In addition to shepherds and sheep, pastoral requires birds and birdsong. One of the remarkable intersections between life and literature during the war occurred when it was found that Flanders and Picardy abounded in the two species long the property of symbolic literary pastoral—larks and nightingales. The one now became associated with stand-to at dawn, the other with stand-to at evening. (Sometimes it is really hard to shake off the conviction that this war has been written by someone.) Such a symmetrical arrangement was already available in the Oxford Book, where Milton's L'Allegro has its lark and Il Penseroso its nightingale. Such a symmetry was also a familiar fixture of the aubade, as in the colloquy between Romeo and Juliet (III, v, 1-36). For some the stand-to larks were a cruel reminder of home and safety. Sergeant Major F. H. Keeling writes: "Every morning when I was in the front-line trenches I used to hear the larks singing soon after we stood-to about dawn. But those wretched larks made me more sad than anything else out here...Their songs are so closely associated in my mind with peaceful summer days in gardens or pleasant landscapes in Blighty." But for most, the morning larks were a comfort: they were evidence that ecstasy was still an active motif in the universe. Sergeant Ernest Nottingham admitted to feeling melancholy "at the sound of a train, or a church bell, or the scent and sight of a flower, or the green of a hedge. But not now in the ecstasy of a lark.—That is inseparably connected with 'stand-to' in the trenches.—So often...have I heard him singing joyously in the early dawn." Frank Richards sardonically consoles himself by asserting a general theological principle; namely, that "God made both the louse and the lark." A war later, in the Italian campaign of 1944, Alex Bowlby automatically employs lark song as a gauge of absurdity: "In the lulls between explosions I could hear a lark singing. That made the war seem sillier than ever."
What the lark usually betokens is that one has got safely through another night, a night made poignantly ironic by the singing of nightingales. "We heard the guns," Cloete remembers. "There was continuous fire. It was a background to the singing of the nightingales. It has often seemed to me that gunfire makes birds sing, or is it just that the paradox is so great that one never forgets it and always associates the two?" A good question. Sassoon "associates the two" when he remembers a moment in spring, 1918, near the Somme: "Nightingales were singing beautifully...But the sky winked and glowed with swift flashes of the distant bombardments at Amiens and Albert, and there was a faint rumbling, low and menacing. And still the nightingales sang on. O world God made!" The nightingale tradition persists through the Second War just like the lark tradition. Bowlby in Italy is again its beneficiary. Under fire from German 88's, he suddenly hears a bird singing and at first thinks it may he a German signaling by imitating birdcalls. "But as the bird sang on I realized that no human could reproduce such perfection. It was a nightingale. And as if showing us and the Germans that there were better things to do it opened up until the whole valley rang with song...I sensed a tremendous affirmation that 'this would go on.'..." 39 It is a point comprised in the final six lines of Eliot's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," written two years after the war. The "bloody wood" where his nightingales sing is Nemi's Wood, from folklore, the place where the priest or ruler is slain by his younger successor. But the irony which juxtaposes nightingales and bloody woods would come naturally to one who had passed a night in, say, Mametz Wood.
~ From The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell, p. 241