The Lost War Horses of Cairo

by Grant Hayter-Menzies

  Dorothy had the gift of a highly developed imagination linked to an empathic heart. This gift gave her a theoretical sense not just of an animal’s suffering, but it seemed to transfer directly to her how it felt to have lamed or broken legs, untreated sores, hunger and thirst, what she believed was an English horse’s longing for the green and temperate island that was its native home. At the sight of any former war horse in Egypt, she would work back through time to what the animal’s life may have been—from fields or hunting or the easy routine of pulling a milk float; then to the mud and sand of European and Middle Eastern battlefields and later being auctioned away from everything familiar, with years of toil and pain to follow for those too strong to die quickly. For the bleached bones of the desert skeleton, she didn’t need imagination to know that the body that had clothed it had not started its life where it had ended, in a rubbish-filled field outside the Egyptian capital. This horse had been one of the survivors of the Great War. Sold or abandoned, it had worked for who knew how many weeks, months or years, and then it had died here amid the stubble and rubble, its bones picked clean by scavengers, sun, and wind.

  This long-dead horse gave Dorothy a revelation different to what she had experienced with Old Bill. She knew she could probably have gone on doing what she was able to do for the war horses brought in to the SPCA. She could comfort the animals as best she could in the time she had available, could keep finding the money to buy and euthanize the hopelessly disabled or sick or those who had given up. After all that she had already done, Dorothy could have easily sat back and said to herself, “At least I’ve kept a few of them from dying in the desert, on a rubbish heap, like this animal did,” and she could have felt justified in believing that she had done as much as could be expected of a foreign woman in a country with many more pressing problems to solve than the fates of a few hundred old war horses. But Dorothy Brooke was not a person to sit back and be satisfied with the results of any endeavor. She had felt the pull of a superhuman responsibility, not unlike what had driven her two husbands and countless men and women to offer their lives in service to the Great War, not unlike what had brought Alfred Branch from what could have been an untroubled existence in England to a daily battle with recalcitrant cultural obstacles and entrenched traditions in Egypt. Or, considering where she had found the horse’s bones, the pull was like the story of a famous local holy man of whom Dorothy perhaps had already heard—the legend of Simon the Tanner, mover of the Mokattam Hills.

  In the tenth century the Caliph Abu Tamim Ma’ad al-Mu’izz Li-Dinillah, better known as al-Moezz, sponsored a religious debate between the Coptic Christian patriarch Abraham and a Jewish vizier to the Fatimid court named Yaqub ibn Killis. The latter invited the patriarch to prove the truth of one of the best known parables in the New Testament. In Matthew 17:20 Jesus is quoted as saying, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” Prove it, said Yaqub to Abraham. The caliph agreed with his vizier, proclaiming that unless the patriarch could move Mokattam, the entire Coptic community would be slain. In prayer, Abraham had a vision of the Virgin Mary, who told him that if he could find a one-eyed water carrier in the marketplace, this man would move the mountain. Abraham found such a man in Simon the Tanner. So strictly did he hold to Old Testament precepts that he had once dashed out one of his eyes for some sin rather than suffer the torments of hell. Taken to the mountain by Abraham, in the presence of the caliph and his guards, Simon the Tanner told the patriarch to cry for mercy three times, and the mountain would be moved. Abraham did this, and the mountain shifted, to the wonder of all. But when he looked for Simon, he was nowhere to be found. The moral of the story: his physical presence was not needed. His faith had been great enough to move the mountain and save his community.

  That day in the desert, looking down at the skull of an English horse, Dorothy recognized the tiny mustard seed of her own belief—the seed that, though smallest of all, could grow into a tree large enough for birds to roost in. Riding home to Heliopolis later with Geoffrey and Pinkie, she resolved on two missions. First, she would write a letter that would alert the world outside Egypt to the horrors she had seen in the streets of the city and in the stables of the SPCA. Second, she would arrange to meet Dr. Branch, chairman in charge of the SPCA, whose help she needed if her plan to save the lost war horses of Cairo was ever to succeed. She had no reason to believe that either plan would work out. But for the sake of Old Bill and of the bones of an English horse bleaching in the desert sun, she had to try.

  3. Old War Horse Fund

  The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.

  —ÉMILE ZOLA

  Dorothy went to see Dr. Branch at his office at the Royal Agricultural Society (RAS), a triangular complex of whitewashed European-style office blocks and exhibition halls located on the lushly green southern tip of Gezira Island in the Nile. Founded in 1908, the RAS was set up to ensure breeding standards for Arabian horses, writes Judith Forbis, “and the Horse Commission was established in 1892 with Prince Omar Toussoun at the helm.” Through these means, and with the guidance of Dr. Branch, “the best descendants of the horses originally imported by Abbas Pasha and Ali Pasha Cherif were gathered together by its dedicated leaders.”1

  Besides the breeding and care of royal Arab horses and Egyptian bulls that came under his supervision, Dr. Branch oversaw animals such as sheep and chickens. Indeed these animals, as Dorothy recalled, were not always properly located in their pens but were often literally on the loose in Branch’s office. This was partly due to the fact that when Branch was at his desk, his door was open to all and sundry. “One walked without ceremony into his sanctum,” wrote Spooner. It was a sanctum in which one might find Branch at his desk, surrounded not just by ordinary office furniture but often by such creatures as a friendly fat-tailed sheep, some turkeys pecking at the flies which buzzed the room or at one’s clothing in passing, and a playful young dog whose gamboling offered sharp contrast to Branch’s habitually serious expression.2

  This was how Dorothy first laid eyes on him, surrounded by some of the animals under his care.

