonly discussed horrors of trench warfare. In this book we gain an even richer understanding of the front lines- we learn about seemingly disparate scenes involving butterflies breeding in bomb craters, the red fields of poppies, crows, magpies, owls, draft horses and war horses, messenger dogs, carrier pigeons, flower gardens, mosquitoes, rats, mice, pet cats, fox hunts, lice, typhoid, malaria and other diseases.
These are some of my favorite excerpts.
1. Carrier Pigeons - On the Western Front the speed of the carrier pigeon – about sixty miles an hour – meant it could gain height quickly and thus rise supreme above some of the dangers posed by shot and shell and gas. Of the 100,000 pigeons put into service by the British on the Western Front, 95 per cent got through with their messages.
2. Magpies - Magpies were the birds of desolation. Subject of British folklore for centuries, Pica pica had associations with both the Devil and the Grim Reaper; the oldest version of the famous magpie nursery rhyme, dating to about 1750, begins: One for sorrow, two for joy, Three for a wedding, four for death
3. War Horses and Draught Horses - The war horse was generally ‘a Light Draught’ used for transportation; many an ‘Officer’s Charger’ was really a pony. The countryside was emptied of draught horses, hunters and riding ponies, a heartbreaking happenstance for farming families who saw their finest and most loved horses go off to war.
4. Flies a poem by Lt Will Harvey - “Some men there are will not abide a rat. Within their bivvy. If one chance to peep. At them through little beady eyes, then pat, They throw a boot and rouse a mate from sleep. To hunt the thing, and on its head they heap. Curses quite inappropriate to its size. I care for none of these, but broad and deep. I curse Beelzebub – the God of Flies”
5. Lice - Officers wore silk pyjamas in the hope that the material was less welcoming to lice. Shorts, apart from giving comfort in summer, reduced lice infestation purely because there was less material for the lice to inhabit.
6. Typhus - Sanitation in the Kaiser’s PoW camps could be cruelly lacking; at Wittenberg Lager, which covered ten and a half acres on the bleak Klein Wittenberg plain, there were ten thousand prisoners, two taps and no soap. The inevitable happened; on Christmas Eve 1914 men started dying from typhus. Instead of devoting proper medical services, the Germans abandoned the camp leaving the inmates to perish.
7. Malaria - In other theatres, the malaria-spreading mosquito caused havoc ... Over 160,000 British soldiers were hospitalised with malaria. Two million man days were lost to the British army because of the disease.
8. Disease - It was a lovely war for microbes, but then the Great War provided a perfect trifecta of conditions: vectors such as rats, huddled humanity, insanitary conditions. Although, on the Western Front, lead bullets took the greater toll of deaths, the incidence of disease was Dark Age. In 1918 in France hospital admissions for sickness in the British army were 980,980 (with 8988 deaths). Disease lessened the army’s fighting capability. On average a sick soldier in France–Flanders spent 42.5 days in a base hospital or, put another way, absent from service.
9. Mice - “Last night, while we were dining, our food being spread upon the floor, a mouse ran about among the plates, and was not at all abashed by the burning candles, or ourselves. They run up and down the earth walls of the dug-outs and at night have violent scuffles overhead, shaking the earth into our eyes and ears as we lie beneath. The amusing thing is that we all take care not to tread upon them or injure them in any way. In some mysterious way the war, while making one more callous to the sufferings of men, seems to increase one’s sympathy with the lower animals”
10. Poppies - The year 1915 witnessed the first of the Western Front poppy fields. Captain Rowland Feilding arrived in the Cuinchy trenches in June 1915 in time to see soldiers rushing wildly across a no man’s land ‘ablaze’ with scarlet poppies... What created the conditions for the luxuriant blooming of poppies on the Western Front was artillery shelling: this sowed poppy seeds (by impersonating ploughing), and then fertilised them with the nitrogen in its explosives.
11. Butterflies - Around the edges of the water white butterflies, which are thirsty creatures, crowd to drink, and when you disturb them they rise in clouds till the air is full of them, like a snowstorm.
12. Messenger Dogs - Eventually it was made a military offence to interfere with a messenger dog in the performance of its duties. The keepers learned an ancient pride in working their dogs. Keeper Sergeant Brown was transfigured by the experience: The old idea was that a dog’s life was nothing, but after the experience I have had with them in the field it has taught me to love and respect them as never before
It takes an exceptional writer to pull off such a nuanced book. Another reason why I liked this book so much is the original information that I gleaned from the pages. I suspect that a book with such a high information content would not be possible without the author’s exceptionally curious nature.
There is a good deal of poetry found in the early chapters and it’s not Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon level good. The poetry examples are provided rather to bolster the various natural world chapters.
I once analysed the major themes of 200 soldier poets from the Great War – hardly scientific, though instructive enough. Pity was well-nigh absent, affinity with nature was everywhere
5 stars.
The Great War was fecund in its antimonies. Some relationships between man and fauna/flora were friendly and pleasant, others were hateful and vile.
This is the 94th book that I’ve read on WWI and it is certainly one of the best ones. It enjoins the flora and fauna of the natural world with the battle lines of WWI. The perspective is almost entirely British although most of the action takes place on the Western Front in France. We already know of trench-foot, the endless shelling, no-mans land, machine gun fire, the loneliness and so on - the commonly discussed horrors of trench warfare. In this book we gain an even richer understanding of the front lines- we learn about seemingly disparate scenes involving butterflies breeding in bomb craters, the red fields of poppies, crows, magpies, owls, draft horses and war horses, messenger dogs, carrier pigeons, flower gardens, mosquitoes, rats, mice, pet cats, fox hunts, lice, typhoid, malaria and other diseases.
These are some of my favorite excerpts.
1. Carrier Pigeons - On the Western Front the speed of the carrier pigeon – about sixty miles an hour – meant it could gain height quickly and thus rise supreme above some of the dangers posed by shot and shell and gas. Of the 100,000 pigeons put into service by the British on the Western Front, 95 per cent got through with their messages.
2. Magpies - Magpies were the birds of desolation. Subject of British folklore for centuries, Pica pica had associations with both the Devil and the Grim Reaper; the oldest version of the famous magpie nursery rhyme, dating to about 1750, begins: One for sorrow, two for joy, Three for a wedding, four for death
3. War Horses and Draught Horses - The war horse was generally ‘a Light Draught’ used for transportation; many an ‘Officer’s Charger’ was really a pony. The countryside was emptied of draught horses, hunters and riding ponies, a heartbreaking happenstance for farming families who saw their finest and most loved horses go off to war.
