The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  On that day, June 28, 1914, the world as everyone then knew it began to slip like a broad, deceptively placid river, moving ever faster toward the brink of a raging waterfall. Established realities changed forever that Sunday. Levers and gears set in place by the abuses of empires old and fading and young and foolhardy, and a general failure of diplomacy so criminally incompetent no punishment could compensate for the destruction it unleashed, clicked and began to function as a machine that created, with all the mechanical precision of the age, a comprehensive, all-destroying worldwide war. So began the toppling of thrones across Europe, the snuffing out of lights in ballrooms and boardrooms that people had assumed would burn forever, replaced by signal flares and exploding gunpowder and miles of war-torn desolation.

  Poets like John Masefield, in his midthirties when the war broke out, already saw what was coming for “generations of dead men” when he wrote that first August of

  The harvest not yet won, the empty bin,

  The friendly horses taken from the stall,

  The fallow on the hill not yet brought in,

  The cracks unplastered on the leaking walls.

  Whether in “the misery of the soaking trench” or “freezing in the rigging,” these men would know only a puzzled despair in that moment of death, “when the blind soul is flung upon the air,” dying for an idea “but dimly understood.” Just as poignant is his image of “friendly horses” being taken from their familiar stalls and also, like the human soldiers, flung into a void.4

  Geoffrey had played a significant role in the conflict, serving as lieutenant-captain and then staff captain of the Third Cavalry Brigade the year the war began. He became brigade-major of the Second Cavalry Brigade the next year and in 1918 served in that capacity with the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. In the war he rode two of his prize mounts: Alice, who was injured and taken home, and Combined Training, who was wounded but stayed with his master and was fit enough to win the King George V Gold Cup for Geoffrey for show jumping in 1921.5

  It was in this final year of the war that Geoffrey, who had already been recognized for bravery (one of the first officers to be gazetted for the Military Cross, in 1915), took part in a battle that assigns him a place in history and connects him to one of the most savagely bloody sallies of the war. At the end of March 1918, as commander of the Sixteenth Lancers, Geoffrey led what is considered the last major cavalry charge of military history, in which nineteenth-century equine culture flung itself at twentieth-century firepower, in the form of German machine gunners from the Twenty-Third Saxon Division entrenched in Moreuil Wood southeast of Amiens. The cost to men and horses was enormous, but the Saxon Division was forced from the Wood (twice, since they regained it the next day), and with this battle the slow but steady disintegration of Germany’s Spring Offensive began. For his part in the charge, Geoffrey was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, as well as the Croix de Guerre.6

  Emerging intact from a war that had swallowed up so many other men, whole or in part, Geoffrey returned to England and passed Staff College in 1920. Between then and 1923, when he served as chief instructor of cavalry at Weedon in Northamptonshire, Geoffrey and his Russian wife (with whom he had had a son, Peter, in 1909) were divorced. As was often the case with couples who by some miracle had made it through the cataclysm together, the Brookes found themselves too changed to continue that bond after it was over. Geoffrey seems to be describing their marriage and Vera’s intense personality in the wife of Archie Languid, characters in his 1927 novel Horse Lovers. Mrs. Languid “was an erratic, self-centred creature, incapable of deep affection, and a good many years his senior” who had a passion for gambling and disliked living in the country, “whereas Archie’s chief interest in life lay in his estate and his horses.…A makeshift, peace-at-any-price domestic policy gradually developed into sullen warfare, and eventually resulted in the breaking of the nuptial ties.” The break was perhaps not helped by the fact that Vera Brooke’s family, and thus Vera herself, had lost everything they owned and the lives of several family members to the revolution. Vera’s later life is not known, though she did leave Geoffrey with several Fabergé objects, mere remnants of her family’s former Russian splendor.7

  For his part, as a bachelor again Geoffrey began to pour his encyclopedic knowledge of horses into books in a literary stream that enlarged to a cataract. Starting in 1924 and continuing for another thirty years, Geoffrey would publish several volumes, nonfiction and fiction, on horse training, hunting with horses, riding and stable-craft, polo ponies, the foibles and virtues of the horse set, and everything in between. He wrote of horses with a sensitivity that stands out all the more, considering what he had witnessed them endure in battle. “The real lover of horses is a student of equine psychology,” Geoffrey wrote in 1924, “and finds in the horse those qualities so beloved by man—courage, unselfishness, fidelity. What more does one ask for in a friend?”8

  Geoffrey might well have continued in this course, focused on his stables, his writing, and his surviving comrades at arms as they reminisced every year on Remembrance Day. But he was to meet a woman who, while so similar to his own nature and interests, was just unique enough to change the course of his life completely.

