CHAPTER XIII 



Birds and Artillery Fire 



WHEN one looks back upon the early days of the war, and remembers 

 the plight of the unfortunate people whose modest homes were 

 situated in what was known as the 'Battle Area,' one is filled with 

 admiration for those who, full of confidence in the Allied Armies, and the 

 belief that help would come at any moment, clung to their homes until the last 

 moment. 



I can think of nothing more hopelessly pathetic than the little rooms, 

 littered with half-finished lace-work and children's toys, which had been so 

 suddenly so tragically evacuated : and which were so soon to be blown to 

 atoms. 



Somehow there seems to be a similarity between the indomitable hopeful- 

 ness of these people in refusing to leave the places in which their lives had been 

 spent and the tenacity of the birds of such districts, in clinging, in spite of 

 all, to their ancestral breeding areas. For any of us who were in the firing-line 

 for any length of time during those fateful days, and who chanced to take an 

 interest in wild creatures, will remember that the din of a bombardment, or 

 the crackle of rifle fire, had little effect on the birds of the neighbourhood, and 

 that it was rather owing to the ultimate lack of cover that they betook them- 

 selves to more peaceful quarters. 



How uncanny it seemed, in the spring of 1915, to hear the Golden Oriole 

 calling cheerfully almost defiantly from the top of a shattered tree stand- 

 ing amidst the ruins of what had once been Hooge Chateau ; or to listen to the 

 song of the nightingale on those summer evenings, and to mark how it grew in 

 vehemence as the whine and crash of 'whiz-bang ' and ' heavy ' grew in intensity. 



And then the swallows and their nests in the smashed barns on the out- 

 skirts of St. Eloi : the magpies at Kemmel, and a host of others. None of 

 them breed in those places now. No oak-tree remains to conceal, with its 

 verdant foliage, the suspended nest of the Golden Oriole, or the glorious colour- 

 ing of the bird itself. 



Deep under the fouled earth are buried the rafters on which the swallows 



129 R 