4. Flies a poem by Lt Will Harvey - “Some men there are will not abide a rat. Within their bivvy. If one chance to peep. At them through little beady eyes, then pat, They throw a boot and rouse a mate from sleep. To hunt the thing, and on its head they heap. Curses quite inappropriate to its size. I care for none of these, but broad and deep. I curse Beelzebub – the God of Flies”
5. Lice - Officers wore silk pyjamas in the hope that the material was less welcoming to lice. Shorts, apart from giving comfort in summer, reduced lice infestation purely because there was less material for the lice to inhabit.
6. Typhus - Sanitation in the Kaiser’s PoW camps could be cruelly lacking; at Wittenberg Lager, which covered ten and a half acres on the bleak Klein Wittenberg plain, there were ten thousand prisoners, two taps and no soap. The inevitable happened; on Christmas Eve 1914 men started dying from typhus. Instead of devoting proper medical services, the Germans abandoned the camp leaving the inmates to perish.
7. Malaria - In other theatres, the malaria-spreading mosquito caused havoc ... Over 160,000 British soldiers were hospitalised with malaria. Two million man days were lost to the British army because of the disease.
8. Disease - It was a lovely war for microbes, but then the Great War provided a perfect trifecta of conditions: vectors such as rats, huddled humanity, insanitary conditions. Although, on the Western Front, lead bullets took the greater toll of deaths, the incidence of disease was Dark Age. In 1918 in France hospital admissions for sickness in the British army were 980,980 (with 8988 deaths). Disease lessened the army’s fighting capability. On average a sick soldier in France–Flanders spent 42.5 days in a base hospital or, put another way, absent from service.
9. Mice - “Last night, while we were dining, our food being spread upon the floor, a mouse ran about among the plates, and was not at all abashed by the burning candles, or ourselves. They run up and down the earth walls of the dug-outs and at night have violent scuffles overhead, shaking the earth into our eyes and ears as we lie beneath. The amusing thing is that we all take care not to tread upon them or injure them in any way. In some mysterious way the war, while making one more callous to the sufferings of men, seems to increase one’s sympathy with the lower animals”
10. Poppies - The year 1915 witnessed the first of the Western Front poppy fields. Captain Rowland Feilding arrived in the Cuinchy trenches in June 1915 in time to see soldiers rushing wildly across a no man’s land ‘ablaze’ with scarlet poppies... What created the conditions for the luxuriant blooming of poppies on the Western Front was artillery shelling: this sowed poppy seeds (by impersonating ploughing), and then fertilised them with the nitrogen in its explosives.
11. Butterflies - Around the edges of the water white butterflies, which are thirsty creatures, crowd to drink, and when you disturb them they rise in clouds till the air is full of them, like a snowstorm.
12. Messenger Dogs - Eventually it was made a military offence to interfere with a messenger dog in the performance of its duties. The keepers learned an ancient pride in working their dogs. Keeper Sergeant Brown was transfigured by the experience: The old idea was that a dog’s life was nothing, but after the experience I have had with them in the field it has taught me to love and respect them as never before
It takes an exceptional writer to pull off such a nuanced book. Another reason why I liked this book so much is the original information that I gleaned from the pages. I suspect that a book with such a high information content would not be possible without the author’s exceptionally curious nature.
There is a good deal of poetry found in the early chapters and it’s not Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon level good. The poetry examples are provided rather to bolster the various natural world chapters.
I once analysed the major themes of 200 soldier poets from the Great War – hardly scientific, though instructive enough. Pity was well-nigh absent, affinity with nature was everywhere
5 stars.
May 26, 2017
There has been awful lot of history written about the horrors of the First World War, we have first-hand accounts from those that fought and suffered, writers who composed some of the most poignant poems and a raft of historical documents and archaeological reports that build a picture of the time. Even though the war dragged on for four years, not all of it was spent fighting. The soldiers had time away from the front lines and the misery of the trenches and when they did they found they could draw comfort from the similarities in the north French landscape to the countryside that they had left behind and that some would never see again.
For it is for the sake of the wolds and the wealds
That we die
Whenever the troops had a spare moment they would take time in between the bombs to observe the birds that were trying to eke out an existence in the war too. It was one of the most popular hobbies of soldiers. Flowers played a large part in soldier’s lives too, some had time to plant and tend gardens, but the image of poppies and cornflowers blooming after the devastation of war is one of the enduring images that remained with the shattered soldiers leaving the battlefields. Some of the officers also hunted, spending hours chasing what little wildlife was left in the fields, some made rods to fish, other took the easier option of dropping bombs in the rivers. Not only did the British Army empty the fields of the workers, they took the horses too, and when they had almost all gone, they shipped them over from Canada. The soldier’s relationship with their equine friends was made closer by the perils of war. In total eight million horses, donkeys and mules died during the conflict, a horrendous number. There were also a huge number of other animals at the front too, the battalions had their mascots which varied from the fairly common dogs, to the less common goats to the frankly unusual orang-utan and cows. Rats and lice were endemic in the trenches causing yet further misery to those knee deep in mud.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
Lewis-Stempels book is a very different take on the usual histories of the First World War. It is full of personal stories of the way that the soldiers saw nature and how it gave them the motivation for them to carry on in the darkest of times. The prose is almost secondary in this book, as there are so many poems and anecdotes about the natural world around them that he has collected together. It is not all grim reading, there are some really positive parts to the book, but I thought the list of those scientists and naturalists that had fallen in action was most moving as it showed how much experience and knowledge that we lost just from one small sliver of society. The war that had taken so many of the fit and able men showed that they still had their humanity.
