Horses in World War I: Their Role, Losses and a Famous Photo

Horses in the First World War: Soldiers and the Animals They Lost

Horses were everywhere in the First World War. They pulled the guns, hauled food, water and ammunition, dragged ambulances and carried scouts and messengers. Estimates of how many died vary widely, but the figure most often quoted, from British and charity sources, is around eight million horses, along with large numbers of mules and donkeys. Britain alone lost about 484,000 horses, roughly one for every two soldiers killed.

This article explains what those animals did, why so many died, what became of the survivors, and the real story behind the photographs that often circulate with the subject, including one that is frequently mislabelled.

The photo of soldiers forming a horse's head

The picture at the top, repeated below in a closer crop, shows hundreds of men standing in tight ranks so that, seen from a tower, their bodies form the head of a horse. It is often shared as an image of soldiers "saying goodbye" to horses lost at the front, and dated 1915. Neither detail fits.

The United States did not enter the war until April 1917, and this is a posed display rather than a memorial. According to research summarised by the equestrian writer Liz Goldsmith, the formation was made by 650 officers and men of the Auxiliary Remount Depot at Camp Cody, near Deming, New Mexico, around late 1917, and reportedly reproduces the head of "The Devil", the saddle horse of the depot's commander, Major Frank G. Brewer. Remount depots bought, trained and shipped horses for the army, so the picture celebrates the animals the unit worked with.

The idea of a "living photograph" was popular at the time. The best known were made between 1915 and 1921 by the English-born photographer Arthur Mole and his partner John Thomas, who arranged up to 30,000 servicemen into emblems such as the Statue of Liberty and the US shield, photographing them from an 80-foot tower to boost wartime morale.

What horses did at the front

When the war began in 1914, every major army still relied on animal power. Cavalry was expected to scout and charge, and early battles saw it do both. The Battle of Halen in Belgium on 12 August 1914, sometimes called the Battle of the Silver Helmets, saw German cavalry charge repeatedly across open ground into Belgian rifle and artillery fire. The German 4th Cavalry Division lost about 848 horses, around 28 percent of its mounts, in a single day.

Barbed wire, trenches and machine guns soon made mass cavalry charges on the Western Front close to suicidal. Horses did not disappear, though; their main job became transport. A single field gun needed a team of six to twelve horses. Supply wagons, field kitchens, cable carts and horse-drawn ambulances kept the front alive, often along shell-cratered roads where lorries could not go. Mules, tougher and steadier under fire, were prized for carrying loads through mud.

Shellfire, exhaustion, cold, disease and poor feed killed far more animals than combat did. Horses also suffered from poison gas; armies improvised nose pads in 1915 and later issued gas masks, which the animals sometimes mistook for nosebags and chewed apart.

The scale of the loss

The numbers are hard to pin down, which is why different sources give different totals. The Wikipedia summary of horses in the war cites an estimate of about six million horses in service; the BBC's Countryfile, puts deaths at around eight million. Either way, the scale was enormous.

This often reproduced image shows a saddled horse standing beside a fallen soldier; the print carries a credit to Simon Butler and Rex Features. Butler has written about the horses of the war, and the photograph appears in collections on the subject, but its exact place and date are not given with it.

Britain began the war with about 25,000 army horses. It bought or requisitioned hundreds of thousands more at home and abroad; by mid-1917 its Remount Department had procured 591,000 horses and 213,000 mules. Army vets treated around 2.5 million cases in total, according to Countryfile, and returned some two million animals to duty.

A popular claim says that one million horses left Britain and only 60,000 came home. That mixes up two sets of figures. The numbers that match more closely concern the United States, which sent almost a million horses overseas for the Allies; only about 200 ever returned to America. Australia shipped 136,000 horses, and only one, a gelding called Sandy, came back.

What happened to the survivors

For most horses that lived through the war, the end of fighting did not mean going home. Shipping them back was expensive and quarantine rules were strict. Older or sick animals were destroyed; many younger ones were sold to farmers in France and Belgium or to butchers for meat. Australia's 13,000 remaining horses were mostly sold, many to India, and about 2,000 were put down.

The photograph above carries its own press caption, "Burying horses, battlefield of Haelen", placing it at Halen in Belgium after the cavalry battle of August 1914. Civilians and soldiers are digging the dead animals into a long trench, a scene repeated on many battlefields.

In Cairo, ex-army horses were sold off and ended their days as working animals in hard conditions. In the 1930s a British woman, Dorothy Brooke, found hundreds of them and raised money to buy and care for them. Her Old War Horse Memorial Hospital opened in 1934, and the charity she founded, now called The Brooke, still works for working horses, donkeys and mules around the world.

Soldiers and their animals

Letters and diaries from the war often speak of horses with real affection. Drivers and grooms lived with the same animals for months, fed and watered them before themselves, and grieved when they were killed. Losing a team could also be dangerous in practical terms, since a stranded gun or wagon left men exposed.

There were also darker episodes. German agents in the neutral United States were suspected of infecting horses and cattle bound for France with the disease glanders, part of a sabotage effort that also targeted shipments to Russia.

War Horse and how the animals are remembered

Michael Morpurgo's children's novel War Horse, published in 1982, follows a Devon farm horse, Joey, through the war. Nick Stafford adapted it for the National Theatre in 2007, with life-size horse puppets that became a long-running hit in London's West End. Steven Spielberg's film version, based on both the book and the play, was released in December 2011 and received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

In London, the Animals in War Memorial on Park Lane, unveiled in 2004, honours the horses, mules, dogs, pigeons and other creatures that served and died in conflicts. Its inscription notes simply that they had no choice.

Sources: Wikipedia: Horses in World War I; Countryfile: The real War Horse; Equine Ink (Liz Goldsmith) on the Camp Cody photograph; The Public Domain Review: The living photographs of Mole and Thomas; Wikipedia: Battle of Halen; Wikipedia: War Horse (film). Horse-and-soldier photograph credited to Simon Butler / Rex Features.

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