The Lost War Horses of Cairo
Page 9
“One day a very sorry pair of old gharry horses were brought, one of which was a piebald,” wrote Glenda Spooner. She referred to a type of horse with a black and white splotched pattern over its coat. On seeing the animal, even in his present condition, Dorothy wondered whether he had once been a regimental drum horse.2 A drum horse, seen today in Trooping the Colour ceremonies, carries just behind its mane two silver drums, which are beaten by the horse’s rider to maintain consistent march time for a cavalry regiment, while the rider’s feet manipulate special reins connected to the stirrups. Piebalds are sturdy, quiet, grave, and handsome animals, and this patient was all of those, despite the fact that he was in such damaged condition Dorothy feared that with all his will to live she would still not be able to save him. Yet the horse with him was in even worse shape, if possible. In fact, it was difficult to imagine how he had survived the trip to reach the Royal Agricultural Society grounds to be offered for sale. Clearly he had persevered because his piebald friend had accompanied him on the long walk from wherever they had started.
Dorothy later believed it was the stress of “black Friday” that caused her to forget that the piebald and his mate had arrived together. From her first inspection of the piebald’s companion, she knew it would be criminal to make him suffer one more instant, and she asked a syce to take him to join the others scheduled for immediate euthanasia. This was done with all the gentleness Dorothy could summon from the grooms under her supervision. These animals were gathered in a yard with an outbuilding where they could be out of the hot sun and away from the other horses. There they were given bran mash, a comforting, filling meal that also hydrated the water-starved, a treat no doubt familiar to those who could still remember what life had been like before 1919. Satisfied by this, each horse was then led away to its instant death.
No sooner had the incapacitated horse limped to the shed than Dorothy heard the piebald whinnying as if in pain. She hurried into the stables, where she found him “in a terrible state of mind,” she recalled, “pawing desperately at his straw with his battered old legs and deformed feet.…Moreover he was shaking all over and, as he was blind in one eye, he had his head turned over his shoulder on the side he could see,” stabled as he was in the Egyptian way, with his face toward the wall. Still unsure what to do, Dorothy had bran mash brought to distract him, but the piebald wanted something else and was so desperate for it that this treat, something that in his long life of Egyptian labor he can never have hoped to taste again, meant nothing to him. This is when Dorothy realized that he was looking for his old friend.3
Dorothy had a syce bring over from the “condemned” yard a horse the groom thought might be the piebald’s mate. But it was not. He led several over, each in their turn. None were the mate the piebald was seeking; and it was terrible to watch as he continued to strain to see over his shoulder, stamping and whinnying in agitation. Desperate to fix her mistake, Dorothy asked the stableman to lead the piebald himself over to the condemned yard, to see if he could find his friend himself.4
“Anxiously, the old boy shambled across the yard,” Dorothy wrote, “and along two rows of waiting horses…until, coming to a miserable old crock, he stopped and nickered softly.”5
The piebald and his mate, noses bobbing against the other, had been reunited.
Both horses were taken back to the stable. They were given bran mash, which they ate happily, heads together, tails twitching. Then they were taken out again and euthanized simultaneously.
In his 2007 book The Emotional Lives of Animals, ethologist Dr. Marc Bekoff quotes the director of a primate research center who, when asked if animals were capable of experiencing and expressing emotion, replied that far from being so capable, animals were merely a “neutral palette on which we paint our needs, feelings, and view of the world.” Having observed firsthand too many instances to the contrary to take this admittedly biased opinion seriously, Dr. Bekoff writes, “When we deny that animals have feelings, it demeans both them and us.”6 But Dorothy had seen this for herself. And she made a vow that never again would any bonded pair be separated. As they had lived and labored—and suffered—together, they would also rest, eat, drink, and sleep forever, together, too.7
In the meantime, funds to keep the Old War Horse Fund running were rapidly running out.