For it is for the sake of the wolds and the wealds
That we die
Whenever the troops had a spare moment they would take time in between the bombs to observe the birds that were trying to eke out an existence in the war too. It was one of the most popular hobbies of soldiers. Flowers played a large part in soldier’s lives too, some had time to plant and tend gardens, but the image of poppies and cornflowers blooming after the devastation of war is one of the enduring images that remained with the shattered soldiers leaving the battlefields. Some of the officers also hunted, spending hours chasing what little wildlife was left in the fields, some made rods to fish, other took the easier option of dropping bombs in the rivers. Not only did the British Army empty the fields of the workers, they took the horses too, and when they had almost all gone, they shipped them over from Canada. The soldier’s relationship with their equine friends was made closer by the perils of war. In total eight million horses, donkeys and mules died during the conflict, a horrendous number. There were also a huge number of other animals at the front too, the battalions had their mascots which varied from the fairly common dogs, to the less common goats to the frankly unusual orang-utan and cows. Rats and lice were endemic in the trenches causing yet further misery to those knee deep in mud.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
Lewis-Stempels book is a very different take on the usual histories of the First World War. It is full of personal stories of the way that the soldiers saw nature and how it gave them the motivation for them to carry on in the darkest of times. The prose is almost secondary in this book, as there are so many poems and anecdotes about the natural world around them that he has collected together. It is not all grim reading, there are some really positive parts to the book, but I thought the list of those scientists and naturalists that had fallen in action was most moving as it showed how much experience and knowledge that we lost just from one small sliver of society. The war that had taken so many of the fit and able men showed that they still had their humanity.
March 16, 2017
Meadowland and The Running Hare were both excellent books by Lewis-Stempel, a farmer, environmentalist and wonderful 'landscape' writer. I had high hopes for Where Poppies Blow and I wasn't disappointed.
I've read so many books about The Great War but this was something different - where the focus is completely on the relationship with the soldiers and the nature all around them.
The rats and lice are a common theme in anything to do with the trenches. But this book also concentrated on the positive and healing side of nature- the horses that the men loved, the pigeons that saved hundreds of lives etc.
I think the most poignant chapter was that of the wild birds that abounded in Northern France. How during any slight lull in gunfire you could hear the skylarks singing. Or at night, when a merciful few hours of quiet might be disturbed by the music of the nightingale.
The subject matter is perfect for Lewis- Stempel and he does justice to this often over-looked aspect of the war.
I've read so many books about The Great War but this was something different - where the focus is completely on the relationship with the soldiers and the nature all around them.
The rats and lice are a common theme in anything to do with the trenches. But this book also concentrated on the positive and healing side of nature- the horses that the men loved, the pigeons that saved hundreds of lives etc.
I think the most poignant chapter was that of the wild birds that abounded in Northern France. How during any slight lull in gunfire you could hear the skylarks singing. Or at night, when a merciful few hours of quiet might be disturbed by the music of the nightingale.
The subject matter is perfect for Lewis- Stempel and he does justice to this often over-looked aspect of the war.
May 14, 2017
Lewis-Stempel, having written nature books and WWI books, here combines his two main interests. For me this fell short of his nature writing, perhaps simply because I have very little interest in the First World War. Yet the prose is also less distinguished, and the thematic approach (chapters on birds, horses, plants, pets and hunting/fishing) is rather formulaic. Lists and poems are interspersed with the text. A niche book I can’t recommend particularly widely.
Favorite line: “Something of British nature-love is explained by the nation’s torn-from-the-rural-womb early industrialisation, which left a psychic wound in the mind of the new town-dwellers.”
Favorite line: “Something of British nature-love is explained by the nation’s torn-from-the-rural-womb early industrialisation, which left a psychic wound in the mind of the new town-dwellers.”
September 26, 2022
didnt enjoy this book felt it was disjointed
January 3, 2017
It's only January, but I may have already read my non-fiction Book of the Year.
Lewis-Stempel combines his interest both in the countryside and in the Great War in this account of the role of the natural world in the conflict. It's already quite widely known that the presence of birds in the soldiers' lives brought solace and interest to a routine where boredom, hellish discomfort and sheer terror co-existed, but here we have an account of the rich interest and affection that birds provoked.
Then there were plants - the emblematic poppy of course, but wild flowers of every kind soothed the soul. And I certainly had no idea that soldiers sent home for seeds to produce prize-winning gardens alongside their wretched trenches, or that soldiers from France to Gallipoli grew vegetables to supplement their rations.
Lewis-Stempel describes the fierce bond between men and the animals who worked alongside them - the official horses, dogs and canaries (yes, they soothed the wounded as they were transported in ambulances), often in appalling circumstances. He talks about the unofficial animals who made life easier - the rat-catching cats, the caged birds, the ferrets.
Then he talks about the wildlife that made life even more hellish - the rats, lice, flies and mosquitoes - which in many cases brought about as much suffering as battle wounds.
He describes how war changed the face of the countryside both in France, and perhaps more surprisingly in England, and explains the birth of the war cemeteries.
This story is told not just in Stempel-Lewis' own terse yet lyrical prose, but in the letters, poems and diaries of the men themselves. Each chapter is interspersed by a section of poems, or of supporting facts and figures.
I won't forget this book. It brought World War I more vividly to life than almost anything else I have previously read.
Lewis-Stempel combines his interest both in the countryside and in the Great War in this account of the role of the natural world in the conflict. It's already quite widely known that the presence of birds in the soldiers' lives brought solace and interest to a routine where boredom, hellish discomfort and sheer terror co-existed, but here we have an account of the rich interest and affection that birds provoked.
Then there were plants - the emblematic poppy of course, but wild flowers of every kind soothed the soul. And I certainly had no idea that soldiers sent home for seeds to produce prize-winning gardens alongside their wretched trenches, or that soldiers from France to Gallipoli grew vegetables to supplement their rations.
Lewis-Stempel describes the fierce bond between men and the animals who worked alongside them - the official horses, dogs and canaries (yes, they soothed the wounded as they were transported in ambulances), often in appalling circumstances. He talks about the unofficial animals who made life easier - the rat-catching cats, the caged birds, the ferrets.
Then he talks about the wildlife that made life even more hellish - the rats, lice, flies and mosquitoes - which in many cases brought about as much suffering as battle wounds.
He describes how war changed the face of the countryside both in France, and perhaps more surprisingly in England, and explains the birth of the war cemeteries.
This story is told not just in Stempel-Lewis' own terse yet lyrical prose, but in the letters, poems and diaries of the men themselves. Each chapter is interspersed by a section of poems, or of supporting facts and figures.
I won't forget this book. It brought World War I more vividly to life than almost anything else I have previously read.
August 11, 2017
I was looking forward to reading this book about the relationship World War I soldiers had with the natural world, but the warning bells were ringing even in the preface: 'Poetry is significant in these pages, though little comes from the familiar bran-bucket of the semi-official 'War Poets', those canonised for their 'correct' politics, meaning anti-war.' (xxii) So, poets like Wilfred Owen, for example, are 'bran-buckets', and their poetry is a kind of political correctness, of all things?
