Dorothy should have known better.
Just when the Brookes’ villa in Heliopolis was full of luncheon guests—invited to celebrate the Cavalry Brigade Horse Show—Dorothy’s world, and the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital, almost fell to pieces.
She had been on her feet for hours already. “I had spent all morning on the show ground,” Dorothy recalled, “and later several hundred residents in Cairo were to be the guests of ‘The Brigade’ when I had to be on duty with Geoffrey for many hours, ending the day by presenting prizes.”16
Compared to everything else she had done that day, the luncheon was a time when she could relax, allow her staff to take care of the guests, talk quietly to one or two friends, and not be on stage at all. It was during this lull that an old friend approached her and asked if he might have a word. Lt. Gen. Sir John Burnett-Stuart was a formidable officer, awarded the Distinguished Service Order during the Boer War and lauded for his service in the Great War.17 Burnett-Stuart, whom Dorothy knew as Jock, asked her if she had heard from Sir Percy Loraine, British High Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan. She said she had not. Jock informed her that Sir Percy had given him the duty of informing her that he wished her to stop buying horses. According to Sir Percy, someone—it was not difficult to guess who—had complained to the High Commissioner’s office about her work and requested official intervention to stop it. Sir Percy knew Jock to be a friend to Dorothy and Geoffrey and had asked him to break the news.
“The bombshell left me in such a bewildered state of agitation that I hardly knew what I was doing all the rest of the day,” Dorothy wrote later. For the moment she had the presence of mind to tell Jock that the High Commissioner would need to communicate directly with General Spinks and the fund committee, not to her, as she could not make unilateral decisions, and they needed to discuss this incredible news at length. Jock, clearly unhappy to be the message bearer, asked her if “you want me to tell Loraine to go to hell.” Dorothy may have been tempted, but instead she thanked Jock and tried to get through the rest of the luncheon, her head spinning.18
It was no surprise to discover that the petitioner to the High Commissioner was none other than Dr. Alfred E. Branch. He had written to Sir Percy “on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture and the SPCA and the people of Egypt generally” to lodge complaint against Dorothy and the war horse–buying campaign. He accused the fund committee of seeking out and purchasing so many former army horses and mules that their owners, poor men, were suffering the consequences of having no animals to do their work—a charge that, given that owners were compensated sufficiently to purchase another animal, shows the speciousness of Branch’s argument. He left no stone unthrown or unturned, including his opinion that just transporting these animals to Cairo from the four corners of Egypt was inflicting more cruelty on them than they were already enduring, compelling proof that Dorothy and her committee were tone deaf to the realities of the poor in Egypt as to the suffering of the animals they allegedly aimed to help. The irony of all this was that long before this letter’s arrival, Dorothy and Sir Percy Loraine had had occasion to speak of her work, in social settings that didn’t permit further explanation or exploration of Dorothy’s work in Sayyida Zeinab. Having only a surface acquaintance with what Dorothy was doing, the High Commissioner could not be blamed for believing what Branch had to say in apparently damning detail.19
After a meeting of her committee Dorothy was chosen by the other members to write a letter to Sir Percy explaining what the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital was, how it had started, and how it worked—how the poor, far from being unconsidered, were compensated for the time their animals were hospitalized, how they were offered free veterinary care, and how they were paid above fair market prices for animals that could no longer work so the owner could purchase another animal with minimum interruption to his livelihood. She also pointed out that the hospital now took in all equines, not just those abandoned after the war. If Dr. Branch was correct, Dorothy wrote, and her work to rescue these aged horses and mules was undermining the Egyptian economy, how logical was it that the government should be depending at all on the labor of such elderly equines, most living their last few years or months, for heavy transport and haulage? How appropriate was it for the High Commissioner to play a role in ending work that had earned huge amounts of publicity, not only in Egypt and in Britain but farther afield, for helping those elderly equines? Was Sir Percy prepared to break the news to the War Office, which was an annual donor to the Old War Horse Fund, or to Their Majesties King George and Queen Mary, who had sent both funds and notes of support?20
There is much in this crisis that suggests interference from a few people at higher levels of the Egyptian government and to a certain gullibility on the part of Sir Percy Loraine. Appointed High Commissioner in 1929, after a career in diplomacy across Europe and the Middle East, Loraine had followed on the heels of Lord Lloyd, a conservative bastion of empire for whom any relinquishing of British imperial territory called forth groans about the last days of Rome. Loraine was more subtle and moderate. He was, however, perhaps too genial for his own good. Egypt’s ruler, Fouad I, had raised himself from sultan to king in 1922, and with his waxed moustache and royal regalia gave a physical impression that lay somewhere between Kaiser Wilhelm II and a Gilbert and Sullivan stage despot. But King Fouad was not a king or a man to be pushed around, particularly by Britain, that thorn in Egypt’s side. A year after crowning himself, Fouad gave himself sweeping discretionary powers. He considered his courtiers puppets and likely enjoyed being able to pull the strings of his High Commissioner, Sir Percy Loraine.21
