The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  But timing is everything. By 1930 the world’s attention had turned away from the horrors, human and animal, of the Great War. The stock market crash in 1929 and subsequent worldwide economic depression had clamped down on partiers living high on a boom that could not last. If the frenzied celebration had been a way of forgetting the loss of a whole generation of young men a decade before, the despair of the downturn focused attention more on present-tense survival than past losses, which postcrash could no longer be contemplated through a haze of champagne. Nobody wanted to be reminded of a war that was, after all, meant to end them all, the cost of which was even then being weighed as draconian compared to the benefits attained. And so, as acts of heroism by British forces continued to loom large from the battlefields of memory, these were mostly confined to the stage of the European theatre of war—the fields of Flanders, the forests of the Argonne, from which had flowed so much blood and poetry. The battles in the eastern Mediterranean became a footnote to these European struggles. Aside from the writings of T. E. Lawrence, first made public in 1922, there was not much said or thought about the desert campaigns—in Egypt, Persia, Syria—of the Great War, which had taken place concurrently with action on the western front. Of those who did remember, their voices were not always welcome, their service considered more vacation than warfare compared to action in the French trenches—underscored by the opinion that the eastern front need never have been fought in the first place. The conversation and the controversy continue today. Journalist Khaled Diab has speculated that “had Turkey emerged victorious or not taken up arms, the Ottoman Empire would not have been partitioned, and the Sykes-Picot carve-up, which has given the Middle East some of its most troubled borders, would not have taken place—at least not then.” But the Ottomans distrusted the British more than they disliked the Germans, and the Germans “were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths of mendacity in order to rouse the Mohammedan world,” writes A. J. Barker, and there was no difficulty, in a nation that was to expunge anything not strictly Aryan from its pedigrees only a generation later, finding an alleged descent for the Hohenzollern family, to which the kaiser belonged, from a sister of the Arab Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him).19

  This, along with promises of a more material nature, proved heady stuff for the Turks. So the “sick man of Europe” looked to Germany as its last hope for resuscitation and for regaining its lost Egyptian province. A year after the outbreak of the European conflict the Turks, allying themselves with the kaiser at the last minute, attempted to seize the Suez Canal, Britain’s most valuable route to India, which all nations coveted. Concerned with protecting its Berlin to Baghdad railway, which didn’t stand much of a chance with England as effective suzerain of Egypt (regardless of the fact that it came under Ottoman rule), Germany needed Turkey’s proximity as much as Turkey needed its firepower. To meet this threat, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) was assembled by the British Army in March 1916, and what came to be called the Sinai and Palestine Campaign began.

  The sacrifices made by men and women in the east were bitterly real. What we do not hear about as often as the sacrifices warrant are stories of the other soldiers—the “long-faced chums,” as they would be described in later years—who fought in the sands of the east. Helping win the battles of Romani, Gaza, and Jerusalem, among many skirmishes that determined the course of the war, were horses, mules, and donkeys, most drawn from England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (starting in 1914, four years before human soldiers shipped out to the war). Many had originally been transported to the European front, where they had already seen service in the slimy, frigid death pits of trenches and shell craters before being shipped further to the heat, sand, and flies of the desert east. And it was to be there that those animals who survived combat, harsh conditions, exhaustion, and starvation were to be left behind like surplus equipment, falling under the control of a native population who, in general, held concepts of animal husbandry very different from where the animals had been born and bred. The animals’ Egyptian owners were for the most part very poor people who had been kicked around by life, men who seldom had enough to feed their families and who could not spare patience or compassion for the beasts of burden they, and the British Army, had made of former war horses. Stories circulated about members of Yeomanry regiments riding their mounts into the desert and shooting them rather than have them fall into the hands of Egyptians, whose abuse of animals they had witnessed in certain instances and believed was widespread. Even if this did happen, it provided release for a comparative few. Most of those horses that lived on were worked till injury or other infirmities passed them down the chain to where even a poor man could afford to work an animal to death if he got a good day’s labor from it, since, after all, he had paid very little to purchase it—the terrible arithmetic of market forces and the diminishing returns of hard labor. A poem, “The Remount Train,” published in the Brisbane Courier in October 1918, spoke to these animals’ collective fate:

  Wave the flag, and let them go

  Hats off to that wistful row

  Of lean heads of brown and bay

  Black and chestnut, roan and grey

  Here’s good luck in lands afar

  Snow White streak, and blaze, and star

  May you find in those far lands

  Kindly hearts and horsemen’s hands.

