Horses in World War I

A Canadian cavalry recruitment poster

The use of horses in World War I reflected a transitional period in the evolution of armed conflict. During World War I (1914–1918), horse-mounted cavalry units were initially considered essential elements of military force, but over the course of the war, the perceived value of the horse in war changed dramatically, and many traditional functions of horse cavalry were replaced by mechanized armored formations. Nonetheless, horses played a significant role throughout the war, particularly in the area of logistical support.

All of the major combatants in World War I began the war with cavalry forces. Due to limited success and equipment failures, Germany and Austria-Hungary stopped using them on the Western Front soon after the beginning of the war, although they were used in a limited fashion on the Eastern Front well into the war. On the Allied side, the United States used cavalry for a limited period of time, while the United Kingdom continued to use mounted infantry and cavalry charges throughout the war. Though not particularly successful on the Western Front, Allied cavalry had some success in the Middle Eastern theatre, partially because they faced a weaker and less technologically-advanced enemy. The Ottoman Empire used cavalry extensively during the war. Russia used cavalry forces on the Eastern Front, though with limited success.

The largest use of horses in World War I was for logistical support. Horses could travel in mud and on terrain where mechanized vehicles could not. They were used for reconnaissance and carried messengers, as well as for pulling artillery, ambulances and supply wagons. Horses performed many other tasks necessary to the war effort and their presence often increased morale among the soldiers at the front. However, they were also known to contribute to disease and poor sanitation in camps through the presence of manure and dead animals. The value of horses for these tasks and the increased difficulty in replacing them was such that by 1917, it was made known to some troops that the loss of a horse was of greater tactical concern than the loss of a human soldier. Ultimately, because the Allied blockade prevented the Central Powers from importing horses to replace those lost, a lack of horses contributed to Germany's loss of the war. However, by the end of World War I, even the well supplied American army was lacking horses.

Conditions were severe for horses at the front, with horses killed by artillery fire, suffering from skin disorders, and injured by poison gas. Hundreds of thousands of horses were killed during the war, with many more being treated at veterinary hospitals and sent back to the front. Procuring equine food was a major issue, and Germany lost many horses to starvation due to lack of fodder. Due to their prevalence in the war, several memorials have been erected to commemorate the horses who died. Artists, including Alfred Munnings, extensively documented the work of horses in the war and horses also featured in the poetry of the war. Novels, plays and documentaries have also been created that feature the horses of World War I.

Cavalry

A line that stretches out of the image of tacked-up horses standing on a road. Many men are standing or resting near the horses. The road runs through a field with buildings and trees in the background.

Members of the Royal Scots Greys resting during a march in France

Prior to the war, many British tacticians realized that advances in technology were changing the style of warfare, limiting the use of cavalry, and ending the era of mounted warfare. However, many cavalry men disagreed with this assessment, and throughout the war, cavalry regiments remained at the ready despite their limited usefulness. This also resulted in scarce wartime resources being used to train and maintain cavalry regiments that were rarely used. Ultimately, the continued use of the cavalry charge as a tactical maneuver resulted in many troops and horses being lost in fruitless attacks against enemy machine guns.

Early in the war, cavalry skirmishes occurred in several areas, and horse-mounted troops were widely used for reconnaissance. While Britain's cavalry were trained to fight both on foot and mounted, most other European cavalry still relied on shock action. There were isolated instances of successful shock combat on the Western Front, where cavalry divisions also provided important mobile fire power, but "cavalry was literally indispensable" on the Eastern front and the Middle East. Even late in the war, cavalry continued to be used. For example, they harassed retreating German forces in 1918 during the Hundred Days Offensive. During this offensive, horses and tanks were sometimes used in the same battles.

Great changes in the tactical use of cavalry were a marked feature of World War I. Although cavalry was used with good effect in Palestine, at the Third Battle of Gaza and Battle of Megiddo, generally the mode of warfare changed. Tanks were beginning to take over the role of shock combat. The use of trench warfare, barbed wire and machine guns rendered traditional cavalry almost obsolete. In the years following the war most armies became mechanized, which required many cavalry regiments to be converted to armored formations. One historian writes that "the Great War brought the end of cavalry". From the Middle Ages into the nineteenth century, cavalry had dominated battlefields, but beginning as early as the American Civil War it had been apparent that their value in war was declining as artillery became more powerful and made shock charges less efficient. The Western Front of World War I made it clear that cavalry was almost useless against modern artillery, as well as being difficult to transport and supply. Nonetheless, British cavalry officers, much more so than continental European nations, were persistent in using and maintaining cavalry, believing all the way until the end of the war that mounted troops would be useful for exploiting infantry breakthroughs and under the right circumstances would be able to face machine guns. However, neither of these particular tactics proved successful.

