"Letting a canary go free in a tunnel is an automatic court-martial"
This is perhaps the only reference to a bird in the much acclaimed book, Birdsong by Sabastien Faulks.
The book is a love story woven into the horrors of tunnel and trench warfare in central France during World War-I. It takes you to places that sound distant and vaguely familiar - Amiens, Vimy, Messines and Ypres. Distant frontlines in a distant war which claimed more than 62,000 Indian lives. There is, of course, no reference to Indian fighting units in this book, or of Expeditionary Force A on the Ypres salient. It is mostly about British miners who had been brought in to support the infantry units by building trenches and tunnels, and to set off explosions which aimed to push back the Germans.
Along the way you learn about the Camouflet - "an artificial tavern created underground by an explosion...it was originally used by a fort's defenders to prevent undermining of a fortress wall during a siege". In a cat-and-mouse game taking place some thirty feet underground, defenders would dig a tunnel under the attackers' tunnel. An explosive charge would be detonated to create a camouflet that would collapse the attackers' tunnel. The fate of those unlucky enough to survive such explosions in narrow tunnels, can only be imagined.
With so many human lives at stake you are left wondering why on earth were soldiers getting court-martialled for losing canaries in such tunnels?
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References & Links
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdsong_(novel)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_La_Bass%C3%A9e
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