Carrier/Messenger Pigeons

essenger pigeons were used

for people living in the
trenches to talk to the
officers that were sitting in a
nice comfy shelter in nice wet Britain.
The idea was that if a message needed
to be sent then someone would get a
messenger
pigeon
and
tie
their
aforementioned message to its leg. The
bird would then be let loose into the sky
to try and find whoever needed to read
the letter. Of course, this meant the
pigeon flying straight into enemy fire,
needless to say not all pigeons made it
to the wanted reader. There was,
however, an American dove with this
dangerous job named Cher Ami, and his
bravery saved dozens of lives and was
awarded a medal of bravery a few hours
before he died. Cher Amis story started
when
he
joined
Major
Charles
Whittleseys brigade. The brigade was

surrounded in Argonne Forest in France,

starving and exhausted, with many
dead and many wounded. At this point
some Americans dropped shells on them
by mistake. Their only hope was to send
out a carrier pigeon. The Major wrote a
hurried note which read Our own forces
are dropping shells on us! For heavens
sake stop it!, but when he tried to
attach in to his pigeons leg, the bird was
alarmed and took flight before the
message was attached. Only Cher Ami
was left. The message was clipped to his
leg and then the bird promptly flew up
the nearest tree to preen himself. The
brigade desperately threw sticks and
stones at the dove but still the perverse
pigeon refused to move. Finally the
major climbed the tree and shook the
branch. Cher Ami took the hint and took
flight. The enemy saw it was carrying a
message and turned their fire on it. One
of the birds legs was blown off, another

went through his chest and a third

knocked out an eye. The bird began to
lose height and the brigade began to
lose hope yet incredibly the dove
recovered itself and flew on to deliver
the message and saved 384 men from
Charles Whittleseys brigade. He died
peacefully the next day and then was
stuffed and went on display at the
Smithsonian Institute. Of course, if there
was no course for a message to sent, in
the tranches, food was so short some
pigeons would be eaten. Sometimes
baskets of pigeons would be dropped
into German occupied land in order for
villagers to attach their messages and
send the pigeons back to UK. These
messages would tell the British and its
allied forces what the enemy was doing.
This is, of course, spying; a punishment
for this was to be shot, the pigeons
however had an even more suicidal job;
roughly sixteen thousand would be

dropped into the cities yet only one in

ten would return alive.
This however wasnt foolproof as the
Germans quickly cottoned on to the idea
and planted baskets of German pigeons
into the villages. People would attach
their messages to what they thought
would be an English pigeon that would
actually fly to Germany and warn the
Germans of our plots, another German
tactic was to assemble squadrons of
hawks and falcons to intercept any
pigeons flying over the English
Channel.
The French, by this time,
clearly didnt like being left out
and decided that they wanted
pigeons of their own, and in
1916 a French pigeon saved
hundreds of lives at Verdun. They were
being shelled by the Germans but they
had no heavy guns to fight back with.
They needed to get a message out to

their gunners to say, Here are the

German gum positions, aim at them and
stop them destroying us, a greyhound
got the message through, but was
wounded, then a pigeon got through just
before it died of its wounds. This pigeon
was awarded the Legion dHonneur,
the highest human medal for bravery;
this then meant that anyone else who
won the award had the privilege of
knowing that they were as brave as a
pigeon.

Stubby the dog

f course, pigeons were not the

only animals to help save
lives in the Great War; an
American
dog
named
Stubby won countless medals for his

bravery on the battlefield, and became

a US celebrity as a result of his work.
Stubby was a poor and homeless dog,
found by happy chance by a man called
Robert Conroy, on the streets of
Hartford. They became so close that
when the First World War began, both of
them ended up in the army. He was
smuggled to the war zone and joined
the 102nd Infantry Battalion and became
a guard dog and he had more acute
senses than a sentry. During the 17
battles he fought in he would go onto
the battlefield and wait by the wounded
and the dying until the stretchers
reached him no matter what the enemy
was firing at him. As the soldiers slept,
stubby would watch over them. He
saved the entire battalions lives by
warning them of a gas attack, and
another
night
an
enemy
soldier
attempted to slip into the US trenches,
and left, quickly. His medals were put on

a special blanket which he wore when

he met President Woodrow Wilson. After
the war, stubby and Robert toured the
country, helping all those who had been
injured, or lost loved ones because of
the
war

Stubby the dog

Rats and Fleas

n the trenches, animals didnt just

save lives, there were a great many
animals that made life for the
soldiers a living nightmare. They
outnumbered the good guys 10 to 1
and consisted of rats, and fleas.

