The book pays tribute to the horse’s great courage under fire and his indomitable spirit. If Warrior became the general’s “passport” and won the affection of soldiers, explained Seely, it owed only a little to the horse’s looks, ancestry and quality. Warrior impressed everyone who met him with his character and personality because he still possessed, despite the horrors of war, an air of innocence. He had never been beaten.
“The soul of a horse,” wrote the general, “is a great and loyal soul, quite unspoiled by the chances and changes of human kind. Above all, it is a courageous soul, and an affectionate soul. But let there be one cruel blow from a grown-up man, and you have ruined the horse’s fine soul and spirit for ever. It is my dream that those who read this book may vow never to beat a willing horse. Warrior has never been so beaten, partly by good fortune, partly because it takes a brave man to beat him.”
After the war, Warrior retired to a paddock overlooking the English Channel. The old horse turned a benevolent eye to the children who came to stroke him. And whenever he saw Seely’s wife, he would walk up to her, “lay his soft nose against her cheek, and close his eyes — the supreme tribute of friendship from a horse to a human being.” The book ends with a little sketch of Seely in a tweed jacket riding off into the sunset on Warrior, who has his left eye turned slightly, looking back.
Like Seely, many soldiers developed a real affection for the horses they rode into war, sometimes over the course of years. In the American Civil War, for example, men under cover of darkness would often steal food for their horses; officers, knowing what feeling had prompted it, would turn a blind eye. And it seemed the affection went the other way, too.
General William B. Bate fought with the Second Tennessee at the Battle of Shiloh, in which he rode a magnificent black stallion called Black Hawk (formally called Canada Chief, owing to his Canadian pacer bloodline). After first being repulsed in battle, Bate told his troops to follow him, adding that he would not bid them go where he himself would not. Soon enough, Bate was wounded and fell off Black Hawk. The horse followed the men into battle for another half mile before turning back to locate his rider.
Black Hawk somehow — perhaps by tracking Bate’s scent or a trail of blood — followed the path of the horse-drawn ambulance carrying Bate to a hospital tent, which was three miles from the battlefield. The horse “poked his head in the tent door,” Captain Robert D. Smith is quoted in the Horse Review of 1896, “and affectionately whinnied to his master while the surgeon was dressing the wound.” The horse’s own wounds, meanwhile, had escaped everyone’s notice. Black Hawk walked a few paces into the woods, staggered and fell dead. Smith recorded how the horse’s obvious attachment deeply moved Bate: “He can still see that almost human look Black Hawk gave him and that last pathetic whinny as he walked off to fall down and die.”
One British cavalryman who penned a diary during a military campaign against the French in 1794 near Antwerp noted: “A soldier would as soon see his comrade killed as his horse; and that the horse has an equal regard for, and knowledge of, his master will be seen in the following fact …” The diary went on to describe a skirmish in which a dragoon was hit by a bullet and fell from his horse. Fellow soldiers, who were retreating from the swarming enemy, presumed he was dead. Two days later, a patrol discovered the dragoon’s horse close by the body, and the pattern in the grazed grass clearly showed that the horse had never ventured more than a few yards from the downed rider. “When they buried the corpse on the spot,” the diarist wrote, “the faithful animal seemed to show great reluctance to come away without his master, frequently turning his head and neighing, as if wishing his dead master to come and mount him; this was an old horse that had lived with one rider many years.”
A former U.S. Cavalry officer told of seeing his war horse, Pig, years after leaving the army. The horse was now part of a six-horse team, and although the animal appeared miserable his former master could not afford to buy him back. “I went up to him and petted him,” the old soldier wrote. “He knew me alright. He nickered and looked at me as much as to say, ‘Come on, please, Charlie, get me out of here.’ I had ridden old Pig thousands of miles and more than once he saved my life. I pretty near cried when I saw him that time in the Black Hills.”
In 1995, a film called In Pursuit of Honor illustrated — as only Hollywood can — the bond that sometimes formed between cavalrymen and horses. Apparently based on a true story, the movie stars Don Johnson as a tough American cavalryman in 1932 who joins others in a wild adventure to save doomed horses.