  To complete the endearing eccentricity of this first impression, Branch sat amid his menagerie wearing an incongruously formal coat of pale silk, coolly unwrinkled in the torrid heat, on his head a red tarboosh, the tasseled conical felt hat worn by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Most men wore their tarboosh with a dignified verticality; Branch’s was habitually cocked slightly to one side. Coupled with his challenging stance and direct gaze, the tilted tarboosh seemed to state, “I’m not like anyone you’ve ever met before, or will ever meet again.” Rumor had it that Branch was known to be a “character,” befitting this appearance, as an American visitor discovered around the same time as Dorothy’s visit. When entrepreneur and horse breeder Henry Babson visited Branch at his office in 1932, he and a friend were taken down a corridor, at the remote end of which sat Branch, immersed in a sheaf of documents. Only when the men stood in front of him did he suddenly bark at them, “What do you know about Arab horses?” then grinning at their startled discomfiture.3

  Branch seems to have delivered much the same performance for Dorothy. After she had circled her way past the fat-tailed sheep and the friendly pup, Dorothy arrived at Branch’s desk. All at once he looked up and bellowed, “Well, and what can I do for you?” chuckling at his joke as he offered her a seat.4 Spooner hints that some of Dorothy’s anxiety about requesting Branch’s help lay in the fact that he was chairman of the SPCA managing committee; his own opinion undoubtedly informed the committee’s decision to allow seized war horses to return to their owners if judged to be still “useful,” a position with which Dorothy could not have disagreed more. It was possible he would tell her that her ideas were worthless, that there were no more war horses left, or that t
hey were too difficult to find and would cause red tape for the SPCA that he would rather not bother with. There was also the fact that Branch, having lived in Egypt for so many years, so long he was more Egyptian than English, might laugh at her expat naïveté. Did she actually think she could make a difference in a culture she couldn’t begin to understand, which he with all his years here had yet to bring under his own control?

  But Branch surprised Dorothy. He told her that he already knew all about the war horses of Cairo. In fact, their suffering was “the most damned-awful scandal that could be found anywhere in the world,” he pronounced angrily, tarboosh tassel swinging. That these horses were still in circulation was, Branch said, an outrage on humanity. He confirmed something else. Dorothy told him she had been assured that there were no more than a few hundred former war horses extant throughout Egypt, making it seem to her a relatively easy job to gather them up. Branch insisted that this was the correct number—but as Dorothy was to discover, he and received wisdom were off by thousands. But for now, she took comfort in this confirmation that the task of rescuing the animals might not be as insurmountable as she assumed.

  The next challenge was to show Branch a letter she had brought with her.

  Returning home from her ride in the desert, Dorothy had sat down at her desk in Heliopolis and poured out her heart to the English public in a letter appealing for financial help to rescue the war horses of Cairo. She had never written such a letter, or anything intended for public distribution. So she chose her words and her strategy carefully. For one thing, she was up against another crucial and popular appeal for funding. Dorothy’s letter, which she planned to send to the Morning Post (later the Daily Telegraph), opens by referencing a war horse awareness campaign that was then spreading through Britain. Concerned citizens had expressed a common wish to fund a monument in memory of the horses who had served and died in the Great War, for which a large amount of money was needed. And there was a parallel movement: other British people were lobbying for bringing back to England war horses left behind in France and Belgium, where many had been seen laboring or, worse, being conducted to the abattoirs that had horrified Ada Cole. “Letters to the press were full of suggestions” about all sort of memorials, writes Sarah Searight; already a monument had been raised in Brussels to memorialize messenger pigeons. One letter writer suggested that Grand National winnings should be channeled toward funding an equine monument in England. There seemed to be little room in people’s imaginations or hearts for the horses still living in the east.5

  Dorothy assumed this apparent dearth was because the public were understandably uninformed about a scandal that the British government was not particularly keen to advertise. In her letter, she uses this topic of memorials as her jumping off point. Making it clear that she respects the idea of a war horse monument, she points out that there were still alive in Egypt hundreds of horses, mules, and donkeys not made of bronze but of tired and elderly flesh and bone, animals whose service in the war should have ensured them release from work, not to mention relief from pain. Carefully but firmly, Dorothy explains that such comfort could best come through the funding not of monuments in an England most of these horses would never live to see again, but of care for them in their last days in Egypt, the place British forces had chosen to leave them behind.