King Fouad may have already pulled Dr. Branch’s strings also over the matter of the abandoned war horses. We have seen that Branch did an about-face on Dorothy and the buying committee by suddenly registering his disapproval and just as suddenly pulling out as a key member of the charity; yet we have also seen that he was in no way a man lacking in compassion toward abused animals—he was, indeed, a man who loved animals. So there is something indefinably but indubitably redolent of political activity around what happened in 1933, when Branch distanced himself from the Old War Horse Fund and went at length to denigrate its work to the highest levels of British diplomacy in Egypt. With this in mind, it is certainly possible there was pressure from Fouad or his courtiers, alarmed by the widespread publicity the hospital and its work were receiving. Many articles and letters in the British press addressing the abandonment of army equines in Egypt made a point of blaming the British government for not ensuring that they could all return home, but many others made statements such as, “There is no Arabic equivalent for the word ‘cruel,’” submitted to the Northern Daily Mail in July 1933, “which, since our term conveys nothing to them, may account for the callous treatment old war horses in Egypt receive at the hands of their native owners.”22 In fact, there is a word for “cruel” in Arabic: qaswa, one that even appears in the Quran, just as the concept of cruelty was no less known among Egyptians than among the English, despite the ironically cruel Western belief that the Egyptian lower classes were insensitive to pain. For example, American clergyman Francis E. Clark, on a round-the-world journey in the 1890s, paused in Cairo to take in the sights and to make pronouncements such as this: “A traveler and resident for ten years in Egypt says that the sense of pain is very small among the lower classes, that their olfactory nerves are also extremely dull, that they cannot distinguish one person from another by his footsteps, and not easily by his voice, and that they never hear a slight or distant sound, or notice a whisper.” These sensory handicaps were attributed by Reverend Clark to “centuries of oppression under hard task masters, and the subserviency to a false and degrading religion.”23
Driven to despair by the cases of neglect she had to witness, and try to correct, if only with euthanasia, every day at the hospital, even Dorothy could confide to her diary on one occasion her impression of “this people’s apparent insensibility to animal pain.” Pain may not
speak in riddles, but it rarely speaks rationally, and this was the voice of Dorothy’s own pain, just as prejudices about Egyptian insensitivity were based as much on the trauma of culture clashes as on the dehumanization colonialism foisted onto the colonized.24
In the end what looked like a death blow to the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital was anything but. Sir Percy Loraine received Dorothy’s letter and report, read them, and then asked to meet with the Brookes the following day. After they had dined, Dorothy brought out for Sir Percy to see one of the picture albums she so seldom shared with anybody, mindful of most people’s inability to look misery in the eye. Sir Percy leaned over the photographs assembled by Major Heveningham. He saw horses and mules with galled backs, deformed hooves and broken limbs, saw eyes blinded, eyes bright with pain or dulled to everything around them. He saw horses whose backbones stood up like ridges in the hot sun, with washboard ribs and jutting hipbones, septic sores gouging ragged hides. And he saw horses for whom there was more life to live, who were clearly flourishing under the course of treatment, the rest and care, being given them at 2 Bairam al-Tunsi Street. Closing the album cover, and obviously shaken by what he had seen, Sir Percy promised Dorothy he would lend his support. That he meant this was borne out by a letter that arrived shortly after the visit. The letter came from the office of the Egyptian prime minister, Isma’il Sidqi, and it left no question as to the government’s approval and enthusiasm for what the hospital was doing. “My grandmother was politically very astute,” recalls Richard Searight.25
It helped enormously to know that there was now understanding and acknowledgment of the hospital’s work at the top of British bureaucracy in Egypt. Yet questions and misconceptions about what Dorothy was doing lingered, often among foreigners resident in the country. “Over and over again,” Dorothy wrote, “I was seriously informed that, although many English residents of Cairo fully appreciated the excellence of my intentions and the self-sacrificing kindness of the members of the Buying Committee, it was common knowledge that at least sixty per cent of the horses purchased were faked Arabs, brought before us for sale as genuine old war horses by wily Egyptians, who were, of course, only too ready to take advantage of our gullibility!” This showed a complete misunderstanding of Dorothy’s work and likely had a colonialist basis: to these people, “the natives” were constantly on the make, doing everything they could to swindle unsuspecting expats. After a while Dorothy stopped bothering to try to educate such people, who were in any case not part of the funding base for the hospital. For, best of all, she was reaching native Egyptians and, through the hospital’s work, reaching the animals that needed help, while educating their owners in how to care for them. As for the visitors who came in increasing numbers to the hospital, she had a visual reminder of why what she was doing was so needed. Glenda Spooner writes that Dorothy had found a magazine illustration “of a cavalry charge in Palestine depicting the horses in all their youthful well-fed glory.” She framed and hung this image in an area of the stables where those who saw it—including herself—could have the sad benefit of comparing it “with the pathetic remnant of the gallant army, standing in rows, starved, broken in spirit and in heart.” It seemed the best way to make it clear to visitors that these heroes had also served, and because they had served, they deserved the best life possible at the end.26
One particular pony, and his unstoppable courage, seemed to sum up all the reasons why everything the hospital and Dorothy were doing in Cairo was worthwhile. She called him Dauntless. He was another of the old polo ponies discarded by some foreign owner, passed down the line of ownership and labor as his physical infirmities reduced his value, until he was being whipped through the streets, pulling a cart for a callous human himself degraded and devalued by poverty, sickness, and age. Of these discarded animals, Col. J. K. Stanford would write, “there is no sadder sight than somebody’s old polo pony or half-starved racehorse, with little thoroughbred ears still cocked, putting all his or her gallant heart into the task of shifting a cartload of sand which might have daunted a Percheron.”27
Dauntless was one of these gallant hearts, but his body had not been equal to the work to which it had been put. He was not simply bony; he had open sores on his withers, the area of a horse’s shoulders at the base of its neck. The wounds resulted from a poorly fitted harness or a yoke attached to an unrelieved heavy load and were never cared for. Nobody had treated the sores, which were now seriously infected. But Dauntless still had spirit—it was what attracted Dorothy to him. When he was first brought into the hospital stable, he gaped in astonishment, as if he never thought he would see anything like this again. He was as happy to be in a box as a child with its toys, and he loved peeking over the half-door to see what was happening in the rest of the building, fascinated by the ongoing flow of life around him—a sign that whatever his present misery, Dauntless had at least when young been surrounded by happiness.