I've noticed, in my reading over the last couple of years, in the centenary of the great battles of World War I, a certain revisionism emerging about the Great War and attempts to re-cast this war as somehow heroic and worthwhile. It might be part of the state of the world, as we build walls, to start throwing up these old lies again, but I don't buy it.
I see flaws here, like a fundamental mis-reading of Edward Thomas's *As the Teams Head Brass*; apparently it's a call to arms, not a delicate evocation of a lost generation.
And a defence of that most romantic anachronism: cavalry: 'The British cavalry on the Western Front were not entirely fancy ornaments ... Along with the brutal-but-cowardly generals, the uselessness of the British cavalry has become an immovable myth of the First World War. Suffice to say the Germans at Gueudecourt on the Somme on 26 September 1916 found the British cavalry had a point' (115) And, he resorts to that most tired declaration of the apologists: 'It was terrible but it was magnificent too' (116)
And, on a minor poet, 'Dearner was never cynical in the way that Sassoon and Owen were cynical. His religious faith was undimmed by war' (260) Owen is cynical. Really? Is that all you see?
One soldier writes, 'Most of the boys and men I was with apparently found no pleasure in flowers' Contemptuous of the man who was actually there: That's 'surely wrong'.
The strengths of this book is in the found letters, poems and fragments from the soldiers themselves and details like, that fifteen thousand Australian soldiers were diverted to agricultural work on the Somme in 1917.
It's not in the cobbling together of a jingoist narrative around it.
I've noticed, in my reading over the last couple of years, in the centenary of the great battles of World War I, a certain revisionism emerging about the Great War and attempts to re-cast this war as somehow heroic and worthwhile. It might be part of the state of the world, as we build walls, to start throwing up these old lies again, but I don't buy it.
I see flaws here, like a fundamental mis-reading of Edward Thomas's *As the Teams Head Brass*; apparently it's a call to arms, not a delicate evocation of a lost generation.
And a defence of that most romantic anachronism: cavalry: 'The British cavalry on the Western Front were not entirely fancy ornaments ... Along with the brutal-but-cowardly generals, the uselessness of the British cavalry has become an immovable myth of the First World War. Suffice to say the Germans at Gueudecourt on the Somme on 26 September 1916 found the British cavalry had a point' (115) And, he resorts to that most tired declaration of the apologists: 'It was terrible but it was magnificent too' (116)
And, on a minor poet, 'Dearner was never cynical in the way that Sassoon and Owen were cynical. His religious faith was undimmed by war' (260) Owen is cynical. Really? Is that all you see?
One soldier writes, 'Most of the boys and men I was with apparently found no pleasure in flowers' Contemptuous of the man who was actually there: That's 'surely wrong'.
The strengths of this book is in the found letters, poems and fragments from the soldiers themselves and details like, that fifteen thousand Australian soldiers were diverted to agricultural work on the Somme in 1917.
It's not in the cobbling together of a jingoist narrative around it.
July 2, 2017
It's not all about blood and bullets and this glorious book looks at the continuance and constancy of allowing, in the midst of carnage, the therapeutic benefits of nature. And, of how, even in the midst of horror, the birds still sang, the blossom bloomed as beautiful as ever, and the tiny creatures of nature still went about their daily business.
The joy of nature brought comfort and in some cases, healing, when I am sure it seemed like the entire world had been plunged into chaos. The author very cleverly divides the content of the book into manageable chapters, each with a foot firmly placed in what was happening in the war, whilst at the same time allowing a glimpse into a very different world.
The book begins as it should, with a beautiful poem, August, 1914 by John Masefield, who juxtaposes the beauty of the English countryside against what was happening just a few hundred miles away in the trenches of the Western Front. And just as poetry can evoke such strong emotions, so can this recounted story of a group of soldiers, from the Royal Warwickshire, who tenderly buried a dead pigeon they found in a communication trench, or the deep and abiding comradeship between an officer and his horse, or of how medics treated both wounded soldiers and animals, even to making artificial wooden legs for dogs who were thus injured in battle.
One of my favourite chapters, entitled The Bloom of Life explains how soldiers cultivated small trench gardens and regularly sent home for seeds and how grassy mounds would be transformed with nasturtiums, daffodils and hyacinths, and how billets would bloom with tiger lilies, auriculas and roses. And of course, who can forget the image of the poppy fields of Flanders.
So many beautifully recounted stories make up the whole of this fascinating book which is a joy to read from start to finish.
The joy of nature brought comfort and in some cases, healing, when I am sure it seemed like the entire world had been plunged into chaos. The author very cleverly divides the content of the book into manageable chapters, each with a foot firmly placed in what was happening in the war, whilst at the same time allowing a glimpse into a very different world.
The book begins as it should, with a beautiful poem, August, 1914 by John Masefield, who juxtaposes the beauty of the English countryside against what was happening just a few hundred miles away in the trenches of the Western Front. And just as poetry can evoke such strong emotions, so can this recounted story of a group of soldiers, from the Royal Warwickshire, who tenderly buried a dead pigeon they found in a communication trench, or the deep and abiding comradeship between an officer and his horse, or of how medics treated both wounded soldiers and animals, even to making artificial wooden legs for dogs who were thus injured in battle.
One of my favourite chapters, entitled The Bloom of Life explains how soldiers cultivated small trench gardens and regularly sent home for seeds and how grassy mounds would be transformed with nasturtiums, daffodils and hyacinths, and how billets would bloom with tiger lilies, auriculas and roses. And of course, who can forget the image of the poppy fields of Flanders.
So many beautifully recounted stories make up the whole of this fascinating book which is a joy to read from start to finish.
May 3, 2017
When I think of World War One, death, destruction and muddy wastelands comes to my mind. That is the sad reality of it. What this book has reminded me of is that life was still going on in those muddy fields and the ruins. Birds, insects, plants and animals lived amongst it all and in some cases thrived because of it. Nature played an important role in the lives of those who served their countries during this time as it often gave comfort and joy to so many.
August 25, 2019
Beautiful. Heartbreaking. Uplifting.
January 18, 2022
Some interesting points and facts but laborious to read.
