The reality looked nothing like Lady Butler’s painting. Unhorsed in the charge at Balaclava, about three hundred cavalrymen were now “struggling along, some crawling, some limping, others running, some dragging loved horses bleeding to death behind them.” Some 475 horses were killed that day (including forty-three later shot as unserviceable owing to wounds). On the battlefield, riderless English horses were rounded up by Cossacks and offered to the highest bidder.
Worse than the battles in a way was the horsemanship. Trench tells the story of a British mounted infantryman who asked his commanding officer during the Boer War expedition in South Africa at the turn of the century what he should feed his horse, mutton or beef.
During the Boer War, professional soldiers in the Royal Artillery did care for their mounts well, for they knew something of horses. But other elements of the British cavalry knew next to nothing: three-quarters of the enlisted men in the Imperial Yeomanry had never sat a horse before passing “a riding test,” and the Mounted Infantry had to learn on the job. Rudyard Kipling had a phrase for it: “three days ‘to learn equitation’ and six months of blooming well trot.”
Only the South African Colonials, who rode their own horses, had the sense to graze and water them at every opportunity. Keeping a single, overloaded and overworked horse sound and fit during long marches required great skill, which most of these men lacked.
One general, who claimed he alone tried to stop the waste, railed about it. “I never saw such a shameful abuse of horseflesh in the whole course of my life as existed throughout the whole campaign, and not an attempt was made to check it … I was shocked, I was horrified.”
The numbers tell the tale. British forces in South Africa lost 7 to 8 percent of their horses every month. Of the 494,181 horses sent, 326,000 perished — only a small number in actual fighting. And lest you think that the South African campaign was an isolated case or specific to the British, consider the Prussian army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. “Operating,” as Trench notes, “in a temperate climate and a fertile country, close to their bases and well served by rail communications, they lost over a million horses in eight months.”
“War is hell,” said General William Tecumseh Sherman. He fought for the North in the American Civil War, and when he uttered those words to graduating cadets at a Michigan military academy in 1879, he was speaking from his own dark experience. “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded,” he said, “who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”
But if war has been hell for humans, it has been the same for horses. What made the horse such a terrible weapon in war was not just his speed and power but his willingness to ride into the very hell that General Sherman decried; to do what was asked of him, despite his rider’s screams, the clash of metal on metal, the piercing sound of guns.
The horse was a willing warrior, and no other animal has been so consistently or widely enlisted to fight men’s wars. The elephant, the camel and the dog saw only spot duty. For most of the six thousand or so years of equestrian history, horses somewhere on the planet were being ridden to war. Luckless barbarians fleeing Roman cavalry officers were menaced by spears, swords and the teeth and hooves of Roman horses. In desert battle, Arab horses fought one another with the same fury that their riders did. Soldiers throughout human history could not have asked for a more generous or devoted ally than the horse.
Like war itself, the war horse chronicle — with all its tales of courage and folly and pride — stirs up a lasting melancholy, in part because of the great fondness that certain soldiers felt for their doomed mounts.
Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey, who rode with Custer towards the Little Big Horn but split off beforehand, wrote in his diary along the way that at lunch time, “When the haversacks were opened, the horses usually stopped grazing and put their noses near their riders’ faces and asked very plainly to share the hardtack … The old soldier was generally willing to share with his beast.” During the American Revolution, a patriot named Samuel Dexter was so grateful to his horse that he established a retirement fund to ensure the horse’s care. Some war horses were buried with full military honors. And Blackfoot warriors, otherwise hardened to deprivation and taught never to complain, wept openly when their horses died.
The melding of horse and armed rider created an enduring effect. The romance that for so long was, and is still, attached to the People of the Horse — to the Comanche and Crow and Sioux of the plains, the Huns and Mongols, the Turkish Mamelukes — helps explain why sword-carrying cavalry continued to charge at guns for centuries longer than they sensibly should have.