The Brookes went home on leave in May 1931, frustratingly soon after the committee had begun its work. This was also a time when with the shortage of funds came evidence that there were many more ex–war horses in Egypt than Dr. Branch had originally estimated. He was Dorothy’s main source for war horses, but she began to have suspicions about his sources of information—he had claimed to know for certain that there were no more than two hundred old war horses in all of Egypt—when the numbers so clearly argued against him. Also, verifiable ex–war horses were being offered to the buying committee from sources outside Branch’s own, bumping the numbers far over the figures he had originally given.
Thus far the committee had purchased over three hundred war horses; along with these were many army mules. As we have seen, Dorothy was concerned about the horses and mules being worked in the limestone quarries in the Mokattam Hills. But she would not blame the men, at least not in theory. “The everlasting necessity,” she wrote of the quarries, “of almost superhuman effort on the part of man and beast render the men callous to all suffering.…So shocking is the condition of the horses that once they set foot inside these dreadful places, I am told on good authority, they are never seen outside again. The appallingly overloaded, great two-wheeled, badly-balanced carts used by the merchants, have to be dragged from the quarry head over deep sand and stones to where the road to Cairo runs. There these quite dreadful horses are unhitched and led back to fresh purgatory,” made the more hellish through the heat in the quarry canyons and the little or no water available to either the men or the animals. The thought of elderly or thirsty or underfed animals being worked to death under these conditions haunted Dorothy intensely. But to get them out of the quarries to the buying committee meant not just pressing Branch, with his connections to “all the blackguards in Egypt,” and recruiting the local police to her cause but also raising more money to pay for the animals, and now the fund was low on resources to help any. So the Brookes’ return to England for a vacation was hardly restful.8
Dorothy’s original fundraising appeal had done wonders to make the public aware of the plight of former war horses in Egypt. Now, only a month after her April 1931 letter to the Morning Post, Dorothy wrote another, which the Post duly published on May 19. She was mindful that not everyone could handle details, let alone photographs, of the sights she had to see on a daily basis—“I have always tried not to harrow the feelings of the public overmuch,” Dorothy insisted, having lived in an England that saw soldiers returned from the Great War rendered faceless by bullets or shells. Or, rather, an England that did not want to see them, so that some donned beautiful, lifeless masks, submitted to the excruciating and not always successful medical marvels of pioneering plastic surgeon Dr. Harold Gillies, or just bravely faced the averted or shocked stares (except, it should be noted, among child spectators, not yet invested with all the prejudices of maturity). Dorothy knew that this tendency to avoid intolerable truths was still a factor with which she would have to deal. And in this thank-you letter/renewed appeal to that public, she achieved a masterpiece of considerate understatement and stark outline of truth that would be the envy of any fund development manager today.9
Sir—It is difficult to find words with which to thank you for printing my letter on April 16 and the innumerable kind people who so readily and generously responded to our appeal for funds…
At the time of writing we have received £870–including a generous donation from Our Dumb Friends League—and I am happy to say, subscriptions are still coming in…
I wish all those kind-hearted persons who have given us their invaluable help could see the animals we buy, and feel the thankfulness we ours
elves experience at having it in our power to release them from their weary bondage and from so much suffering. Many are nearly thirty years of age: their sunken faces and shaking legs tell the story of their sorrows. Many have been beautiful horses in their day; even now their fine skins and carriage of their heads, as they shamble past, tell us plainly that no misfortune nor adversity can quite break their pride of race. It is a heart-rending sight.
Now that the administration of the Fund is on a firm footing, we cannot help entertaining a real fear that our present funds—thankful though we are to have them—will not carry us over half, nor a third, of the work before us. It is impossible to compute the exact number of old War Horses still alive in this country, but it can be estimated at many hundreds and, until we have the money, it will be impossible to call up more than a limited number of these poor animals in the country districts, where their sufferings are acute and where any form of inspection or supervision is out of the question.
