Farewell To The Horse
Ulrich Raulff Allen Lane €355 ★★★★★
Leaf through the pages of any glossy fashion magazine and sooner or later you will find a photograph in which a beautiful model appears alongside a horse. A recent Versace advert, for example, showed a bare-legged girl in a crop top and strappy sandals, one arm slung over the withers of a hefty bay, her naked toes perilously close to its hooves.
To anyone with a knowledge of the history of our relationship with horses, the juxtaposition can seem incongruous.
In his eloquent account of the separation of human and equine destinies, German historian Ulrich Raulff observes that it is more than a century since horses relinquished the place at the heart of human existence that they had occupied for some 6,000 years.
In the millennia before mechanisation, the speed and endurance of horses were the foundation on which all technological advances rested. Food production, transport and communications networks, and warfare all ran on horsepower. Horses were the most political of animals, and the most symbolic: if their power was awe-inspiring, their gentleness, beauty and loyalty were deeply moving, celebrated in literature and art.
In our own time, Raulff notes, horses have gone ‘into semi-retirement with a part-time job as a recreational item, a mode of therapy, a status symbol, and a source of pastoral support for female puberty’.
Yet some trace of that special relationship still lingers in the incongruous fashion shoots, the annual flutter on Cheltenham and the stately ceremonial occasions: these are the last echoes of an alliance that began with one small step for mankind, when an intrepid Neolithic ancestor first mounted a horse.
Raulff argues that our farewell to the horse was a protracted and hesitant affair. It took place over what is known as the ‘long 19th century’ – the period that began with Napoleon and ended with the First World War – although working horses remained a significant presence for some decades after that.
They were widely used in the Second World War as draft animals and in rare, doomed cavalry charges. And while the mechanisation of agriculture began in the early 19th century, in rural Westphalia, where Raulff grew up, horses were still ubiquitous in the mid-Fifties.
While national leaders (especially shortish ones, such as Napoleon and Mussolini) loved to have themselves portrayed as heroes on horseback, the ruthless exploitation of equines was accompanied by a growing sense of unease. The German poet Schiller wrote that ‘Paris is paradise for women, purgatory for men, hell for horses’, and for horses, the observation was true of every 19th-century city. Carriage accidents and pile-ups, bolting horses and roads so bemired that animals and men vanished without trace became the stuff of popular comedy; but the suffering of abused horses began to excite both revulsion and compassion.
The wretched lives of working horses were indignantly portrayed in images such as George Cruikshank’s 1831 etching The Knacker’s Yard; and the pity and horror of the First World War, in which some eight million horses are estimated to have died, was vividly evoked by harrowing photographs such as a picture of an injured horse being shot, taken by German soldier and author Ernst Jünger.
In this richly textured, witty and entertaining history, Raulff is careful to avoid the elegiac mode. But he knows horses well, and his account of a significant milestone ‘in the withdrawal of mankind from the analogue world’ ends on a note of regret, as he wonders what the consequences will be for human beings, now that ‘the old friend with whom they had been through thick and thin, who had comforted and rescued them, kicked and bitten them… is no longer there’.
‘The old friend who had comforted and rescued them, kicked and bitten them is no longer there’