What I see in old photographs of cavalrymen and dragoons is unabashed haughtiness. Fully armed, trained to kill, with all that power underneath him, the trooper must have felt almost invincible. Foot soldiers and peasants were cut down by cavalry all through the ages. The carnage that took place, especially at the hands of such feared horse peoples as the Mongols, inspired dark legends. Imagine what terror was induced when great dust clouds appeared on the horizon and got steadily closer until the unmistakable sound of thousands of horses’ hooves told all in their path that what they feared had finally come.
Czechs once believed that the devil created horses. Europeans thought Satan traveled on the back of a coal-black horse. The Chinese thought a demon called Horsehead tortured the damned in the next life. And in many folk tales, phantom steeds and headless horses foretell death.
But a mounted soldier is, of course, not invincible and the horse, for all his natural weaponry, is actually a shy warrior. So much of horse etiquette — who grazes where, who waters first, the hierarchy in the pasture — is determined by display. A look, ears back, a swishing of the tail — horses constantly read one another and diplomacy rules their society far more than aggression does.
Mares and geldings skirmish, but only the stallion warms to actual war. In the wild, fights will range for three days or more and the combatants may cover thirty miles in the course of their attacks and retreats. The American wildlife ecologist Joel Berger, who has spent years studying wild horses in Wyoming and elsewhere, reports that 96 percent of adult males show signs of bite-related wounds. One stallion had fifty scars on his body. But deaths from these battles are not common and only one in almost seven hundred observed encounters actually led to a harem takeover. By comparison with human society, equine society is a veritable peace corps.
For all that, horses do make war when men call upon them. And, if our attraction to horses is indeed “bred in the bone,” as the proverb says, then the bone is spattered with blood, equine and human both.
The horse was first used in war four thousand years ago. Someone with imagination must have looked upon the donkey-drawn wagon and come up with the tank of its day — the horse-drawn chariot with two men inside, one to drive the horses and one to fire the arrows. Several thousand chariots at a time could charge an enemy and in minutes inflict terrible damage on foot soldiers.
The chariot, though, was useful only on roads and flats. Mountains and rivers seriously impeded its progress, and by 900 B.C. the mounted soldier had supplanted it.
Around 700 B.C. the Huns, Asiatic nomads who also devised the stirrup, invented the right clothing to wear in the saddle — trousers and boots. This marked a vast improvement over bare legs and sandals. First of the so-called horse people, the Huns were the masters of hit-and-run warfare. Wearing no armor and using only bows (warriors were particularly adept at galloping forward, turning in the saddle and firing up to six arrows a minute at enemies behind them), they completely outmatched their Chinese opponents, who stuck with the short sword and the chariot. “Their country,” wrote one Chinese historian, who both dreaded the Huns and admired their horsemanship, “is the back of a horse.” In the saddle, the Hun ate, drank, slept.
Even when the Chinese taught themselves to ride and shoot like Huns, the enemy still confounded them. The formidable Great Wal
l of China was built in part to keep the Huns and their horses out. The Huns then looked west, and by A.D. 450 they had conquered most of what is now Russia, Germany and Poland and had invaded Rome. They might have continued had Attila not died, freakishly, of a nosebleed.
The world cowered before these terrible centaurs. “Swift as the wind,” one Hungarian chronicler wrote, “the riders came up like a tornado and disappeared like a flock of birds.”
Hun cavalry could cover ninety miles a day. Each rider took a string of four or more horses on conquering journeys that sometimes spanned thousands of miles. When one horse showed signs of tiring, the rider mounted a fresh one. In time of need, the horseman would make a delicate cut in the neck of his horse and drink a cup of blood without harming the animal. The Hun warrior was as kind to his horse as he was unmerciful to his enemies, and the reward for old war horses was retirement to a good pasture.
As fierce as the Huns were, the Mongols who came after them seemed even more terrible and more invincible than their steppe ancestors. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Mongol horsemen dominated the known world the way no other people had before or have since. They overran northern China, Korea, Tibet, Central Asia, parts of Russia, northern India, Poland and Hungary and prepared to raid Vienna and Venice, retreating only at the news that Genghis Khan’s son had died.