United Kingdom

The 20th Deccan Horse drawn up in ranks during the Battle of Bazentin Ridge, 1916

Prior to World War I, Britain had increased its cavalry reserves after seeing the cavalry feats of mounted Boers during the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Horse-mounted units were used from the earliest days of the war: On August 22, 1914, the first British shot of World War I in France was fired by a cavalryman, Edward Thomas of the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, near Casteau, during a patrol prior to the Battle of Mons. Within 19 days of Britain beginning mobilization for war, on August 24, 1914, the 9th Lancers, a cavalry regiment led by David Cambell, engaged German troops with a squadron of 4th Dragoon Guards against German infantry and guns. Campbell obeyed orders to charge, though he believed the more prudent course of action was fighting dismounted. The result of the charge was a British loss of 250 men and 300 horses. On September 7, Campbell's troops charged again, this time toward the German 1st Guard Dragoons, another lancer cavalry regiment. In the same year, the British Household Cavalry took on their second to last operation that was completed on horseback—the Allied retreat from Mons. Upon reaching the Marne River and encountering the trench system, cavalry was found to be ineffective. Although entire cavalry divisions were still being formed in Britain, cavalry troops quickly became accustomed to fighting dismounted. In 1917, the Household Cavalry conducted its last mounted charge during a diversionary attack on the Hindenburg Line at Arras. Upon orders of Field Marshal Earl Haig, the Life Guards and the Blues charged into heavy machine gun fire and barbed wire and were slaughtered by the German defenders. In addition, two-thirds of the men of the 10th Hussars were lost in the charge at Arras. British cavalry continued to be used throughout the war, and the last British fatality from enemy action before the armistice went into effect was a cavalryman named George Edwin Ellison, from C Troop Royal Irish Lancers. Ellison was shot by a sniper as the regiment moved into Mons on November 11, 1918.

Despite their lackluster record in Europe, horses were indispensable to the British war effort in Palestine, particularly under Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, for whom cavalry made up a large percentage of his forces. Much of Allenby's tactics were undertaken not by British regular cavalry, but by the Desert Mounted Corps, consisting of a combination of Australian, New Zealand, Indian and English Yeomanry regiments. The Indian troops joined Allenby's forces in the spring of 1918, when several Indian cavalry regiments were transferred from the Western Front. By mid-1918, Turkish intelligence estimated Allenby to command a strength of around 11,000 cavalry. Allenby's forces crushed the Turkish armies. Some cavalry tacticians view this action as a vindication of cavalry's usefulness, but others point out that the Turks were outnumbered two to one by late 1918, and were not first-class troops.

Continental Europe

Austrian Hussars somewhere in Russia 1915

Before the war began, many continental European armies still considered the cavalry to hold a vital place in their order of battle. Prior to 1914, France and Russia expanded their mounted military units. On the side of the Central Powers, Germany added thirteen regiments of mounted riflemen, Austria-Hungary expanded their forces, and the Bulgarian army also readied the cavalry in their army.

On the Allied side, French cavalry had similar problems with horses on the Western Front as the British. The treatment of their horses by the French created additional problems. One writer said, "The French cavalryman of 1914 sat on his horse beautifully, but was no horsemaster. It did not occur to him to get off his horse's back whenever he could, so there were thousands of animals with sore backs...". Another example was General Sordet, who was accused of not letting horses have access to water in hot weather. By late August 1914, a sixth of the horses in the French cavalry were unusable due to these issues. By early September, with battered men and horses, having abandoned a crucial position in the First Battle of the Marne, Sordet was relieved of command. Later, in a June 1918 charge by French lancers, the horses were left behind and the men charged on foot.

