Canadian General Seely - 'The sombre close of the Battle of the Somme was cruel to horses no less than men. The roads were so completely broken up by alternate frost, snow and rain, that the only way to get ammunition to the forward batteries was to carry it up in panniers slung on horses. Often these poor beasts, who were led forward, in long strings with three shells on each side of them, would sink deep into the mud. Sometimes, in spite of all their struggles, they could not extricate themselves, and died where they fell.'

'Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the man on a horse.' - Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from 1915 to the end of the war.

IT is easy to look back in hindsight and judge decisions made by commanders and politicians in the Great War that led to the slaughter of millions as either 'incompetence' - in its kindest form - or downright criminal at the more extreme.

However, many of those decisions were made at a time when the 'killing' industry of mass war was in a transitional stage - when mobility, much dependent on the horse, began to give way to the evolving motorised vehicle and tank; at the same time the mass production artillery and machine-gun shells and bullets facilitated death on, up until then, an unimagined scale.

Warring factions were entrenched facing each other for a 400 mile line ranging from Switzerland to the North Sea - when either side looked to penetrate the front before the cavalry regiments moved into 'mob' up in the big breakthrough.'

War Horses, written by South Devon author Simon Butler, comes up with some fascinating snippets of information - for example the British Army, at the outset of the carnage faced a shortage of horses to feed its war machine - somewhat down to the fact that for decades — including the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s - the British Government, in their wisdom allowed the sale for tens of thousands of horses on to the Continent. Such was the shortage in 1914 the British Army had to rely on the open market in Britain to acquire 469,000 animals - including imports from USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, Portugal and Spain.

Butler tells of the farcical situation where at the beginning of the war when motor transport commandered were short of magnetos and they were duly purchased by the Army by Bosch of Germany!

It is a well documented fact that an estimated ten million fighting men, almost 800,000 of them British, died in the First World War. Perhaps a lesser known one is that on the Western Front alone a total of a million horses died. Of those used by the British Army, themselves numbering almost a million, only around 60,000 are said to have been returned to Britain at the war's end.

As the introduction to this book says: 'Alongside this tide of human cannon fodder was formed an equally large army of horses and mules – transport animals and cavalry mounts essential to the bloody business ahead.

While men cheerfully volunteered in their tens of thousands, similar numbers of horses were being stripped from farms, liveries, hunt stables and from private ownership, packed on to ships and sent overseas. More than eight million animals were thus engaged in the war worldwide.'

The War Horses concentrates upon those groups of animals who were requisitioned rather than those 'professionally' employed by the cavalry, in other words the horses, mules and donkeys who took on the drudgery of heaving rations, guns and munitions up to the front line, returning with wounded and maimed men.

The author draws upon more than 200 photographs and eye-witness accounts to illustrate the actuality of war and the vital role played by the horse on the Western Front.

Poignant memoirs reveal the bond formed between the fighting men and the animals in their care; remarkable stories of compassion and kindness set against the harrowing background of 'The War to End All Wars'.

This is an exceptional book - well written and researched, beautifully illustrated and exquisitely produced — certainly worth the £19.99.

Published by Halsgrove. ISBN 978 0 85704 084 8

JOHN

HUTCHINS