This soldier holding an owl reminds us that, despite the battlefields’ wretchedness, lyrical and freewheeling birds were ever-present.

 


‘Here one knows the larks sing at seven and the guns begin at nine or ten …’ 

This soldier holding an owl reminds us that, despite the battlefields’ wretchedness, lyrical and freewheeling birds were ever-present. 

 

Unsurprisingly, birds feature heavily in Great War literature and soldier diaries. 

 

In 1916 Sergeant Keeling recorded that every morning in the trenches he would hear the larks singing. ‘They made me feel more sad than almost anything else out here,’ he wrote. ‘Their songs are so closely associated in my mind with peaceful summer days.’  

 

Other soldiers recorded seeing scores of swallows crossing the scarred fields, flocks of linnets sitting on the barbed wire, owls hunting mice in no-man’s-land, and robins flying in jumps across the parapet.

 

Great War poet Isaac Rosenberg observed how the soldiers, with unseen sinister threats around them, would lift up their faces on hearing unseen larks sing. Rosenberg was killed in 1918.  

 

Poet Will Streets wrote in ‘A Lark Above the Trenches’ of hearing the wild lyric and free carols of a lark above the shriek of hurtling shells. Streets died on the Somme in 1916. 

 

Soldiers also believed that certain birds signified omens: crows implied doom and death, larks represented inner discovery, and robins suggested new beginnings. 

 

This symbolism associated with birds has always intrigued me, so I naturally explored it in ‘Night in Passchendaele’.

 

The novel’s main character, Wilfred Rhodes, in a moment of despair, sees a plump robin with a bright orange breast perched on a pillbox. 

 

It sings its little heart out for Rhodes. Yet what remains unclear, as the robin reappears throughout the novel, is whether it’s a symbol of renewal or of impending doom. 

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