Russia possessed thirty-six cavalry divisions when it entered the war in 1914, and the Russian government claimed that its horsemen would thrust deep into the heart of Germany. Although Russian mounted troops entered Germany, they were soon met by German forces. In the August 1914 Battle of Tannenberg, troops led by German Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and Lieutenant-General Erich Ludendorff surrounded the Russian Second Army and destroyed the mounted force of Don Cossacks that served as the special guard of Russian General Alexander Samsonov. However, other Russian cavalry units were successfully used to harass retreating Austro-Hungarian troops in September 1914, with the running battle eventually resulting in the loss of 40,000 of the 50,000 men in the Austro-Hungarian XIV Tyrolean Corps, which included the 6th Mounted Rifle Regiment. In general, Russian regular cavalry fared worse than the special units like the Cossacks, as the great distances they needed to be moved meant that they had to travel by train. It took approximately the same number of trains (around 40) to transport a cavalry division of 4,000 as it did to transport an infantry division of 16,000.

The cavalries of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria–Hungary, faced the same problems with transport and the failure of cavalry tactics as the Russians. Germany initially made extensive use of cavalry, including a lance-against-lance battle with the British in late 1914, and an engagement between the British 1st Cavalry Brigade and the German 4th Cavalry Division in the leadup to the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. That battle ended "decidedly to the disadvantages of the German cavalry", partially due to the use of artillery by the accompanying British L Battery of horse artillery. Thus, the Germans stopped using cavalry on the Western Front not long after the beginning of the war, changing in response to new, more mechanized, battle tactics. They continued to use cavalry to some extent on the Eastern Front, including probes into Russian territory in early 1915. The Austrians were forced to quit using cavalry due to large-scale equipment failures. Austrian military saddles were so poorly designed as to rub the skin off the back of any horse not already hardened to the equipment from parade ground practice, and only few weeks into the war half of all Austrian cavalry mounts were disabled, and the rest nearly so.

Ottoman Empire

In 1914, the Ottoman Turks began the war with one cavalry regiment in the Turkish army corps and four reserve regiments (originally formed in 1912) under the control of the Turkish Third Army. These reserve regiments were composed of Kurds, rural Turks and a few Armenians. The performance of the reserve divisions was poor, and in March 1915 the forces that survived were turned into two divisions totalling only two thousand men and seventy officers. Later that month, the best regiments were consolidated into one division and the rest disbanded. Nonetheless, cavalry was used by Ottoman forces throughout 1915 in engagements with the Russians, and one cavalry unit even exchanged small arms fire with a submarine crew in the Dardanelles in early 1915. Turkish cavalry was used in engagements with the British, including the Third Battle of Gaza in late 1917. In this battle, both sides used cavalry forces as strategic parts of their armies. Cavalry were included in engagements that continued through the end of the year. Cavalry continued to be used through 1918, including in conflicts near the Jordan River in April and May of that year, which the Ottomans called the First and Second Battles of Jordan, part of the leadup to the Battle of Megiddo. By September 1918, regular army cavalry forces were stationed throughout the Turkish front, and the only remaining operationally-ready reserve forces in the entire Ottoman military were two cavalry divisions.

Canada and the United States

An American soldier demonstrating a gas mask for his horse.

When World War I began, Lord Strathcona's Horse, a Canadian cavalry regiment, was mobilized and sent to England for training. Upon deployment, the regiment served as infantry in French trenches during 1915, and were not returned to their mounted status until February 16, 1916. After that, in the defense of the Somme front in March 1917, mounted troops saw action, and Lieutenant Frederick Harvey was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions. Overall, Canadian cavalry had the same difficulties as other nations in breaking trench warfare deadlocks and were of little use on the front lines. However, during March and April 1918, Canadian cavalry was essential in the open warfare initiated by German offensives that had resulted in retreat by British forces. On March 30, 1918, Canadian cavalry charged German machine gun positions in the Battle of Moreuil Wood. The charge was made by Lord Strathcona's Horse, led by Gordon Flowerdew, later posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions during the charge. Nearly three-quarters of the 100 cavalry participating in the attack were killed or wounded in the attack against 300 German soldiers.

You can't make a cavalry charge until you have captured the enemy's last machine gun.

