Cupid would spend April to July 1916 in the machinery-clogging sands near El Shatt (Mina’ash Shatt), later the site of an infamous World War II refugee camp, where the Suez Canal is linked to the Gulf of Suez. Despite the oppressive heat, she and the other mounts were well watered. This was thanks to the camels. Throughout the desert sorties, these animals steadily carried water and food for the horses—indeed, without them, “General Allenby himself admits that he could not have hoped either to take Beersheba or to press through Palestine after its capture.”7 On a reconnaissance mission in the desert, Cupid just missed the fate of ten horses and thirty-two camels unlucky enough to be with them. While they were gathered in one area being watered, a pair of German planes appeared without warning, spraying bullets over the terrified animals tethered to their watering troughs. A soldier was killed as well, but Cupid lived.
Six months later, the brigade marched from El Shatt north to Moascar near Ismailia and on to Kantara (El-Qantarah el-Sharqiyya) and El Gilban (Sheikh Abu Gilbân), and then in February 1917 they began their trek along the ancient caravan route into Palestine. Their menagerie now included not just Bosche but also a goose named Lordy, a friendly bird whom the men could not leave behind or even imagine wanting to eat, though few were not hungry. Lordy traveled on horseback or on mechanized transport and was fed bread scraps. No one, writes Martin Laurie, would ever have considered eating him. Nor did Bosche have to worry about keeping up; he hitched a ride with the ammunition column, “lying in the sun on top of one of the wagons and being spoilt rotten by the men who drove them.”8
The Battle of Romani, fought on August 3–5, 1916, had proved to be a decisive step forward in both the defense of the Suez Canal and the decision taken afterward to send British forces deeper into Ottoman Palestine. Australians commanded by Gen. Harry Chauvel and Turkish forces under German general Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, supported by the German Air Force, clashed in what Stuart Hadaway describes as “a First World War battle won principally by cavalry, albeit ones who used their horses to gain superior mobility before fighting on foot.”9 The fact that the horses were rarely engaged in direct combat did not keep them out of harm’s way: many died from heat exhaustion. It is terribly easy to see why. “The load carried by a Mounted Rifleman’s horse in the field is considerable,” wrote Lt. A. Briscoe Moore of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles in late 1916. Aside from the rifleman himself and his heavy kit, haversack, food, and all manner of bags, sacks, and supplies for horse and man, each horse carried a weighty bandolier of ammunition around its neck.10 Under this burden, in torrid heat, with constant shortage of water and seldom enough rest, a given desert campaign horse had more to worry about than shell-fire. “Since leaving their quiet homes in south Essex some two and a half years before,” writes Martin Laurie, “the horses and men had travelled some 3,800 miles through England, France and North Africa.” These were not, he points out, animals whose normal day would have included anything much beyond a hunting excursion, delivering beer or milk, or ploughing a field. Yet as unfamiliar to her as her new war service was, Cupid held up under her duties without apparent difficulty.11
Conditions combining sandstorms and lack of water for bathing were barely endurable, even for hardened soldiers. Sapper Bonser described how “it was impossible to see a man twenty yards away” in one of these storms, and how the sand got absolutely everywhere: “all over our perspiring bodies, sand on every mouthful of food we ate, and a sip of tepid water left sand on our lips.”12 Hence the delight of arriving at El Arish on the Mediterranean, a town of largely mud brick dwellings; the outskirts of the town were surrounded by fruit plantations. There, after pitching tents under the date palms, men and horses were able to bathe in fresh, cool saltwater waves. The relief was brief; soon the brigade was on the road again toward the ancient city of Gaza, its white minarets and white walls sharply outlined against the distant Mediterranean Sea. This lovely vision was to be smashed to pieces during the First Battle of Gaza, fought on March 26. Vernon and Cupid could only watch, since the brigade was held in reserve and under cover, but both spent another of their nine lives as enemy fliers took note of their location and directed gunners to start firing toward them. When the brigade itself was called into action, Cupid again made it through safely. The EFF was defeated in this first battle with the Turks, as well as in their second attempt in April. Needing rest, Cupid’s brigade was sent to a camp near Deir al Belah (“monastery of the date palm”), a former crusader stronghold southwest of Gaza, trying to survive the heat, the flies, and the lack of adequate water. Hot days, frigid nights, and sand “frequently as deep as their knees and hocks” made every step an ordeal.13 The third and, for the British, successful Battle of Gaza began on October 27, aided by the Royal Navy’s bombardment from the sea, and by November 7 the city was taken from the Turks. Sapper Bonser, riding through later with his cable team, remembered “an untidy dilapidated Gaza from which most men had fled. Here and there a dark face peeped stealthily from a doorway, but, apart from the troops hurrying through, it was a place of desolation.”14
