Environmental history is, without belabouring the pun, an expanding field,Footnote ¹ and there has been a similar development in the environmental history of war and militarised landscapes, linked to a welcome growth in recent years of research and publications in the related sub-discipline of military archaeology.Footnote ² There is an increasing amount of literature on congruent subjects, such as the impact of expanding urbanisation and humankind's socio-economic activities on the landscape and natural world through, among other occurrences, systematic deforestation, river canalisations, chemical and radiation pollution, industrial-scale mining and quarrying, oil spillages and fires.Footnote ³ There has also been exciting and innovative research on the history of grand-scale ecological eventualities: droughts, crop failures, famines, fires and floods.Footnote ⁴ As a part of this work, some historians have been paying more attention than before to the experiences in the past of wild and cultivated animals, domesticated pets, and the landscape, especially forests and wetlands, focusing on the history of the natural environment in general, and during wartime in particular.Footnote ⁵

The present article seeks to contribute to this body of work by revisiting a familiar terrain of war, the French campaign of 1940, but from the unfamiliar perspective of the impact of the fighting on animals.Footnote ⁶ Animals have neither a capacity to write about their trials and tribulations nor the ability to share and transmit their stories themselves.Footnote ⁷ Yet this does not make inevitable the ‘silence of the lambs’, nor of the cattle, horses, goats, swine, chickens, cats and dogs. It is not so difficult to reconstruct the animal world's experiences of war. This article is not an exercise in military, political or even social history; it is an endeavour to recover, and understand, the effects of the 1940 campaign for the landscape and, specifically, for the landscape's non-human inhabitants. Everyone familiar with early cinema remembers Paul Baumer's death at the hands of an unseen sniper in the closing frames of the classic war film, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), as Baumer incautiously stretches out to try to touch a butterfly near his trench – the only living thing of beauty in the scarred, sordid, death-dominated landscape of the 1918 battlefields.Footnote ⁸ What follows will develop the recent growth of interest in ‘all manner of encounters between humans and animals’, to focus on landscapes of defence and animals in warfare, asking what kinds of experiences and what kinds of victimhood the animals of France underwent in 1940.Footnote ⁹

A generation after 1918, the territory of northern France and Belgium became spaces of combat, despoliation and death once again. Across broad swathes of the countryside, however, the fast-flowing military operations made less impact on the natural landscape and flora than had the largely immobile and intensive trench warfare of 1914–18. Shell-craters brimming with stagnant foul-water and shattered woods with their trees reduced to jagged stumps by bombardment populate photographs of the First World War's desolate battlefields. This was warfare's ‘environmental collateral damage’, in the phrase of John R. McNeill.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1940 the forests of France, some replanted for barely twenty years, survived largely unscathed.Footnote ¹¹ ‘Relying on wooded landscapes to stymie enemy movements’, McNeill cautions, ‘was always a risky gamble’. The excessive trust of the French high command in the inaccessibility, if not outright impenetrability, of the Ardennes to German mechanised and motorised units was the most infamous miscalculation about the landscape and military operations.Footnote ¹² The impassability of mountains could also be exaggerated by defenders or insurgents. It was tempting to rely on the interior lines and familiarity with the terrain of one's homeland, by what Clausewitz termed ‘retreat to the interior of the country’.Footnote ¹³ The capacity of rivers and canals to delay a purposeful enemy, equipped with portable bridging apparatus, pontoons and rubber boats, was also exaggerated.Footnote ¹⁴ To be sure, densely wooded hillsides proved tactically determining in some instances, when occupied by well-drilled and disciplined French troops whose officers had a good eye for the ground. An example was the forested heights near Inor, east of the river Meuse. These were turned into a bastion by General Edouard Chapouilly's 3^rd North African Division. The fight faced by the Wehrmacht to dislodge the brave and stubborn Maghrebin defenders in May 1940 proved so traumatic that the Germans likened it to being in a ‘Green Hell’ of thickets and thorns.Footnote ¹⁵

However, in the départements of the Nord, Somme, Aisne, Oise and Seine-Maritime the military operations mostly swirled and flowed over the natural landscape. The ground thereabouts, abounding in arable fields and pastures, was better suited to mechanised warfare. Yet even in Flanders, observant soldiers noticed the brutal intrusion of the technologies of industrialised killing. In mid-May 1940, Lieutenant Peter Hadley described how his British Expeditionary Force platoon attacked the heavy clay soil around Steenbrugge in Belgium with their entrenching tools:

The Wehrmacht punched through French lines so quickly that there was seldom time and opportunity for those in retreat to entrench. And in the mobile warfare of 1940, the combatants could rarely employ natural features as strongpoints and ‘force multipliers’ to halt or at least canalise the enemy. Only on the Somme and Aisne in early June, and on the Loire later that month, were the French defenders able to dig in. Unlike 1914–18, even during the heaviest attrition in 1940 the battles rarely raged over a single location or landscape for more than a week. Thus it was not so much the French countryside, the paysage, as the urban townscapes and built environment that felt war's fury and impact with the greatest severity.Footnote ¹⁷ The cities and towns of France, with their factories, railway junctions and marshalling yards served as a magnet for bomber aircraft, the latest means for man to deliver the destructiveness of war. The city of Nancy in Lorraine experienced a heavy aerial bombardment. Beauvais, to the north of Paris, was even more intensively pounded. Many of its buildings were burnt out after several days of air raids by the Luftwaffe, the German air force, and the devastation was made worse by a prolonged battering from German artillery.Footnote ¹⁸ Districts of Amiens, too, suffered extensive damage and the city witnessed destructive house to house fighting as Allied rearguards dug into its outskirts on the retreat to Dunkirk.Footnote ¹⁹ A number of city centres, including Strasbourg in September 1939 and Reims in May 1940, saw almost their entire civilian populations evacuated. Paris too, shortly before most inhabitants left for the south, was the target of air attack, suffering the heaviest air raid in the campaign on 3^rd June 1940.Footnote ²⁰ And just like Lille before it, the capital was then declared an ‘open city’ as the fighting on the ground washed towards the suburbs.