Convinced that the horse was obsolete as a military force, the army had ordered 506 cavalry horses at a base in Texas dispensed with, but not by selling them or even by giving them away. They were to be taken to a gully across the border in Mexico, machine-gunned and the earth bulldozed over them. “There’s nothing left,” says the Johnson character in a drunken rage. “No horses, no cavalry, no honor.”
The cavalrymen, bonded with those particular horses and horses in general, watch the first lot of one hundred “murdered” and then risk court martial and death to save the rest. With the army in mechanized pursuit, five men, driving the herd before them, make a run from Texas to the Canadian border.
No doubt some cavalrymen felt they owed a debt to horses they had ridden for many years and who, like Pig, had saved their lives more than once. During the Second World War, a Red Army cavalry division was ordered to advance over a snow-covered minefield. The divisional commander told his men to ride with loose reins and let the horses choose their own path. Most of those who did so made it through. Most of those who rode collected were blown up.
There is an innocence about horses, a general willingness to please, that makes what happens to them in war nothing short of heartbreaking. A poster from the First World War shows a man holding in his arms the head of a dying horse. All around is the blasted landscape of that war — a shelled house, branchless trees, tortured metal on the roadside. Another soldier is urging the man to come. Up ahead an artillery wagon pulled by two other horses is struggling in the mud. But the man, who is cradling the horse’s head as he would a child’s, must first bid farewell. “Good-bye old man,” the caption reads. And the poster pleads, “Help the Horse to Save the Soldier. Please Join the American Red Star Animal Relief, National Headquarters, Albany, N.Y.”
5.5 Some soldiers formed powerful bonds with their horses, and grieved when their comrades died. (photo credit 5.5)
Animal relief. There is almost none of that in war. In the First World War, some 1.5 million horses were used as cavalry alone; an estimated five hundred thousand died. The diaries of cavalry officers paint a bleak picture of muddy battlefields where mange (a skin disease) and glanders (a swelling of the neck glands) spread among horses like wildfire. To control mange, the army had all horses clipped, but then they shivered in the cold. Water troughs froze; food supplies dwindled. Ravenous horses chewed and choked on halters and blankets, the manes and tails of other horses, their own hay nets, even the epaulets on men’s shoulders.
Many thousands of horses caught what soldiers called “moon blindness,” an eye disease linked with unsanitary conditions. Parasites were endemic. Mustard gas would leave the horses in terrible pain and, three weeks later, blind. Chlorine gas caused pneumonia and gangrene.
In his diaries, Captain Alfred Savage of the Canadian Army Veterinary Corps barely suppresses his rage over the abuse of horses during the terrible winter of 1917 in northern France. Four inches of snow lay on the ground and bone-chilling winds racked men and horses. More horses died in one week in January than during the previous six months, and two-thirds of the watering holes had been frozen for ten days. Since none of the officers using the remaining watering holes “seemed to give a damn,” Savage wrote, “it was about time 99% of [them] received a course in Elementary Horse Management.”
Later that year, at Passchendaele in Belgium, the earth was so rutted with shellfire that the ground acted like a sponge. Horses s
ank to their knees in the thick brown porridge. It was a mercy to shoot them. Lieutenant Colonel D. S. Tamblyn, a Canadian who fought there, wrote:
The battle of Passchendaele Ridge was one of the terrible experiences of the Great War for our dumb friends. The return of pack animals and their leaders from the forward areas was a sight never to be forgotten. Horses and men, plastered with mud from head to foot, some exhibiting evidence of having received first aid treatment, others bearing ghastly wounds, and the carcasses of dead animals being used as stepping stones by the men to bring their charges and themselves out of the mire to more solid ground, made an awful picture. Shrapnel and bombs were bursting here, there and everywhere; horses neighing, and men bidding their last farewell to their dumb pals, who probably had been their chums since the commencement of the war, made matters worse and more unbearable. Such sights cannot but be indelibly impressed on one’s mind.
