The Intimate Bond

by Brian Fagan

  Dogs were ubiquitous, used for protecting private property. Often-fierce mastiffs, muzzled during the day, roamed as guard dogs at night. They attacked people, killed sheep, and ran freely in the streets, chasing passersby. Christ’s and Trinity Colleges in Cambridge even employed a servant to keep dogs out of their chapels. Dogs pulled carts and sleds, and occasionally plows. Sheepdogs and other working animals were admired for their skills, often even loved. Even so, many were hanged or drowned when no longer useful, and even cooked down for their grease. Many families kept watchdogs, especially farmers and shopkeepers. Until as late as the sixteenth century, beasts owned by the poor and stray dogs had been regarded as filthy vermin, their behavior the subject of common sayings such as “as surly as a butcher’s dog.” Dogs became a symbol of gluttony, of lust and disorder. The distinction tended to reflect social classes among people.

  Most dogs lived with working households and often fended for themselves. Stray canines became pests, so much so that theater owners employed men to chase them out of auditoriums. Dogs were so numerous that a canine tax was proposed without success again and again; there were with perhaps a million of them in Britain during the late eighteenth century. (There were about 9.16 million people in England and Wales in 1801.) Finally, in 1796, concern over rabies epidemics led to a tax aimed at eliminating the dogs of the poor, which were considered less controlled than those of the aristocracy. Draconian measures combated rabies. Thousands of unlicensed dogs perished after the passing of the 1796 law. Roaming animals were considered unsanitary, also violent, when let out by their owners to forage for food. All this was a manifestation of a growing gulf between animals and humans. But some breeds were much respected by aristocratic and working-class owners for their ferocity and stamina, notably the bulldog, “excelling in fight, victorious over their enemies, undaunted in death.”9

  Racing Horseflesh

  Fox hunting and flat racing (a race over a level course of fixed distance), the lure of speed in the saddle, were irresistible to both country gentlemen and the nobility. As we shall see, there were close emotional and practical links between these field sports and the seemingly glamorous life of an aristocratic cavalry officer. There was something about the close-packed cavalry charge that was thought to bring out the best in both horse and rider. But this prolonged love affair—it was often nothing less—began on the hunting field and racecourse.

  Both fox hunting and flat racing had long histories in Europe. The Romans brought new breeds of foxhounds to Britain in 43 CE. By 1340, medieval lords regularly hunted foxes. King Edward I is said to have founded the first royal foxhound pack in that year. Fox hunting became more popular with the passing of the Enclosure Acts that fenced off commonly held land, which was when jumping became a regular part of the sport. With the advent of railroads in the 1830s, the sport became increasingly popular with the aristocracy, many of whom “rode to hounds” from an early age. This created a demand for fast horses, and to a popular misconception that riding fast after foxes prepared one to lead cavalry into battle. Thoroughbred horses were especially suitable for fox hunting, bred as they were for speed and endurance, so the two sports grew hand in hand.

  Flat racing flourished in England as early as 1174, when 6.4-kilometer (4-mile) races became popular near Smithfield, just outside London.10 Horse racing flourished at markets and fairs, receiving royal support from the animal-loving King Charles II and later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century monarchs, who patronized what had become a popular sport. The breeding of thoroughbred racehorses began in earnest when wealthy owners imported three stallions from the Near East: the Byerley Turk during the 1680s, the Darley Arabian in 1704, and the Godolphin Arabian in 1729. About 160 Eastern stallions ultimately contributed to the creation of thoroughbreds, horses bred for the racecourse. In 1791, the General Stud Book became the official register of British horses, and remains so today. Selective breeding for speed and racing ability led to races being shortened progressively and to some extraordinary racehorses. Perhaps the most famous was Eclipse, an undefeated stallion bred in 1764 by Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, which won eighteen races, and walked 2,250 kilometers (1,400 miles) to get to the race meetings into the bargain. He retired to stud after a career of seventeen months, having no competition. He then sired between three hundred fifty and four hundred winners. Eclipse is said to be ancestral to 95 percent of contemporary English thoroughbreds.

  Figure 15.3 The racehorse Eclipse as painted by George Stubbs, 1770. Superstock.