March 19, 2018
This one's tough. 3.5 stars? It's a moving, well-researched exploration an fascinating topic, with an immense amount of source material. At times though, the narrative was interrupted with a few too many of these excerpts, especially ones without real substance. It's almost as if Stempel wanted to include every single applicable quote he found, and didn't have an editor to trim the unnecessary ones. Which brings me to my main complaint: a general lack of editing with regard to Stempel's writing. The organization and flow is rather disjointed; he often abruptly mentions a soldier on one page as if we know who they are, then introduces them properly, as if they were never previously mentioned, several pages later. (For example, he references one Ford Madox Hueffer several times, but only after maybe the fourth mention does he finally add a parenthesis saying that Hueffer was also known as the poet Ford Madox Ford - something that would have been quite helpful to know at the first occasion). Regardless of Stempel's somewhat distracting way of writing, there's a lot of lovely, poignant material in here that's worth reading.
November 6, 2017
I received my copy of 'Where Poppies Blow' through Goodreads , and at this time of year it couldn't have come at a more fortuitous time. Written about the men who endured so many horrors during the time of the Great war, existing underground in the trenches, it illustrates the close bond they formed with nature in all it's forms, a taste of sanity amidst the nightmare. Frequently moved to tears throughout the reading it did however illustrate the wonder of the bonds formed, the pleasures given, and the love of the smallest token. No other reading has ever given such an insight and if you love animals, are interested in military matters, respect your environment and place great importance on caring for your planet then this is a must read. I really cannot recommend it enough. I defy anyone not to be affected.
November 21, 2017
John Lewis-Stempel takes us on a fascinating tour of the nature as experienced by soldiers at the Western Front in WWI. He tells us about the beauty that kept them sane - many men were birdwatchers, while others grew gardens (celery did particularly well in the trenches apparently). He also tells us about the working animals - the horses, mules and pigeons. Obviously there were the irritants such as rats, spiders and lice, but there were also pets - not to mention the creatures that were hunted, fished for and shot.
Every section is illustrated with direct quotes from the men who served, making it as poignant as it is interesting.
Every section is illustrated with direct quotes from the men who served, making it as poignant as it is interesting.
May 25, 2017
Like all of John Lewis-Stempel’s books, this text provokes sighs and smiles in well-measured balance. It’s that finely-tuned light/shade instinct that makes his writing so supremely readable, I think. This one is beautifully put together and full of surprises, insights and nuggets of curiosity that you just have to go away and Google.
February 18, 2025
An emotional and thought-provoking book. It is an extremely well written book showing the horror of war and the beauty of nature and the loyalty and comfort of animals. Highly recommended
August 21, 2017
To be invited along to see the announcement of the winning book/author in this year’s Wainwrights Golden Beer Book Prize held at Blenheim Palace during Countryfile Live was a real honour. I was privileged to meet most of the writers both before and after the prize ceremony. I said during the run up to the day that the 2017 prize was the toughest yet as the quality of the writing is just an exceptional high standard and gets better and better every year. One of the writers on this year’s shortlist was John Lewis-Stempel who had two books with The Running Hare and Where Poppies Blow listed and it was in the end his book Where Poppies Blow came out as the winner of the 2017 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize.
Many books have been written of the horrors of The Great War and the hell that the soldiers endured. My bookshelves are filled with books on WWI and also natural history but I have not yet come across a book that takes a look at how the British soldiers explored nature during the darkest years of 1914-18. They lived in nature it was in fact all around them and in Where Poppies Blow John Lewis- Stempel explores the soldier’s relationship with the plants and animals and how nature helped to fill the hours and days of the men that filled the trenches. From those who kept logs of the birds and plants they saw to the men who kept gardens as a reminder of home. Nature has a way of enduring like no other. To endure the hell of the trenches in The Great War the men needed something to take their minds off the horror they witnessed on a daily basis. Britain sent over five million men to the battlefields during those years but one fact that many may not understand was just how many horses, mules and donkeys were sent to aid the war effort, in total more than two million with many of them dying in such dreadful conditions. But without these animals Britain would not have been able to have continued the war. Many of the men cared deeply about their horses in their charge and here in Where Poppies Blow there is a chapter dedicated to the bravery of these animals with words and poems.
In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
When you read how the British Soldiers kept both flower garden and also vegetable garden and held show to decide winners this was both to keep up morale and the reminder of home life and in fact the growing vegetables helped feed the men in the trenches. There are chapters also on men and how they kept notebooks on the daily bird sightings and even nesting birds despite the shelling. To hear Larks singing in between the fighting must have been on one hand been calming and on another near impossible. Nature carried on despite the hell that was The Great War. Nature had a way of healing it was all around them from the Poppies of the battlefields to the Skylarks that sang while shells rained down.
Where Poppies Blow is a truly remarkable insight to life of the British soldier during The Great War and a side that many will have never known. John Lewis-Stempel has written many books on both natural history and also military history and this deserves its place among the best. The Wainwright chair of judges Julia Bradbury described Where Poppies Blow as “an extraordinary book about the healing power and resilience of nature in the darkest of times”
This is a remarkable and moving book and one that I whole-heartedly recommend. The poems alone will move you to tears. This is the second time that John Lewis-Stempel has won the Wainwrights Golden Beer Book Prize. He previously won it in 2015 with Meadowland (Transworld).
400 Pages.
Many books have been written of the horrors of The Great War and the hell that the soldiers endured. My bookshelves are filled with books on WWI and also natural history but I have not yet come across a book that takes a look at how the British soldiers explored nature during the darkest years of 1914-18. They lived in nature it was in fact all around them and in Where Poppies Blow John Lewis- Stempel explores the soldier’s relationship with the plants and animals and how nature helped to fill the hours and days of the men that filled the trenches. From those who kept logs of the birds and plants they saw to the men who kept gardens as a reminder of home. Nature has a way of enduring like no other. To endure the hell of the trenches in The Great War the men needed something to take their minds off the horror they witnessed on a daily basis. Britain sent over five million men to the battlefields during those years but one fact that many may not understand was just how many horses, mules and donkeys were sent to aid the war effort, in total more than two million with many of them dying in such dreadful conditions. But without these animals Britain would not have been able to have continued the war. Many of the men cared deeply about their horses in their charge and here in Where Poppies Blow there is a chapter dedicated to the bravery of these animals with words and poems.