In all these instances, urban sophisticates blessed with money and motor transport promptly made their escape. Those with a car took along as many of their most prized material possessions as they could pile into, and onto, their vehicle. And in a recognition of a cosmopolitanism that understands humans and animals as fellow creatures, many beloved house pets travelled too. These were cats and dogs most commonly, but also caged canaries, budgerigars and parakeets.Footnote ²¹ On the move to evade the Germans were not just French people but the members of domestic menageries that Kathleen Kete once memorably called the Parisians’ ‘beast[s] in the boudoir’. Two British auxiliary nurses, Denis Freeman and Douglas Cooper, volunteers in the French army medical service, recounted ‘the not unfunny spectacle’ as rumours swept Paris of the imminent approach of the Wehrmacht on 16^th May 1940, of a woman setting out for the railway station with ‘a canary in a cage’ as well as ‘five trunks, two fur coats [. . .] and, for some inexplicable reason, a bright blue feather boa wrapped round her neck.’Footnote ²² A high incidence of domestic pet-keeping among the residents of the more fashionable bourgeois arrondissements had become a notorious feature of Parisian life since the mid nineteenth century.Footnote ²³

In the 1930s Friedrich Sieburg, the German author and Francophile, wrote in his entertaining and perceptive book, Is God a Frenchman? of how he ‘regard[ed] the living creatures as the most important feature of the Paris streets’. He explained that this meant not only the human beings ‘but also the horses, cats and dogs’. Sieburg observed approvingly that the continued presence of horse-drawn vehicles represented resistance to pressure from urban motor transport, with its then scarcely forty year old internal combustion engine, to consign them to history. ‘Then there are the cats’, Sieburg continued, ‘mounting guard on the doorways of the little shops or enjoying their timeless existence in the police stations [. . .] and newspaper kiosks’.Footnote ²⁴ And once the phoney war escalated into a hot one, with the bitter battles of early summer 1940, domestic animals found themselves in fresh danger as the visceral and existential dangers of the hour overcame concern for them by their human owners and pet-keepers. The fighting was fiercest in the north of France, in the Pas-de-Calais, Nord, Somme, Aisne, Oise and Meuse départements. There it was agricultural livestock that suffered most, from the violence and from human self-centredness and neglect. Belgian and French cowherds and shepherds, farming families, blacksmiths and agricultural merchants joined city dwellers in fleeing the Germans. As people set out, the majority of victims were not humans but the pets kept in urban apartments and the animals of the countryside. On 6^th June Douglas Cooper was at La Ferté-Gaucher, a little north of Paris: ‘La Ferté was dead [. . .]. There was nothing but a few cats.’Footnote ²⁵ The pre-war mass incidence of people and pets cohabiting in Paris suitably illustrates what Michael Morpurgo, the author of War Horse, has termed the ‘emotional connection between humans and animals’.Footnote ²⁶

‘It's important to understand’, as Kathleen Kete has remarked, ‘that research on the history of European attitudes towards animals is very new. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that significant work on the subject began.’Footnote ²⁷ In the early twenty-first century over sixty-three per cent of United States households own at least one pet, ‘roughly translating to 88 million cats and 75 million dogs’. Investigations undertaken by psychologists, animal welfare societies and the American Red Cross, prompted by behavioural patterns observed during Hurricane Andrew (1992) and Hurricane Katrina (2005) in the south-eastern United States, have established that:

War with its prospect of destructive combat, or at best the vagaries of occupation by a potentially callous foreign invader, also prompts flight or evacuation by frightened civilians. As in the United States when facing the onrush of hurricane storms, so the French citizens of Lille, Amiens, Reims and Paris in June 1940 abandoned their homes in the face of the German tanks and trucks. French villages and towns within twenty kilometres of the frontier had been evacuated, under pre-war provisions, after mobilisation in September 1939. One great city, Strasbourg, was also affected for it hugged the river Rhine on the Franco-German border.Footnote ²⁹ During the late autumn of 1939 Harry J. Greenwall, Paris correspondent of the Daily Mail, ‘decided to go to Strasbourg to see if [he] could find a story there’. He discovered batteries of loudspeakers firing noisy verbal exchanges of propaganda with their German counterparts across the river.