An American observer of French cavalry tactics in 1917

By 1916, the United States Cavalry consisted of 15,424 members organized into 15 regiments, including headquarters, supply, machine-gun and rifle troops. Just prior to formally joining the war effort, the US had gained significant experience in 1916 and 1917 during the Pancho Villa Expedition in Mexico, which helped to prepare the US Cavalry for entry into World War I. In May 1917, a month after the US declaration of war, the National Defense Act went into effect, creating the 18th through the 25th US Cavalry regiments, and later that month, twenty more cavalry regiments were created. However, trench warfare and weapons that included machine guns and artillery made cavalry warfare impractical. Thus, on October 1, eight of the new cavalry regiments were converted to field artillery regiments by order of Congress, and by August 1918, twenty National Army horse units were converted to thirty-nine trench mortar and artillery batteries. Some horse units of the 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 15th Cavalry regiments accompanied the US forces in Europe. The soldiers worked mainly as grooms and farriers, attending to remounts for the artillery, medical corps and transport services. It not until late August 1918 that US cavalry entered combat. A provisional squadron of 418 officers and enlisted men, representing the 2nd Cavalry Regiment and mounted on convalescent horses, was created to serve as scouts and couriers during the St. Mihiel Offensive. On September 11, 1918, these troops rode at night through no mans land and penetrated five miles behind German lines. Once there, however, the cavalry was routed and had to return to Allied territory. Despite serving through the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, by mid-October the squadron was removed from the front due to only having 150 men remaining.

Australia and New Zealand

Australian Imperial Force light horsemen, 1914

The Anzac Mounted Division formed in Egypt in 1916 and was composed of four Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) mounted brigades from the Australian Light Horse and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade. All had fought at Gallipoli as infantry. Members of the division engaged Turkish troops at the Suez Canal in mid-1916 and had captured major Turkish strongholds at Magdhaba and Rafah by early 1917. They participated in the First, Second and Third Battles of Gaza in 1917, and in 1918 conducted raids across the Jordan River, assisted in the capture of Amman (capturing 10,300 prisoners in nine days), and reoccupied Gallipoli in December.

The division carried rifles, bayonets and machine guns, generally using horses as swift transport and dismounting to fight. Units were as small as four men, with three fighting while the fourth held the horses. However, on occasion they fought as mounted troops: At the Battle of Beersheba in Palestine in 1917, the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade made what is sometimes called "the last successful cavalry charge in history", when two regiments successfully charged Turkish trenches. They formed up over a wide area, to avoid offering a target for enemy artillery, and galloped 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) into machine gun fire, equipped only with rifles and bayonets. While some of the front ranks fell, most broke through, their horses jumping the trenches into the enemy camp. Some soldiers dismounted to fight in the trenches, while others raced on to Beersheba, to capture the town and its vital water supplies. The charge was "instrumental in securing Allenby's victory [in Palestine]".

The Australians primarily rode Waler horses, and the English cavalry officer, Lieutenant Colonel RMP Preston DSO, summed up the animals' performance in his book, The Desert Mounted Corps:

"... (November 16th, 1917) The operations had now continued for 17 days practically without cessation, and a rest was absolutely necessary especially for the horses. Cavalry Division had covered nearly 170 miles...and their horses had been watered on an average of once in every 36 hours.... The heat, too, had been intense and the short rations, 9½ lb of grain per day without bulk food, had weakened them greatly. Indeed, the hardship endured by some horses was almost incredible. One of the batteries of the Australian Mounted Division had only been able to water its horses three times in the last nine days — the actual intervals being 68, 72 and 76 hours respectively. Yet this battery on its arrival had lost only eight horses from exhaustion, not counting those killed in action or evacuated wounded. ... The majority of horses in the Corps were Walers and there is no doubt that these hardy Australian horses make the finest cavalry mounts in the world...

There were 13,000 Australian horses remaining at the end of World War I, but due to quarantine restrictions, they could not be shipped back to Australia. Two thousand were designated to be killed due to illness or age, while the remaining 11,000 were sold, most to India as remounts for the British Army. Of the 136,000 horses shipped from Australia to fighting fronts in the war, only one, named Sandy, was returned to Australia. New Zealand horses were also left behind; those not required by the British or Egytian armies were shot to prevent maltreatment by other purchasers.