Taking the city had been excruciating for everyone. “Our horses are rather pulled down by excessive work,” Vernon wrote on November 12. The animals were tasked with carrying ammunition, work that was hard on the horses in the humid heat. In what remained of the year, Martin Laurie writes, “There was very little rest for either man or beast” in the quest to pursue and capture the Turkish army.15 As the brigade prepared attack for Mulebbis (Peta Tikvah, an Orthodox Jewish religious settlement dating from the nineteenth century) on December 26, Vernon’s father wrote of a landscape soggy as a wet sponge, entirely lacking in roads, in which one lost all sense of direction and where, in the vacant sparseness, it was easy to look at the fact that men and animals were reduced to half their rations and wonder whether they would end up with nothing to eat at all in a countryside denuded by Turkish forces. Yet by January, the constant rains had abated and conditions improved to the point where the horses could be allowed to graze on fresh grass. “What a relief the green was, from the glare of the sand, and how greedily the horses cropped the sweet grass and young corn,” wrote one soldier.16 The Lauries wrote of witnessing friendly interaction between brigade members and people in one of the villages close by their camp. Commanders gave permission for horses from the brigade to be lent by day to farmers for their spring ploughing, the Turkish Army having taken all the villagers’ able-bodied animals.17 Army veterinarians did what they could for the animals, whose hooves had never been trimmed, whose unhealed pack sores from poorly fitting harnesses were never treated. Some of the men could not bear seeing these donkeys being overloaded, whipped and otherwise abused. Sapper Bonser related how one of his unit, a young soldier from Sheffield, described as “a rough handful,” actively intervened when he saw Syrians goading their donkeys with sharp packing needles. On one occasion this soldier tussled with a Maronite priest who was about to jab his donkey with a needle. Taking the priest’s clenched fist, he drove the needle into the man’s own hand, prompting him to topple with a scream off the back of the donkey. “Our young driver walked off with the needle,” Bonser wrote; it has to be wondered, however, whether this resulted in a needle-free life for the priest’s animal.18
By March, little Bosche, who had survived so many near disasters and did not even allow the first two battles of Gaza to separate him from his soldiers, had disappeared, as had the goose Lordy, also never seen again. This depressing news was counterbalanced by Ranald Laurie’s investiture in Tel Aviv with a medal awarded him for his service during the First Battle of Gaza. The ceremony took place at the Jewish Agricultural College, where the medal was presented by His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught, the popular governor general of Canada and father of Princess “Pat,” for whom the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry was named. As Ranald pointed out later, the medal was “subsequently removed and handed back to do duty at another investiture of another Division another day & so on,” lending t
he ceremony an unexpected surreality.19
By summer Vernon had been posted to command of the Division Ammunition Column (DAC), and with him Cupid reached Haifa in October and then Acre, en route to Beirut. “This part of the journey was to be very hard on the horses,” says Martin Laurie, “and the men; the weather was excessively hot and they were plagued by torrential thunderstorms.”20 Faithful Cupid went wherever her master did, sometimes with him leading her, as Vernon did when, on the way to Sidon, troops had to crawl along paths cut into seaside cliffs, stretches of which were barely wide enough for a single horse. Vernon and Cupid arrived in Beirut on October 31 to find that the Turks had surrendered the previous day. No one knew what was coming next. Germany was still very much in the fight, and it was considered possible that the men and horses who had made it this far into the eastern Mediterranean might have to ship out again for France, where most of them had started almost four years earlier. Beirut was certainly a milestone for Cupid, as Martin Laurie writes. She had been at war for four years, two months and twenty-seven days, and she had obediently and bravely traveled over four thousand miles. Ranald Laurie was disturbed by the condition of the horses after this massive journey, their sides “thin as rakes” from lack of forage and supply. Nonetheless, Cupid and Polly, though in poor shape, served in their turn as Vernon rode back and forth from the docks, accompanying convoys of feed and supplies for animals and men. They were engaged in this daily exhausting shuttle when word came, with the ringing of bells, that Germany had signed the armistice on November 11 and that hostilities were to cease at 11 a.m.21