  Dorothy Evelyn Gibson-Craig was born in Melrose, Scotland, on June 1, 1884.9

  She arrived a few days after the seventy-first birthday of Queen Victoria, whose Golden Jubilee marking her fiftieth year on the throne would be celebrated three years later. In a more than coincidental sense, Dorothy, whose nickname among family and friends was Dodo, was born with one foot in the twentieth century, the era of greater rights and freedoms for women, and the other in the nineteenth, when compassion for the rights of animals first took deepest root, alongside abolition of chattel slavery and child labor, as a social concern.

  Young Dorothy, who was followed by siblings Cecilia (Cicely) Dulcibella, Eardley Charles William (later sixth/thirteenth baronet), and Marjorie Violet, was a daughter of Henry Vivian Gibson-Craig and wife, Emily Dulcibella Wilmot, and granddaughter of Sir William Gibson-Craig, second baronet. The family seat, Riccarton, was a massive gabled stone mansion in Edinburgh, much influenced by the Scottish Baroque style made de rigueur by the historical novels and histrionic tastes of Sir Walter Scott. The house was demolished in 1956, a year after Dorothy’s death, and its grounds are now the location of Heriot-Watt University, but its cemetery remains the property of the Gibson-Craigs. Many of the family members interred there fought or died in the two world wars of the twentieth century—a link with soldiers and warfare that was to thread itself throughout Dorothy’s future life and the work to which she devoted it.10

  In 1905 Dorothy, who had grown up to be a willowy beauty, became the wife of Lt. Col. James Gerald Lamb Searight of the Royal Scots (Lothian Regiment). Born in 1878, Searight, whose family nickname was Gerry, was a thin, angular man who had served in the Boer War in South Africa (1899– 1902). How they met we do not know, but Dorothy married Gerry in Great Kimble Church in Buckinghamshire. Gerry suffered from an illness contracted in South Africa and was in many ways still an invalid when he married Dorothy. Her willingness to marry a man believed to be terminally ill has much about it that foreshadows her future work with sick and dying horses in Egypt. As it happened, Gerry did live on, dying in his eighties in 1959, and the Searights had three healthy children over the next several years: two sons, Rodney, born in 1909, and Philip, born in 1916, and daughter Pamela (Pinkie), born in 1915.11

  Despite his long life, Gerry’s health never completely righted itself. This, however, did not stop him from wishing to be of service at the outbreak of the Great War. Gerry served as lieutenant-colonel, commandant, in the Royal Defence Corps. This home-based unit was composed of garrison battalions formed in 1917 in which soldiers who, for reasons related to age or health, were not considered fit to take part in the fighting overseas but able enough to do their bit at home. This was a job that allowed Gerry to remain close to home yet play a significant role
in defending the nation. He was judged by others to have carried it out extremely well: for his service, Gerry was awarded the Order of the British Empire.12 Dorothy demonstrated bravery of her own by remaining in London with her children; her youngest, Philip, had an abiding early memory of having to dart under a table in his nursery when zeppelins floated, eerily clanking in the dark, over the city, a trial run for the Blitz of 1940.13

