War Horses

British gun team, New York Tribune, c.1918

World War I was a modern industrial war, the first global war to use airplanes, tanks, and machine guns. And so it is easy to forget the vital role that horses played in the Great War.  An estimated sixteen million horses were used on all fronts, while eight million died in service.* Horses were vitally important to military transportation, carrying men, food, supplies, artillery, and heavy guns to the front lines.  Where motorized vehicles were unable to travel, horses found a way: over roads blasted with shell holes, across rivers and flooded streams, up steep embankments, through deep mud, and along stretches of ground where no roads existed. Horses made a major contribution to the Allied victory; due to the naval blockade, Germans were less able to replace their animals lost in action, and the German army “did not attempt to cure or destroy their wounded horses, which were often acquired by Allied troops.  Some historians even hypothesize that if the German equine force had been strengthened with professional veterinary services, they might have been able to defeat the British and French.”**

Illustration by Fortunino Matania for The Sphere

As Michael Morpurgo has vividly portrayed in his novel War Horse, horses suffered terribly in the First World War.  They were targeted by enemy machine guns and shell fire; they collapsed and drowned in mud and shell holes; thousands died of exposure; they were driven past the point of exhaustion and often went without adequate food and water—so hungry that they ate blankets and uniforms.***

Gilbert Frankau was a British officer in the Royal Field Artillery. His poem “Gun Teams” was published in his collection A Song of the Guns, written under what he described as “the most remarkable conditions… at the battle of Loos, and during a lull in the fighting” and completed after his artillery brigade was ordered to Ypres, “within sight of the ruined tower of Ypres Cathedral.”† As an artillery officer, Frankau worked closely with the horses he describes in his poem, the six-to-twelve horse teams required to pull heavy field artillery to the battlefront. 

Gun-Teams

WWI postcard by C.T. Howard

Their rugs are sodden, their heads are down, their tails are turned to the storm.
(Would you know them, you that groomed them in the sleek fat days of peace,—
When the tiles rang to their pawings in the lighted stalls, and warm, —
Now the foul clay cakes on breeching-strap and clogs the quick-release?)

The blown rain stings, there is never a star, the tracks are rivers of slime.
(You must harness up by guesswork with a failing torch for light,
Instep-deep in unmade standings; for it’s active-service time,
And our resting weeks are over, and we move the guns to-night.)

The iron tires slither, the traces sag; their blind hooves stumble and slide;
They are war-worn, they are weary, soaked with sweat and sopped with rain.
(You must hold them, you must help them, swing your lead and centre wide
Where the greasy granite pavé peters out to squelching drain.)

There is shrapnel bursting a mile in front on the road that the guns must take:
(You are nervous, you are thoughtful, you are shifting in your seat,
As you watch the ragged feathers flicker orange flame and break) —
But the teams are pulling steady down the battered village street.

You have shod them cold, and their coats are long, and their bellies gray with the mud;
They have done with gloss and polish, but the fighting heart’s unbroken.
We, who saw them hobbling after us down white roads flecked with blood,
Patient, wondering why we left them, till we lost them in the smoke;

Who have felt them shiver between our knees, when the shells rain black from the skies,
When the bursting terrors find us and the lines stampede as one;
Who have watched the pierced limbs quiver and the pain in stricken eyes;
Know the worth of humble servants, foolish-faithful to their gun!

            —Gilbert Frankau

Fortunino Matania

A memorial to First World War horses in Hampstead’s church of St. Jude-on-the-Hill is inscribed, “Most obediently and often most painfully they died—faithful unto death. Not one of them is forgotten before God.”††  Another poignant image of the bond between horses and the soldiers who served with them is the painting by Fortunino Matania, “Good-bye Old Man,” reproduced and used by charities to raise funds for animals serving in the war. The illustration is often associated with Henry Chappell’s poem “A Soldier’s Kiss,” which depicts a soldier’s farewell to his faithful companion:

Only a dying horse! He swiftly kneels,

Lifts the limp head and hears the shivering sigh

Kisses his friend while down his cheek there steals

Sweet Pity’s tear; “goodbye old man, goodbye."°

------------------------------------------------------------------------* Ernest Harold Baynes, Animal Heroes of the Great War, Macmillan Company, 1927, p. 22 and

Dion Dassanayake, “Never Forget: Incredible tribute to the 8 million hero horses killed in First World War,” Express, 28 Oct. 2015,  www.express.co.uk/news/history/615101/World-War-One-horses-killed-Remembrance-Day-November-11, Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.