Another visitor to Strasbourg in late 1939 was W. Somerset Maugham, the playwright, researching a book on France at war. His account corroborates that of Greenwall:

Once the tide of war ripped into France in May and early June 1940, however, those who were without means to flee, except on foot or by pushing prams and handcarts, faced painful choices.Footnote ³² For families, notes the historian Hanna Diamond, ‘deciding who should stay and who should leave was the first and most difficult consideration’. Those who decided it was too hazardous to take elderly relatives onto the roads ‘left their homes feeling doubly tortured, terrified not only about their own unknown fate, but also about the fate of those they were leaving behind’.Footnote ³³ Yet even in Diamond's book, published in 2007, the focus remained on ‘how the exodus was experienced by the French people’. The work privileges the experiences of French people, and especially women and children, but says little about domestic animals and farm livestock.Footnote ³⁴

Dogs and cats were frequently left behind with the old and infirm. Some pets were delivered for safe-keeping to friends or neighbours who opted not to evacuate. To avoid shutting their animals indoors to suffer and eventually die from thirst or starvation, many departing owners preferred to salve their conscience and released house-pets into the streets. ‘There is a legend’, wrote Freeman and Cooper, the volunteer nursing auxiliaries with their field ambulance, ‘that the Latin peoples treat their animals unkindly. Nothing could be more untrue.’ They added:

The risks run by working dogs on country farms and smallholdings threatened by the approaching fighting may have been less. But the urban streets of the cities of northern France, including Paris, were transformed by the unexpected crisis into a realm for roving dogs and cats. Desperate for water and scraps of food-waste, the deserted domestic animals scavenged resourcefully in the back-alleys and along the boulevards of the otherwise fast emptying metropolis.

The throng of humans that decamped southward in the ‘exodus’ was unprecedented and unmanageable. An estimated seven to eight million French made for the Auvergne, the Limousin, Béarn and the Midi, to avoid the fighting or a German occupation. Their arrival in the south bloated the populations of usually sparsely inhabited départements. After the Armistice of 25^th June 1940, the pressure on food supplies, which was aggravated by large-scale German and Italian compulsory purchase, inflicted near starvation on humans and animals in the Vichy zone of the collaborationist authorities that then took power. Having failed to secure a place aboard the last ships for Britain, Harry Greenwall proceeded to the Riviera, where he lived hand-to-mouth. From September 1940 he saw more elemental, existential, human-animal interactions:

Those interactions in 1940 have not been seriously examined. The rest of this article delves deeper into the campaign, to explore Michael Morpurgo's contention ‘that telling a story through an animal's eyes makes it timeless’.Footnote ³⁷ In many instances that story for the animals of France turns out to have been as violent and sordid as war itself.

Lucien Carron was a 2^nd-Lieutenant in the 6^th Infantry Regiment, part of 44^th Infantry Division. Among the formations the French high command had just moved from Lorraine in a redeployment of forces to try and stem the panzers, Carron's platoon deployed around Oeuilly-sur-Aisne during the small hours of 18^th May 1940:

Late the next afternoon, Carron was able to reconnoitre Oeuilly:

No full-scale anthropomorphic re-framing is required to recognise the severe, frequently deadly, collateral damage caused to animals and to the natural world more widely through the direct and indirect consequences of military operations in 1940. To quote Kathleen Kete again: ‘what is at stake [. . .] is power [. . .] and sometimes it's very malign.’Footnote ⁴⁰ This observation is one that supports Morpurgo's further remark that, like children, ‘animals are the victims of the adult world [. . .] living by an adult agenda’.Footnote ⁴¹

In the light of the fate outlined for domestic animals and pets, it should be no surprise that the war in France brought catastrophe to farm animals as well. Evidence abounds in accounts by sharp eyed, sensitive human onlookers, many of them in military uniform. On 10^th June Freeman and Cooper had parked their field ambulance in an orchard just south of Rebais. Nearby was a mobile anti-aircraft unit, and a bus the army had requisitioned. The bus-driver was sitting in his seat, smoking a cigarette and accepting congratulations from a surrounding throng of soldiers.

New life, animal or human, has always been interpreted as a sign of hope for the future, something to which people cling, especially in wartime. It might be assumed that soldiers had no time to deal with animals amid the fighting in 1940 and the more urgent priorities of their missions and their personal survival, but this was not so.

For hundreds of thousands of French troops looked at life with the eyes of countrymen. They were army reservists, around forty per cent of them mobilised from regions of France and occupations that could be legitimately described as rural. ‘In 1940’, Hanna Diamond reminds us, ‘many city dwellers were only one generation removed from the countryside’.Footnote ⁴³ A substantial minority of the French troops were dairymen, shepherds, viticulturists, farmhands and cultivators first, reluctant soldiers second. On 6^th June 1940 Douglas Cooper was transporting some wounded to a hospital at Sézanne. A reservist army nurse ‘added to the picture with his own story’, to help pass the journey-time:

Elsewhere Major René Consigny, a supplies officer in the French 5^th Motorised Division, found himself beyond Guise, near the Franco-Belgian frontier. On 12^th May a Belgian officer presented himself to Consigny to discuss how they should regulate ‘the evacuation of the villages [. . .]. Less important but more difficult to resolve was the question of rounding up all the livestock abandoned by the inhabitants who'd fled’.Footnote ⁴⁵