Logistical support

Mules hauling supplies at Gallipoli, 1915

During World War I, horses were used to pull ambulances, carry supplies and ordnance, and act as cavalry mounts. The Royal Corps of Signals used horses to pull cable wagons, and the promptness of messenger services and dispatch riders depended on their mounts. Horses often drew artillery and steady animals were crucial to artillery effectiveness. The deep mud common in some parts of the front, caused by damaged drainage systems flooding nearby areas, made horses vital, as they were the only means of getting supplies to the front and guns moved from place to place. Between six and twelve horses were required to pull each field gun; thousands of horses were employed in this task during the war. In some instances, dummy horses were used to deceive the enemy into misreading the location of troops. At the beginning of the war, the German army depended upon horses to pull its field-kitchens, as well as the ammunition wagons for artillery brigades.

Horses and mules assisted in moving ammunition and other supplies by wagon though bad conditions. After the April 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge, one Canadian soldier recalled, "the horses were up to their bellies in mud. We'd put them on a picket line between the wagon wheels at night and they'd be sunk in over their fetlocks the next day. We had to shoot quite a number." The value of horses was known to all. In 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, men at the front understood that "at this stage to lose a horse was worse than losing a man because after all, men were replaceable while horses weren’t." Animals used in war also bolstered morale at the front, due to the soldiers' affection for them. Some recruitment posters from World War I showcased the partnership between horse and man in their attempts to gain more recruits. Despite the boost in morale, horses could also be a health hazard for the soldiers. This was due to the difficulty of sustaining high levels of hygiene around horses, and was especially noted in camps in Egypt. Horse manure was prevalent in both the battle and staging areas on several fronts, creating breeding grounds for disease-carrying insects. Manure was supposed to be buried, but fast-moving battle conditions often made this impossible. Sanitation officers were responsible for the burial of horse carcasses, among other duties.

Procurement

Unloading horses from a ship at Gallipoli, 1915

Allied forces

To meet the need for horses during World War I, Britain imported horses from Australia, Canada, the USA and Argentina, as well as requisitioning them from British civilians. However, Lord Kitchener also ordered that no horses under 15 hands (60 inches, 152 cm) be confiscated, at the request of the children of Britain, who were concerned for the welfare of their ponies. The British Remount Service, in an effort to improve the supply of potential horses for military use, provided the services of high quality stallions to British farmers for breeding their broodmares. One breed of horses that was almost wiped out by the war was the Cleveland Bay; smaller members of the breed were used to carry British troopers, while larger horses were used to pull artillery. During the war, New Zealand found that horses over 15.2 hands (62 inches, 157 cm) fared worse than those under that height. Small, well-built Thoroughbreds of 15 hands and under worked well, as did compact horses of other breeds that stood 14.2 to 14.3 hands (58 to 59 inches, 147 to 150 cm). Larger cross-bred horses were acceptable for regular work with plentiful rations, but were proven less able to withstand short rations and long journeys. Riflemen also experienced more problems with tall horses, due to the number of times they were required to mount and dismout the animals. Animals used for draught work, including pulling artillery, were also found to be more efficient when they were of medium size with good endurance than when they were tall, heavy, long-legged animals.

The continued resupply of horses was a major issue of the war. One estimate puts the number of horses that served in World War I at around six million, with a large percentage of them dying due to war-related causes. In 1914, estimates put Britain's horse population at between 20,000 and 25,000. This required them to call upon the US to help with remount efforts, even before the US had formally entered the war. Between 1914 and 1918, the US sent almost one million horses overseas, and another 182,000 horses were taken overseas with American troops. This deployment seriously depleted the country's equine population. Only 200 returned to the US, with 60,000 being killed outright. By the middle of 1917, Britain had procured enough animals to have possession of 591,000 horses and 213,000 mules, as well as almost 60,000 camels and oxen. Britain's Remount Department spent 67.5 million pounds on purchasing, training and delivering horses and mules to the front. The British Remount Department became a major multinational business and a leading player in the international horse trade through supplying horses to not only the British Army, but also to Canada, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, and even a few to the United States. Shipping horses between the United States and Europe was both costly and dangerous; American Expeditionary Force officials calculated that almost seven times as much room was needed per ton for animals than for average wartime cargo, and over 6,500 horses and mules were drowned or killed by shell fire on Allied ships that were attacked by the Germans. In turn, New Zealand lost around 3 percent of the nearly 10,000 horses shipped to the front during the war.