At a rough estimate we shall need at least £3,000 to deal adequately with the work before us. Subscribers may rest assured that every penny given to this cause goes to the rescue of the horses, pays a fair price for each animal and for a few days’ forage and attention before he meets a painless end.10
Dorothy and Geoffrey spent four months in England, without any real rest from their Egyptian responsibilities. The piles of mail she had had to deal with in Heliopolis seemed to follow Dorothy inexorably. In fact they not only accompanied her to her own home but were carted along to the homes of friends and family to whom she and Geoffrey paid visits. Dorothy easily confessed she was “unmoved by their pained expressions when I appropriated their dining room tables,” which, like the table in her Heliopolis dining room, was the only surface capable of holding all the paperwork. (To help ease this burden, her sister Cicely Gibson-Craig generously stepped forward to handle all English correspondence for the Old War Horse Fund.) Perhaps their pained expressions changed when relatives and friends heard how much Dorothy’s second letter had raised—another £5,000, a large fortune at the time. Dorothy deposited the money in Lloyd’s Bank, Fleet, the manager of which had volunteered all his services for managing the fund.11
People touched by Dorothy’s account of the lost war horses of Cairo did more than just write checks. From Britain to the Dominions, animal lovers raised funds through a variety of events. There were whist parties, with all winnings going to the fund, and gymkhanas where English horses could play a role in helping their less fortunate relatives in Egypt. Florence, Lady Alexander, widow of famed actor Sir George Alexander and herself a former stage personality, organized a ball at the Dorchester in Mayfair, a luxury hotel in London that had just opened for business in 1931, to benefit the Old War Horse Fund. The RSPCA made a grant to the fund of £500, just the beginning of what would be widespread cooperation on the part of that organization with the work of the fund committee.12 A prominent member of the RSPCA, solicitor E. Meade-King, even went out to Egypt to see if he could buy any of the former war horses who were judged to be in healthy enough condition to survive the sea voyage. His was the first of several such efforts, which would culminate in the return of a few old war horses to England over the next several years, giving Dorothy’s supporters a very real sense of the good their support was doing for the animals they had helped rescue.13
The RSPCA chapter in Leamington, a spa town in Warwickshire, was particularly supportive of Dorothy’s work. Capt. J. A. Durham, a member of the chapter, and probably another member, Mrs. George Bryant of Ashorne Hill (her red brick manor house would become “the Bletchley Park of the steel industry” during World War II) were behind a long article in the Royal Leamington Spa Courier, published in November 1931. Besides its quotes from Dorothy’s committee report for that year, the article speaks in the more universal animal welfare language of the RSPCA.14 With the celebration of Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, wrote Captain Durham and Mrs. Bryant, “with all their sad and hallowed memories” of soldiers lost and battles won, was it not all the more appropriate to encourage commemoration of those other soldiers, “our ‘Long-Faced Chums,’ who gallantly and so uncomplainingly bore with us the heat and the burden of the day during the drab and dreary times of the War?” Such reminders would not be needed, they added, were it not for the fact that the horses, mules, and donkeys who had served alongside human soldiers were unable to speak for themselves—indeed, it was because of that voicelessness that they had been conscripted into war without being given a choice. Yet that silence should in no way downplay the contributions, and sacrifices, of animals brought into human conflict through no fault or choice of their own. Who, they asked, had not seen wounded horses standing patiently in a battlefield, the sky overhead exploding, ready to continue to serve though their injuries were mortal and their lives now measured in the moments it took to bring a pistol up to their heads? Who had not seen these animals struggling to pull guns through mud and filth, obedient in their selfless service to human warfare?15
The writers appealed to the newspaper’s readership to remember what horses had endured in the war. “Remember they suffered, suffered in the same manner we did, from wounds, from sickness, from dread diseases,” wrote Durham and Bryant. And after the war, who thought of what happened to these soldiers? Who remembered the thousands of them abandoned or sold in countries without animal cruelty laws or traditions of care like those in the Western nations from which these animals had come? “Surely the bounds of common decency and humanity were passed when for filthy lucre we parted with some 22,000 war horses to the natives of Egypt. Were honour, conscience, virtue, gratitude all exiled? Was there no relenting pity?”16
