This is my second post on horses at war. If you missed part 1, you can read it here. To make sure you don’t miss future newsletters — or to support this work with a paid subscription — push the subscribe button!
After his first voyage to the Americas, Christopher Columbus made a quick turnaround. In 1492, of course, he had happened upon lands that he thought were ripe for exploitation — he quickly decided that both these islands’ natural resources and their people could make him and his royal sponsors very rich. So Columbus left behind a few dozen settlers in Hispaniola, went back to Spain, and raised money and men for a second trip to the Americas.
This time, he made sure to bring horses.
For Columbus and his fellow Spaniards, horses were an essential part of the formula for subjugating these new lands. The Spanish army had just finished conquering Granada, where its heavy cavalry had been incredibly effective. Now the Spanish would take horses across the Ocean Sea to dominate a new group of people.
Let’s spare a thought for the horses on this voyage. They were likely trapped in small pens, unable to move much, for well over a month, while their ships heaved on the ocean’s waves. When they arrived in America, they were lowered over the side of their ship in a sling until their hooves hit the beach. What a terrifying trip it must have been.
When Columbus returned to Hispaniola, he found that the settlers he had left behind were dead. He used his horses to intimidate the native people of the island who had killed the Spaniards. A Spanish account described the encounter this way:
A great number of fine horses-fleet for the course and strong to bear armour-had been brought out by the Spaniards. These horses had plated bits, trappings of gay colors, and straps highly polished. The formidable appearance of these animals was not without terror to the Indians, for they suspected that they fed on human flesh.
Whether the natives really thought the horses were going to eat them, they were right to be afraid — the horse would be a crucial tool in the European subjugation of the Americas.
When Hernan Cortes landed his troops in Mexico, horses were a key part of his strategy. Armored Spanish soldiers mounted on horses towered above native people, who may have even thought that the Spanish horsemen were mythical creatures. The warhorse was a key instrument in Cortes’ conquest of a people whose military forces vastly outnumbered his.
The Americas, you see, were devoid of horses — they had once existed in the Western Hemisphere but were probably hunted to death ten thousand years ago — giving Europeans a dramatic advantage over native peoples. The closest thing to a horse in the Americas before the Spanish arrived was the llama, which is less than half the size of a horse and unsuited to carry a human on its back. The horse was probably as important in those early days as the famous triad of guns, germs, and steel.
But the Spanish didn’t have a monopoly on warhorses for long — native peoples all around the Americas soon acquired horses and adapted their lifestyles and warfare to these newly introduced beasts.
The story of the horse’s introduction into the Americas is just one way in which the warhorse continued to shape the modern world. In fact, horses — much to their misfortune — were at the center of human conflict deep into the twentieth century. Even deep into the age of mechanized war, there were countless horses involved in warfare, risking their lives and toiling as parts of conflicts that they had no way of understanding.
The European war horse was, in many ways, artificial. Europeans relied on a supply of horses from the steppes of central Eurasia and the Middle East. These animals were imported at great expense into Europe and carefully bred for size and strength. The breeding often went wrong — too much inbreeding gave the horses problems, and it was quite expensive to keep horses out of service for breeding purposes.
Many European horses weren’t strong enough to carry a person on their backs, and the wild horses there tended to be quite small. Therefore horses like these, shown winning the Battle of Hastings in the Bayeux Tapestry, were representative of an immense investment of time and money into creating a war machine made of horseflesh:
By the end of the Middle Ages, strategists had found ways to counter cavalry — mostly with longbowmen and guns. Despite this fact, horses continued to be at the center of warfare, as auxiliaries to tightly drilled infantry formations and as beasts of burden. We can see the role of horses in this drawing of the fearsome Spanish tercio formations of the 1500s and 1600s, which helped to turn Spain into one of the world’s dominant powers (this depicts the battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600)
But modern warfare was never quite as orderly as the image above makes it seem.
We obviously don’t have photographs from battles during the 17th century, so we have to rely on paintings, which were usually based on secondhand accounts of the conflicts and can only hint at the realities of war. Still, they give a sense of the chaos humans and horses endured on the battlefield, replete with loud cannonfire, people fighting and falling, and, of course, horses — some charging, some panicking, some dying, some running loose — amidst the mess of human conflict.
This anonymous painting of the siege of Vienna in 1683 attempts to convey the chaos of a battle with tens of thousands of horses. It was the site of the largest single cavalry charge in history, in which 18,000 Polish winged hussars barreled down on the Ottoman forces, breaking them.
By the Napoleonic Wars, armies had grown — and so had the number of horses that accompanied them. Napoleon’s army at Waterloo, for example, had nearly 50,000 horses — about one for every three men. Only half of them were cavalry horses; the rest hauled artillery through the mud or carried supplies for the army.
William Sadler’s painting of Waterloo demonstrates the centrality of horses amidst the carnage of battle.