Due to the high casualty rates, even the well-supplied American army was facing a deficit of horses by the final year of the war. After the American First Army, led by General John J. Pershing, pushed the Germans out of the Argonne Forest in late 1918, they were faced with a shortage of around 100,000 horses, effectively immobilizing the artillery. When Pershing asked Ferdinand Foch, Marshal of France, for 25,000 horses, he was refused. It was impossible to obtain more from the United States, as shipping space was limited, and Pershing's senior supply officer stated that "the animal situation will soon become desperate."

Central Powers

An Ottomon cavalry charge in the Sinai, 1916

Prior to World War I, Germany had increased its reserves of horses through state-sponsored stud farms and annuities paid to individual horse breeders. These breeding programs were designed specifically to provide high-quality horses and mules for the German military. These efforts, and the horse-intensive nature of warfare in the early 20th century, resulted in an increase in the ratio of horses to men in the German army, from one to four in 1870 to one to three in 1914. The breeding programs allowed the Germans to provide all of their own horses at the beginning of the war. The horses were considered army reservists too, as all horse owners had to register them regularly, and the army knew where all horses were at all times. In the first weeks of the war the German army mobilized 715,000 horses and the Austrians 600,000; the Russian military topped them all by gathering over a million horses in August 1914. Overall, the ratio of horses to men among all of the belligerent nations was estimated at one to three.

The only way for Germany to import large numbers of horses after the start of the war was through conquest. Over 375,000 horses were taken from German-occupied French territory during the war for use by the German military. Captured Ukrainian territory provided another 140,000. The Ardennes was used to pull artillery in World War I for the French and Belgian armies. Their calm, tolerant disposition, combined with their active and flexible nature, made them an ideal artillery horse. The breed was considered so useful and valuable that when the Germans established the Commission for the Purchase of Horses in October 1914 to capture Belgian horses, the Ardennes was one of two breeds specified as important, the other being the Brabant. However, the Germans were not able to capture the Belgian royal horses, as these were successfully evacuated, though they captured enough horses to disrupt Belgian agriculture and breeding programs. Horses used for the transport of goods were also taken, resulting in a fuel crisis the next winter as there were no horses to pull coal wagons. The Germans sold some of their captured horses at auction. Ultimately, due to the Allies preventing the import of remounts to Germany, the Germans ran out of horses. This led to an inability to move supplies and artillery and was a contributing factor to their loss of the war.

Casualties

British horse and human casualties after the Battle of Le Cateau

For Britain, horses were considered so valuable that if a soldier's horse was killed or died he was required to cut off a hoof and bring it back to his commanding officer to prove that the two had not simply become separated. Nevertheless, battle losses of horses were approximately 25 percent of all war-related equine deaths between 1914 and 1916. Disease and exhaustion accounted for the remainder, although during certain battles cavalry losses were quite heavy. Germans specifically targeted horses with gunfire. East Africa saw the highest death rates, with 290% of the original military stock of animals dying in 1916 alone, mainly due to infection from the tsetse fly. This number was higher than 100% due to additional horses being requisitioned and sent to the front, where they had a high attrition rate. On average, Britain lost around 15 percent (of the initial military stock) of their animals each year of the war (killed, missing, died or abandoned), with losses at 17 percent in the French theatre. This compared to 80 percent in the Crimean War, 120 percent in the Boer War and 10 percent in peacetime. During some periods of the war, 1,000 horses per day were arriving in Europe as remounts for British troops, to replace horses lost. Other horses, having collapsed from exhaustion, would drown in ankle-deep mud, too tired to lift their heads high enough to breathe. Equine casualties were especially high during battles of attrition, such as the 1916 Battle of Verdun between French and German forces. In one day in March, 7,000 horses were killed by long-range shelling on both sides, including 97 killed by a single shot from a French naval gun. By 1917, Britain had over a million horses and mules in service, but harsh conditions, especially during winter, resulted in heavy losses, particularly amongst the Clydesdales, which drew the guns. Over the course of the war, Britain lost over 484,000 horses, one horse for every two men.