  On the October afternoon in 1930 when she arrived with Geoffrey at Ramses Station in Cairo, Dorothy was likely still cogitating over organizing the life that lay ahead of them for the next few years in this hot, dusty, crowded, and strange city. They were waiting for their car when Dorothy happened to notice her own wistful row of lean heads brown and bay.

  Several pairs of emaciated, ragged gharry (taxi) horses stood, heads bowed, their drivers bartering loudly for passengers. A gharry, derived from the Swahili word for cart, was a form of public transportation in Cairo, differing in size, shape, and comfort for passengers, well known to visitors throughout what foreigners called “the East.” Almost forty years earlier, one such visitor was to write of the “dozens of ramshackle vehicles drawn by animals for which it would be hard to find an English name that would convey an adequate idea of their shape and build,” greeting him at the docks in Calcutta. It seemed incredible to him that the “lean and bony” cab horses of Calcutta could pull anything, but they did because, of course, they had to. The sight of underfed draft horses attempting to pull overweight gharries was, in Cairo, the least of what many foreigners in the city saw daily. Honor Baines, an Englishwoman who would later support Dorothy’s charitable work, recalled arriving in Cairo with her parents around this time. Only six years old, she saw “ponies and donkeys, flies covering their eyes and noses and sores, the animals so thin that one could, as my father said, hang a hat on their withers. I can also remember seeing animals left to die in the sun.”20

  Though Dorothy and Geoffrey had been given some idea that they would find much to alarm them in the streets of Cairo, the gharry horses were even more mortifying because of an added trenchant detail. Dorothy immediately noticed the horses’ size, which, even in their wasted condition, made them tower over native Arabs. Then she saw something else. Against the background of a wasted flank, still clearly visible, was the jaunty arrow-shaped brand of the British Army. These haggard nags standing in the hot sun were not only English horses; they were former war horses, animals whose efforts had helped win the Great War. “Although they were battered by Cairo traffic,” wrote Sarah Searight, “as under-nourished as their owners, some reduced to skin and bones, [Dorothy] nevertheless could distinguish the magnificent frames of the Percherons and Walers that had carried cavalry regiments to war and kept them armed and fed. A Cairo gharry was a poor reward.”21

  This was only a glimpse. Then a shining car arrived, and Dorothy and Geoffrey were whisked away from the heat and dust of the station, from the silent misery of the abandoned war horses, to a pleasant villa in Heliopolis that would be
their Egyptian home for the next several years, a place of parties and merriment.

  But the sight of those horses had shaken Dorothy Brooke’s life to its core.

  At the same time, an idea began to take root that only grew stronger the more it was opposed, doubted, discouraged, even attacked. Dorothy needed to help these battered war horses. And she needed to find all the others rumor claimed were to be located within the city or in the quarries outside on its limits, still laboring despite age, illness, injuries, despair. The thin rumps and jutting spines of the gharry horses would prompt in Dorothy a shift in thinking not just about caring properly for working horses but why they should be cared for—to honor the right of a working animal to have a life free of pain, hunger, and thirst, and to get to the root cause of why their owners, for whom they were the sole source of income, would neglect and even abuse them in the first place.

