Bird Song

[Ghazala]

This article was in The Times on 22nd April 1915...

Spring has come in so haltingly this year that it almost seems as if summer was reluctant to return to the northern world, so desolated and full of horrors. In England the war touches us comparatively little, though it is true that a bomb from an aeroplane has killed a blackbird, and many of the summer birds which haunt open spaces larks and pipits and wheatears must be dreadfully disturbed to find the parks and commons and golf courses, which they have been accustomed to have to themselves while nesting, now filled with tents and trampled by squads of men. Many thousands of eggs of ground-nesting birds will be crushed this summer by soldiers boots. But, after all, the British Isles, so far as the wild things are concerned, are much as they have been in other years; it is difficult to guess how the birds will fare over a large part of Europe.

Last September, when one-half of Belgium was already waste, the writer watched terns wheeling over the Yser by Furnes and Dixmude, and plovers whistled across the fields which are now all shell-torn and seamed with trenches. One of the curious sights of the early stages of the war was the swallows gathering in countless numbers for their autumn flight on a clump of ruined farm buildings on the very edge of a battlefield. Doubtless that farm, with its red-roofed buildings half hidden in the orchard trees, had been the rendezvous for departing swallows for innumerable generations. War had swept over it. The red roofs were gone and the trees blackened, but the swallows still gathered there, huddling along the jagged remnants of walls and crowding the broken branches of the apple trees. Fighting was going on close by, so that the air pulsated to the throb of guns, and whenever a Belgian battery spoke all the birds rose with a rush of wings into the air and swung in tumbling flight about the sky. What will the swallows and the terns and plovers do this year, and all the other birds that nest in the Belgian woods?

We shall probably hear, from the German side and our own, of men crouched in the trenches, not daring to lift their heads lest a snipers bullet should find them in the moonlight, listening to nightingales flooding the night with their melody. One can imagine it would be hard to kill under such circumstances.

[Stoppage Drill]

Slightly off-topic (but, pace, at least from Round 2 of the Great 20th Century War) and I have posted it before, but there is some relevance to the opening post and it is always a haunting listen . . . . 1000 men of Bomber Command bound for Mannheim . . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_MHqW5KVds

[SiegeGunner]

Wasn't Erich Maria Remarque's character Paul Bäumer in AQOTWF shot by a sniper while sketching a skylark?

[Moonraker]

In at least one film version wasn't he reaching out for a butterfly?

Moonraker

[Uncle George]

Wasn't Erich Maria Remarque's character Paul Bäumer in AQOTWF shot by a sniper while sketching a skylark?

No, you must be thinking of another book. "He fell ... and lay on the earth as though sleeping."

[petwes]

Thanks for posting that: I read that it in the Times today (with a slight irony on a flight to Hamburg) and thought, for 1915, it was a quite reflective view of the war.

Peter

[SiegeGunner]

Am I perhaps thinking of the John-Boy Walton film version ... or am I just imagining things ...?

[Stoppage Drill]

IIRC the book contains a passage where Paul observes butterflies, and reflects on metamorphosis and all that sort of stuff, but I think the 1930 film introduced the final butterfly scene. Blowed if I can find my copy at the moment.

[Uncle George]

Yes I think the original film introduced the 'reaching for the butterfly' ending, here adopted by a paperback edition.

[BelgianExile]

The 1979 film version definitely has a bird - not sure if it's a skylark or not. I don't remember him sketching it, but seem to remember he heard it, had a look, and got slotted.

Lovely prose in the first post though - quite evocative.

[spof]

I'm currently reading a biography of the man who did the first English translation of All quiry (Lt Arthur Wesley Wheen MM+2 Bars a signaller in 54 Bn AIF) and it states that the reaching for the buuterfly act is introduced in the 1930 movie which then has a line of ghotstly German soldiers marching away. The book ends:

He fell in Ovtober 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All Quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

[dah]

Returning to the original 'Bird song' thread.....

Enjoyed reading and reflecting on it as an aspect of the war we don't often consider.......and which may have been a similar distraction or reassurance of ongoing life to some soldiers in the front line.

Strange also to reflect that the rest of the animal kingdom will have coped their way around the war, preoccupied in their own struggle for survival, procreation and the next meal......with no residual memory of WW1 traumas to pass down or disturb future generations.

Life, mercifully (or is it, mercilessly?) goes on.