War Horses – the Engines of Battle
The Wars to End All Wars
1914: Thousands of horses are conscripted from farms and familiesas “the war to end all wars,” as it’s dubbed gets under way. Two children write to British Commander Lord Kitchener:
We are writing for our pony, which we are very afraid may be taken for your army. Please spare her. Daddy says she is going to be a mother early next year and is 17 years old. It would break our hearts to let her go. We have given two others and three of our family are now fighting for you in the Navy. Mother and all will do anything for you but do please let us keep old Betty and send official word quickly before anyone comes.
Your troubled little Britishers, P., L. and Freda Hewlett.
(Kitchener replies with a letter exempting old Betty from service.)
1918: Of the 256,000 horses who have died in Europe on the Western front, only 58,000 are actually killed by enemy fire. The rest have died in the mud, the cold, caught in barbed wire, limbs broken from stumbling into trenches and shell craters, or poisoned by gas.
Across the Mediterranean, on the other hand, thousands more have died of heat and thirst in the deserts of Africa and the Middle East.
By the end of the war, 484,000 of the million horses and mules taken to war by the British alone are dead.
Due to their lack of veterinary support, it’s estimated that the Germans lost about two million horses, four times as many as the British.
In France alone, during the four years of war, 2,563,549 horses and mules were taken in to veterinary hospitals.
1930: Dorothy Brooke, wife of a British general, pays a visit to Cairo, Egypt. She sees thousands of emaciated horses being used as beasts of burden for poor people trying to ply their trade. These are the same horses who had been shipped from the U.K. 15 years earlier to “serve their country” and were simply abandoned after the war when the troops went home.
Dorothy stays in Egypt to tend the horses and learns that a memorial statue to the horses of the war is being planned in London. She writes a letter to the Morning Post (today’s Daily Telegraph):
Sir: There have been several references lately in the columns of The Morning Post as to the possibility of raising a memorial to horses killed in the War. May I make a suggestion?
Out here, in Egypt, there are still many hundreds of old Army Horses …They are all over twenty years of age by now, and … the majority of them drag out wretched days of toil in the ownership of masters too poor to feed them – too inured to hardship themselves to appreciate, in the faintest degree, the sufferings of animals in their hands.
These old horses were, many of them, born and bred in the green fields of England – how many years since they have seen a field, heard a stream of water, or a kind word in English?
Many are blind – all are skeletons.
If those who truly love horses – who realize what it can mean to be very old, very hungry and thirsty, and very tired, in a country where hard, ceaseless work has to be done in great heat – will send contributions to help in giving a merciful end to our poor old war heroes, we shall be extremely grateful; and we venture to think that, in many ways, this may be as fitting (though unspectacular) part of a War Memorial as any other that could be devised.
Dorothy E. Brooke.
Donations flow in, and within three years, Dorothy is able to buy 5,000 of these ex-war horses. Many are old and sick beyond being able to be healed, and are mercifully put down. But by now Dorothy has enough support to open the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital in Cairo. Her goal is to provide free veterinary care for all the city’s working horses and donkeys.
Today, the Brooke Hospital for Animals works across Egypt, India, Pakistan, Jordan, Palestinian villages in Israel and the West Bank, Afghanistan, Kenya, Ethiopia, Guatemala and Nepal, reaching over 700,000 donkeys, horses and mules.
An unsuccessful Polish cavalry attack at the start of World War II
1939: World War II. In a land where frost and snow could quickly bring tanks and trucks to a halt, Russia deployed 1,200,000 horses to the battlefields. Few of them survived. In the first ten minutes of one engagement, as the Germans advanced into Russia, 2,000 Russian horses were left dead and dying in the bloodstained snow, along with their riders, from machine gun fire. No Germans were hurt.
Today: For 4,000 years, horses were considered the supreme war animal. Today, they are used less. But they still have a place in battle. In Afghanistan, US-backed rebels still gallop against the Taliban, sometimes joined on steeds by American soldiers half a century after the United States officially dissolved its last mounted fighting unit.