In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
When you read how the British Soldiers kept both flower garden and also vegetable garden and held show to decide winners this was both to keep up morale and the reminder of home life and in fact the growing vegetables helped feed the men in the trenches. There are chapters also on men and how they kept notebooks on the daily bird sightings and even nesting birds despite the shelling. To hear Larks singing in between the fighting must have been on one hand been calming and on another near impossible. Nature carried on despite the hell that was The Great War. Nature had a way of healing it was all around them from the Poppies of the battlefields to the Skylarks that sang while shells rained down.
Where Poppies Blow is a truly remarkable insight to life of the British soldier during The Great War and a side that many will have never known. John Lewis-Stempel has written many books on both natural history and also military history and this deserves its place among the best. The Wainwright chair of judges Julia Bradbury described Where Poppies Blow as “an extraordinary book about the healing power and resilience of nature in the darkest of times”
This is a remarkable and moving book and one that I whole-heartedly recommend. The poems alone will move you to tears. This is the second time that John Lewis-Stempel has won the Wainwrights Golden Beer Book Prize. He previously won it in 2015 with Meadowland (Transworld).
400 Pages.
November 17, 2019
“What joy it is to know that you [his wife] in England and I out here at least can look upon the same beauty in the sky. We’ve the stars to share.”
An intelligent and interesting read, examing the First World War through the unique perspective of nature. This book juxtaposes the beauty and power of nature alongside the sheer horrors of nature experienced by the soldiers on the Front line. Lots of the material is taken from extracts from soldiers’ letters and poems; it was an amazing to see that the words from the people who experienced the true nature of the First World War first-hand are given a voice again a hundred years later.
I do tend to avoid books that may be too morbid in tone when reading for pleasure, however this book struck a great balance of showing the true horror that was faced by man and beast, but at the same time, showing moments of beauty, joy and the occasional funny moment, which combined to make an uplifting read. A personal favourite story was the on describing the man who served his superior two of the army’s pigeons as there was no other food available and burning their cages so there was no evidence of his crime.
A slight criticism of the book is that it is quite long and other reviewers believed it would have benefited from more editing. As I was reading at times I was inclined to agree, but on the other hand I really would have struggled to say which parts should have been left out, as I enjoyed all the book, apart from the hunting chapter. At times, at a new paragraph, the book topic does occasionally change very dramatically which can be a bit jarring when reading.
I very rarely, if ever, read a book that would be described as nature writing, but I really enjoyed this and would consider reading other books by the same author. I loved the writing and highlighted a huge number of sections. A great book to read around this time of year as a way of remembering the huge sacrifices of the men and animals made for us when serving in WWI.
An intelligent and interesting read, examing the First World War through the unique perspective of nature. This book juxtaposes the beauty and power of nature alongside the sheer horrors of nature experienced by the soldiers on the Front line. Lots of the material is taken from extracts from soldiers’ letters and poems; it was an amazing to see that the words from the people who experienced the true nature of the First World War first-hand are given a voice again a hundred years later.
I do tend to avoid books that may be too morbid in tone when reading for pleasure, however this book struck a great balance of showing the true horror that was faced by man and beast, but at the same time, showing moments of beauty, joy and the occasional funny moment, which combined to make an uplifting read. A personal favourite story was the on describing the man who served his superior two of the army’s pigeons as there was no other food available and burning their cages so there was no evidence of his crime.
A slight criticism of the book is that it is quite long and other reviewers believed it would have benefited from more editing. As I was reading at times I was inclined to agree, but on the other hand I really would have struggled to say which parts should have been left out, as I enjoyed all the book, apart from the hunting chapter. At times, at a new paragraph, the book topic does occasionally change very dramatically which can be a bit jarring when reading.
I very rarely, if ever, read a book that would be described as nature writing, but I really enjoyed this and would consider reading other books by the same author. I loved the writing and highlighted a huge number of sections. A great book to read around this time of year as a way of remembering the huge sacrifices of the men and animals made for us when serving in WWI.
September 10, 2018
I was disappointed with this book. Although I rather liked the change of pace and style provided by sections consisting of, for example poetry on a subject or a list of WWI soldiers' pets, other aspects of the book suggest that this may not have been a careful decision but a way of ensuring the book got out in time for its moment. There are several points where it is very clear that a thorough overview hasn't been taken so that information is repeated, or is inserted at the wrong point. There's no doubt it is a great subject, the relationship between 'nature' and those (largely the British) fighting in WWI - nature being taken from the torment of lice to the notion that men were fighting for the British countryside, via their field sports exploits and the part contributed by horses, dogs, pigeons to the war effort.
And Lewis-Stempel is clearly very cross about something. He doesn't like that Sassoon chappie nor Wilfred Owen. I'm not expert (and Lewis-Stempel does write military history) but it feels as though he misrepresents the conventional wisdom in order to shoot it down, quite unnecessarily. There's also a weird point where he quotes at some length from a soldier's account which argues (in an example) that some combatants didn't appreciate flowers and then just says the writer was wrong. So a fair few bum notes were struck and I don't think the argument was adequately made about countryside being what most were fighting for. There was also a rather unpleasant edge to some of the contrasts made between the 'British' (as in Empire countries) and other nations' attitudes.
So it feels a wee bit naff that this book won the Wainwright Prize... at worst just for being trendy, at best just because this is a really interesting subject that many will have wanted to read about and a lot of work has clearly gone into and because he's known to be a good writer.
And Lewis-Stempel is clearly very cross about something. He doesn't like that Sassoon chappie nor Wilfred Owen. I'm not expert (and Lewis-Stempel does write military history) but it feels as though he misrepresents the conventional wisdom in order to shoot it down, quite unnecessarily. There's also a weird point where he quotes at some length from a soldier's account which argues (in an example) that some combatants didn't appreciate flowers and then just says the writer was wrong. So a fair few bum notes were struck and I don't think the argument was adequately made about countryside being what most were fighting for. There was also a rather unpleasant edge to some of the contrasts made between the 'British' (as in Empire countries) and other nations' attitudes.
So it feels a wee bit naff that this book won the Wainwright Prize... at worst just for being trendy, at best just because this is a really interesting subject that many will have wanted to read about and a lot of work has clearly gone into and because he's known to be a good writer.
