Rats Overran the Trenches of World War I. So the Soldiers Made Room for Some Small, Furry Comrades

The trenches of the First World War were cold, wet and crowded. And they were full of rats.

The rats came for the food, the waste and far worse, and they spread disease among the men.

So the soldiers turned to one of the oldest allies people have: the cat.

Cats and dogs in the trenches hunted the rats and helped keep the dugouts a little cleaner, the Imperial War Museums explains. At sea, navy crews kept cats on board their ships for the same reason.

But the cats gave the men something more. In a place of mud, noise and loss, a cat curled up in a dugout was a small piece of home. Units adopted them as pets and mascots, and the men posed with them for photographs.

One of those photographs was taken on February 6, 1918, in a trench near Cambrin, in northern France. A Lewis gunner of the 6th Battalion, the York and Lancaster Regiment, smiles at the camera as he holds the regiment’s cat on a wooden ledge in the trench wall.

The ships had their cats too. Pincher, the mascot of the British seaplane carrier HMS Vindex, was photographed sitting on the propeller of one of the ship’s seaplanes. On the Australian light cruiser HMAS Encounter, the ship’s cat peered out from the muzzle of a 6-inch gun. Officers aboard HMS Royal Oak and the light cruiser HMS Centaur were photographed with their ships’ cats as well.

You may have seen claims online that half a million cats went to war and worked as gas detectors. No official count of the cats was ever kept, and the animals used to warn of poison gas were mainly canaries and mice.

More than 16 million animals served in the First World War, according to the Imperial War Museums: horses, mules, camels, dogs, pigeons and more. The cats were among the smallest of them.

They asked for little more than scraps and a warm corner. In return, they gave tired, frightened young men a reason to smile. The video above tells the story of the animals who shared the trenches with the soldiers.