With few exceptions, horses sent to war in Europe did not come home. Some died in transit. Across Canada sixteen horses were put to a boxcar, one thousand to a trainload, before they boarded ships at Levis, Quebec, or Halifax, Nova Scotia. More would die in the crossing; many succumbed to pneumonia from lack of shelter in England; countless more would die on the battlefield. At war’s end, survivors were sold, often to butchers in war-ravaged countries desperate for food. Even in death, the horses served.
One of the last great battles involving soldiers on horseback occurred almost two centuries ago: the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Two horses from that epic battle are still remembered.
That Bonaparte had twenty horses shot out from under him in battle underlines what a target the emperor must have presented on his white steed, and how vulnerable both were. The horse most closely associated with the conqueror, the horse depicted in most of those triumphant paintings, is Marengo, a name taken from a village in northern Italy where Napoleon and the French engaged the Austrian army in 1800. Napoleon’s troops fought three separate battles that day. They lost the first two but won the final, decisive, one.
In that battle Napoleon rode a short, thickset gray stallion brought into France from Egypt only the year before. Just over fourteen hands tall (a short horse for a short man), the horse remained steady amid the chaos and the barrage of gunfire and cannonade, even though Napoleon himself was slightly wounded in the foot by a bullet that removed part of his riding boot. So pleased was the emperor with his horse that he named him after the battle. Marengo would take eight wounds over the course of his long military career.
The story is told that one day near the battlefield of Austerlitz in Austria, Napoleon was alone, deep in thought, as he led Marengo through the woods on foot. Suddenly, the horse tensed. Marengo snorted and pointed his ears forward. Napoleon leaped into the saddle and off they galloped, pursued by Russian spies hiding in the bush.
Marengo joined Napoleon in the folly of the Russian campaign and the subsequent retreat. By the Battle of Waterloo, where Marengo was wounded, he was a senior horse of twenty-two years. It was his last battle.
Napoleon used three horses, including Marengo, at Waterloo. In his hasty retreat to Paris after the defeat, he left Marengo behind at a stable near the battlefield. The victorious English took the horse back home, where he was royally treated and stood at stud for a long time, outliving his master by ten years. Marengo died in 1831 at the grand old age of thirty-eight.
By the way, they stuffed him, too.
Across the battlefield at Waterloo that day was a fifteen-hand chestnut originally trained as a racehorse and ridden by the duke of Wellington, also known as the Iron Duke. That horse, Copenhagen, similarly took his name from a battle.
Copenhagen had earned a reputation for stamina and spirit. The day before the battle, Wellington rode him for ten hours and then from dawn to dusk at Waterloo. When the exhausted Wellington finally dismounted, Copenhagen swung around and aimed a kick that almost killed the duke. Next day came more mischief: the fiery horse eluded his grooms and had to be chased through the streets of Brussels.
British soldiers loved him. Painters and sculptors set down his likeness. And so much was written about him in diaries and memoirs that he approached the fame of his master. Lady Frances Shelley was granted a visit to Wellington’s estate and, even better, a ride on Copenhagen. “A charming ride of two hours,” she later wrote. “But I found Copenhagen the most difficult horse to sit of any I have ridden. If the Duke had not been there, I should have been frightened.” When it came time, the duke gave Copenhagen — the subject of an obituary in the Times of London — the kind of funeral reserved for high-ranking officers. The duke did not, as far as I know, stuff him or mount him in a glass case.
I do find the notion of mounting the mount, as it were, distasteful. But even the stuffed horse, it seems, offers a service. In the last years of his life, Comanche became a powerful symbol for a nation in mourning. Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence maintains that horses can become the focus of widespread grief and hope. In His Very Silence Speaks, she cites the intriguing case of Sefton, a black gelding who survived an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb blast.
Sefton was part of the Queen’s Household Cavalry and was in London’s Hyde Park — no doubt posing for tourists’ cameras — on July 20, 1982, when the first bomb went off. Four troopers and seven horses were killed, along with seven infantrymen (members of a military band) in a separate explosion in Regents Park.