  As Dorothy would learn in time, too often these owners were themselves disenfranchised, judged low on the scale of worldly values. Evicted from work they and their ancestors had always known on farms that spread out from the Nile, these peasant farmers were victims of centralization of resources and of what Egypt scholar Alan Mikhail describes as “a dehumanization that affected both animals and humans.”22 Pushed out of their villages, men and their families ended up in the city; unskilled in any of the services demanded in urban life but acquainted with working animals, they found themselves in a Cairo awash with cheap war horses and army mules. So they put them to work and often worked them into the ground. Lao She’s novel Camel Xiangzi (Rickshaw Boy) ends with lines that could describe the situation of many of these men and animals, laborers trapped on a treadmill that kept them just one step ahead of death. “Watching a skinny stray dog waiting by the sweet-potato vendor’s carrying-pole for some peel and rootlets,” Lao She writes of the impoverished rickshaw puller, “[Camel] knew that he was just like this dog, struggling for some scraps to eat. As long as he managed to keep alive, why think of anything else?”23

  Dorothy did not know the problems to this depth or detail. Yet from this October day she would try to effect change in the lives of people who played a role in their animals’ misery, to clarify to those looking on in horror from the heights of privilege or ignorance that it was poverty, not people, that was the enemy; compassion and education were the tools for combating it and the cruelty that trails in poverty’s wake and makes the fight for survival justification for cruelty. Above all, Dorothy was moved most to see innocent animals that had fought wars they had not caused and that had been left behind through no fault of their own suffer a misery they did not deserve. She wanted to do something for them before it was too late. In so doing, the general’s wife from England was to set in motion a concept of practical compassion that outlived her lifetime. “At its last gasp,” writes Susanna Forrest of Dorothy’s achievement, “the working horse had found an ally in womankind.”24

  In memory of those working horses, let us leave Dorothy and that hot October afternoon in 1930 Cairo. Let us rewind back in time—back through the frantically hedonist 1920s, when nobody wanted to remember anything before today; back to the Great War, the end of a brief age of innocence for both humans and animals, back to the whys and wherefores of how war horses like those harnessed to misery at Ramses Station ended up in Egypt in the first place. How the triumphs and tragedies they and their soldiers experienced in the war’s last years are vividly highlighted in the story of one small mare, who served and survived in Europe, Egypt, and Palestine, and whose good luck ironically saved her from outliving the war itself.

  1

  Dawn Raiders

  By the galloping horses, nostrils wide, panting,

  Beating hooves sparking against the earth,

  The dawn raiders stir up a storm of dust,

  Attackers appearing suddenly amid the attacked.

  Man is ungrateful to his Lord

  And indeed, is witness to this.

  Indeed, he is strong in his love of wealth.

  But don’t men know that, on the day when

  what is in the graves is scattered,

  And what is in man’s breast is harvested,

  Their Lord is the only one who knows them best?

  —QURAN, CH. 100: SURAT AL-’ĀDIYĀT (THE COURSER)

  1. Cupid

  Concerning the war I say nothing—the only thing that wrings my heart & soul is the thought of the horses.…I walk round & round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured—let Him kill his human beings but how CAN HE? Oh, my horses.

  —EDWARD ELGAR1

  The astonishing thing is that in the highly mechanized 1914–18 conflict, whether in Europe or the east, cavalry was even given a role to play. Indeed, British prime minister David Lloyd George would complain in 1934, the year Dorothy Brooke founded her equine charity, of the “ridiculous cavalry obsession” of British officers in the Great War.2

  In an era of weaponry capable of blasting a unit to heaven from the other side of a valley, cavalry seemed to belong to an earlier age of the rapier and hand-to-hand combat. Geoffrey Brooke’s famous charge on Moreuil Wood in 1918 was rather more an anomaly than the norm, and certainly the carnage it caused among men and horses was no recommendation for the use of equines in combat. “Cavalry lost much in popular esteem during the War,” wrote Ernest Harold Baynes. “There was no field for cavalry’s salient characteristics.”3 Yet those characteristics were to have a use, though not in the European theater where so much of the world’s attention was focused. Thanks to these equine soldiers, the Great War “was won for the Allies beyond all question when the whirlwind campaigns in Palestine and Syria turned an enemy flank, and forced Turkey to capitulate,” weakening Germany’s foothold in the region.4

  Philosophers fancied the world captured in a dewdrop; poets have seen war’s horror and life’s hope in a soldier’s tear. Even so, the huge, unknowable story of English horses in Egypt during and after the Great War is epitomized in the brief, brave life of Cupid, a bay mare born and bred in the meadows of Essex.