The rats were especially aggravating for

any and every soldier as food rations
were short and the vermin would often
eat the little food they had each night.
Unfortunately for the rats, the human
soldiers soon realised that they had
weapons that the rats did not. This
meant a few techniques were invented
and slowly the soldiers perfected the art
of killing the rodents, the top three
methods are described on the next
page;

Method

Description

1
The breaded
spade

Place some bread in the

middle of the trench,
hide round it armed with
a torch and a spade.
When you hear the rats,
switch on your torch

and beat then with your

spade.

2
Dynamouse

3
Nacho Cheese

Put cordite at the

entrance to a suspected
rat hole and light it. The
smoke should either kill
the in their home or the
will be forced out where
you can batter them
with clubs
Put a bayonet at the
end of your rifle, put a
small morsel of cheese
on the tip of the blade,
as the rat devours the
dairy produce, and pull
the trigger. You cant
miss

Fleas were a pain, to say the least. They

infested nearly every soldiers body, the
average amount of lice on a soldier was
about 200, but the record was 1069 lice,
some German, and some British. The
British lice were a fawn colour, the
German lice a bright red, if the mated
youd have pink lice. When he saw
them he decided he should compose a
poem about the sight which is written
on the next page.
A German soldier described one method
of treating them; they would get the lid
of a boot polish tin and hold it with a
piece of wire over a flame from a
candle. When the lid started to glow
they would drop the lice onto the red
hot tin. The sound of the sizzling lice
was sweet music to their ears; this
technique later became known as
chatting and was the favoured method
of getting rid of these parasites

The Little Soldiers of the

Night
Though some hundreds you
may kill,
Still youll find theres hundreds
still,
For they hide beneath each
other
And are smart at taking cover;
Then you have an awful bite,
Theyve a shocking appetite.
There are families in dozens,

Uncles, mothers, sisters,

cousins,
And they have their married
quarters
Where the rear their sons and
daughters;
And they take a lot of catching
Cause an awful lot of catching.

Introduction

eople did an awful lot of work in

the First World War. They hid for
years in trenches, with not
much food at all and shot
people living in the other
trenches. There were many

heroes, on both sides, one

American kept firing till the
final second of the war, then
got himself elected as president
of the USA and was responsible
the atomic bombs on Japan, he
was, in a way, the man who
fired the last shots in two world
wars, he was Harry S Truman.
This man, nor any other
man(unless the are involved
with animals) will not be
mentioned again in this writing
because I will be looking and
the heroes, and villains, of the
animal
kingdom,
without
whom, we could have lost
almost ten times as many lives

as we did, and the war may still

not have been over, should
they not have been used.

Epilogue

n my introduction I mentioned
that I will not mention a human
again. This was a lie. A project
on the war to end all wars is
wasted, if it does not, in some
way, remember those who
gave their lives for their
country, and how we can learn
from the mistakes they made.
There were hundreds of
tragedies in WW1. Every single
family in Britain France
Germany and Russia lost
someone in the war to end all
wars. This is not the real
tragedy. WW1 was nicknamed

the war to end all wars. It did

not. It led toWW2 and far more
misery, death, and destruction.
Those people whose names are
etched on to the memorials
would have given their lives
gladly, if they believed they
were fighting for peace, fighting
to end all future fights.
Why didnt it? Big mistakes and
small accidents. One accident
so microscopic no one even
noticed it at the time. This
accident happened in a German
dugout in the battle of the
Somme. A British shell landed
there and killed all the
occupants... except one. By

hideous chance he escaped

with just a bit of shrapnel in his
eye. He lived to start another
war. His name was Adolf Hitler.
Lucky Hitler- unlucky world
Sometimes history is changed
by big events like WW1,
sometimes by freak accidents
that happen in less than a
second; the arrow that hit King
Harold at the Battle of Hastings,
the shell that failed to kill Hitler.
But if each of us stands at a
war memorial, reads the names
etched upon it, and say; never
again. If everyone on this earth
were to say that, and mean it,

then the thousands of deaths

will not have been such a waste