The fate of farm animals also registered strongly with the troops of the 3^rd North African Division that, as we have seen, gave the Germans such a hard fight in the woods around Inor. The formation was deployed on the flank of the French forces along the Meuse that bore the brunt of the German panzer breakthrough in mid May 1940. At an abandoned farm where the divisional staff had located their headquarters, the operations officer, Captain (later General) Lecoq, entered-up his diary. ‘14 May: 05.00 hours. Awoken by laughter and shouting [. . .]. Fine weather outside. Some cows bellowed in the farm's pasture, their udders swollen to bursting-point. Poor beasts! Overhead, aircraft swept by and, far distant, we heard artillery-fire’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Close by and also keeping a diary was another soldier of this formation: Gustave Folcher. A native of Aigues-Vives near Nimes, Folcher was thirty years old when wrenched from the Camargue by the September 1939 mobilisation. In May 1940 he was the leader of a light machinegun team in the 12^th Zouaves, a regiment raised from North Africa's European settler community and from Provence. Like Captain Lecoq, Folcher was unsettled by the lowing of distressed cattle in the meadows adjoining the river Yoncq. These animals, too, were in agony after going unmilked for days. With the Germans attacking to the west, however, Folcher's gun-crew needed a clear field of fire. Since a dozen of the cattle were grazing directly to his front, Folcher to his ‘great regret’ had to spray a clip of bullets into them. He killed several of the cows, the noise of the firing frightening off the rest.Footnote ⁴⁷

In Belgium on 19^th May, Lieutenant Hadley of the British Expeditionary Force encountered scenes ‘like the Marie Celeste all over again’ when seeking billets in the deserted village of Steenbrugge:

Hadley and his platoon sergeant sought milk in a deserted farm. They found and took one bowlful from the cellar. As the officer reflected, they could have ‘had an ample supply if only there had been the time and the opportunity to milk the cows that were in the stalls – abandoned, poor wretches, to their fate’. Outside in the farmyard meanwhile, ‘all scurrying about, expecting to be fed’, was the ‘pathetic sight’ of about thirty small yellow chickens.

In mid May also, but this time in the Aisne, another North African regiment, the 9^th Zouaves, found that the proprietor-farmers of the ‘fertile country’ outside Soissons had fled. Here, as well, ‘the animals of the farmyards and cattle-sheds, the meadows and the crop fields’ remained, all abandoned. Colonel Tasse, the commanding officer, counted some 800 cattle, over 200 horses, 500 or 600 sheep, as many pigs, and several thousand chickens and rabbits. ‘Around us the echoes of the distant fighting mingled with neighing and bellowing [. . .] and groans of beasts expiring from thirst and hunger’. The colonel censured the French authorities. It should, he believed, have been possible to evacuate such assets and stop them ‘swelling the booty of our invader’.Footnote ⁵⁰ At Oeuilly, the nerves of 2^nd Lieutenant Carron's men of the 6^th Infantry Regiment were fraying by night time on 29^th May 1940 when their early-warning system, some empty bottles strung in close order on wires just above ground level, started to jingle noisily. Was it a German patrol trying to sneak round their strongpoint? Two lookouts went silently forward, rifles at the ready. They ‘found themselves face to face in the half-light with a pair of cows, one with a horn snagged in the wire, shaking itself violently under the placid gaze of its motionless companion’.Footnote ⁵¹

British personnel, too, had an eye for the fate that befell livestock in 1940. A march on 22^nd May after darkness had descended near the Belgian town of Anseghem stuck in the mind of Lieutenant Hadley. ‘The nightmare effect was completed by the companionship of a half-moulted goat, which attached itself unasked to our column, rubbing against our legs and tripping us up’.Footnote ⁵² Earlier, Hadley's troops had come under German artillery fire:

The incongruity of the beautiful fauna amid the ugliness perpetrated by people is redolent of Paul Baumer's final, fatal moments with his butterfly. Intimations of mortality were all around. A week later, on 30^th May, a Royal Air Force liaison officer found the Aisne landscape ‘dead’, the population departed. By a roadside were some soldiers from whom he sought an explanation. They ascribed it to fear of the Luftwaffe. When the Royal Air Force officer also ‘asked how it was that the farms were deserted as well as the towns, they pointed upwards and shrugged’.Footnote ⁵⁴

In the country outside Amiens the landscape was predominantly used for pasture. Parcelled out between large dairy farms, it had a scattering of small villages. Here Georges Sadoul, with the French 13^th Infantry Division, found half the farms abandoned when his detachment arrived at the end of May. Here, too, the cowherds had all vanished. The cattle were ‘bellowing, bloated, desperate for milking, their udders fit to burst’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Billeted for four days at a large farm near Pissy, Sadoul awoke on 31^st May to find the owner had absconded during the night. ‘Forty or fifty fowl were scuttling around the yard: white pullets, cockerels, cooing pigeons, laying hens each with a file of chicks in tow. An enormous pig grunted away in its sty. Some gentle little milk calves were lowing in their byre’. As Sadoul himself prepared to move out, he noticed the farm's red and black sheepdog, still tethered to its lead in the yard:

Gordon Waterfield, a Reuters journalist, meanwhile exploited his connections with the French air force during the ‘days towards the end of May, when war correspondents were being kept from the front’. At Chartres an officer of the Armée de l'Air told Waterfield that ‘crews, who have had to jump for it, have landed in completely deserted country, as a result of the evacuation by the civilian population’. He had been forced to bail out, his aircraft hit in a raid against General Heinz Guderian's panzers near Montcornet. When his crew landed, ‘there was not a living human being in sight, only the cows munching placidly in the fields’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Just as war in 1940 intruded on flora and especially on fauna, so the natural world and its creatures impinged on the soldierly preoccupations of the military. Horses shying after a near-miss artillery or bomb explosion threw many a wagoner or gun-crew, or delivered a painful kick to a soldier who had strayed unwisely near his mount's hind quarters. And with northern and middle France criss-crossed by rivers and canals, the preferred spots for defensive entrenchments, early summer brought hazards of its own. ‘Expecting to be called at any minute’, noted Freeman and Cooper, the British ambulance volunteers, on 12^th June:

