War Horse: Chapters 8–14

I galvanized myself into a gallop to keep up with Topthorn, and as I did, so the first terrible shells fell among us and the machine guns opened up.

The bedlam of battle had begun. All around me, men cried and fell to the ground, and horses reared and screamed in an agony of fear and pain. The ground erupted on either side of me, throwing horses and riders clear into the air. The shells whined and roared overhead, and every explosion seemed like an earthquake to us.

But the squadron galloped on inexorably through it all toward the wire at the top of the hill, and I went with them.

Behind us the riderless horses, all that was left of a proud cavalry squadron, galloped back toward our trenches, and the hillside below was strewn with the dead and dying.

The manner of his gait and the way he held himself indicated a man clearly accustomed to wielding authority.

After a time he was joined by a man in a white coat who emerged from the tent, his hair disheveled, his face pale with exhaustion. There was blood on his coat.

That was just the first attack—there will be more to come. We expect a sustained offensive—it will be a long battle.

The tall officer drew himself up to his full height and bristled with indignation.

He was a formidable sight as he advanced on the man in white.

“Very well. It’s a sacrilege, Doctor, a sacrilege,” he said. “But if it’s got to be done, then I’d rather do it myself and see that it is done properly.”

Topthorn was all the time in a great state of alarm, for it was clear he had never pulled before in his life, and at last I was able in my turn to help him, to lead, to compensate, and to reassure him.

I was puzzled by this adulation but loved it, thrusting my head over the high stable door whenever I heard them coming into the yard. Side by side, Topthorn and I would stand at the door to receive our unlimited ration of compliments and adoration—and, of course, this was sometimes accompanied by a welcome gift of perhaps a lump of sugar or an apple.

Then, with her grandfather busying himself about us, she would prattle on merrily about how when she was older and stronger and when the soldiers had all gone home and the war was over she would ride us herself through the woods—one at a time, she said—and how we would never want for anything if only we would stay with her forever.

Topthorn and I were by now seasoned campaigners, and it may well have been that that drove us on out through the roar of the shell fire back toward the trenches each morning, but there was more to it than that.

Any horse has an instinctive fondness for children, for they speak more softly, and their size precludes any threat; but Emilie was a special child for us, for she spent every minute she could with us and lavished us with her affection.

The snow disguised perfectly the ruts and shell holes, so that we found ourselves straining to extricate ourselves from the piled-up snow and the sinking mud beneath it.

She used no reins on me, no saddle, no bits, no spurs, and sat astride me not as my mistress, but rather as a friend.

Quite suddenly we found ourselves besieged by all the orderlies we had come to know so well. They climbed the fence and patted and smoothed us with great affection.

The horses, six at a time, were yoked to huge heavy guns, and they stood in the path, puffing and blowing with exertion.

He had eyes that stood out of his face in a permanent stare, and he wore a pair of wire-framed spectacles through which he watched us intently, nodding as he did so.

Perhaps it was the contrast with the few idyllic months we had spent with Emilie and her grandfather that made what followed so harsh and so bitter an experience for Topthorn and me.

The lines of wounded seemed interminable, and the countryside was laid waste for miles behind the trenches.

We received our corn ration only sporadically as winter came on again, and there was only a meager hay ration for each of us. One by one, we began to lose weight and condition.

The gun team was a motley collection of six horses.

Of the four we joined, only one had the height and the strength to pull as a gun horse should, a great hulk of a horse they called Heinie who seemed quite unperturbed by all that was going on around him.

Behind us was a perfectly matched pair of smaller dun-colored ponies with blond manes and tails. No one could tell them apart, even the soldiers referred to them not by name but merely as “the two golden Haflingers.”

Because they were pretty and invariably friendly, they received much attention and even a little affection from the gunners.

They must have been an incongruous but cheering sight to the tired soldiers as we trotted through the ruined villages up to the front.

There was no doubt that they worked as hard as the rest of us and that, in spite of their diminutive size, they were at least our equals in stamina.

They both went rapidly downhill until the two of them were only any use for pulling on flat, hard surfaces, and since we scarcely ever traveled over such ground, they were soon of little use in the team, and made the work for the rest of us that much more arduous.

Each night we spent in the lines up to our hocks in freezing mud, in conditions far worse than that first winter of the war when Topthorn and I had been cavalry horses.

He was an untidy, portly little man who chuckled incessantly and would talk more to himself than to anyone else.

He lay not on his stomach as he always did, but stretched out on his side, lifting his head from time to time as spasms of coughing shook him. He coughed intermittently all night and slept only fitfully.

He lay not on his stomach as he always did, but stretched out on his side, lifting his head from time to time as spasms of coughing shook him. He coughed intermittently all night and slept only fitfully.

And sure enough, he was up on his feet the next morning before the gunners came to feed us our ration of corn, and although his head hung lower than usual and he moved only ponderously, I could see that he had the strength to survive if only he could rest.

We had found at last a true friend and one we could trust implicitly.

“Just look at him, Karl. Can you not see that he’s something special? This one isn’t just any old horse. There’s a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be? I tell you, my friend, there’s divinity in a horse, and especially in a horse like this..."

And to find a horse like this in the middle of this filthy abomination of a war is for me like finding a butterfly on a dung heap.

The soldiers stood all around us in complete silence, looking down at the prostrate form of Topthorn, in a moment of spontaneous respect and sadness.

My first inclination was to run with them, to run anywhere to escape the shelling, but Topthorn lay dead at my feet and I would not abandon him.