When I was a child, my grandmother, Mercedes, who lived with my family, would go visit her cousin in Tampa, FL in the winter. My aunt Marie was an animal lover, and bred white Persian cats. One year my grandmother brought back a book for me that had belonged to my aunt Marie; she knew how much I loved animals and wanted me to have it as it was about cats.
That book was lost to time, or more likely my mother, ever the OCD clean freak, packed it in with other stuff for St. Vincent de Paul, thinking I didn’t want it anymore.
About 6 months ago, I remembered the name of a cat from the book and Googled it; amazingly, Amazon had ONE copy of the book left that was slightly water damaged, so I ordered it. Here is an excerpt from that book, “Cat’s Company”, by Michael Joseph, first published in 1930:
I have rarely been without a cat. Even in two wars, during periods of army service, I have contrived to keep a cat. In France, during the 1914-1918 war, (WWI), I had a cat with me most of the time.
One of my trench pets was a jolly black and white kitten, christened Scissors by the mess cook, whose company he regularly patronized. Scissors, whose glossy black fur was ornamented by a neat white waistcoat, was a great favourite and knew his way about the whole of the sector. He used to follow us up the poppy-lined communication trenches and along the front line. Only a narrow strip of No-man’s-land separated us there from the German front line and Scissors had a playful but dangerous habit of leaping gracefully on to the parapet and picking his way delicately along the broken ground, through the wire and over the massed sand-bags, keeping pace with my orderly and myself as we made our cautious way below along the zig-zag of the front line. It must have been perfectly obvious to “the enemy” that Scissors was accompanying his officer on his morning round – indeed, one fine August morning we distinctly heard a laugh and a shout in guttural German from beyond the wire – but that part of the line was then known to both armies as “peaceful” and no sniper or bomb-thrower tried his skill on the furry target.
Scissors was wounded before we left the Arras sector by a stray fragment of shrapnel. It was, luckily, a flesh wound only, and when he got used to the little bandage I tied round his leg he became quite proud of it and displayed it to all and sundry; a habit which nearly got me into trouble with the Brigade Major, who, evidently disapproving of trench pets in general and bandaged kittens in particular, snorted at Scissors in an apoplectic kind of way which caused me great alarm. I knew that snort! I remember hastily asking a random question about gas masks (which happened to be his particular hobby) and the crisis passed.
He never forsook his nightly habit of rat-hunting. Rats in their thousands infested the trenches and dug-outs and gave Scissors plenty of scope. That most of them were larger than Scissors did not in the least deter him. I can see him now, as the flare of the Verey lights used to reveal him, streaking along the trench boards in pursuit of a gray rat larger than himself. Scissors hunted for love of the chase; he never attempted to eat his victims. What sensible cat would, with unlimited bully beef at his disposal?
Poor Scissors! He was missing when the division moved to another part of the line, and there was no time to search for him. I have often wondered what became of him. Somehow I cannot picture him as a casualty. I prefer to believe that he made friends with one of the officers or men who relieved us, or that he wandered across No-man’s-land into the German line. My batman* was horrified, I remember, at the mere suggestion, but I never had any qualms. If Scissors could survive the wrath of our Brigade Major he was safe enough with the Bavarians across the way.
* ”A batman or an orderly is a soldier or airman assigned to a commissioned officer as a personal servant” …from Wikipedia