After the jubilant evening they woke up to a morning of sober reality. “What to do with all these animals at the end of the war was a major problem,” wrote Sarah Searight. There is no evidence that the military apparatus had already totted up the theoretical expense of shipping all the horses back to where they had come from, but the decision to not bother to do so was heartlessly swift. The expense, of course, went beyond shipping the animals home. Thanks to their having been sent to places far from where they had started, all the surviving horses had to be assumed to be harboring incipient infections from the locales of battle that could never be brought home to England. The costs for quarantining them, as Sarah Searight points out, would have alone been astronomical. Though all of this was understood and, at least in theory, agreed to, nobody seemed to want to take responsibility for euthanizing the animals, which in itself threatened costs in organizational time and funds for disposal of the corpses that nobody had to offer.22 Ranald Laurie wrote home that “they will not I am sure ship any of these horses home, if they get them to Egypt they’ll turn them into hides and tallow, if we leave them here we shall have to shoot the lot. Well, my dear, so ends the Great War.”23 One Royal Yeomanry regiment held a quasi funeral at Gaza, in which “items of saddler and spurs, etc., were buried and a wooden memorial erected bearing the inscription (much abbreviated): ‘Stranger pause and shed a tear—A regiment’s heart is buried here.’”24 For reasons not explained in the Laurie record, though some of the mounts were left in Beirut with occupying forces, rendering many of their departing handlers inconsolable, Cupid, Polly, Flashlight, and other horses made it aboard the ss Huntsgreen (originally the German Derflinger, seized and renamed at Port Said after the outbreak of war). All arrived safely in Cairo on December 14, 1918.
The brigade settled in at Helmieh, site of a rest camp that included hospital facilities in the flat deserts outside Cairo. At Helmieh those men who were not critically injured or gravely ill found relief from boredom or bad memories in classes and sporting events. And their horses were not forgotten: there were races, jumping, and other equine events to keep them busy. While there, Cupid’s brigade groomed their mounts for the Armistice celebration in Cairo, which ended with a march past Gen. Sir Edmund Allenby in Opera House Square. In yet another passing brush with Great War greatness, Ranald rode Flashlight and Vernon rode Cupid under the galvanizing gaze of the Liberator of Jerusalem. The parade was a happy prelude to the Christmas party that followed back in Helmieh, yet sadly it was also the beginning of the end for Flashlight, Polly, Cupid, and the other equines stabled at the camp.25
Men began to leave for Kantara, where a camp had been established to repatriate and demobilize soldiers, and in January Vernon’s time came to depart. Before he left, Martin Laurie writes, Vernon rode Cupid as often as he could and continued to discuss with his father what could be done about bringing her back home to England with him. By the time he had to leave, they had not formulated a plan, but Vernon, as ever, was optimistic. “I have had to leave my horses at Cairo,” Vernon wrote in a letter before getting on his train, “but we have faint hopes that we may be able to get one home”—that one being Cupid. Ranald would give it all he could to make that happen, Vernon added.26
Then came news that defeated any further hopes. On February 16 Ranald wrote to Vernon that none of the horses were to be transported from Egypt. All their own animals, to the tune of fifteen, were slated either for destruction or to be handed over to the Army of Occupation, which meant they would remain in Egypt or farther afield.27 Because of this order, “many [of the horses] were therefore taken to the local markets and sold to local farmers,” writes Sarah Searight. So arose the stories of isolated cases that coalesced to become a legend, in which officers rode their mounts into the wastes of the desert and shot them rather than leave them in Egypt, a fate to which soldiers in France were no more willing to consign their mounts when the war was done.28 Indeed, one Australian Imperial Force (AIF) officer, Maj. Oliver Hogue, also known as “Trooper Bluegum,” wrote a poem encapsulating the dilemma as well as the prevailing stereotypical view of Egyptian horse handlers:
I don’t think I could stand the thought of my old fancy hack
Just crawling round old Cairo with a ‘Gippo on his back.
