ABOUT US/CONTACT US

BIRD BATTLEFIELD TOURS was founded by two brothers, Antony and Nicholas Bird, in 1995. Both were educated at Winchester College. Antony studied sociology at Exeter University, has an MPhil from University College, London and became a town planner and later a book publisher. Nicholas read art history at Sussex University, joined the auctioneers Christie’s and subsequently the Victoria and Albert Museum where he became the publisher, winning several major awards. Both became interested in military history and battlefields while staying with French families in the mid-60s, and learning about the effects of war and occupation from their hosts. Their father is a much-decorated veteran of Alamein and the Western Desert. Nicholas is a member of the Royal United Services Institute, the Guild of Battlefield Guides and has been elected to Council of the Society for Army Historical Research.  He reviews for, among other journals, International Affairs, the Chatham House journal.   Antony and Nicholas Bird co-edited Eyewitness to War [Summersdale, Chichester, 2007, £9.99] - an anthology of ‘the finest writing about war by those who were there’ - which has a Foreword by Major General Patrick Cordingley DSO.  It is avaialble in paperback, entitled Voices from the Front Line [£8.99 - discounts online].  The anthology has been favourably reviewed, one perceptive reviewer calling it 'brilliant'.

Antony Bird has written the definitive book on the Battle of Le Cateau [26 Aug. 1914], which has been published [2008] by Crowood Press [www.crowoodpress.co.uk] at £19.95.  The book is entitled GENTLEMEN, WE WILL STAND AND FIGHT: LE CATEAU 1914.

Nicky Bird
19 Hale Gardens
London W3 9SG
Tel/Fax: 020 8752 0956
e-mail:nick@nickybirddesign.com
info@birdbattlefieldtours.com

Tony Bird
1a Franklin Place
Chichester
W.Sussex
PO19 1BL
Tel: 01243 789077
Fax: 01243 773348
e-mail:antonybirdpublications@hotmail.com
info@birdbattlefieldtours.com

Nicky Bird is a Member of the Guild of Battlefield Guides and is currently working towards their badge◄. The Guild’s ethos is to analyse, develop and raise the understanding and practice of battlefield guiding.

This article about BIRD BATTLEFIELD TOURS originally appeared in Battlefields Review in 2002.

GOING TO THE PAST

Nicky Bird co-runs BIRD BATTLEFIELD TOURS, an unashamedly relaxed operation, and has been going to French and Belgian battlefields for over 30 years. He maintains that guided tours needn’t be didactic, joyless exercises; that they should offer access to corners of battlefields often overlooked, and convey something of what the soldier saw and underwent. And that you should ‘…go to the past, not looking for messages or warnings,’ as Pat Barker wrote in Another World, ‘but simply to be humbled by the weight of human experience that has preceded the brief flicker of your own few days…’

Ernie Franklin and Nicky Bird, St. Mère Église, Normandy, 1999 (with the dummy of parachutist Pvt. Steele hanging from the church tower behind)

I first heard the Last Post sounded at the Menin Gate at Ypres thirty-five years ago. I was alone, apart from the buglers and a local drunk sheltering form the rain. This year there were over a hundred spectators at the same spot. It is a tourist attraction. The museum on the first floor of the Cloth Hall used to boast a higgledy-piggledy collection of guns, trench signs, minenwerfer, posters, uniforms, Mills bombs, photos…crammed clumsily into cases and on walls, a marvellous array from which you could feel and sense the atmosphere and experience of those years. Now the museum has been hi-jacked by curators who preach the current line, and visitors are force-fed videos and inter-active stuff about war poets, and ‘women’s role’ and the sterling contribution of colonial troops. You are told how to feel. The museum used to be gloriously empty, like the equally chaotic one at Cassel in French Flanders, recently revamped. Not any more.

Paradoxically, it is the sheer popularity of these sites and visits to battlefields in general, that gives the guided tour its raison d’être. The enthusiast wants to avoid wasting time at preachy museums, needs to know the unspoilt places, the preserved trench system, how to dodge coach parties, where to eat and where to stay. On your way to Ypres, for example, it would be a shame to miss the moving and beautiful cemetery of Lijssenhoek, shaded by cedars, and Remi Farm next door where wounded and dying Tommies scratched their names into its beams; or the grave of the only double VC of the Great War, Capt. Noël Chavasse RAMC, nearby. The gullible tourist might spend a vexing afternoon touring the Citadel at Verdun, a puerile trip in a miniature railway around moronic waxworks, a sub-Disney waste of time. Above all, the competent tour leader can balance what is all too evident – hills pitted with shell holes, row on row of young men’s graves – with historical background explaining the story behind the battle.

