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Canary mail test9/18/2023 ![]() ![]() ‘After a canary had been gassed three times, he classed it as “P.B.,” and promoted him to the headquarters dugout, where his only duty was to sing to the Commanding Officer,’ one report said. One Company Commander kept a careful eye on his avian tunnelling team. In the trench conditions of chaos and the constant threat of death, soldiers could easily fall in love with their canaries. Canaries impressed with their resilience and lifted spirits with their song. Such tales of cheery endurance clearly echoed popular and propagandist ideals of plucky British fighting spirit. Nevertheless, the canary seemed to ignore the shells and sang beautifully. The little bird would get ‘so black with smoke that it’s a job to distinguish it from a sparrow’, he wrote. In a letter published in the Daily Mail, one rifleman wrote to a friend that ‘our only companion is a little canary we rescued from a deserted house’. In the trenches too they were sometimes kept simply as pets. There was an intimate relationship between soldier and bird, derived in part from domestic life where they were often kept as caged songsters in working-class homes. While canaries had this official role in the war, they were also objects of affection. To ensure their sensitivity as gas detectors, birds were even given pedicures so that their claws could not grip too tightly. He never failed us though.’ The sensitivity of canaries to carbon monoxide meant they gave early warning to its presence, not necessarily when they stopped singing, but when they panted for breath or could no longer grip their perch. Canaries’, told of a bird called Dick who after his job underground would ‘often as not reach the surface again a limp little form lying at the bottom of his cage. Stories of the bravery of canaries at the front made the national press at home. But the tunnels could only be re-entered once a bird had breathed the air.Ī sapper from the 3rd Australian Tunnelling Company’s Mine Rescue Station carries a small cage for a canary or a mouse. When German digging teams came across Allied tunnels and blew them up, the atmosphere of the underground labyrinth was flooded with poison gases. Reaching beneath the German front was an underground network of chambers that could be packed with explosives to destroy the enemy from below. The Mines Committee recommended that two or three canaries were kept at rescue stations to test tunnels below the trenches for carbon monoxide. But there were tensions in the depiction of British forces as sensitive and caring because a more urgent national message was that our men had the strength to win the war. More than this, however, the relationship between soldier and canary came to symbolise a view of British spirit that was used as a powerful image in wartime propaganda. The nature of their dangerous underground work with tunnellers forged close companionship. Canaries were a special kind of British hero of the First World War trenches. ![]()
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