Yet if the mosquitoes bit the men, hungry soldiers were a more serious menace for the abandoned animals. ‘Take everything the lads can eat’, said an officer to Georges Sadoul as his detachment prepared to pull out from their farm billet near Pissy in the Somme on 31^st May, ‘we don't want to waste anything’. Across the border in Belgium, Peter Hadley of the British Expeditionary Force noted that the ‘most pathetic sight of all was the livestock that had been left behind’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Royal Air Force squadrons which had forward deployed into France were also on the move, their airfields and installations being notably at risk from the rapid enemy advance. Hence whilst 105 Squadron's ground crews, vehicles and aircraft relocated to Rhèges, south of Troyes, a rear party packed stores and spares at Bethéniville. ‘During the period’, recalled a Royal Air Force officer, ‘the squadron were provided at its new destination with pork and chickens from the numerous animals which had been turned loose’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Grim though this period of combat could be, however, for animals in the wrong place at the wrong time, death had been as likely in the tedium of the phoney war as in the tumult of the fighting. Lieutenant Paul Mousset, with French troops in Lorraine, received orders just before Christmas 1939 to ‘recover’ around thirty cattle that had strayed towards the German lines. ‘Our pioneers were going to play cowboys’. But Mousset, unsure what to do with the cattle, left them to graze and referred to his superiors. A quartermaster said the cattle should be sent to the military abattoir, far to the rear. Ten men were detailed to round up the animals and commence a cattle-drive, no easy task in what was a bitter mid-winter. The cows managed a few kilometres, the legs of some buckling beneath them whilst others slipped on the black ice and camber, slithering into the roadside ditches:

After some days a slaughter-man appeared, brandishing a pick-axe with which he proposed to kill each cow by stoving in its brains. Mousset could bear it no longer when the first animal fought back and the ‘duel between the cow and the brute took on the spectacle of a bullfight’. Mousset ordered the men away and took the beasts to a far corner before dispatching them with a shot each to the head, from his service revolver.

Other livestock were victims of similar behaviour. When the 57^th Infantry Regiment traversed the town of Stierck after a tour of duty in the Maginot Line in December 1939, their colonel's eyes popped out on stalks. The men ‘weren't troops on the march but [. . .] a house-clearance gang’. One soldier was bent beneath the weight of two suitcases, tied shut with string, bulging with loot. ‘Others had a dog [. . .], a squealing pig’ and ‘a cow being trailed on a leash’.Footnote ⁶² Elsewhere, during the big freeze of December 1939, René Balbaud of General Henri Vernillat's 43^rd Infantry Division shot dead a horse after it slipped and broke a leg. ‘Lash it to the back of a vehicle’, Balbaud told his comrades, ‘This ice will let it slide along the road, and we'll eat it tomorrow’.Footnote ⁶³

With the 1940 campaign witnessing unexpected forced marches, the swirl of mobile war unhinged Allied supply arrangements as much as strategy. Soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force seized the chance to take animals with them from abandoned farms and smallholdings, to offer a do it yourself alternative to army field kitchens often unable to keep pace with the action. A chicken, wrote Lieutenant Hadley, ‘was hopefully dragged round hanging from the tail of the platoon truck for several days, until eventually, when opportunities for cooking remained consistently absent, it became too high for even the greatest connoisseur of game’.Footnote ⁶⁴ And the shortcomings of the French commissariat were starkly exposed as the Wehrmacht stepped up its high-tempo war. The troops, who were often exhausted, frequently went unfed.

Robert Guerlain found himself in an evacuated village on the Somme in early June. The streets had been barricaded and a strongpoint established. ‘There were skirmishes and patrols as we'd expected [. . .]; there were no supplies’.Footnote ⁶⁵ On 5^th June, Sergeant Ritzmann with a machinegun crew of 29^th Alpine Division endured seventeen hours of air attack and artillery bombardment with no food or drink. Ordered to withdraw, the party joined some Chasseurs Alpins preparing to defend Nesle. The town had been ransacked. Ritzmann spent all morning on 6^th June ‘seeking things to eat’. Two volunteers and he ‘went and fetched in my haul, putting it all at the mairie: around a hundred packets of corn broth or other soup, over two hundred litres of water, a Primus stove with two bottles of butane gas, three bath towels, some distilled water, iodine, two splendid pitchers etc’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Although there were no portable microwave ovens in 1940, the failure of military logistics often made farm animals into ready-meals for famished soldiers. René Balbaud was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 16^th May 1940, north east of Maubeuge. Drenched by overnight rain, the troops were ‘done in’, and by next day Balbaud's men were clamouring for rations:

In the Somme the 34^th Reconnaissance Group under Lieutenant-Colonel René Landriau, the scouting unit of 29^th Alpine Division, hustled forward on 17^th and 18^th May towards Péronne. In the recollection of Jean Armandi, a non-commissioned officer with its motorcycle squadron, there was ‘no longer any organised replenishment of supplies, and we were instructed to live off the land. In the Somme and Oise that was straightforward as, with no bother, we found things to eat in the abandoned farms.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Further east, General Robert Boissau's 44^th Infantry Division was hastening down the Aisne valley to a position around Jonchéry. It, too, had redeployed so rapidly that it had outrun its logistics. But Boissau's troops, just like the 9^th Zouaves and the Royal Air Force ground crews in the same region, found the countryside teemed with livestock. Setting about their task with some relish, hungry French infantry from Boissau's formation slaughtered the poultry, goats, lambs and swine on the spot. Larger beasts such as cattle and horses were herded back to field abattoirs behind the fighting regiments, the meat they provided being distributed in more orderly fashion by the commissaries.Footnote ⁶⁹