  Beloved Pets

  An emerging and passionate interest in hunting and racehorses coincided with a significant change in human behavior toward highly prized animals. Triggered by the philosophies and scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment during the second half of the eighteenth century, this coincided with a rising enthusiasm for dogs and cats as companions, friends, and even confidants. Devoted owners created miniature cenotaphs for them; portraits of aristocratic owners often included their favorite pets as symbols of power. Equestrian portraits of monarchs and other important figures depicted them with their horses or on horseback—their faithful steeds. The eighteenth century saw a fashion for animal portraits. English artist George Stubbs (1724–1806) painted highly realistic portraits of magnificent racehorses that depicted the powerful anatomy of the beast, posed with its owner, trainer, or even a groom. Pride of ownership, of achievement on the racecourse or while fox hunting at a gallop, created an entire genre of eighteenth-century art. Dogs and cats, painted with or without their owners, sometimes displayed their characters to the artist by a pose, even by an expression in the eyes.11

  Dogs and cats on the streets were one thing, cherished pets another. For centuries, wealthy aristocrats prized their greyhounds and foxhounds for their fidelity. Effigies of medieval knights lie in cathedrals with a faithful hound at their feet. Gentlewomen cosseted small lap dogs such as spaniels and pugs as companions. Pets became a fashion with royalty as early as Elizabethan times. King James I was obsessed with hounds. He was said to love his dogs more than his subjects. Half a century later, Charles II was famous for his spaniels; he played with them at the Privy Council table while conducting government business. In some aristocratic households addicted to hunting, the foxhounds were better treated than the servants, and enjoyed a much better diet than local villagers. Large country houses teemed with animals of all kinds, even with litters of cats in chairs. Dog droppings and marrow bones littered the hall. A cacophony of barking and howling kept guests awake at night.

  Feline fortunes changed gradually after medieval times, especially in crowded cities, where humans and cats lived in close juxtaposition.12 Many wealthier households apparently kept them as pets, both as mousers and as companions. The earliest-known cat show, using the term loosely, was held at the St. Giles Fair at Winchester, England, in 1598. We know almost nothing about the event, but it was the remote ancestor of the cat shows of today. The seventeenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop Laud, is said to have imported one of the first tabby cats into England, at a time when they cost the huge sum of five pounds (about eight dollars) each. His contemporary the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu cherished large numbers of pet cats, constructing special quarters for them and even providing for their upkeep in his will. Cats crossed to what became the United States as early as the seventeenth century.

  “Tirrany or Crueltie Towards Any Bruite Creature”

  By 1700, pet keeping was commonplace among affluent families. This obsession with pet keeping burgeoned during the nineteenth century with the population explosion in cities and the emergence of an urban middle class. With this development came notions that animals had characters and individual personalities, which entitled at least some of them to moral treatment. This, and a concern with the evils of live vivisection, generated laws protecting animals against mistreatment. A law passed in Ireland in 1635 prohibited the plucking of wool from sheep instead of clipping or shearing them. The Colony of M
assachusetts passed the Body of Liberties Laws in 1641, which stated that “No man shall exercise any tirrany or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usuallie kep for man’s use.”13 During the early nineteenth century, repeated efforts to pass legislation to protect working animals died in the House of Commons. One journalist wrote that “England is the hell of dumb animals.”14 None other than Queen Victoria remarked to the home secretary as late as 1868 that “the English are inclined to be more cruel to animals than some other civilized nations.”15 In the case of pit ponies (used underground in coal mines) and other urban working animals, she was right.

  The greatest suffering of all befell animals destined to labor in the streets or to be slaughtered in butchers’ stalls. There was a grim, mercenary callousness to the way in which horses were worked to death, pigs fattened for the butcher, and donkeys and ponies worked in coal mines, mills, and later railroad yards. As the historian Jason Hribal wrote in 2003, “The farms, factories, roads, forest, and mines have been their sites of production. Here they have manufactured hair, milk, flesh, and power for the farm, the factory, and mine owners. And they are unwaged.”16 The comparison with the sufferings of working people in factories, slums, and the countryside was irresistible.

