It's only January, but I may have already read my non-fiction Book of the Year.

Lewis-Stempel combines his interest both in the countryside and in the Great War in this account of the role of the natural world in the conflict. It's already quite widely known that the presence of birds in the soldiers' lives brought solace and interest to a routine where boredom, hellish discomfort and sheer terror co-existed, but here we have an account of the rich interest and affection that birds provoked.

Then there were plants - the emblematic poppy of course, but wild flowers of every kind soothed the soul. And I certainly had no idea that soldiers sent home for seeds to produce prize-winning gardens alongside their wretched trenches, or that soldiers from France to Gallipoli grew vegetables to supplement their rations.

Lewis-Stempel describes the fierce bond between men and the animals who worked alongside them - the official horses, dogs and canaries (yes, they soothed the wounded as they were transported in ambulances), often in appalling circumstances. He talks about the unofficial animals who made life easier - the rat-catching cats, the caged birds, the ferrets.

Then he talks about the wildlife that made life even more hellish - the rats, lice, flies and mosquitoes - which in many cases brought about as much suffering as battle wounds.

He describes how war changed the face of the countryside both in France, and perhaps more surprisingly in England, and explains the birth of the war cemeteries.

This story is told not just in Stempel-Lewis' own terse yet lyrical prose, but in the letters, poems and diaries of the men themselves. Each chapter is interspersed by a section of poems, or of supporting facts and figures.

I won't forget this book. It brought World War I more vividly to life than almost anything else I have previously read.
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There has been awful lot of history written about the horrors of the First World War, we have first-hand accounts from those that fought and suffered, writers who composed some of the most poignant poems and a raft of historical documents and archaeological reports that build a picture of the time. Even though the war dragged on for four years, not all of it was spent fighting. The soldiers had time away from the front lines and the misery of the trenches and when they did they found they could draw comfort from the similarities in the north French landscape to the countryside that they had left behind and that some would never see again.

For it is for the sake of the wolds and the wealds
That we die

Whenever the troops had a spare moment they would take time in between the bombs to observe the birds that were trying to eke out an existence in the war too. It was one of the most popular hobbies of soldiers. Flowers played a large part in soldier’s lives too, some had time to plant and tend gardens, but the image of poppies and cornflowers blooming after the devastation of war is one of the enduring images that remained with the shattered soldiers leaving the battlefields. Some of the officers also hunted, spending hours chasing what little wildlife was left in the fields, some made rods to fish, other took the easier option of dropping bombs in the rivers. Not only did the British Army empty the fields of the workers, they took the horses too, and when they had almost all gone, they shipped them over from Canada. The soldier’s relationship with their equine friends was made closer by the perils of war. In total eight million horses, donkeys and mules died during the conflict, a horrendous number. There were also a huge number of other animals at the front too, the battalions had their mascots which varied from the fairly common dogs, to the less common goats to the frankly unusual orang-utan and cows. Rats and lice were endemic in the trenches causing yet further misery to those knee deep in mud.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row

Lewis-Stempels book is a very different take on the usual histories of the First World War. It is full of personal stories of the way that the soldiers saw nature and how it gave them the motivation for them to carry on in the darkest of times. The prose is almost secondary in this book, as there are so many poems and anecdotes about the natural world around them that he has collected together. It is not all grim reading, there are some really positive parts to the book, but I thought the list of those scientists and naturalists that had fallen in action was most moving as it showed how much experience and knowledge that we lost just from one small sliver of society. The war that had taken so many of the fit and able men showed that they still had their humanity. ( )