Of all the surviving horses, Sefton was the most grievously hurt. The nineteen-year-old horse took thirty-eight shrapnel wounds and would have died of a severed jugular vein had a soldier not put his fist into the horse’s neck to staunch the flow of blood.
An Irish journalist later remarked on the curious response to the twin bombings. It was the crime committed against the horses, as much as or more than the one against the humans, that stirred the greatest outrage in both England and Ireland. That week, wreaths were laid where the horses died; the dead bandsmen were not remembered that way. Medical updates on the surviving horses earned greater prominence on television newscasts than did those of the wounded men.
Like Comanche, Sefton would henceforth be no ordinary, and certainly no anonymous, horse. A painting of “the brave and defiant horse” was auctioned off to raise money for victims’ families; the painting, in turn, led to cards, plates and pendants. A great wave of get-well cards urged the horse to live and, by doing so, to “cheat the bastards [the IRA].” When the horse did indeed survive and appeared in a public ceremony for the first time, out came the hankies. “The sobbing,” said one observer, “was contagious and quite unashamed.”
What to make of all this? Is the emotion not misplaced? Lawrence, an anthropologist, sees it in a more positive light. “By diverting attention from grief,” she wrote in His Very Silence Speaks, “as well as by its own presence, an animal possesses a remarkable capacity to heal.” Lawrence points out that Custer’s horse Dandy (not present at the Little Big Horn and therefore spared) helped assuage the grief of Emanuel Custer, who lost three sons, a son-in-law and a nephew in that battle. “I don’t know how I could have lived without that horse,” the elder Custer once wrote. “He’s been a comfort to me for thirteen long years.” Elizabeth Custer called Dandy her father-in-law’s “anchor.”
Comanche played the same role for General Sturgis, who lost a son at the Little Big Horn, and for the American nation, which had suffered a crushing defeat. All that grief was transferred onto one horse.
British author and ex-cavalryman J. N. P. Watson, who wrote a book on Sefton, believes that the horse’s leap into the limelight has everything to do with the innocence that almost all equines possess. The horse, he said, is so lacking in malice and yet so dutiful and brave that “when he suffers it makes man ashamed for the human race.”
The silence immediately following the bombing unnerved witnesses. Not one horse, even Sefton with his ghastly wounds, snorted or whinnied. One eyewitness called the quiet “so absolute it chilled the mind and the senses.”
Like Comanche, Sefton enjoyed a glorious retirement. He had always been a horse comfortable at the center of things. A British brigadier recalled feeding him mints and patting him, this while the horse was recovering from surgery. And when the man turned to talk to someone else, Sefton gently but firmly grabbed his hand and brought it back. “He wanted my attention again,” said the brigadier, “and knew how to get it. He has a great personality, a very strong personality, and that was an important factor in his recovery.”
At the Home of Rest for Horses, it was forbidden that Sefton be ridden. Crowds came around with carrots and apples and mints (eventually the treats were rationed, lest he balloon or colic), and no one seemed particularly surprised that Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence had traveled all the way from America to visit this celebrated horse. Sefton died, finally, in 1993 at the age of thirty, whereupon they put him where he belonged. In the ground.
CHAPTER 6
THE WONDER HORSES
OF HOLLYWOOD
AND LITERATURE
Tonto: “Him shine like Silver.”
Lone Ranger: “Silver! That would be a great name for him.”
Roy Rogers: “We were getting ready to do the first picture.
I was fooling around with my guns as we talked. I believe
it was actually Smiley Burnette who said, “As fast and as
quick as the horse is, you ought to call him Trigger, you
know, quick-on-the-trigger. I said, ‘That’s a good name.’ ”
I HAVE A LITTLE scar at the base of my neck where the gun butt struck. My memory of the incident is kaleidoscopic, with blank spaces and faces and one last name. That little crescent moon where the hair never again grew is as real as the images: the blood trickling down my back, the trip home cradled in linked arms, my rescuers all talking at once as the door opens, the look on my mother’s face …
Wild About Horses Page 14