  Even greater cruelties awaited horses drafted into battle as cavalry steeds and pack animals. In times when virtually everything depended on animal power, this included warfare. Images of prancing warhorses and cavalry charging into battle evoked powerful emotions of nationalism and military triumph, but as we shall see, when medieval ways of going to war confronted firepower generated by the Industrial Revolution, reality was gruesomely different from image.

  CHAPTER 16

  Victims of Military Insanity

  Thundering hooves, closely packed steeds, drawn lances and sabers, brilliantly caparisoned riders sweeping in an irresistible attack—the dream of a mass cavalry charge intoxicated aristocratic leaders raised on field sports. Born to a life of power and display, they rode to hounds at a gallop and bred thoroughbreds on their country estates. Combat and the exultation of victory resembled the rush of a successful hunt. Trumpets, plumes, and all the pomp of the military life turned war on horseback into what has been called an “aristocratic trade.” Dazzling uniforms, beautifully turned out horses, and the precision of cavalry maneuvers stirred powerful yearnings for command, for military glory.

  Soldiers had ridden into battle for well over three thousand years, long before anyone invented cannons or muskets.1 Cavalrymen served as scouts, pursued fleeing infantry, and protected the flanks of Roman legions. Generals such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar made effective use of lightly armed cavalry units, which were a far cry from heavily armed medieval knights, who engaged, for the most part, in individual combat. These latter may have been symbols of medieval chivalry, but they were lumbering figures, the medieval equivalent of tanks. (The word chivalry, derived from eleventh-century Old French for chevalier, or “knight,” originally meant horsemanship, and the medieval, and earlier, Latin word caballarius, “horseman”.) Heavy armor and rigid saddles locked knights into positions where they could withstand the shock of a lance blow. But armored riders had much less control of their horses. These large stallions weighed up to about 454 kilograms (1,000 pounds). Considered to be natural fighters and controlled with severe curb bits, they learned to bite, kick, and stamp on their opponents. Mounted knights were dangerous to infantry, but they were no match for lightly armed Mongolian horsemen, who enjoyed a subtle, tactile relationship with their mounts. They paid careful attention to the overall balance of their beasts, and ensured that they had an easy gait and a long stride. They also paid careful attention to a horse’s head, its ears, and its alertness and personality—to their relationship with their charge. At the Battle of Mohi in Hungary in 1241, fast-moving Mongol archers played havoc with Hungarian knights, the heavy cavalry unable to respond to the rapidly changing invader’s tactics.

  Mongol riders learned while infants the use of natural tools for riding—voice, legs, hands, and body. Horses are so sensitive to any touch that they can feel a fly land on their flanks. Thus, they learn to feel the distinctive movements of a rider’s body and limbs and can distinguish among subtle changes. They also have excellent memories, which make them readily trainable. Leg squeezes of different intensity move the animal forward; right- or left- leg pressure steers the animal right or left; both legs applied in separate places can cause the beast to turn around. The rider’s body when shifted forward or backward tells the horse to speed up or slow down. As the heavily armored knight gave way to cannons, the old horse-handling skills came to the fore once again. By the late eighteenth century, many aristocratic foxhunters and racecourse owners had developed close understandings of their most cherished horseflesh. They assumed that such expertise qualified them to become cavalry officers. In this they were only partially correct. Among other things, a brilliant ability at handling a horse and commanding a charge did not necessarily translate into a concern over the ultimate fate of the steed in the cut and thrust of battle. The story of cavalry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a tragic commentary on the fine line between being at one with an animal and exposing it to extreme danger without concern for its safety. It’s also a story of increasingly impersonal warfare, where horses literally became cannon fodder.