5.2 Mongol archer: Brilliant horsemen who conquered much of the known world in the 12th and 13th centuries. (photo credit 5.2)
Mongolian babies, it was said, were bathed daily in cold water to harden them, and by the age of sixteen Mongolian boys were brilliant horsemen. They could ride two days and two nights, sleeping, eating, even relieving themselves, in the saddle.
Historians debate the number of people slaughtered by Genghis Khan and his warriors. One estimate puts it at more than eighteen million. On the other hand, some cities — Bokhara and Samarkand, for example — simply capitulated at the very appearance of Mongol horsemen, such was their reputation as unbeatable in war. What is known is that Mongol chiefs gathered intelligence first and attacked second, that they fought diversionary battles with the enemy to mask the thrust of the attack and that the yasa, or Mongol code of law, meant instant death to any warrior who abandoned a comrade.
John Keegan, the eminent British historian and author of A History of Warfare, called the Mongols “warriors for war’s sake, for the loot it brought, the risks, the thrills, the animal satisfactions of triumph.” A latter-day biographer of Genghis Khan quotes him as replying thus to the suggestion that falconry was the greatest pleasure known to man: “You are mistaken. Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding [and] use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and support.”
The Mongols’ customary food — milk, meat and blood — was derived from one source: the horse. Blood was drawn from the veins of living horses, stored in gut bags, thickened over a fire and then fried like a black pudding.
The Hun and Mongol invasions rocked Europe, as did the Crusades. An army of mounted Christian knights from Europe took Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1099 and for much of the twelfth century fought a seesaw battle against Saladin. Armored knights of the Middle Ages were as slow and heavy as their Muslim enemies were light and fast. Where a modern jockey on a Thoroughbred can do forty miles an hour, a knight could manage about fifteen. He rode a lighter horse (the palfrey) to the site of the battle and a heavier horse (the destrier, about the size of a draft horse) to charge the enemy (thus the expression “to get on your high horse”). Assuming the knight weighed 176 pounds and his armor seventy-nine pounds, the further weight of saddle, stirrups and other tack meant the poor horse had to bear a total weight of 448 pounds.
The Arabs’ horses — “fast, spirited and elegant beast[s], pampered and often hand-fed,” says Keegan — were effective in battle, but there were precious few of them. Somewhat like his Christian enemy, the Arab rode his camel to war and saved his sleek and precious horse until the moment he drew his scimitar.
5.3 Female knight on her high horse: the Crusades pitted Christian against Muslim, power against speed. (photo credit 5.3)
The exorbitantly rich Bedouin vocabulary pertaining to horses is a measure of how important the horse was in that culture. There are thirteen Bedouin words for herds of horses; one hundred for horse colors; twenty for a noble, high-bred horse or mare; eighteen for fiery horse; fifteen for starting a horse; fourteen for trotting; twelve for prancing; and twenty-one for different kinds of walk.
The Arabs, Keegan contends, were not horse people in the way that the nomadic Hun and Mongol raiders were. They were architects and builders, patrons of art and literature, and in the jihad, or holy war, that would overwhelm North Africa, the Middle East and what is now Turkey, they would eventually hire Turk mercenaries — horse people of the steppes riding shaggy little ponies. The Mamelukes were blood relations in every way to the Mongols and their mounts.
Legend has it that Turkish women gave birth in the saddle, and it did indeed seem that Turk warriors were born there. No soldiers, not the religiously inspired forces of Islam or the professional soldiers on the Christian side, succeeded in withstanding the fleet and merciless Mongol invaders.
The Mamelukes did.
They were part of an Egyptian army that confronted Tamerlane and his Mongols at Ain Jalut, just north of Jerusalem in 1260. It was an extraordinary battle, still studied by military historians today. Turk against Turk. Horse people against horse people.