January 11, 2019
You know what - I REALLY DIDNT LIKE THIS BOOK ! .. it was like meeting some posh bloke that doesnt understand that your not as well educated and said Phwaah phwaar at the end of every sentance hey what ! .... Being autistic i didnt get round the old fashioned slang very well, not being so well educated i didnt understand or relate to reference about famous poems etc that i was just 'presumed' to know and wasnt printed so0 i felt i was out of the conversation, this book presumes and expects you to already know stuff and understand long complicated words that ive never seen before. on top of all that i was BORED ! ... i really wanted to read this b ook but found it too unfriendly to get very far
A BETTER EDUCATED PERSON SUMS THIS UP BETTER THAN ME: This one's tough. 3.5 stars? It's a moving, well-researched exploration an fascinating topic, with an immense amount of source material. At times though, the narrative was interrupted with a few too many of these excerpts, especially ones without real substance. It's almost as if Stempel wanted to include every single applicable quote he found, and didn't have an editor to trim the unnecessary ones. Which brings me to my main complaint: a general lack of editing with regard to Stempel's writing. The organization and flow is rather disjointed; he often abruptly mentions a soldier on one page as if we know who they are, then introduces them properly, as if they were never previously mentioned, several pages later. (For example, he references one Ford Madox Hueffer several times, but only after maybe the fourth mention does he finally add a parenthesis saying that Hueffer was also known as the poet Ford Madox Ford - something that would have been quite helpful to know at the first occasion). Regardless of Stempel's somewhat distracting way of writing, there's a lot of lovely, poignant material in here that's worth reading.
A BETTER EDUCATED PERSON SUMS THIS UP BETTER THAN ME: This one's tough. 3.5 stars? It's a moving, well-researched exploration an fascinating topic, with an immense amount of source material. At times though, the narrative was interrupted with a few too many of these excerpts, especially ones without real substance. It's almost as if Stempel wanted to include every single applicable quote he found, and didn't have an editor to trim the unnecessary ones. Which brings me to my main complaint: a general lack of editing with regard to Stempel's writing. The organization and flow is rather disjointed; he often abruptly mentions a soldier on one page as if we know who they are, then introduces them properly, as if they were never previously mentioned, several pages later. (For example, he references one Ford Madox Hueffer several times, but only after maybe the fourth mention does he finally add a parenthesis saying that Hueffer was also known as the poet Ford Madox Ford - something that would have been quite helpful to know at the first occasion). Regardless of Stempel's somewhat distracting way of writing, there's a lot of lovely, poignant material in here that's worth reading.
December 26, 2017
I didn't enjoy this book as much as the other books by Lewis-Stempel. Maybe I prefer him on his farm than in the trenches. There is not the same beautiful writing although of course the subject is rather different. The voices of the soldiers is far more dominant & of course more important. The poems about birds were gorgeous & I suspect you will be scratching yourself after "Of lice & men". However I was a little disappointed by the rest. Too many details about the regiments, too many lists & although the common soldier was included there is more from officers & the upper classes. The figures and detail about the treatment of horses is shocking but so was the war. The book does appear a little too "pro the Brits" & there is a sense of "Empire" which at times appears farcical. How can we possibly (by we I mean British) be proud of empire when we have committed as many atrocities in the name of King or Queen as any empire on earth. Having just read about the Romanov's & the 3 cousins Nicholas, Willy & George , the protagonists of WW1, it is clear that this war was a complete farce with devastating consequences for the normal people of every country involved. Were men really fighting for this green & pleasant land? If so were they not deluded? I may be a pacifist but my views were greatly changed by being involved in "The Last Post" a play written about the Beechey boys of Lincolnshire who died. I have huge respect & get moved every time that bugle is played. However let us not forget that the Great War was a despicable mess & not a fight for this green & pleasant land.
January 2, 2024
This book is a stunning work of meticulous research and fantastic writing. I have found no other book which matches this in satisfying my two main areas of interest, being nature and history. The book takes us through the great war but rather than focusing on the usual rhetoric of timeline of events leading up to the outbreak of war, disastrous tactics of the officer class etc. (which can be found in countless other books) This work instead focuses on the humanity that still existed throughout the war in its interaction with nature.
I found it mesmerising to read about how nature gave men glimpses of hope and brief interludes of peacefulness in the midst of what was hell on Earth.
The author has meticulously researched the topics discussed, be it the poetry written, the Trench gardens, or the breadth of animals and birds present on the front lines. He superbly presents the narrative in a way that does not overwhelm like many nature writers unfortunately fall into the trap of doing.
Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed this book it did leave me with a sense of despair as I realised that even in a time of such plight and immense upheaval, the men mentioned throughout the book (perhaps it would be better to say boys as many still were) who were living through such scenes of death and immense violence, still had a greater appreciation for nature than we have in today's peacetime society.
I found it mesmerising to read about how nature gave men glimpses of hope and brief interludes of peacefulness in the midst of what was hell on Earth.
The author has meticulously researched the topics discussed, be it the poetry written, the Trench gardens, or the breadth of animals and birds present on the front lines. He superbly presents the narrative in a way that does not overwhelm like many nature writers unfortunately fall into the trap of doing.
Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed this book it did leave me with a sense of despair as I realised that even in a time of such plight and immense upheaval, the men mentioned throughout the book (perhaps it would be better to say boys as many still were) who were living through such scenes of death and immense violence, still had a greater appreciation for nature than we have in today's peacetime society.
October 12, 2023
During trench warfare soldiers lived their life in inhumane conditions. Surrounded by death, terror and decay. Not to mention flooding and mud, rats and lice. It still beggars belief that the mindless loss of life continued for so long, on both sides.
This author looks at the impact nature had on the lives of those soldiers, doctors and nurses.
There is quite an emphasis on the poets of that time, including one of my favourites Siegfried Sassoon. Poets are the observers of life, and as such they use all their senses to illuminate their experiences. The nightingales, the domestic animals and horses and donkeys. Companions on the journey, but sadly sometimes taken by the enemy for food. There is one particular section on animals being turned into sausages, which would have been tragic for soldiers who had built up affection for their animal companions.
Having read the brilliant psychological interplay of the Regeneration series by Pat Barker on the traumas of the First World War this book was an affirming work in that is showed that there was some light during these darkest of times.
It is an original topic and the photos included are delightful.
This author looks at the impact nature had on the lives of those soldiers, doctors and nurses.