“He was the greediest horse for sugar that I have ever met,” Dorothy remembered. The pony quickly learned to recognize Dorothy’s voice and came to expect the kindnesses she lavished on him specially. “It must have been a pleasant change for the old boy to find his command instantly attended to,” she wrote. As soon as he heard Dorothy coming, Dauntless would neigh and stamp. “He had me completely at his mercy,” she recalled, “because his delight was so terribly pathetic. There was nothing one wouldn’t try to do to give him happiness.”28
She soon realized why he was so hungry for sugar—he had the charmed curse of a long memory. This old pony, his body in tatters, had once been the spoiled plaything of some polo player, born and bred in England and coddled in Egypt until, like the elderly dogs or cats still today dropped off for euthanasia at animal shelters on Christmas Eve as nuisances to family celebrations, the pony was sold, and sold again, worked out of all proportion to his age and condition, his physical ailments as neglected as his emotional ones. And now here he was, his life measured in a matter of days or even hours. Yet still he remembered something of the charmed atmosphere in which he had grown up. “This old pony had evidently, in happier times, been taught to hold up one fore-foot for a special treat,” Dorothy wrote. “I can so well recall the expression of anxiety the first time he tried it on me. So many people must have ignored this gesture learnt when young, and which he originally must have regarded as infallible.…It nearly broke my heart to think how often he must have lifted that tired old foot to unheeding masters before he realised that it produced no results at all.”29
Dorothy and George Gibson watched Dauntless’s antics, charming and intensely poignant in a little pony with so many physical infirmities, with such an unhappy past. They observed his cunning escapes, as if he were still a saucy infant, from the stable to where the fresh piles of clover were kept, the billows of which he would swallow whole until led away; how he playfully strained to roll on his back in the sand of the paddock and had to be stopped from doing it, though the others were there doing it, too, because his sore-ridden withers were bandaged, and any healing that had occurred would be undone by the rolling.
Soon came the fly season, and Dauntless had to be placed in a meshed box, where his sores would be safe from maggots. He could only be let out into the paddock briefly and never unsupervised, and he couldn’t see the other animals, which were as much a joy to him as Dorothy and her soft voice. Gradually Dauntless grew depressed, and with his physical condition not improving, Dorothy had to give an order that she had given thousands of times, but that in this one case desperately tore her heart in two. When the Quran adjures devout Muslims, “Do not take life, which Allah made sacred, other than in the course of justice,” it refers to human life, but it could just as well have served to describe the decision Dorothy had to make for Dauntless. It was selfish to let him suffer because she loved him, justice to him to let him go.30
Dorothy wrote, “One could hardly bear to part with him. He was so brave, so full of zest for life.” Some people thought all horses were the
same, Dorothy added, “whereas in fact they are as intensely individual as humans.”31
The only difference, when compared to most human beings in similar painful and deprived circumstances, was that the Dauntlesses of this world never complained.
8. World War
And this is how…
What dies, dies
What passes, passes
What is lost, is lost…under the layers of dust!
And you ask me…And I shall not answer.
—DR. MOHAMMED ABD-ELHAY1
As Geoffrey and Dorothy Brooke arrived in Rawalpindi, Punjab (now in Pakistan), in 1935, when General Brooke was assigned as inspector general of cavalry in India, they arrived at a time when the jewel in Britain’s crown was considerably less lustrous than it had been. “The English have not taken India,” said Mohandas Gandhi, “we have given it to them.”2
India was about to take itself back, but in 1935 Rawalpindi was still a British cantonment, or military garrison, located on the North-West Railway and the grand trunk road along the Leh River. When the Brookes stepped off their train at Rawalpindi Station, they would have seen a city of mostly low-storied structures, the sky occasionally pierced by minarets or church towers; there were crowded bazaars and broad streets lined with trees, and a statue of Queen Victoria, smiling benignly over all.
The Lost War Horses of Cairo Page 14