  “Grass Before the Mower’s Scythe”

  By the time of the Napoleonic Wars at the very end of the eighteenth century, cavalry were a well-established weapon on the battlefield, their field movements subject to greater discipline. Generals learned that well-planned cavalry charges could have devastating effects. On January 8, 1807, Napoléon Bonaparte was in the midst of a violent but inconclusive battle with the Russians at Eylau, in East Prussia.2 A Russian attack in the midst of a snowstorm threw his infantry into confusion. Napoléon had but one option: a massive charge by his eleven-thousand-strong cavalry reserve under General Joachim Murat. In one of the great charges of history, Murat’s squadrons surged through the Russian infantry around the village of Eylau and divided them in two. The cavalry put hundreds of infantrymen to the sword and rode through the Russian guns. Their large horses trampled down a battalion that attempted to resist. Never had cavalry played such a central role in a major battle, partly because these were mounted on fine-quality horses just requisitioned after the French conquest of Prussia.

  Eylau was a textbook example of intelligent cavalry deployment under very severe conditions. But the cost in equine and human lives was enormous. Murat lost a thousand to fourteen hundred well-trained cavalrymen, and numerous horses, but his attack relieved the pressure on the French infantry and allowed them to redeploy. The surgeon general of Napoléon’s Grand Army served soup and stew made from the flesh of slain horses to the wounded, apparently with good results, so much so that he promoted the consumption of horsemeat back in France.

  By contrast, the Battle of Waterloo, eight years later, provided a dramatic illustration of just how ineffective, even suicidal, such charges could be. Well-disciplined squares of foot guards repelled a French cavalry charge of at least five thousand closely packed trotting horses. The infantry stood their ground and felled horsemen by the dozen with controlled musket volleys. In another engagement in the same battle, a British artillery commander, Cavalié Mercier, faced French cuirassiers. He wrote, “On they came in compact squadrons, one behind the other. . . . Their pace was a slow but steady trot. None of your furious galloping charges was this, but a deliberate advance, at a deliberate pace. . . . They moved in profound silence, and the only sound that could be heard from them amidst the incessant roar of battle was the low thunder-like reverberation of the ground beneath the simultaneous tread of so many horses.” Then the artillery opened up at close range: “Nearly the whole leading rank fell at once. . . . The discharge of every gun was followed by a fall of men and horses like that of grass before the mower’s scythe.”3

  Figure 16.1 The fury of t
he charge. The Royal Scots Greys attack at the Battle of Waterloo, 1815. Pantheon/Superstock.

  Regiments of Display

  Few cavalry officers digested the lessons of Waterloo. One expert who did was British cavalryman Capt. Louis Edward Nolan (1818–1854). An accomplished horse master and expert on horse-based military tactics, he wrote Cavalry: Its History and Tactics, in 1853, on the eve of the Crimean War. This articulate, well-reasoned manual was to become a definitive source on the subject. During his entire career, much of which he spent studying cavalry in other armies, Nolan placed a great emphasis on the relationship between soldiers and their horses, and on proper leadership, by officers who could judge distance and skillfully mask their intentions in the face of the enemy. Everyone, whether officer or enlisted man, had to keep his eyes and wits about him—judging distances between his mount and neighboring horses; in the case of leaders, riding straight at the enemy; and taking advantage of reconnoitered ground.

  A meticulous horse master, Nolan trained individual soldiers to ride well before introducing them to formation riding, which, ultimately, was what cavalry warfare involved. Above all, “a cavalryman should be complete master over [his horse], so as to control and direct him at the slowest or fastest pace with equal ease; he should know how to quiet and subdue the hot-tempered, and put life and action into the sluggish horse.”4 Predictably, this passionate advocate of cavalry warfare adopted the ancient teachings of Xenophon: “Horses are taught not by harshness but by gentleness.”

  Decisiveness was the mantra of cavalry command, said Nolan, but beware the danger of approaching the enemy at full speed. The shock of contact would probably dismount the rider and break most of his bones. He added: “Men and officers should . . . understand that to gallop forward because the enemy are in that direction is by no means a proof of valour.”5 In other words, mass cavalry charges were an inappropriate use of cavalry in an era of increasingly effective firearms. Nolan wrote of the importance of careful planning, of maintaining reserves, of the strategic advantages of attacking infantry on their flanks, and of the need to reconnoiter and make use of the natural topography. His view of mounted soldiery was forthright: “Cavalry ought to be at once the eye, the feeler, and the feeder of an army. . . . It reaps the fruits of victory, covers a retreat, and retrieves a disaster.”6