There is quite an emphasis on the poets of that time, including one of my favourites Siegfried Sassoon. Poets are the observers of life, and as such they use all their senses to illuminate their experiences. The nightingales, the domestic animals and horses and donkeys. Companions on the journey, but sadly sometimes taken by the enemy for food. There is one particular section on animals being turned into sausages, which would have been tragic for soldiers who had built up affection for their animal companions.
Having read the brilliant psychological interplay of the Regeneration series by Pat Barker on the traumas of the First World War this book was an affirming work in that is showed that there was some light during these darkest of times.
It is an original topic and the photos included are delightful.
November 11, 2021
4.75/5. Bought new. Third book I’ve read by Stempel.
Very easy and enjoyable to read. No prior knowledge needed to enjoy this. I’m not that interested in animals but I still liked this. 327 pages of main content, but a lot of poetry and a couple of lists so really a little shorter plus 50 pages of notes. Mostly about animals with chapters dedicated to birds, horses, vermin+insects+diseases, trench pets, and on hunting+fishing. But there are also chapters on the British soldiers view of the British landscape and on gardening, either at the front or in POW camps. Personally I found the horse chapter and the gardening chapters to be the best in my opinion, with the hunting+fishing chapter being worst. Each chapter covers the soldiers experiences on the Western Front with that particular animal, the experiences with the animal in other fronts (East Africa, Mesopotamia, Salonika, Gallipoli, Palestine) and then the military uses of that animal (messages, transport/logistics, detecting gas etc).
Overall I’d recommend it but it isn’t a must read.
Very easy and enjoyable to read. No prior knowledge needed to enjoy this. I’m not that interested in animals but I still liked this. 327 pages of main content, but a lot of poetry and a couple of lists so really a little shorter plus 50 pages of notes. Mostly about animals with chapters dedicated to birds, horses, vermin+insects+diseases, trench pets, and on hunting+fishing. But there are also chapters on the British soldiers view of the British landscape and on gardening, either at the front or in POW camps. Personally I found the horse chapter and the gardening chapters to be the best in my opinion, with the hunting+fishing chapter being worst. Each chapter covers the soldiers experiences on the Western Front with that particular animal, the experiences with the animal in other fronts (East Africa, Mesopotamia, Salonika, Gallipoli, Palestine) and then the military uses of that animal (messages, transport/logistics, detecting gas etc).
Overall I’d recommend it but it isn’t a must read.
January 17, 2021
Heartbreaking yet threaded with hope, this book is a powerful portrait of the horror and destruction of "vile war." And how Nature and animals were literal lifesavers for those at the front in "the war to end all wars." It's a harrowing read for those of us who love non-humans (and humans), but a testament to the healing power they can bring.
You may weep. At the cruel end for so many faithful horses, for example, shipped out from the fields of England to be sold, lame and blinded at the end of the war, to French and Belgian butchers.
There's a surprising and affecting quote regarding the war from Sir Edward Elgar, Roman Catholic and Edwardian composer of many a weighty Christian choral epic: "O, my beloved animals! The men and women can go to hell - but my horses. I walk round and round cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured. How CAN He?"
Yes, so many questions, and we never learn, it seems.
You may weep. At the cruel end for so many faithful horses, for example, shipped out from the fields of England to be sold, lame and blinded at the end of the war, to French and Belgian butchers.
There's a surprising and affecting quote regarding the war from Sir Edward Elgar, Roman Catholic and Edwardian composer of many a weighty Christian choral epic: "O, my beloved animals! The men and women can go to hell - but my horses. I walk round and round cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured. How CAN He?"
Yes, so many questions, and we never learn, it seems.
June 25, 2023
I really liked this! WWI is one of my niche history favourites, I absolutely love learning about it and I particularly adore its literature. I've also been interested in its literary depictions of nature for a while, so naturally when I found this I knew it would be right up my alley. I will admit that I was expecting it to focus on poetry a lot more, so I was surprised when it didn't, but I still thought it was a great read and very fascinating. It's got a very good mix of personal stories and writing from actual soldiers and proper 'history', which I liked. I also found myself deeply moved quite often, so I'd have to set the book aside and process what I read. It's really worthwhile for anyone interested in WWI, and even for people who are just getting into it. I can't recommend it enough!
January 18, 2018
This book aims to be both a military history and a nature book. Some chapters e.g. rats, louses, disease succeed very well and really enhanced my understanding of what the trenches were like. Some e.g. on Horses and Dogs covered areas I knew about but were good refreshers.
Unfortunately some chapters just didn't work and the over-the-top language of nature writing did not match the topic being discussed. This mis-match led to possibly one of the most pretentious sentences I have ever read in the English language: "Such are the inconsistences of humans in uniform, that the same endothermic vertebrates, which were believed a blessing, an aid to nostalgia, a sign from God, could also be shot for food (see p281-88) and employed as tools."
Unfortunately some chapters just didn't work and the over-the-top language of nature writing did not match the topic being discussed. This mis-match led to possibly one of the most pretentious sentences I have ever read in the English language: "Such are the inconsistences of humans in uniform, that the same endothermic vertebrates, which were believed a blessing, an aid to nostalgia, a sign from God, could also be shot for food (see p281-88) and employed as tools."
March 13, 2022
This was a whim purchase in a bookshop on my travels. I'd read a very short book about oak trees by Lewis-Stempel before, and I did enjoy it, but this probably didn't quite end up being the book I thought it might be. The opening chapter was good, with observations on how the general feeling about our landscape possibly helped with the desire to join up and defend it, but I'll admit to a feeling of being bogged-down once I'd read the second chapter about birds. I can understand the choice of the themes, but it can feel a little stodgy. For this reason, I skipped the chapters on horses and pets/mascots, as I just don't have much affinity with those subjects. I did read the first couple of pages of each though as there were some useful headline stats in them. The other chapters on pests/disease and the aftermath of war were interesting, though. I wouldn't say it wasn't worth reading, but potentially one you don't need to read all of.
November 25, 2017
I wasn't as blown away by this as I expected to be having read other books by the same author and seen the glowing reviews of this one. There were some chapters I really enjoyed but other times it felt a bit disjointed and bitty with lists between the chapters and others just a string of anecdotes with little narrative to make sense of them. What does emerge is a sense of the connection between the soldiers and the natural environment which showed itself in many different ways - from birdwatching to gardening to care for wounded animals. I felt like I got a new perspective on the conflict but it could have been better written and presented.
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