Page 15 - Chiron Spring 2018

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Burnham, John , Quote from ‘Forever Thoughts’ - on the Animal Memorial in Dartmouth Park, Morley, Leeds, 2011.
First published as Chapter 15 in Britain goes to War on 9th November 2015 by Pen & Sword
© PN SKELTON-STROUD 2015
MEMORIALS
‘Worse than dying in a war is to be forgotten’
John Burnham 2011
Memorials to the huge number of soldiers killed during the Great War are common in all the countries which fought and it is not surprising that memorials to military animals also exist. A particularly poignant one in Edinburgh depicts canaries and mice, described as the ‘Tunnelers’ Friends’, used to indicate foul air in tunnels dug on the Western Front. It also depicts a mule, horse, camel, reindeer, dog, ox, elephant and carrier pigeons and is truly indicative of the many species that served.
In addition to the many personal memorials to individual animals placed by their owners or the regiments who cared for them, there were other institutional ones in Great Britain. The RSPCA opened a memorial dispensary in London and the Royal Veterinary College started a fund to re-equip the college as their form of memorial.
There is a bronze group by H. Haseltine, ‘Les revenants’, in the Imperial War Museum, showing worn-out and gassed horses returning from the Front yet nothing was done on a national level until 2004 when the ‘Animals in War’ memorial in Park Lane London was dedicated. It shows heavily laden mules struggling towards a gap in the surrounding wall suggesting relief from the horrors of war.
Similar national memorials exist in Canada in the form of three distinctive and revealing bronze plaques and in Australia where the memorial is in the shape of a horse’s head upon a granite column, the last remaining fragment of Charles Web Gilbert`s original Desert Mounted Corps memorial [Australian Light Horse and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles], which stood at Port Said, Egypt until it was destroyed during the Suez Crisis of 1956.
SILENT SOLDIERS
In constant memory of all those animals who served in the Great War who gave of their trust, unswerving loyalty and companionship Faithful even unto death
CHIRON CALLING 13