Another letter of this type was published in the Bucks Herald, written by Great War veteran Gen. Sir George de Symons Barrow. Barrow had commanded the Yeomanry Mounted Division in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and had been present for General Allenby’s entrance into Jerusalem in December 1917, a Pyrrhic victory described by one historian of the period as having been “achieved after three years of wasteful conflict by a short war of movement with relatively few casualties.”17 Relatively few human casualties, that is. Like Geoffrey Brooke in France, Barrow had had plenty of opportunities to witness the heroism and the tragedy of horses in the battles of the desert campaigns. What makes Barrow’s letter so important is that it was the first known publicly shared indictment since the founding of the Old War Horse Fund of the cruel method by which British and Allied forces had so casually disposed of the equines who had helped them beat the Central powers and win the war. “On the termination of hostilities in November, 1918, followed by the withdrawal of our troops from Palestine and Syria, several thousand horses and mules were left in the country. A large number of these were the chargers and troop horses of the Mounted Force which played such a great part in Lord Allenby’s decisive campaigns against the Turks.”18
Following the war’s end, General Barrow wrote, these animals being of no further use to the government, and there being no funds to organize transport back to where they had come from, the horses were sold to Egyptians. Though many of these horses had since died, many others, over a quarter century in age, were still living and were, in the general’s words, “miserably wretched.” To make this all the worse, as age overtook them and their strength, bred into them for other purposes than dragging overloaded garbage carts or gharries filled to capacity with tourists, their value decreased, and, too often, so did their owners’ interest in looking after a draft horse or mule that might die in a month’s time.
Barrow, an eyewitness, painted in no uncertain terms the physical and mental deterioration of the equines left in Egypt to be worked in the streets, fields, and quarries. “Some are blind, some suffer from advanced forms of ringbone, which makes each step an agony; and one recently purchased had been worked for some time with a broken leg and was blind in both eyes,” he reported. Most had never had enough to eat, and those in the worst physical shape were worked during the night, when t
heir owners were less apt to be arrested by the police. “Such is the sad fate of these faithful old servants who carried our soldiers gallantly on many a long and waterless march and in many a combat,” Barrow wrote. For these broken animals, death was sweet release, if it could only be given to them. And, it was made clear to readers, the way to help ease this suffering was to contribute to the Old War Horse Fund.19
Dorothy was grateful for the many voices that echoed everything she was trying to share with the world about the fate of Britain’s lost war horses. “So many people persist in giving me all the credit,” Dorothy noted in her diary, “that I want to make it abundantly clear that it would be absolutely impossible for me to achieve any fraction of success but for the unselfish, sustained and invaluable help rendered by a great number of other people, who never receive adequate recognition. I have been given many more pats on the back than I deserve.”20 Yet had she not undertaken the work, even with an obvious groundswell of public interest in the fate of the abandoned war horses and army mules, it is very possible that they would have been completely forgotten. This was never more clear than in a publication touting the official party line, the Illustrated London News, a standby of weekly news reporting in England that seemed content to edit the contributions of war horses out of the stirring narrative of the Great War.
In May 1935 the Illustrated published a deluxe edition celebrating the Silver Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary (at the death of his father, King Edward VII, on May 10, 1910, George, then Duke of York, had acceded to the throne). Pages of commissioned art and vintage photographs were devoted to memorializing and celebrating Britain’s role in the war. Yet aside from a brief, parenthetical, amused reference to animal assistance—“(horse, mule, donkey, camel, and even sleigh-dog),” as if describing a circus—the colored plates to which all readers would have turned, showing “Phases of the British Army’s Part in the Great War,” included none of these animals. They were not included even in the vignette titled “1917 Palestine,” where horses, mules, and camels had been at least as responsible for driving out the Turks as British soldiers were, a fact that men like Geoffrey Brooke and Sir George de Symons Barrow knew all too well.21