  Foaled in 1909, Cupid had been given as a present to Vernon Laurie, fifteen-year-old son of City broker Ranald Laurie, in 1911. Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities in early August 1914, Cupid and three other Laurie horses—Flashlight, Nimrod, and Polly—were joined to “B” Battery 271st Brigade Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA); Ranald was commander of the local Territorial Field Artillery Brigade and was responsible for purchasing horses for it. After training in England, Cupid joined other horses selected for active service in a crowded sailing across the Channel to Le Havre, where they boarded a “filthy, damp and cold” train for St. Omer, then on to Lynde in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region.

  There, many of the horses had to be reshod since the glutinous, gluey mud had robbed them of their shoes, as with the boots of their human counterparts. It was here that Cupid, who had been exposed to gunfire in the training camp in England, first got to experience the real thing amid the rain and wind. She spent almost two months in northern France before being sent with Vernon to Marseilles, where she, Flashlight, Nimrod, and Polly boarded the ss Andriana. With them were a contingent of Australian Walers and troops and Bosche, a small yellow dog with a curly tail who had followed Vernon back from a café in Marseilles. They were all bound for Alexandria.

  The voyage lasted four days. While the seas were generally calm, there was prolonged rolling that unsettled the horses, already agitated from the stifling heat down in the horse decks. The cramped conditions could be tragic. An officer of the Second Royal Irish Regiment, Maj. Patrick Butler, was to write about one such sailing in which he saw a horse “behaving like a mad thing, [who] threatened to smash his way out of his pen.” Because of the close quarters in which all the animals were crammed, it was impracticable to use a bullet on the maddened horse, so the grooms bled him to death. “Poor beast,” added Major Butler, thinking of what awaited all the horses, “his troubles were over early.” During the sailing, the Lauries’
Nimrod, who had failed to eat, weakened and then collapsed. This had already happened with several of the horses. Even though the conditions were crowded, they did not prevent the use of a gun: the “echoing crack from a .45 revolver was heard more than a few times,” writes Martin Laurie. Nimrod could not be made to stand, though Vernon and the other men tried for an hour. So a shot rang out; Nimrod’s lifeless body was dragged overboard, and Vernon watched the corpse as it floated away in the ship’s wake, his face wet with tears.5

  By February 12, 1915, a month after the Turkish army began its march toward the Suez Canal, and a few days before they were driven back toward Beersheba in the Negev Desert, horses and men had reached port in Egypt and entrained for Cairo, whence they headed for Mena Camp in the shadow of the pyramids at Giza. During their six weeks at Mena Camp, Cupid was ridden around the ancient tombs and learned hard lessons in less interesting novelties, such as the flies and sandstorms that tormented animals and men alike.

  Bosche was not permitted in the camp (or was not well concealed enough to remain there). After some searching and asking around it was determined he could be looked after at the Cairo Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) while the regiment was at Mena Camp. Vernon described the SPCA as having in its care hundreds of horses, mules, and donkeys, as well as camels, other dogs, and even a kangaroo that had been brought along as mascot of an Australian regiment. Concern for animals was by no means unique to just a few in the British forces and did not go unnoticed among the locals. Sapper H. P. Bonser wrote of a day visit to Cairo in 1916 during which, while other soldiers visited the red light district, he and a mate fed four starving cats with meat they had bought specially, an act that touched native Cairenes standing nearby. “This caused quite a stir,” Bonser remembered. “The men made friendly noises, and a number of them offered sweetmeats.” Afterward, he wrote, whenever he and his fellow soldiers were in the neighborhood, the locals remembered their act of kindness, dubbing them “The askaris [soldiers] who fed pussini.”6