Moving Soldiers : The Physical and Emotional Role of Military Horses in First World War Soldiers' War Experience

Abstract

Horses and other equines were essential for any war effort of the early 20th century. They pulled guns and ammunition carts, carried supplies, machine guns and soldiers.

Most of them perished in the war, were killed by soldiers when unable to move on or sold to butchers when the war ended. Horses were moving human participants of the war in both physical and emotional sense.

Soldiers of the First World War frequently bonded with the working animals and many were profoundly influenced by this relationship. They formed intense attachments, sometimes deeper than the connection they had for their human comrades.

Some wrote poems to their mounts and cried over their deaths. Biographical sources show us that horses moved soldiers to tears more frequently than we would have thought.

The described attachments serve as a rebuttal of the idea of tough, emotionless military men. The scale of emotions however varied among soldiers.

Some perceived war horses as their fellow combatants whereas others disregarded them as a nuisance and beat them frequently. Until recently animals have been marginal to the discourse of war, often virtually invisible and absent from any story of war.

This paper should help fill the gap by exploring the broad scale of human-animal, inter-species relationship of soldiers and their horses amidst the frenzy of the World War. We shall ask these questions: How did the soldiers relate to their animals? How significant was the presence and proximity of an animal for the soldiers on the battlefield and what forms did their everyday coexistence take? How did the soldiers view the engagement of horses in warfare and how did they bear their suffering and deaths? How did the dynamics of human-horse interactions shape the soldiers' war experience? The author builds on her research of wide range of biographical documents, literary works and artworks of soldiers serving in British, French and Austro-Hungarian armies.