WW1 canaries

[darklar]

I am reading birdsong, a story about WW1. In part of this they take canaries down a tunnel probably to check if there were poisonous gasses etc... but they would be court marshalled if they did not bring the canary back...dead or alive. Alive I can understand, but why dead?

[anthomson]

Excellent book - I cannot remember this bit, but would guess they needed to bring the canary back as proof that it had not escaped into the tunnel. Sound travels extremely well underground so a canary chirping might give away the position of the tunnel especially since the german counter tunnels might have only been a few feet away. It absolutely fasinated me reading about how they used to tunnel under each others lines. I had never heard of this until I read Birdsong.

[rarll]

I have tried several times to get into this book, but have always failed .Am now going to give it another go.

[firefly]

No, I think canaries were used in tunnels (and indeed in mineshafts) to indicate whether there were any noxious fumes around, more likely to be ones naturally occurring in the tunnels than anything else-canaries being more prone to such fumes than us. A dead canary left in the tunnel would obviously show that someone had been down it.

[Spongebob]

Apparently there is a monument to the WW1 canaries at Edinburgh Castle.

[raf rules]

so that the soildres that are poisness won't feel the pain in there body and they can live in peace