  The letter, published on April 16, 1931, is worth quoting in full, as it lays out Dorothy’s entire vision—the problem she faced as well as the solution the public could help her achieve:

  There have been several references lately in the columns of The Morning Post as to the possibility of raising a memorial to horses killed in the War. May I make a suggestion?

  Out here, in Egypt, there are still many hundreds of old Army Horses sold of necessity at the cessation of the War. They are all over twenty years of age by now, and to say that the majority of them have fallen on hard times is to express it very mildly.

  Those sold at the end of the war have sunk to a very low rate of value indeed: they are past “good work” and the majority of them drag out wretched days of toil in the ownership of masters too poor to feed them—too inured to hardship themselves to appreciate, in the faintest degree, the sufferings of animals in their hands.

  These old horses were, many of them, born and bred in the green fields of England—how many years since they have seen a field, heard a stream of water, or a kind word in English?

  Many are blind—all are skeletons.

  A fund is being raised to buy up these old horses. As most of them are the sole means of a precarious livelihood to their owners, adequate compensation must, of necessity, be given in each case. An animal out here, who would be considered far too old and decrepit to be worked in England, will have before him several years of ceaseless toil—and there are no Sundays or days of rest in this country. Many have been condemned and destroyed by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (not a branch of the RSPCA), but want of funds necessitates that all not totally unfit for work should be restored to their owners after treatment.

  If those who truly love horses—who realise what it can mean to be very old, very hungry and thirsty, and very tired, in a country where hard, ceaseless work has to be done in great heat—will send contributions to help in giving a merciful end to our poor old war heroes, we shall be extremely grateful; and we venture to think that, in many ways, this may be as fitting (though unspectacular) a part of a War Memorial as any other that could be devised.

  Dorothy passed her letter to Branch, who read it in silence. If there was much about him that was inscrutable and unpredictable, it was obvious to Dorothy that he recognized the need for publicizing the problem and that he appreciated the logic of Dorothy’s plan for how to solve it. When he finished, Branch told her he approved of everything she had written. Indeed, Branch was so moved he promised Dorothy that he could find all the former war horses that existed anywhere in the region around the capital. “I know every blackguard in Cairo,” he claimed. “I’ll lay my hands on every English horse.” There was just one catch. He could do his part only if she did hers: raise the money necessary to buy all the horses he found.6

  Money was already at the top of a long and troubling list that Dorothy carried around in her head, and it had to be addressed before she could begin to grapple with any of the other issues. The important thing right now was that she had Branch’s promise of help. She had verified his real concern for the horses, and he had given her letter a passing grade. She assured Branch that she would find the money he needed to fulfill his side of the bargain.

  Folded, sealed, stamped, and addressed to the Morning Post, the letter, which included a photograph of Old Bill, was dropped by Dorothy into a post box near Branch’s office.

  The Brookes employed a butler, Ahmed, whose duties included retrieving and delivering the daily mail, and Ahmed was as keen to watch for a response to the Morning Post appeal as Dorothy was.

  Glenda Spooner implies that in the first few weeks after Dorothy had mailed her letter, she and Ahmed were constantly on the qui vive for what they assumed would be at least a few letters and, perhaps, donations to the cause. Then, when nothing came, they turned their attention to the respective exigencies of their lives. Dorothy’s “social chains,” in particular, bound her to a round of entertaining, sporting events, and parties, in between which she spent her free time at the Cairo SPCA, trying to help the battered old war horses brought in by owners or police and trying to find money in order to buy the ones that needed help the most.

  Waiting for a response to her first letter didn’t mean Dorothy stopped writing other appeals, and she was doing just that when Ahmed entered the drawing room one morning with the mail. She acknowledged him, then did a double take. Ahmed was carrying not a tray with a few envelopes on it but a stack of them just barely held in place between his arms and chin. “Much post, more outside,” Ahmed told her in delight. “Postman very pleased—think madam’s birthday.”7

  Dorothy had ne
ver received so many letters at one time. She asked Ahmed to place what he had on the dining table and bring in the remainder, while she sat down armed with her letter opener. There was no telling what the envelopes might contain. Would there be notes finding fault with her suggestion that living, starving horses deserved at least the same attention and monetary support as memorial bronze ones? Would there be people who assumed she had a lot of money and wondered why she wasn’t spending her own fortune on caring for the animals, whose care she so easily commended to the public’s attention? But she need not have worried. Without exception, the tenor of the correspondence was complete support for the war horses’ rescue; and almost without exception, each note contained a donation to be used for that purpose.

  Ahmed, smiling ear to ear, happily heaved another stack of mail onto the table.

  “The campaign caught the public imagination,” writes Sarah Searight. In fact, it prompted letters to the Morning Post from supporters asking for more help on Dorothy’s behalf. One of these, a Mrs. Hall, wrote what stands as a good example of most readers’ reactions to Dorothy’s original electrifying letter. “We must dash at the business,” she insisted, “and not let one needless pitilessly hot week prolong [the animals’] suffering.” And readers paid attention; more than that, they, too, paid in donations to the cause. Even King George V and Queen Mary would be moved to donate funds from this time forward.8