Black Beauty's Family

by Josephine Pullein-Thompson

  After a drink of chilled water, we were quickly led down another ramp into the very bowels of a cross-channel steamer. Here we stood tied in the dark with aching legs and dizzy heads listening to the sound of feet on deck, the shouts of men and the strange honking of ships’ hooters.

  ‘I trust we won’t be here many days,’ said Floss, jerking at her rope.

  ‘Sometimes these journeys last for weeks. I’ve been in the artillery long enough to have heard many a tale, I can tell you,’ said Pioneer tossing his handsome liver chestnut head, ‘but I’m tough. It’s the quality horses like Princess who take the rough life so badly.’

  My nerves were already on edge. When at last the ship started to shake and vibrate, I felt my heart pounding with fear, and sweat broke out on my flanks. But it wasn’t very long before we were off the steamer and on another train rattling through the flat French countryside. There were many stops and delays; darkness came and went. Through the slats in our truck we saw dawn breaking over red rooftops, tall foreign trees, sleeping shuttered houses. At each stop Augustine and his two gunners came to visit us. At one station he spent a long time arguing with Frenchmen in peaked high-crowned hats.

  ‘Fourrage’ and ‘Foin’ he kept saying. Later on in the war I learned that these words meant fodder and hay, and I knew then that he had been doing his best to find us something to eat. At that station he was unsuccessful, but at the next stop he brought us hay which, foreign though it was, tasted very good to our empty bellies.

  After many hours, as the shadows lengthened over the long white roads, we drew into a station crowded with soldiers. Our truck was disconnected from the train and shunted into a siding, and presently we disembarked, led by Augustine and the two gunner privates.

  Evening was again in the air, keen now with the promise of frost; the foreign sky blank and white. The men made a shelter for us out of hop poles and sacking, and we learned that we were to join a battery on the following day. Far off we could hear the rumble of guns like distant thunder, while overhead a monoplane buzzed like some lonely hornet lost on the wide horizon.

  9

  ALL HELL LET LOOSE

  THE WAR WAS long and terrible. Names of places and battles live like little fires of hell in my memory, and sometimes, when the wind is low, I seem to hear again the songs of the soldiers: There’s A Ship That’s Bound for Blighty, Tipperary, and It’s a Long, Long Trail Awinding, tunes sung occasionally to different words than the composers intended.

  My friends, Pioneer, Joey, Floss and Sampson, were all wiped out somewhere on the Somme, pulling a gun through mud deeper than any we had seen in our lives before. I can recall it all now so clearly: the great flash followed by a boom like thunder; the earth caving in, the struggling horses. For me it was the first disaster, a taste of the future. They had been only ten days at the Front. Soon the rest of us retreated, the shells following us, pitting the ground with craters, our ears battered by the noise, our flesh flapping with fear. Farther back were the kite balloons, from which men of the Observer Corps watched the enemy through binoculars. Now and then a mono- or bi-plane buzzed overhead in the grey, French sky. For a horse it was all strange and frightening. It was as though the whole human race had gone mad.

  We usually went into action before a battle, moving up the big guns with which to batter the Germans so that the infantry could advance while the enemy was still suffering from our fire. It was Augustine’s job to see the guns reached their positions, directed their fire in the right direction and were replaced, if possible, when put out of action. We were normally moved farther back once the bombardment had started. The men covered their ears immediately, after firing a shell, but, of course, we could do no more than lay ours back, and sometimes we felt as though they would be blown out by the noise and vibration.

  These battles were very frightening, but, worst of all was the steady, unending misery of cold and mud, the lack of proper shelter and shortage of food when things went wrong. Sometimes we stood out night after night in dreadful horse lines, our rugs saturated with sleet and rain, freezing against our backs, our bellies often empty and aching. Most of my friends, the artillery horses, were hardy and tough, former dray horses or vanners, but the better bred horses, the officers’ chargers, suffered terribly, for they had spent all their lives cossetted by grooms in warm stables or taking their yearly holidays in summer fields. Many died in the horse lines of pneumonia, for which the army vets had no cure, and, later a terrible horse influenza took its toll. It was a time of great sadness and bewilderment and I think some of us who survived would not have minded dying just to escape from the misery of it all.

