cattle

Cattle occupy a sharply double position in the wartime world: they are animals with bodies, needs, and vulnerability, yet they are also counted as food, property, transportable stock, and part of the national war effort. The narrative brings this contradiction into focus most powerfully when cattle become the means by which starving prisoners of war briefly preserve one another’s lives, while elsewhere their feeding is treated as a matter of public duty.

Cattle in a Scarcity Economy

The wartime shortage of food places cattle inside a broad system of collective provisioning. The nation’s pigs are described as short of food, and large bins are distributed through the streets so households can donate fresh and dry scraps to fatten them for the good of the nation. Cattle are not presented in exactly the same domestic collection scheme, but they belong to the same material economy in which animals are drawn into the management of hunger, rationing, and military supply. Food is no longer merely a private household concern: animal nourishment becomes a civic contribution, while human meals become increasingly restricted.

This pressure is also visible after the family leaves the hotel. With catering coupons gone, the household receives the same basic rations as everyone else and is always hungry; the Friday entitlement to fish and chips becomes an unusually important culinary pleasure. The new pram acquired for the baby is consequently commandeered by its grandmother to carry sustenance for the family. Against this background, cattle are not remote pastoral scenery. They represent a valuable concentration of meat in a society where ordinary foods have disappeared and rationing will continue for years.

Herding on the Forced Marches

Cattle acquire their most consequential role during the imprisonment of Geoff and his fellow prisoners of war by the Japanese. On one of the long forced marches, the captives are assigned to herd cattle. The task places them close to animals that are simultaneously under guard, physically burdensome to move, and potentially capable of sustaining people who are being starved almost to death.

The prisoners steal two cows. Their keepers then conceal the theft by burying only the horns and hooves and persuading their captors that the missing animals have died of a serious disease that would make them dangerous for human consumption. The deception disguises a deliberate slaughter as a sanitary risk. The meat, however, goes into the bellies of the ravenous captives, and Geoff’s butchery skills become directly useful to the group. The cattle’s bodies are converted into food through practical knowledge that the prisoners’ captors cannot detect.

The episode is both an act of resistance and an emergency redistribution of life. The prisoners do not steal for profit or indulgence; they take cattle because starvation has made food a condition of continued existence. The theft preserves quite a few lives for a while longer, and the group is fortunate never to be discovered. Cattle therefore become more than provisions: they form the material basis of a small, hidden community of survival within the brutal order of prisoner-of-war captivity.

Animal Bodies and Human Survival

The forced-march episode exposes the unequal moral world created by war. The captives are treated by the Japanese with extreme brutality: they are nearly starved, many are brutalised, and many are murdered on a whim. Within that setting, the cattle are guarded as controlled resources while the prisoners themselves are denied adequate food and exposed to arbitrary violence. The animals’ meat becomes available only through risk, concealment, and collective labour.

The narrative does not sentimentalise the slaughter. Cattle are living creatures, but the circumstances leave the prisoners with no meaningful alternative if they are to survive. Their horns and hooves, buried as evidence, become the remnants of a false story; the meat becomes nourishment; and Geoff’s technical skill links the animal’s death to the temporary preservation of human life. The scene holds animal vulnerability and human vulnerability together rather than allowing either to disappear. Cattle are neither merely pastoral symbols nor abstract supplies: their material bodies determine what the prisoners can do, while the prisoners’ desperation determines how those bodies are used.

Wartime Meaning and Aftermath

The cattle theft briefly interrupts the prisoners’ decline, but it cannot undo the larger consequences of captivity. When Pamela Wheeler Fellows later meets Geoff as an adult and returns his last letter, she cannot recognise in him any feature of the handsome young man he had been. The ordeal has broken him, as it has his fellow survivors; it has changed him beyond recognition and eventually contributes to his premature death. The cattle preserve lives for a limited period, yet their rescue of the prisoners is necessarily temporary within a system designed to exhaust and destroy them.

Across the wider narrative, cattle thus connect domestic rationing with the most extreme conditions of war. At home, animals are incorporated into organised campaigns to feed the nation; on the forced marches, they are seized and transformed into illicit sustenance; in both contexts, animal life is managed under the pressure of scarcity. Their presence reveals how wartime survival depends upon bodies that are vulnerable, useful, and constantly subject to human systems of ownership, hunger, and violence.