Tamerlane dwarfed even Attila and Genghis Khan in his appetite for atrocity. Tales of pyramids of human skulls date from his campaign. The Mamelukes, then, saved both Muslims and Christians from a dark and savage reckoning.
Like the samurai in Japan about this time, the Mamelukes were a warrior class. Taken as slaves, they were taught both the Koran and the furusiyya — that special mastery of horse and arms that allowed them to hand the Mongols their first major defeat.
The invention of gunpowder by the Chinese in the 1300s, followed by guns and cannon, eventually ended the era of the horse soldier. But it was not easy for a proud cavalryman to give up his horse or for his superiors to concede the folly of riding toward spit fire. Yet they persisted, and for a century or two longer than seemed rational. Polish cavalry did not, as Nazi propaganda proclaimed, charge German tanks during the early days of the Second World War. But there is some truth in the image: what Keegan calls “the twilight of the war horse” was a sad, slow unfolding.
When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, the Mamelukes’ furusiyya offered a futile response to muskets and cannons. Napoleon, though, seemed touched by Mameluke gallantry and had a Mameluke named Rustum as his personal servant right to the end of his reign. At Cairo in 1811, the Mamelukes were again slaughtered, this time by the Ottoman Muhammad Ali. Gunmen against swordsmen — even swordsmen on horses — was no contest.
If soldiers were loath to give up the horse as a weapon in war, their reluctance stemmed from confidence in their own equestrian skills, which had grown increasingly elaborate. Cavalry schools in sixteenth-century Europe taught officers and their mounts deft moves meant to heighten their efficiency in battle and enable a hasty retreat.
There was the pesade, in which the horse rears up to protect his rider from bullets; the half pirouette, a quick turn that allows the rider to mow down enemy soldiers; and the piaffe, a high-stepping, in-place trot that essentially kept the equine motor idling while the rider hacked at the infantry with his sword. Advanced horses and their riders also learned the difficult capriole, in which the horse tucks in his front legs and thrusts out his back legs, rising in the air without moving forward.
Several years ago I watched a performance by Andalusian horses at Jerez de la Frontera in Spain. While there is much to admire in the precision riding — and that of its Viennese counterpart, the Lipizzaners of the Spanish Riding School — the ballet left me cold. I remember sitting i
n the dark in that operalike building as a single beam of light caught a gray horse between pillars, performing the piaffe to music, first under the instruction of his trainer and then as the trainer walked away. The display went on for a long, long time, and I wondered later what might have convinced that horse to stop. The same horse galloping in a pasture would have given me more pleasure than that ostentatious show of equine obedience.
In actual battle, such cool gymnastics as the pesade often fell prey to the rider’s own fear and adrenaline or proved to be of little practical use — once foot soldiers had seen one pesade they had seen them all. And as the English discovered at Poitiers in 1356 and again at Agincourt in 1415, the long bow could take away any advantage in horse and knights. Further, when soldiers formed a four-sided “infantry square” and did not panic and run as their forebears had done, they could indeed repel a cavalry charge. By the 1830s the haute école style of riding moved from the battlefield to the circus.
First, of course, the circus — or at least something more permanent and elaborate than the dancing bears of the Middle Ages — had to be invented. That task fell to Sergeant Major Philip Astley, a British cavalryman. He opened a riding school in an old London lumberyard, but when enrolment flagged he put on exhibitions to entice recruits. He did somersaults and handstands on horseback. He would ride around the ring standing with one foot on the back of one horse and the other foot on another horse; the two horses would then jump over a pole, with Astley still on board. Crowds grew and Astley added clowns and jugglers and slack-wire artists, inspiring his competitors to became bolder: in 1772 David Wildman made a name for himself by galloping with one foot on the saddle and one foot on the horse’s head while his own head was enveloped in bees. Astley built his first fully enclosed amphitheater in 1780, then added musicians, tightrope walkers, clowns, jugglers and performing dogs. The Ringling Brothers would one day thank him.
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