** Elizabeth D. Schafer, “Veterinary Medicine,” The European Powers in the First World War: An Encyclopedia, edited by Spencer C. Tucker, Routledge, 2013, p. 723.

*** Elizabeth D. Schafer, “Animals, Use of,” The European Powers in the First World War: An Encyclopedia, edited by Spencer C. Tucker, Routledge, 2013, p. 53.

† Gilbert Frankau, author’s “Note,” A Song of the Guns, Houghton Mifflin, 1916, no page.

†† “The War Horse Memorial,” St. Jude-on-the-Hill, stjudeonthehill.com/the-war-horse-memorial/, Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.

° Henry Chappell, “The Soldier’s Kiss,” Our Dumb Animals, vol. 49, no. 5, Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, October 1916, p. 76. 

Only a cog

British munitions factory, Chilwell

It is easy to forget the sheer scale of the Great War. The numbers tell the tale: over 32 million artillery shells were fired during the battle of Verdun; over 3,000 artillery guns were used by the Allies during the Third Battle of Ypres; during the battle of High Wood on August 24, 1916, it is estimated that 10 British machine guns fired over 1 million rounds in 12 hours.  The human toll was also staggering: over 35 million were killed or wounded, and on average, 230 soldiers died each hour of every day during a conflict that lasted over four years.*

Men were dwarfed by the scale of a war such as the world had never seen before. Gilbert Frankau’s poem “Ammunition Column” considers one man’s place in a modern, industrial war.

Ammunition Column

I am only a cog in a giant machine, a link of an endless chain:
And the rounds are drawn, and the rounds are fired, and the empties return again;
Railroad, lorry, and limber; battery, column, and park;
To the shelf where the set fuse waits the breech, from the quay where the shells embark.
We have watered and fed, and eaten our beef; the long dull day drags by.
As I sit here watching our “Archibalds”** strafing an empty sky;
Puff and flash on the far-off blue round the speck one guesses the plane—
Smoke and spark of the gun-machine that is fed by the endless chain.

The Great Black Cloud (detail), by Kerr Eby 

I am only a cog in a giant machine, a little link of the chain,
Waiting a word from the wagon-lines that the guns are hungry again:—
Column-wagon to battery-wagon, and battery-wagon to gun;
To the loader kneeling 'twixt trail and wheel from the shops where the steam-lathes run.
There's a lone mule braying against the line where the mud cakes fetlock-deep'
There's a lone soul humming a hint of a song in the barn where the drivers sleep;
And I hear the pash of the orderly's horse as he canters him down the lane—
Another cog in the gun-machine, a link in the self-same chain.

I am only a cog in a giant machine, but a vital link of the chain;
And the Captain has sent from the wagon-line to fill his wagons again:—
From wagon-limber to gunpit dump; from loader's forearm at breech,
To the working-party that melts away when the shrapnel bullets screech.
So the restless section pulls out once more, in column of route from the right,
At the tail of a blood-red afternoon; so the flux of another night
Bears back the wagons we fill at dawn to the sleeping column again . . .
Cog on cog in the gun-machine, link on link in the chain!

In Frankau’s poem, the war has taken on a monstrous life of its own: the guns are insatiably hungry and must be fed. The poem’s regular meter sounds like a drumbeat, signaling the inevitability of the conflict’s relentless advance.

 

Men are reduced to machine parts as they work to satisfy the appetite of the war and its endless demand for ammunition. Everything and everyone appears small and subservient to the Great War.  The mule, the horse, the lone soul humming song: all are merely links and cogs in the chain of mechanized killing.  The grim irony is that in stoking the engines of war and prolonging its life, the men ensure that the killing will continue.  War feeds on human lives. 

Gilbert Frankau joined the British Army shortly after the war began in 1914 and was transferred to the Royal Field artillery in early 1915.  He fought at Loos, Ypres, and the Somme, but left the army “on account of ill-health contracted on active service” in February of 1918.†

Frankau is sometimes omitted from collections of war poetry for being “politically dubious.” WWI scholar Tim Kendall notes that the writer “hated the Germans with an intensity matched only by his master, Rudyard Kipling.”††  And yet Ferenc Békássy, a Hungarian soldier fighting for Germany’s ally, shared Frankau’s sense of the way in which the war was making all men into replaceable parts. In his poem “1914,” Békássy also protested “that he was not a unit, a pawn whose place can be filled.”  

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*Scott Addington, The Great War 100, The History Press, 2014.

**Anti-aircraft fire. This link explains that the term likely originated from a music hall song. 

†London Gazette, 19 February 1918. 

††Tim Kendall, “Gilbert Frankau” on the blog War Poetry.