Meanwhile ill-supplied British Expeditionary Force ‘Tommies’, retreating to Dunkirk, also helped themselves to French and Belgian livestock. Peter Hadley's platoon was digging in near the village of Steenbrugge on 20^th May:

Not far distant was Captain Charles Richardson, then a young staff officer in the British Expeditionary Force's 4^th Division. Richardson's memoirs bear further witness to an ‘increasingly chaotic [supplies] situation’. In the three infantry brigades of the 4^th Division, food was running short ‘despite using whatever was to hand locally.’Footnote ⁷¹ A similar predicament confronted the British Expeditionary Force's 3^rd Division as it withdrew towards the Channel coast. Its commander, Major-General Bernard L. Montgomery (later Field-Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, ‘Monty’), was famous for taking pains to ensure the wellbeing of his men. ‘During the operations the food situation became more difficult’, Monty recalled. As soldiers do when they must, the 3^rd Division improvised:

It all amounted, as Monty put it in his characteristically clipped prose, to ‘beef ration[s] on the hoof.’Footnote ⁷²

On 22^nd May the Coldstream Guards learnt, in the words of their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel A. de L. Cazenove:

Falling back on Dunkirk and intermingled with stragglers, Captain Richardson of 4^th Division encountered ‘an amiable sapper colonel in the “Q” [Quartermaster's] department’. The colonel inquired: ‘“How are you off for rations?” “Not too good”, I said. “Farms with geese and chickens seem to be a thing of the past.”’ Richardson was promptly told to commandeer a Belgian supply train loaded with bully beef, laid up in a nearby railway station.Footnote ⁷⁴

In these matters of logistics, the Wehrmacht was no more efficient than the Allies. German troops outran their re-provisioning, especially as not all the agriculturalists of northern France abandoned their animals, even when they abandoned their farms. On 8^th June Douglas Cooper, with the French military ambulance service, found the ‘stream of refugees’ on the roads ‘had swollen to considerable proportions [. . .] and there were not only lines of people on foot, but in addition a large assortment of barking dogs of all sizes, goats, cattle and poultry’.Footnote ⁷⁵ On occasion the Wehrmacht envied the French army commissariat, as Robert Guerlain recounted after being taken prisoner, south of Péronne:

Just as in earlier wars, the heaviest casualties in 1940 were among the horses. Military operations had depended for centuries on equine power. Horses had their own hierarchy, descending from the aristocratic steeds of the cavalry and the officer class.Footnote ⁷⁷ And notwithstanding impressions that the 1939–45 conflict was one big swirl of clanking mechanised action dominated by technology and the exhaust-fumes of internal-combustion engines, horsepower remained as vital as manpower till the mid-point of the war.Footnote ⁷⁸

During its invasion of Poland in September 1939, as well as in 1940 in the West, the German order-of-battle still included the 1^st Cavalry Division under General Kurt Feldt. Despite containing infantry battalions on bicycles, as well as motorised howitzers, heavy artillery and an attached anti-aircraft machinegun company, the 1^st Cavalry remained a predominantly mounted formation. To traverse the Seine its 12,000 horses had to swim the river with the aid of floats, whilst its motorised artillery had to cross many miles to the north west at Vernon over a bridge built by Wehrmacht military engineers.Footnote ⁷⁹ Having moved by rail to billets near Aachen in late May, the 1^st Cavalry had been ordered west into France. Its troopers crossed the Somme west of Amiens early on the morning of 7^th June 1940 and joined the second stage German offensive, Case Red (Fall Rot), designed to knock France out of the war.

Heavily engaged in reconnaissance probes and offensive sweeps, 1^st Cavalry Division acted as the flank guard for the XXXVIII Corps and then for the VIII Corps. The horsemen found themselves in several stiff actions against French infantry and artillery. They overcame a counterattack by thirty French tanks on 9^th June, another notable success occurring on 19^th to 20^th June when the 22^ndReiter Regiment seized a bridge at Le Port Boulet that the French had not managed to demolish.Footnote ⁸⁰ But the cavalry did not have things all their own way. On 8^th June, near Catheux in the département of the Oise, a detachment was ambushed by a rearguard company of 8^th Moroccan Tirailleurs, protecting the retreat of the French 13^th Infantry Division. After beating off a ‘violent attack by a very determined enemy’ in mid-afternoon, the Moroccans’ commanding officer, Lieutenant de Contenson, had just withdrawn his men when he spotted ‘a party on foot emerging from a wood, under an escort of some German horsed cavalry’. Gesturing his troops to lie low, the lieutenant and a non commissioned officer aimed two light machineguns and slew three of the horsemen. The remainder fled at the gallop. The unidentified infantry then approached, frantically waving their arms so as not to be fired on. Some forty-five in number, they were French troops, with two wounded officers and a dozen Moroccans. All were overjoyed that the German cavalry had been scattered, so they could re-join their comrades and resume the fight.Footnote ⁸¹