  Twice I was tied next to captured German horses, stout hearted strong fellows with hoofs like saucers. They were used to pull our guns and worked as well as any British gunners’ horses. From them I learned that the Germans thought the human’s God was on their side, that Sunday after Sunday they held church services kneeling sometimes under bare and angry skies, as the British knelt, to ask the same God for help and succour. It seemed strange that people believing in one God could fight to destroy each other. It was very confusing, for both countries seemed to have many good and noble men. I was told that early in the War that, one Christmas, German and British soldiers had crossed the strip of earth between them, known as No Man’s Land, to make friends and drink each other’s health, but the generals had put an end to that and had ordered them to continue fighting.

  One day, after a lull, my master was one of three men ordered to reconnoitre to see whether several big guns could be moved farther forward to bombard the enemy before an attack.

  ‘Just to have a little look-see,’ someone said. ‘But keep your eyes skinned for rookies.’

  The sky was overcast. The evening air for once empty of the rumble of guns, so that we could hear the birds singing and farther down the valley, the trickle of water. A.A. was silent too, but I knew by the way he gripped the reins that he was tense. No one quite knew where the enemy was . . . Every so often our riders brought us to a halt so that they could scan the landscape through their binoculars or consult a map or compass.

  We came into a wood, not yet flattened by guns, a place of peace with sand-white anemones like little spots of snow against the bright russet of last year’s bracken. I stopped for a moment to paw the ground for I longed to lie down and roll, being like many soldiers from the trenches, itchy with lice. But Augustine urged me on.

  ‘Good old Emily,’ he whispered. ‘What would I do if you weren’t with me? What will we all do when this is over, if we come through? Come on, no time to stop.’

  He straightened up. At the same moment the fire from a shell flashed across the sky like a white sword of flame. The boom of the gun followed together with the weird shriek with which we were now familiar. And then suddenly it was as though all hell had been let loose. A pit was in front of our hoofs, trees were falling like match-sticks and, sharper than everything else, was ‘a-rat-a-tat-tat’.

  ‘Machine gun post!’ shouted Augustine. ‘Back, back.’ The enemy had moved up into the spot we were to reconnoitre. I saw a steel helmet. Someone was crawling through the woods on hands and knees. Augustine fired his revolver, and the man rolled back, but the ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ came from behind gorse bushes farther up, and was more than a match for us. Darkness was coming down like a curtain, but too slowly to protect us. ‘Rat-a-tat-tat-rat-a-tat-tat’. Now, like grey ghosts, in the half-light more Germans advanced. Augustine swung me round. ‘Come on, Emily!’ I needed no second bidding, for my own heart was pounding with fear.

  We started to gallop back down a narrow path that wound crazily through the trees. Another machine seemed to start up and suddenly Augustine said, ‘I’m hit. Go on, Boys, don’t wait!’

  His hands were limp on the reins. His legs no longer guided me. His body slumped. I should have stopped, but the firing terrified me. There seemed to be bullets everywhere. His voice was very matter of fact, as though he had always expected this mom
ent, had even lived through it in his imagination many times. The other horses, Piper and Blossom, were ahead of me, their hoofs throwing up mud, but I slowed my pace. Augustine’s body slid from the saddle and came to rest in fern, tipped with the greenness of spring. His face was the colour of gruel, his khaki uniform already wet with blood.

  Piper’s rider, a young man from Cornwall, turned back a moment.

  ‘Done for,’ he said. ‘Poor devil!’

  For a moment I was alone standing under a sky rent with the sounds of battle. Then I turned too, and followed the other horses.

  I came out of the wood. Below me lay the poor battered valley shrouded in mist; above me the guns rattled. Piper and Blossom had gone. Barkless trees shone through the gathering darkness like white milestones. The firing stopped. I sniffed the air, heavy now with the bitter odour of cordite. A green Very light rose in the sky, pretty as a plaything.

