Ode to oat-powered engines

Lewis Jones canters through a beguiling study of 6,000 years of equine history

apparently he rode like a madman, in the casual Corsican style, in which the horse is steered like a motorbike, by shifting body weight from side to side.

Mussolini loved to pose as a mounted Caesar, but Hitler loathed horses, as did Stalin. When Marshal Zhukov, the conqueror of Berlin, rode a splendid grey across Red Square in the Victory Day parade of June 1945, Stalin objected to what seemed to him a piece of monarchical iconography, and began to plot his downfall. Even so, Russia did not disband its “Red Cavalry” until the mid-Fifties.

Raulff dates the first deployment of cavalry to the Battle of Issus in 333 BC, as painted by Albrecht Altdorfer in 1529: Darius, King of Persia, flees the battle on his chariot, while Alexander the Great pursues him on his favourite horse, Bucephalus. Cavalry has defeated the chariot, and “the young god of war has triumphed over the hegemon of the old world”.

Until about a century ago, cavalry – that “infernal, gigantic, snorting, roaring, thundering and flashing monster” – was the decisive factor in warfare. During Queen Victoria’s reign Britain engaged in 80 military conflicts, most of which involved cavalry, and Raulff quotes a superb account of a charge by Winston Churchill, who led a squadron of lancers against the Mahdi’s Dervishes at Omdurman in 1898.

In the First World War, Edmund Allenby enjoyed brilliant cavalry victories against the Ottomans, but to ride into the line of fire on the Western Front, “you had to be insane, a general, suicidal, or all three”.

Douglas “Butcher” Haig, a diehard cavalryman, wore spurs even at his headquarters, and in 1927 still maintained that aeroplanes and tanks were simply accessories to a man on horseback.

The legendary Polish cavalry charge against Wehrmacht tanks on the first day of the Second World War really is a legend. A unit of lancers suffered a “random collision” with a Panzer regiment, and charged the tanks in the hope of squeezing through, which about half of them did.

“Like love and the stock exchange,” muses Raulff, “our historical memory is a motherland of wishful thinking.”

For a German intellectual he takes a remarkably indulgent view of historical fantasy, commending the “charm” of Lefebvre des Noëttes’ discredited theory that such innovations as stirrups and harnesses were not made by the ancients because they enjoyed an abundance of slaves. “Was it not more fun,” he asks frivolously, “to err with Lefebre des Noëttes than to be right with his critics?”

Still, he is hugely informative about all sorts of things. America’s first cowboys, for example, were Jews who had learnt about horses from the Moors in Andalusia, and joined the conquistadors to escape the Inquisition; when the Inquisition followed them across the Atlantic, they moved north to what is now known as New Mexico, taking with them the gineta style (where the rider would sit upright with his legs bent and wearing shorter stirrups), and the high-horned Western saddle.

Raulff ’s approach is philosophical and poetic, as well as historical. His book is lavishly illustrated, and he writes perceptively about the artists Delacroix, Landseer and Stubbs, and the semiotics of Degas’ The Fallen Jockey: “a green chalkboard on which he wrote the equation of modern racing. In front of the brackets is speed and within the brackets are beauty and death”.

He describes at length the rise of England as the world power of thoroughbred racing under the Stuarts, and notes that the Hanoverian succession was decided at York races in 1714. Racing, he concludes, is “the most sublime form of agon involving animals”; greyhounds chase the skin of a hare, but in a horse race “nothing and no one is hunted, only the shadows of time”.

Raulff ’s history abounds in literary allusion, with frequent reference to Tolstoy, who reckoned he spent seven years of his life in the saddle, to Flaubert, Hardy and, surprisingly, Kafka.

In 1889, Nietzsche, who had little time for animals, is said to have witnessed a coachman beating his horse in the shadow of an equestrian statue in Turin, and was so moved that he embraced the horse’s neck, weeping and calling it his brother. It’s such a touching story, observes Raulff, again displaying a fine contempt for mere facts, that it “barely seems to matter whether or not the details are true”.

He modestly says that he has failed to achieve what he set out to do in Farewell to the Horse, and that his “first genuine horse book will have to wait until my rebirth as a horse”. (German jokes are always doubly funny.) But if this book is a failure, it is a magnificent one.

Nietzsche once embraced a horse in Turin, calling it his brother