In 1940 the French army, just as much as the Wehrmacht, remained heavily reliant on horsepower to move its transport and heavy guns. ‘Despite the tanks in use,’ cautions Rosemary Bailey, writing of reservists from Roussillon serving in northern France, ‘horses still formed a key part of the French army. Most of the German artillery was still drawn by horses.’Footnote ⁸² Although British cavalry regiments with the British Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium were entirely mechanised, the French in 1940 still had five partly-horsed divisions, the Divisions Légères de Cavalerie. The French also retained a mounted squadron in the reconnaissance unit of every infantry division and corps, whilst each German infantry division possessed a cavalry scouting battalion for the same purposes.Footnote ⁸³

Numerically more significant than cavalry thoroughbreds, as the historian Michael Thompson notes, was the mass of ‘workaday animals’ that kept army supply trains moving.Footnote ⁸⁴ Mass mobilisation in the Napoleonic Wars had assembled unprecedentedly large bodies of troops which then had to be sustained in the field. Such changes of scale in military organisation, and in war itself, had accentuated the importance of national equine bloodlines.Footnote ⁸⁵ Challengingly, ‘logistics and command-and-control systems could not keep pace with the growing size of armies. Supplies still had to be hauled by horses.’Footnote ⁸⁶ Expressed statistically, the resulting increase in horsepower requirements is startling. In August 1914 the British army deployed 120,000 soldiers to France, supported by 53,000 horses, requiring a monthly forage issue of 5,900,000 pounds. Yet by November 1918 the British armies in France, now three million soldiers, required 500,000 horses for supply and movement, needing 32,250,000 pounds of forage a month.Footnote ⁸⁷ The French army in 1914–18 also relied heavily on equine traction. A lack of horses to pull the new heavy artillery formed to meet the siege nature of the Western Front in the winter of 1915–16 demanded extra detachments of munitions lorries, sparking feuds over priorities for lorries and horses between the artillery, the supply branch, the army air service and the fledgling tank arm.Footnote ⁸⁸

In 1940 horse-drawn transport still remained ‘an indispensable element in the modern army [. . .] for pulling guns and supplies’ for the invaders as well as for the invaded.Footnote ⁸⁹ Of course, as the historian David Dorondo has remarked, German newsreels and illustrated military magazines such as Signal depicted a Wehrmacht mechanised juggernaut, so that ‘once the war began, and especially in the victorious years [. . .] Germany and the rest of the world seldom saw the foot-slogging, horse-supported infantry divisions’. But propaganda notwithstanding, the 1939–45 German military dependence on ‘the hundreds of thousands of horses assigned the mundane but absolutely crucial jobs of pulling everything from ammunition wagons to ambulances to field kitchens, meant that the army simply could not have gone to war without the horse’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nor were horses any less essential for the French army: 4,780 horses were required to mobilise each of its thirteen first-line unmotorised infantry divisions in 1939.Footnote ⁹¹ Of these 4,780 animals, just 293 were for the divisional reconnaissance group's cavalry squadron and for the officers at headquarters. No fewer than 3,191 horses were needed simply to haul the divisional artillery and ammunition, with 1,300 horses to pull stores and equipment.Footnote ⁹²

Observant French soldiers remarked on the ubiquity of horsed traction when called-up in 1939. Cavalry troopers and experienced soldiers of the 4e Bureau, the supply and transport department, generally knew the limitations of their mounts. They understood, as infantrymen and many senior officers did not, that the beasts which impressed untutored eyes were acutely susceptible to malnutrition, pulmonary ailments and leg injuries. Yet even in 1914–18, the attrition-rate among horses was high, and not until that war's later years was there markedly improved stabling, grooming and diet, backed up by higher standards of veterinary treatment. The aim, achieved to a significant degree, was to keep more horses alive and more of those fit for work and, occasionally, for frontline cavalry action. As Gunner Frederick William Cook wrote in April 1919 at the conclusion of his war service in Mesopotamia (Iraq) with Major R. T. Denne's 1/3^rd Kent 1072^nd (Territorial) Battery, Royal Field Artillery:

By 1939–40 the veterinary service of the French army, as well as the British, was considerably more experienced and better-equipped with medicines. This was just as well. East of Metz, near the village of Servigny-les-Raville, Gustave Folcher with the 12^th Zoauves saw horses suffering severely before fighting had begun:

The equine breeds most commonplace in rural France were taken, en masse, into military service. But they were not all suited to the heavy haulage for which they were harnessed. Indeed, even the powerful draught-horses the army located in some parts of the countryside could prove ill-matched to the military roles assigned them. Colonel Tasse of the 9^th Zouaves recalled his unit's re-equipment at Castelnaudary, after it arrived from North Africa:

Roger Mauret, chronicler of wartime in Heiltz-le-Maurupt, a village near Vitry-le-François, writes caustically about the army's propensity to requisition the sturdy, muscular draught horses. These were vital to work the land. When the army returned horses to the countryside, which it did not do often, they tended to be highly-strung and physically frail. Heiltz had to cope in the bitter winter of the phoney war without the ‘village menfolk in the prime of life’, mobilised in September 1939, and without their strongest horses. When some men returned on leave during the spring thaw of 1940 to help sow new crops, the army's empty gesture by way of assistance entailed ‘lend[ing] the agriculturalists a few cavalry mounts’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Further evidence of the hardships faced by horses during the severe weather of 1939–40 occurs in the war diary of General Aubert Frère's VIII^th Corps. Deployed near the Maginot Line, its 35^th Infantry Division had to move forward on 3^rd October 1939. It had been assigned to relieve the 23^rd Infantry Division and 15^th Motorised Division at the front. Negotiating the roads, especially that from Rohrbach to Bissing, proved most arduous because the ‘climate, state of the roads and condition of the horses completely altered the fundamentals of the problem’, the artillery requiring twice as long as the army staff had timetabled to effect the relief.Footnote ⁹⁷Some three months later, with temperatures as low as they fell, René Balbaud remarked on the horse-drawn wagons, artillery and limbers slithering and sliding as his 43^rd Division completed a tour of duty in Lorraine:

Balbaud later found himself in a deserted factory near Maubeuge on 18^th May 1940. It was a week into the shooting war. ‘Provisions? Out of the question’, he noted. ‘We've lost seven of our ten horse-drawn wagons’.Footnote ⁹⁹ With France still an agriculture-reliant society in 1939–40, and military transport so dependent on equine muscle, it is unsurprising that troops grew emotional when they witnessed injuries and mortalities among the precious stock of horses. On 14^th May 1940 Lieutenant Gérard Simond of General Jacques Chanoine's 5^th Cavalry Division drove through the burning town of Le Chesne, south-west of Sedan:

Unit war diaries tended to the matter-of-fact, not the vivid. As sources, their lapidary prose ought to echo Michael Morpurgo's lack of sentimentality about horses: ‘I think that horses are very beautiful, and I think they're very courageous in certain circumstances. But I also think they're rather stupid.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ Yet the war diary of the 34^th Reconnaissance Group (29^th Alpine Division) betrays the potent feelings that bound men and animals. On 6^th June 1940, near Roye, Captain Emile Pinsard's cavalry squadron was bombed twice by the Luftwaffe. The raids:

Officers too junior to have access to a staff car and for whom the war of 1940 was their first, were poignant in their descriptions of the carnage that befell French bloodstock. Retreating on 7^th June from Fourdrinoy, west of Amiens, after a battle that no battalion commander in his 60^th Infantry Regiment had survived, Lieutenant Goetz attested how their ‘movement was slowed up by the cadavers of horses, [and] the skeletal wrecks of cars blocking the roads’.Footnote ¹⁰³

Yet senior officers too, men who had survived the 1914–18 trenches and now coolly took life-and-death decisions that affected thousands of troops, could be shocked at the fate of horses. On 8^th June General Paul Gérodias, commanding the 29^th Alpine Division, witnessed a road-bound column get ‘torn to pieces by enemy air attacks’. As Luftwaffe bombs detonated among the mounted artillery, the ammunition caissons began to explode. The horses, some streaming blood from shrapnel wounds, careered off into the country in what Gérodias called a ‘scene from Dante's Inferno’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ At the same time on the Aisne, in General Dody's 8^th Infantry Division, the II^nd Group/82^nd Artillery Regiment was hit by air attack. The ‘group lost half its horses’, remarked the after-action report, the war diary annex noting how ‘interesting’ it was that the slaughter all occurred in the horse-drawn artillery, ‘emphatically showing how vulnerable is this mode of traction’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In addition to such losses from enemy action, countless equine casualties stemmed from fatigue, accidents, malnutrition and sometimes deficient veterinary services. June 1940 brought long, sunny, hot and dry days. If air raids or artillery fire did not kill the horses, the rigours of a three week-long retreat in the heat, with insufficient water, feed and rest often did. The supposedly technology-led fighting afforded numberless opportunities for French troops to reflect that war was still no affair of automata. It remained one of flesh and blood, humans and animals. Whether inner-city reservists or erstwhile farm labourers, troops confronted anew an experience of suffering shared with the animals. As Michael Morpurgo has recently re-stated: ‘We're both sentient creatures; we both feel pain; we know hunger; we know cold. There's so much that we have in common.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ On 25^th June, the day the Franco-German armistice took effect, Major Jean-Antoine Mouzel, with the newly surrendered staff of General Charles Condé's III^rd Army, was standing under Wehrmacht guard before the main railway station at St.-Dié. Looking around, Mouzel saw the buildings were pock-marked with shell holes. ‘Horses without harnesses wander around’, he noted. ‘They are thin, emaciated, and a lot of them limping.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It was symptomatic of how the largely horse-powered 1940 French army had lost, and to a largely horse-powered Wehrmacht. Why they had is altogether a different subject, one rooted in strategy, tactics, combat doctrine and military morale.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

But animals, the domestic pets, livestock and the beasts that provided the bulk of army transport, remain assuredly the most overlooked losers. As the historian Richard Vinen remarks, ‘France lost more horses than men that summer’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ And the casualty toll among animals would deepen the tribulations of French people in the Occupation ahead. ‘To the peasants’, as Denis Freeman and Douglas Cooper, noted at the time, ‘the loss of a favourite dog was a matter of serious concern’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The horses of smallholders and farmers were in most cases the only source of traction for carts, ploughs, mechanical seed-drills and manure spreaders in the 1940s to turn the fields of France into agricultural produce and pull the wagons to carry that produce to railheads, distribution cooperatives and markets. It is ironic that being conquered in war in earlier centuries had sometimes seen the landscape, as in post-Conquistador Mexico, reclaimed by animals. But the conquering of France in 1940 left a landscape lacking enough animals to work it, so it had to be reclaimed by a weary and soon malnourished French people.Footnote ¹¹¹