  I trotted down a path, saw at last the light of camp fires and came back to the horse lines. My saddle empty.

  10

  A NEW MASTER

  SOMEONE MUST HAVE blundered, for after Augustine’s death things seemed to go from bad to worse.

  There was a long and dreadful retreat with the enemy harassing us all the way. Some horses were left behind, their drivers dead. Others were without food.

  Desperately hungry, I was ridden for miles by Augustine’s friend, another gunner officer, David Bellamy, a nice enough young man but often silent and moody. The days were long and raw, the nights bitterly cold, moonless and dark. The men were dispirited, although at times they joked and occasionally raised a song. We had abandoned many guns, but, after two days, we met new supplies coming up, which included two tractors which were to take the place of horses.

  At last there was a halt. We came to new billets. A line of motor ambulances were on their way to pick up the wounded, and the men gave a cheer and wave because two girls were sitting beside the drivers of the first pair.

  David Bellamy urged me on. He was cold and tired and wanted a meal, but something made me hesitate. The girl who leaned out to wave back was the Lady Angela, her red hair peeping out from under the nurse’s cap.

  ‘Your horse is just like one I had at home. We called her Black Princess.’

  David Bellamy stopped, smiled, took off his army cap.

  ‘This one is Emily, until recently Augustine Appleyard’s charger.’

  ‘She’s the image of my Princess, but thin, poor thing. Here, come on, there’s a good girl.’

  I turned to nuzzle the Lady Angela.

  ‘Her eyes are different. She’s thinner. Princess! Is it you Princess? If only horses could speak.’

  ‘Then their riders would learn a thing or two,’ said David with a quick laugh.

  But now the ambulance was moving on. ‘Goodbye, good luck, Princess Emily!’ It was the last I saw of Lady Angela.

  We rested in barns until the May sun had dried the mud and flowers bloomed again in cottage gardens, and then we went back to the Front again, where we met a new horror, mustard gas. Now the men often donned gas masks, which made them look like pigs and frightened the new horses which came over from England from time to time. Those who did not, often lost their power of speech, died or were sent home incurably ill. Sometimes the smell of gas seemed to hang in the air for days on end, making us all feel very depressed.

  There were many attacks and counter attacks, crazy attempts to gain a few yards of No Man’s Land, a derelict place pitted with shell holes treacherous with mud and eerie with death.

  One day the great General Haig visited us on his spirited grey charger, looking very healthy and clean. The soldiers were polite in his presence, but afterward very bitter. They invented coarse rhymes about the General and asked one another what he knew about the realities of war. It was all very well to ride about on a fine charger, but wasn’t it time some of the leaders spent a time in the trenches or battled their way across the mud and barbed wire of No Man’s Land.

  So the war went on and on until we thought it would only end for us in death. Another winter came. Our heels cracked open in the horse lines and a young private lost his footing on the duck boards and drowned in the mud while attempting to feed us.

  In early summer we took more guns forward for another bombardment. People began to talk of the ‘Big Push’. Monstrous machines, called tanks, ground their way mercilessly across the countryside. Hopes began to rise in the British ranks; the gunners started to sing again as they groomed us and, with fairer weather and southern winds, the mud began to dry again. New fresh-faced boys straight from school came to replace the hundreds lost in battle.

  Soon we noticed more German prisoners of war coming in, sad, broken men putty-faced and hollow eyed. I learned that, after bombardment, many enemy soldiers had given themselves up and our advancing infantrymen had found trenches deserted.

  Soon my brave friends pulled the gun carriages across No Man’s Land, dragged them up to the crest of a hill from which our artillery shelled the retreating Germans in the valley.

  It was, although we did not know it then, the beginning of the end. The cavalry began to move up at last for action. I caught a glimpse of Symphony, a mare I had known at the Remount Depot, looking blythe, untouched by the deeper horrors of war. They charged in the old fashioned style, while we, the gunners’ horses, so much more experienced in the ways of battle, rested our weary legs farther back, while the guns we had moved rumbled and thundered.

