By Stephen Frater
For thousands of years, horses defined military land power, mobility, logistics and tactics. Yet, decades before motorized vehicles, including tanks, appeared on the battlefield, it was clear to almost all, except it seems cavalry officers, that the era of combat horse brigades, and charges, was over. Accurate artillery and rapid-firing rifled small arms swept cavalry off the field at Balaclava during the ill-fated British “Charge of the Light Brigade” during the Crimean War against Russia in the mid-1850s. One hundred and thirteen men died in the charge that produced no decisive gains and resulted in unacceptably high cost, with a ratio of casualties to survivors of 1.5 to 1. Over 330 horses were killed. That charge, immortalized by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s epic poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” prompted French Marshal Pierre Bosquet to state “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre” (“It is magnificent, but it is not war)” and “C’est de la folie” (It is madness”). Russian commanders were reported to have initially believed that the British cavalrymen must have been drunk to attempt it.
War Horse, Steven Spielberg’s Golden Globe-nominated film, which opened today, is based on the novel of the same name by acclaimed British children’s writer Michael Morpurgo, and on the London and Broadway plays adapted for stage by Nick Stafford. The film follows the story of Joey, a thorough-bred colt born in Devon before the First World War. Joey is sold at auction to poor, alcoholic farmer, Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), whose son Albert (Jeremy Irvine) bonds with the colt and protects him from his father’s rage when it’s realized that Joey’s not the ideal plough-horse. Nevertheless, Joey, with Albert’s protection and love, rises to this, the first of many challenges, and succeeds in transforming rocky British soil into productive planting acreage. When WWI breaks out, however, Ted is forced to sell Joey to the Army, where cavalry units are still being organized and deployed. Albert tries to enlist–to stay with Joey–but as a fifteen year old, his age makes him ineligible. Joey goes to France as the personal mount of the kindly Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston) who gets killed in the war’s first cavalry charge. Joey survives and having crossed into German lines is taken “prisoner” by and put to use as an expendable beast of burden pulling cannon and wagons. At various times in the film, Joey is protected by other youngsters, including two ill-fated brothers who desert, with Joey in tow, from the army, and are captured and shot. A chronically-ill Dutch girl named Emilie (Celine Buckens) then cares for Joey until he is again seized by the Germans for ever-harder jobs pulling wagons full of wounded men and war material. Emilie dies off screen from her undefined illness. As the years pass, Joey somehow survives until 1918, when Albert finally enlists. After having been gassed near the end of the war, the temporarily blinded boy soldier and his horse Joey are finally reunited, in a happy-ever-after-John Williams-themed PG-13 ending that won’t leave the kids sobbing breathlessly in the mall parking lot.
The reality, as Spielberg notes in an interview given upon the film’s nomination for the Golden Globe award, is that during the war, about four million horses died from malnourishment, mistreatment, in combat, and for food.
Horse-mounted units were indeed used in World War I. On August 22, 1914, the first British shot of the war in France was fired by a cavalryman, Edward Thomas of the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, near Casteau, during a patrol in the buildup to the Battle of Mons. August 24, 1914, the cavalry regiment the 9th Lancers,engaged German troops with a squadron of 4th Dragoon Guards. The senseless charge cost the British 250 men and 300 horses, numbers eerily reminiscent of the Crimean War death count. Finally, after great losses, cavalry was found to be ineffective in modern war and cavalry troops quickly became accustomed to fighting dismounted. The last British fatality from enemy action, before the 11:00 AM, November 11, 1918, armistice was also a cavalryman, George Edwin Ellison, from the Royal Irish Lancers. He was shot by a sniper near Mons that day.
The military’s attachment to cavalry ran deep. George S. Patton, one of the fathers and masters of American mechanised warfare, was a 1912 Olympic equestrian champion and as late as the 1930s, the U.S. Army was still training horse-mounted units, including the 7th Cavalry, at Fort Bliss, Texas, less than 70 years after George Armstrong Custer commanded the unit at the Little Big Horn. Jack Rencher, a central character in the upcoming book Hell Above Earth, underwent cavalry training with the 7th as late as 1939.
For a look at horse cavalry training in pre- WWI England: Check this for reference Courtesy British National War Museum(open source)
STEPHEN FRATER is a former New York Times Regional Media Group staff writer and columnist, author of Hell Above Earth: The Incredible True Story of an American WWII Bomber Commander and the Copilot Ordered to Kill Him, and Writer in Residence at the University of Rhode Island. For more information about Stephen Frater and his work, visit his web site, www.stephenfrater.com.