Elizabeth Thompson’s “Scotland Forever!” centers the horses — look in their eyes and you can see the adrenaline flowing — in the charge of the Royal Scots at Waterloo:
And while the painting above highlights the individual horses and soldiers, this painting of Napoleon’s cavalry stretching as far as the eye can see in their preparation for the Battle of Eylau gives a sense of the sheer number of horses that these armies demanded.
Though most of these battlefield artists try to show the horses as part of an undifferentiated mass, some war horses became celebrities in their own right. Napoleon’s horse, Marengo, was named after the battle in which Napoleon first rode him to safety. Marengo features in one of the most famous paintings of Napoleon, David’s image of Napoleon crossing the Alps:
Marengo was representative of many of his fellow warhorses. He was acquired at great expense, imported from Egypt because of his desirable bloodline. He suffered eight wounds in battle. Even though he looks rather spooked in the image above, he was apparently known for his steadiness and calm in a fight. Perhaps this is because French military trainers terrorized horses early in their lives, shooting guns next to their ears, flashing swords in front of their faces, and letting dogs run amok around their feet. Only those who could remain calm were selected for Napoleon, who was not a very good rider — he was said to handle a horse “like a butcher.”
When you think of twentieth-century warfare, you probably think about artillery and tanks and planes, not horses. But the horse was an integral part of the major wars of the 1900s, often in much larger numbers than had been seen in previous centuries. While in the early modern period, horses had been employed as a type of war machine, in the twentieth century, they found themselves among the machines.
The wars of the 20th century weren’t just bigger than those that had come before, they were more global, which means horses were moving in huge numbers all over the world. Check out this image from the Boer War in South Africa of a horse being unloaded in Port Elizabeth for the British army. What must this have been like for the horse?
As many as 360,000 horses were brought to South Africa for the British war effort; 300,000 horses died in the three-year war. They were shot in combat, but also ridden to death (500 died this way in one battle) or killed and eaten by starving troops. Many simply died because their handlers didn’t manage them well after a long and draining ocean voyage. According to the Boer War Memorial, “the average life expectancy of a British horse, from the time of its arrival in Port Elizabeth, was around six weeks.”
Many horses, of course, didn’t even survive the journey by ship and their bodies were unceremoniously thrown overboard:
Though it is often known as the first mechanized war, World War I involved more horses than any war in history. Before the fighting started, the British army only had 20,000 horses. By the end of the war, six million horses had served the war effort on all sides. The United States exported enough horses to combatant countries that there was a noticeable shortage of the animals in America. The war was as deadly for horses as it was for people, and, as with the human soldiers, many of them were killed not in battle but by artillery fire or disease. On one day during the Battle of Verdun, 7,000 horses were killed by artillery; nearly 100 of them died in a single blast.
Horses had all sorts of roles in World War I. They hauled ammunition, like these horses at Vimy Ridge:
They carried wounded humans to safety:
They fought in old-fashioned ways, as these Ottoman lancers did:
Horses were even fitted with gasmasks (that don’t look like they would have been terribly effective) for chemical warfare:
The number of wounded horses was so high that the public became aware of their plight through propaganda campaigns in England:
And the US:
When Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, the Polish cavalry famously faced off against the German Wehrmacht. When I learned about this in high school, my teacher described Polish horsemen charging Panzer tanks with sabers drawn.
This was meant to illustrate the technological gap between Germany and Poland — Germany was fighting a 20th-century war while Poland was fighting a 19th-century one. The story wasn’t quite true — the cavalry charge at Krojanty was actually fairly successful, and the tanks showed up afterward.
And as anachronistic as the Polish cavalry seemed:
Horses were a huge part of World War II, as well. In fact, more horses took part in this conflict than had done so in World War I. Estimates of the number of horses that died in the conflict exceed 3 million. But as in that previous conflict, it was the lot of the horse to perform dangerous and exhausting labor:
And sometimes horses did end up on the same battlefields as tanks:
Occasionally, when the latest technology failed, horses were there to save the day, towing this British bomber in Finland:
Horses have been humanity’s constant companion for thousands of years. This means that they’ve been present for our most terrible conflicts.
I wonder what the horses understood of the wars that we made them fight. How aware were they of the danger they faced? How frightened were they? What did they think about the grueling labor and horrible conditions they endured?
Did the horses have a sense of how cheaply their lives were spent, often for the least honorable of causes?
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My father, born in and raised in India, the last of the British Raj generation, joined the British army as a boy trumpeter in 1937. His 17th/21st Lancers were mechanized in 1938 and he told us of having to watch as some (or all, he wasn’t certain) of the horses were taken down to the river and shot, an event that soured him on the cavalry and prompted him to transfer to the Royal Artillery. I can find no mention of the episode in any official records, though.
I asked him what it had been like to have been a cavalryman. “Horses,” he replied, “bite at one end, shit at the other and kick on all four corners.” No love lost there, then.
Surplus to requirement, he said, but they wouldn’t ‘give them to the Indians’. Awful.