  Dorothy and Geoffrey may have met some time shortly after the end of the war, perhaps as early as 1919. These were the years composing what Juliet Nicolson terms “the great silence”—when, between the deafening noise of war and the frantic music of the Jazz Age, the “English habit of maintaining difficult feelings was to suppress rather than discuss them, as if by remaining silent the feelings would disappear.”14 Under this thinnest of veneers applied for the most irrelevant of reasons boiled storms of bereavement, bitterness, passion. Whatever was happening between Gerry and Dorothy, it seems to have been well concealed, at least from those around them, and perhaps from each other, in the approved English way; yet storms of the heart are rarely containable. Geoffrey divorced Vera in 1922, and after Dorothy and Gerry were divorced, Geoffrey and Dorothy had a Registry Office marriage. They lived at Tidworth, Wiltshire, where Geoffrey served as colonel of the Sixteenth Lancers until called up to take the Cavalry Brigade post in Cairo—which brings us to four years later, when their ship docked in Port Said and they disembarked in the autumn heat, so at variance from the damp cool of the English October they had left. They had a four-hour train journey ahead of them to Cairo.

  Some of those 124 miles ran along the Suez Canal, tribute to the genius of human ingenuity and bone of contention in past and future wars. Dug in 1859 to link the Red Sea and the Mediterranean and obviate the lengthy and expensive sea journey around the horn of Africa, the canal, worked by the forced labor of thousands of Egyptians, was completed ten years later. It opened to great fanfare, with the khedive (viceroy) of Egypt, Isma’il, barging down the waterway with the Empress Eugénie of France beside him, their ship surely a wondrous sight to desert Bedouin who from a distance would have glimpsed sails and prow floating magically through desert dunes. Though plagued by cost overruns, the canal proved as great a boon to shipping as predicted, but, as mentioned, it was also and almost from the start a curse to peace. After helping the khedival government put down a native uprising in northern Egypt, Britain was recompensed with occupation of Egypt and Sudan, along with responsibility for protecting the canal (and reaping its benefits). Because Egypt was technically part of the Ottoman Empire, this set up tension between the two imperial powers. When the Great War broke out and the Turks sided with Germany, seizing the canal became the aim of both the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman imperial court) and Berlin. Britain sent an army to defend the canal, which is why so many English horses had been brought, blinking, to the shimmering deserts of Egypt, the Sinai, and Palestine in the Great War.

  Not one to rhapsodize on scenery, Dorothy was more likely focused not on the sand-strewn topography rushing past her passenger car window but organizing her thoughts on what she would need to do to manage her new household in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis, and on the busy social calendar that came with being the wife of the commander of the British Cavalry Brigade. According to Glenda Spooner, a close friend, from the very start “Dodo had social chains” that she could not break—she would have to field five hundred callers just in the first month and a half of taking residence in Cairo. As Florence Nightingale, to whom Dorothy would one day be compared, wrote in her mid-Victorian complaint against the narrowed roles expected of Victorian women, “Women have no means given them whereby they can resist the ‘claims of social life,’” taught as they were that a woman wasn’t a lady if she didn’t happily permit herself “to be interrupted at all hours,” regardless of her hopes, dreams, or plans. Claims on Dorothy’s time would not be merely enacted within the Brooke villa; both Brookes faced obligations to dine out “three days a week, [give] dinner parties themselves on two nights as well as a lunch party every Sunday, followed by ‘being at home’ that day to about thirty people,” wrote Spooner. Of these details Dorothy and Geoffrey were still mercifully less aware than they would be once their train reached Cairo, which itself was a setting rich with much that was, to them, at that moment utterly unknown, save for the geography classroom imagery and basic facts all people of their generation had at their fingertips, conveniently colored pink on maps of the British empire.15

  By the time of the Brookes’ arrival in October 1930, Cairo had passed through thousands of autumns and remained much the same as when it began, in legend, as the cosmic battleground of Set, god of war and upheaval, and Horus, god of sun and life. The very name of Egypt’s capital, Cairo—al-Qāhirah—refers to victory in battle. The rival gods’ wrestling match had been a stalemate, but afterward many other more mortal armies had conquered the city over its millennia of existence, establishing periods of light between periods of darkness, as well as darkness in periods of light, along with overlapping layers of cultural influences. Successive waves of dynasties followed the reigns of the pharaohs responsible for building the pyramids at Giza and the temples and tombs at Memphis, on the opposite side of the Nile. The British had been a force in Egypt since the last decades of the nineteenth century, having instituted what Wilfrid Blunt called a “veiled protectorate,” but foreign influence, including successive waves of refugees from a variety of nations, had long been part of Cairo’s makeup and often a source of as many vices as virtues. By the time the Brookes arrived in fall 1930, Cairo was less a garrison for Britain than a popular wintering place for wealthy foreigners, like the debutantes referenced by Max Rodenbeck, or prancing through Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, the last line of which—“It is not the past that matters, but the future”—contains the seed of what was to end this colonialist fantasy world a quarter century later.16