Feeding horses was a major issue, and horse fodder was the single largest commodity shipped to the front by some countries, including Britain. Horses ate around ten times as much food by weight as a human, and hay and oats further burdened already overloaded transport services. In 1917, Allied operations were threatened when horse feed rations were reduced due to German submarine activity restricting supplies of oats from North America, combined with poor Italian harvests. The British rationed hay and oats, although their horses were still issued more than those from France or Italy. Germany faced an even worse fodder crisis, as they had underestimated the amount of food they needed to import and stockpile before the beginning of the war. Sawdust was mixed with food during times of shortage, and many animals died of starvation. Some feed was taken from captured territories in the east, and more from the British during the advances of the 1918 spring offensive.

Many horses died as a result of the conditions at the front—of exhaustion, drowning, becoming mired in mud and falling in shell holes. Other horses were stolen after their riders were killed. Horses also endured poor feeding and care, poison gas attacks that injured their respiratory systems and skin, and skin conditions such as mange. When gas warfare was first begun in 1915, nose plugs were improvised for the horses to allow them to breathe during attacks. Later, several types of gas masks were developed by both the Central and Allied nations, although horses often confused them with feedbags and destroyed them. Soldiers found that better-bred horses were more likely to suffer from shell shock and act up when exposed to the sights and sounds of war than less-well-bred animals, who often learned to lie down and take cover at the sound of artillery fire. Veterinary hospitals were established to assist horses in recovering from shell shock and battle wounds, but thousands of equine corpses still lined the roads of the Western Front. During one of the war years, 120,000 horses were treated for wounds or disease by British veterinary hospitals alone. Ambulances and field veterinary hospitals were required to care for the horses, and horse trailers were first developed for use on the Western Front as equine ambulances. Disease was also a major issue for horses at the front, with Equine influenza, ringworm, sand colic, sores from fly bites, and anthrax among the illnesses that affected them.

At the end of the war, many older horses were killed, and younger horses were sold to slaughterhouses or to locals, often upsetting soldiers who had to give up their beloved mounts. Many of these decommissioned horses were sold to French butchers.

Legacy

An Australian memorial to ANZAC troops in World War I

The horse is the primary animal associated with the war, and memorials have been erected to their service, including that at St. Jude on the Hill, Hampstead, which bears the inscription "Most obediently and often most painfully they died — faithful unto death." Another memorial to the men of the Australian Light Horse Brigade and New Zealand Mounted Rifles, as well as two other corps representing aviation and camel riders, is the Desert Mounted Corps Memorial, or Light Horse Memorial, in Canberra, Australia. This memorial commemorates the men in these corps that died between 1916 and 1918 in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and was originally located in Port Said, Egypt, where it was mostly destroyed during the 1956 Suez War. A piece from the original memorial, a shattered horse's head, was brought back to Australia and used as part of a new statue in the A is for Animals exhibition honoring animals who have served with the Australian military. The exhibition also contains the preserved head of Sandy, the only horse to return to Australia after World War I. The Animals in War Memorial in London commemorates animals, including horses, that served with the British and their allies in all wars, including World War I. The inscription reads: "Animals In War. This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time. They had no choice."

The Canadian Forestry Corps invited war artist Alfred Munnings to tour their work camps in France, and he produced drawings, watercolors and paintings of their work, including Draft Horses, Lumber Mill in the Forest of Dreux in 1918. Munnings was sent to France in early 1918 as an official war artist with the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. Forty five of his paintings were later displayed at the Canadian War Records Exhibition at the Royal Academy, many of which featured horses in war. Many other artists created works of art that featured the horses of World War I, including Umberto Boccioni with Charge of the Lancers and Terence Cuneo with his celebrated postwar painting of the saving of the guns at Le Cateau during the Retreat from Mons. In 1916, artist Fortunino Matania was commissioned by the Blue Cross to paint an image that would be used to raise money to help care for suffering war horses in Europe. In 1917, the organization purchased the iconic image Goodbye Old Man from Matania, and the picture was published in magazines worldwide. The painting was accompanied by a poem, also featuring the plight of the horse in war, called The Soldier's Kiss. Writing poetry was a means of passing the time for some soldiers, and the horses of World War I figured prominently in several poems. In 1982, Michael Morpurgo wrote the novel War Horse, about a cavalry horse in the war. The book was later adapted into a successful play of the same name at the Royal National Theatre in London, which then moved to the New London Theatre, and may be adapted into a screenplay. In January 2010, the History Channel aired a documentary entitled The Real War Horse, depicting the horses of World War I.

References

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