‘By treating the pet, we treat the owner’
great conflict to involve animals in the fighting and they died on a terrible scale. More than a million horses served in the British Army between 1914 and 1918, used for transport or in futile cavalry charges across the mud that ended in a hail of machine-gun bullets; a relic from a very different theatre of war. By the end of hostilities, over a million horses had died, with fewer than 100,000 returning home.
Some 20,000 dogs also served alongside British troops. Each was required to undergo six weeks of intensive training and went on to become heroes to the soldiers they fought with. In 1918, for example, an Airedale called Jack saved an entire detachment of Sherwood Foresters trapped behind enemy lines. Jack charged across No Man’s Land with a message requesting urgent help tied to his collar. He was shot twice, but miraculously made it back to base, before succumbing to his injuries.
Even amid the unrelenting horror of the First World War, the death and destruction of these innocent animals struck a chord back home. The Blue Cross Fund, which was first established in 1912 by the “Our Dumb Friends League” animal charity to support horses injured in fighting in the Balkans, was relaunched to provide medical help in the Western Front. The idea was that Blue Cross would treat the animals, while the Red Cross dealt with human combatants.
The appeal was seized upon by the British public and raised a total of £170,000 – more than £6.5 million in today’s money. By the end of the war, Blue Cross had treated more than 50,000 sick and injured horses and 18,000 dogs in 19 hospitals established on the front line. The fund had also sent veterinary supplies to more than 3,500 units of the British and allied armies all over the world.
“The relationship between humans and animals is obviously an incredibly close one,” says Steven Broomfield the manager at the Blue Cross in Victoria.
Nowadays, the 80 or so hospital staff working for the charity – which the is supporting in its Christmas appeal – undertake 30,000 consultations and around 8,000 operations a year, ranging from dental extractions to orthopaedic surgery. Occasionally, Broomfield says, they still treat animals that have fallen in the name of public service, in the form of injured police horses and dogs. But the memory of the animals that came before them, who served and died for this country, still looms large.
“Most of the men at the start of the First World War had volunteered to go, while the horses didn’t really have a choice,” he says. “Because the horse was still so common in Edwardian Britain, pretty much everybody had connections with them. We are a nation of animal lovers and it probably isn’t a massive surprise how people responded to the appeal.”
In fact, a surprising diversity of animals found themselves embroiled in the conflict. Glow worms were used to pore over battle maps in the dark, while carrier pigeons were an essential line of communication. More than 100,000 pigeons served with British forces in the Great War, with a success ratio of 95 per cent in getting their messages through. When Britain trundled out the first ever tanks in 1916, each had a pigeon inside the cabin.
As portrayed by Michael Morpurgo’s book (which inspired a Steven Spielberg film and the National Theatre’s record-breaking stage dramatisation), the presence of animals on the front line was also a vital source of solace for troops embroiled in the very worst of humanity.
“The bond between the cavalryman and his horse was very close,” Broomfield says. “A dreadful example occurred in the Battle of Arras in 1917, where two regiments of cavalry became trapped in a village under heavy shelling for several days. Something like 600 horses were killed. The effect it had on the men, who had been looking after these horses for several years, was profound.”
Broomfield says that dogs not only served a valuable wartime role, they were also adopted by regiments as mascots. “If you are away and in pretty horrible conditions then a puppy attaches itself, you will keep it on as your companion. It provides the same friendship and stress relief as for working people today.”
At the end of the war, Blue Cross transformed a pet boarding kennels in Charlton, south-east London, to be used as a quarantine station offering free board for adopted dogs being sent to this country. The animals were returned to soldiers in hampers six months later. One infantryman in Glasgow recorded this homecoming in a diary.
“I was waiting for Queenie at the station, and as soon as I could I opened the box to have a look at her, thinking she would be stiff, but as soon as the box was opened she sprang out and when she smelt me – well I thought she would have gone mad… I can assure you ours was a happy house last night.”
The Blue Cross Fund also rescued more than 4,000 old war horses that had been sold abroad as working horses and often mistreated. The charity was responding to a mass outcry from the British public that animals which had served this country so bravely in war were being sent overseas to be worked to death.
The pace of industrialisation meant that by the Second World War there was little need for Blue Cross to operate on the front line. But as bombs rained down on London its hospital (which first opened on May 15, 1906) remained in action throughout. In total, Broomfield says, the charity cared for more than 350,000 animals injured during the raids and also secured foster homes for them outside of London.
Blue Cross, which also runs an education programme for schools and prospective owners and a pet bereavement support line, helps 40,000 vulnerable pets a year. It hopes to make that 70,000 by 2020.
It may seem strange to focus on the plight of animals during the most desperate of times, but Broomfield says there is an obvious reason for that. “By looking after their pets, we are making people’s lives better. We have a lot of owners who are elderly or separated from society. Very often their pet is the only thing they actually have that gives them stability and affection.”
From a cavalryman and his horse on the Western Front to an elderly woman and her cat living alone in a flat in the modern city, both find the same reassurance in the animals they care for. “Very often we find that we don’t actually end up treating the pet,” Broomfield says, “but the owner.”