  Pathé newsreel cameras from the 1920s and 1930s offer us glimpses of what awaited Dorothy and Geoffrey Brooke on their arrival in the Egyptian capital. In the flickering frames, one sees elegantly garbed Europeans seated on the terrace at Shepheard’s Hotel, with its arching sign on the roof, gazing down with a certain dismissive indifference at robed tourist guides being harangued by police, guides who would take some of these same tourists, clad in incongruous spats or silk frocks, on the backs of camels to the pyramids or through the plundered detritus of temples whose histories they made up as they went along, gesticulating under impassive smiles of stone kings. Or the newsreel lenses might shift from panoramas of the golden dusty city, glimpsing domes and minarets, bazaars crowded with men in gelabiya, selling a thousand and one things or services under awnings or in alleyways, to focus on the water carriers, each bent brown back bearing a shining darker brown goatskin bladder filled at the lip of the broad Nile, the life-giving and dangerous river whose flat surface was crowded with the billowing wings of felucca sails. Or they might observe one of the many demonstrations, usually by young people, that erupted on certain days when students, according to a British satirist, “having found their examination papers beyond their powers,…had downed their books and gone into the street yelling for ‘Independence.’”17 (If anything, these youths were as keen for independence from their parents’ bourgeois aspirations to French culture as they were from British rule.)

  From the terrace at Shepheard’s, those foreigners just passing through might also observe the quieter processions of Muslim men holding aloft draped coffins en route to quick burial before sundown, weaving their dignified way among the spluttering motorcars already clogging every street in the city. And threading their way among them they would see horse-drawn trams (then in the process of being replaced by electric ones) or horses pulling cabs known as gharries, and mules with panniers filled with goods rocking on their backs or hitched to simple carts, their enormous wheels dwarfed by the combined loads of supplies and several human passengers. Even allowing for the jerkiness of old celluloid f
ootage, it is obvious from the newsreels that the animals had to give a strained heave to gain forward momentum in pulling these overly heavy loads. Judging from their thin legs and visible ribs, they had little muscle with which to do so—today as then, working equines are often hired from stable owners whose lack of care of the animals the hirer is in no financial position to remedy, making the animals’ situation worse. So off they struggle, the bony horses and mules of 1932. Like many working equines of the twenty-first century, they drag their burdens through crowds busied with more immediate matters, under the eyes of tourists focused not on present pain but on taking in a fantasy of past glories.

  Dorothy was not a naive foreigner arriving in the Middle East blinkered to conditions existing there. According to her granddaughter, travel writer Sarah Searight, Dorothy had already heard enough about the sad circumstances of Egyptian equines to seek out evidence for this shortly after she arrived. And she had already been moved to action by the plight of horses suffering in her own country. In 1926, Dorothy had become a founding member of the International League for the Protection of Horses (ILPH), now World Horse Welfare, the brainchild of a Norfolk woman named Ada Cole. While living as a nun in Antwerp, Cole had witnessed sick, elderly English workhorses, most of them half-dead from a rough sailing across the Channel, being whipped down a gangplank and marched for miles to be butchered in a Belgian abattoir. Cole’s efforts resulted in the banning in 1937 of exportation of live horses from Great Britain for slaughter (a practice still present in the United States and Canada) and formed the basis for the ILPH and its wider-reaching work to improve equine welfare around the world. There is little doubt that the organization that Dorothy would found in Egypt derived a good part of its inspiration in Ada Cole’s work for compassionate treatment and euthanization of working equines.18