Perhaps some English out in Palestine may find
My broken-hearted waler with a wooden plough behind.
No, I think I’d better shoot him and tell a little lie:
“He floundered in a wombat hole and then lay down to die.”
Maybe I’ll get court-martialled but I’m damned if I’m inclined
To go back to Australia and leave my horse behind.29
The Australian government used a system of classification that, according to Jean Bou, did little more than delay the inevitable. Per age and physical condition, a given horse would be “passed on to imperial units, pooled in remount depots for later reissue or, failing that, sold. The older and unfit horses would be destroyed.” The latter animals were given a sad send-off: “manes and tails were shorn (horse hair was valuable) and their shoes removed”; then the horses were taken out and shot under the eye of a veterinary officer.30
It was as if the horses and mules stabled in Helmieh somehow sensed their coming fate.
The night of February 20–21, 1919, a violent sand storm rattled the nerves of men and animals. Mules in general are not as skittish as horses, but something—a flapping piece of canvas or being struck by flying debris—made one of them go berserk. The mule broke free of its restraints and ran through the stable complex. Ranald Laurie would point out that Cupid, for all her docility, had a very short temper when confronted by other horses. When the mule ran toward her, Cupid either stood her ground or reared up in defense. The larger mule collided with her and knocked her to the ground. Ranald brought three veterinarians to look at the injured Cupid; all agreed that there was no way to save her. Crouching beside Cupid and speaking soothing words, Ranald brought out his pistol and ended her suffering. He then asked the veterinary sergeant to save one of Cupid’s hooves. It was cleaned out and brought home to Essex, where, encased in brass, it still serves as a doorstop in the Laurie family’s home. Ranald was done with war and death. It was this part of war and death, he wrote his wife, that he hated most.31
Cupid’s war service and the story of how she died are only known to us through the fact that she remained with her owner
throughout the war, and that her owner recorded her every adventure, including her final one. Her death was a blessing in disguise. Strong horses like Cupid, who had survived deserts, disease, unremitting hard work, and lack of food and water, might well have lived many years longer. Although some of the horses at Helmieh were given over to the Army of Occupation (and we don’t know where these eventually ended up), many more, along with mules and donkeys, were sold in the Egyptian markets. Among these may have been the gharry war horses Dorothy Brooke saw on her first day in Cairo, eleven long years later. Perhaps the wounded and abused old warrior who was to capture Dorothy’s heart and move her to dedicate her life to saving working equines like him had fought, like Cupid, in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine. Only he had had the bad luck to survive.32
2. Old Bill
Conquests on earth are written by the blood of horses.
—AMAL DONQOL
Wishing to help the gharry horses at Ramses Station and finding a way to realistically do so were, as Dorothy Brooke discovered, not quite the same thing.
Even the afternoons, said to be a lady’s time to dispose of as she wished, were not Dorothy’s own: they were taken up with polo matches—Geoffrey being a preeminent player—and by a variety of other events requiring her presence. Even had she found the perfect excuse, short of being at death’s door, Dorothy’s absence from any of the above would probably have been considered disturbing, if not an affront, to the dignity and esprit de corps of the small, socially interdependent British minority in Cairo—a city in which colonialism firmly held the upper hand until forcibly removed following the Suez Crisis in 1956. Right up to that ejection, British expatriates and British troops held on to this last tattered proof of the once great military power that had been the British Empire. Part of that colonial presence was to show up crisply on time, all the time, regardless of physical weariness and emotional disengagement.
The Lost War Horses of Cairo Page 4