Lijssenhoek Cemetery: view towards the Cross of Sacrifice (designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield)

‘A Soldier of the Great War: Known Unto God’. The inscription carved on countless headstones leaves a haunting impression of waste and destruction. The battlefield tourist often has entrenched prejudices, fostered by family tales and images of ‘Scarlet Majors at the Base’. Three things – Sassoon and Owen apart - have led to the popular attitude that the Great War was unremitting incompetence and frightfulness, and nothing else: Sebastian Faulks’ novel about love and tunnelling, Birdsong; Alan Clark’s 1961 rant against château generals, The Donkeys; and the film it inspired - Oh What a Lovely War!

One purpose of our outfit, BIRD BATTLEFIELD TOURS (which I run with my brother Antony), is to counter this approach, by stressing that soldiers actually spent far more time training, in support, in reserve or on leave than being shot at in the front line. And they had concert parties, had enough to eat, drank themselves to oblivion in estaminets, and enjoyed mademoiselles.

Luncheon in the Montagne de Reims, 1918. French, British and Italian officers

‘War is hell’, Sherman wrote. But it is not the complete picture. War is also thrilling, boring and ridiculous. For every Sassoon or Owen traumatised by his ordeal, there is a Capt. Greenwell, of the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, who wrote home during the First Battle of the Somme: ‘It is an extraordinary sort of battle and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I think we shall soon enter upon another violent phase. I hope so…’ He wanted to beat the enemy, a far more common sentiment among the men than the pacifist ambivalence of war poets. Bomb school he found ‘ripping’ fun, and in the depths of the wretched winter of 1915, while struggling to fulfil new duties as Transport Officer, Greenwell confided: ‘My mind is deeply engaged with a grand dinner party I am giving…’

War is not all hell... convivial moment in Normandy, June 1944

Capt. Sidney Rogerson of the West Yorks thought the Great War ‘the happiest period’ of his life, despite terror and discomfort, because ‘though it may have let loose the worst it also brought out the finest qualities in men.’ On the other hand he was far from blind to the horrors of war, particularly of mud: ‘Terrible in its clinging consistency, it was the…supreme enemy, paralysing and mocking English and German alike. Distances were measured not in yards but in mud.’ One November we trudged through a field near Martinpuich on the Somme and could not move after a few yards, and this without 60 lbs. on our backs. It was illuminating. As illuminating as seeing for oneself the perceptible ridge at Waterloo, behind which Wellington concealed his troops. There is no substitute for standing on ground a soldier stood on, and seeing the limit of his horizon.

Mud, Pilckem Ridge, 1917

We make several promises at BIRD BATTLEFIELD TOURS (we might get you lost, briefly, but that is not a promise). You will not be lectured to death, in fact you will hardly be lectured at all, although somebody who knows a bit about the battle or campaign can always be asked questions at any time (best not after dinner). There will be a minimum of driving (in a mini-van – we do not run to a big coach, numbers are limited and anyway we don’t have the requisite licence). Many of the most interesting and best preserved sites we visit – like Waterloo, Verdun and Le Cateau – are so compact it is a mercifully short ride around the battlefield. We travel by train or plane before picking up the van. You will find your travelling companions affable – whingers and abrasive know-alls having been banished over the years. You will stay somewhere agreeable, probably old and certainly comfortable, and will eat and drink rather well. We do not see why some poor punters have to endure a bleak lunch of one croque monsieur and a single glass of warm plonk, particularly if they’ve sat in a coach for hours with a bloke banging on about creeping barrages. This perfectly reasonable prejudice does mean that Arnhem is not so popular as, say, the D-Day beaches, because the food isn’t so good.

A break for a lengthy lunch — Trun, near Falaise, 2003

We aim, on every trip, to go somewhere the casual visitor cannot. We went inside the château of La Haye Sainte at Waterloo, conducted by the owner, and saw the bullet holes still preserved in the wooden skirting and doors, and saw where Major Baring and his KGL survivors escaped out the back (now the downstairs lavatory). We toured the newly excavated tunnels at Vauquois near Verdun, wearing coal-miners’ helmets, an experience that brings home the awful claustrophobia of that subterranean world, as well as the staggering endeavour and ingenuity of those resilient men. The German system, 15 kms. of underground passages and rooms, with the paraphernalia of war still lying around, is – predictably – far more capacious and sturdy than the French, on the opposite side of the hill. And when we go to Venice (our only non-battlefield tour, an exception chosen because I am an art historian by training) we can admire the interiors of private palazzi, shamelessly exploiting family connections.

We provide our punters with copious notes on what we visit and detailed historical background. We bring maps and trench maps, and important things like a corkscrew. And, most importantly, no tour should be without a compass. I was standing on top of Vimy Ridge on a grey day, pointing to the slope up which the heroic Canadians had to struggle, when someone asked why the heroic Canadians had attacked from the German side. The bugger was right, I had got the Canadians attacking their own men, a compass would have helped. Sometimes you can bluff your way out of these mishaps but this wasn’t one of them.