  Autumn came and peace at last. All France seemed to be loud with the cheers of women, old men and girls. Garlands of flowers were lovingly hung round the necks of smiling British soldiers. We saw for the first time American troops who had come over to help towards the end, Indian troops in white turbans, and soldiers from Africa, and the West Indies. We saw dogs and doves, who unknown to us, had carried messages when field telephone lines were cut.

  Our side had won the war, but what did this mean to us? We longed for home, for green English meadows, high thorn hedges, the special smell of our native land.

  Some officers bought their chargers from the army and took them back to England, but David, who wanted to be a great actor, had no need for a horse, and no special affection for me.

  The French people were tired and often hungry. Would they eat us like bullocks? They had, we were told, a fondness for horseflesh. Billeted in warm barns we waited patiently, while men far away decided our fate.

  11

  EXILE

  MOST OF THE cavalry horses now returned with their regiments, but many of the artillery horses were aged and of little further use to a branch of the army which was being rapidly mechanised.

  So on a windy day in March I found myself again at a sale, standing next to a fine gun carriage horse called Big Ben, who had suffered shell shock but was otherwise sound. The French peasants, farmers and cabbies looked at us much as their English counterparts would have done, inspecting our teeth, running their hands down our legs, picking up our hoofs, pulling down the lower lids of our eyes and lifting our tails. Most of them seemed to be more interested in the horses that had pulled the guns than in me. The cabbies were gradually changing over to motors. There was not much call for carriage or riding horses in those hard days following the war when many people were struggling for survival. Finally, I was sold for less than Big Ben, in spite of my breeding, to a man who could barely read or write.

  Monsieur Bernard Forel was a peasant who had been lucky enough to inherit a few acres of land from an uncle. The smell of garlic, alcohol and sweat seemed always about his spare, stunted frame. There was rarely a smile in his brown, leathery face which was pierced by two eyes, small and sharp as ferrets’, and crowned by a balding head with two sad tufts of grey hair on either side like little bushes guarding a bare track. He had good reason to be sad because both his sons had been killed in the war.

  Madame Forel was a small, wiry person with a face smooth and brown as a walking-stick handle which has seen much use. She alwa
ys wore black, although sometimes this colour was slightly relieved by an apron of coarse sacking-like material. Her greying hair was severely pulled back into a tight bun as though she resented it and wished it out of the way and forgotten. Her eyes were the colour and shape of coffee beans and a line of dark hairs running along her upper lip gave the impression of a moustache, which was confusing in a lady. She smelt pleasanter than her husband, the scent of herbs and fresh dough sweetening the garlic.

  I now started a very hard part of my life. Monsieur Bernard Forel ran a small market garden and farm, and every morning but Sunday, I had to take his vegetables and fruit to market, trotting briskly down a long straight road between Lombardy poplars for seven miles to the nearest town. A poor riser in the mornings, he always left a little late so I was forced to hurry most of the way. Now, had my cart been as light as Dr Miller’s trap, this would have been no hardship for the mornings were usually fresh, the dew had dampened the dust, and the birds were singing blithely as indeed they had sung throughout the war. But Monsieur Forel’s cart was both heavy and badly sprung, with iron-rimmed wheels and shafts that were too wide and too long for me. The harness, too, had been made for a larger animal and rubbed me in the wrong places so that I was often overtired and sore and wanted nothing more than a good long sleep under a shady tree in deep cool grass.

  While my master sold his goods at his stall, I was left standing under a tree in the market place, with a nosebag of chaff, mixed with a little bran and wheat flyers which are the husks which remain when the wheat is ground at the mill. It was dry, tasteless fare on a hot day, but better than nothing.

  Other horses stood with me in the Square and sometimes Big Ben was amongst them and then we would greet one another with soft neighs, but we were tied so that we could not touch or smell each other. My other companions were French, some bright and cheerful others sad with dull coats, weary eyes, swollen fetlocks and hips standing out like cliffs in their poor thin bodies.