For the love of a horse
When, on the dusty plain beside the nile 2,000 years ago, an inspired hyksos soldier hitched a cart to a nag and rode into battle in his ‘chariot’, he elevated Equus from beast of burden to war horse. More, that nameless warrior elevated humankind. no longer was the fighting man pedestrian, a plodder—he was now as fleet and exciting as the wind.
Only those who know nothing of war say it has no glory. how else to explain its fatal attraction? War is at its most glamorous on the back of a horse. Imagine a portly, warty Cromwell at Marston Moor running about on foot, yet put him on a gleaming galloping tail-streaming stallion and he becomes a man of destiny. Dashing, even.
For horse soldiers down the centuries, it was their noble charger that made them brave, heroic. Jack Seely, commander of the Canadian Cavalry in the First World War, attributed his crucial victory at Moreuil Wood in 1918 to Warrior’s ‘supreme courage’ declaring: ‘My stout-hearted horse not only kept his own fear under control but by his example helped beyond measure.’
In war, the man-horse bond—and love is not too strong a word here—is intensified (page 56). When Bucephalus, Alexander the Great’s horse, died, the strong man was so grief stricken that he founded a city, Bucephala, in his memory.
For the love of a horse, fighting men are prepared to risk their lives. Withdrawing under heavy machine-gun fire in 1918, one British officer on the Western Front had a rider and mount go down and later recorded that the trooper ‘crawled towards his horse which raised its head and was looking at him. he reached the horse, gently lifted its head on to his knee, and stayed put’. neither direct orders to leave nor German bullets could persuade him to leave his dying steed. he was there for the end, until the end.
And Pte William Parr, if he suffered a warrior’s death, wanted, heart-breakingly, to be interred with his equines—in a moving poem, he asks ‘Lord of All please grant my only prayer’, which is that ‘when my soul at last reports to Thee/please let me take my horses where I go’. In that all-consuming conflict a century ago, the British soldier understood the value of the war horse. In the words of Pte Albert Massie: ‘he is a mate of ours—one of us.’ The British soldier gives no higher honour. To all the war horses: a salute. And a tear.
‘To all the war horses: a salute. And a tear