THE HORSE IN WAR
For at least the last six and a half thousand years men have ploughed with horses, hunted game with horses, pulled vehicles with horses, moved goods with horses, used horses for sport and eaten horses, but most of all they have used them for war. The first recorded case of equestrian warfare is dated to around 2,500 BC in Mesopotamia – although there were almost certainly mounted warriors well before then – and as late as the Second World War both German and Russian armies fielded mounted cavalry units, while at the beginning of that war, in all armies except the British, artillery pieces and transport wagons were much more likely to be horse drawn than propelled by an internal combustion engine. Today both the Chinese and Russian armies still maintain horsed cavalry units. Until the development of reliable motor vehicles with a cross-country capability, the horse was the fastest means of moving guns, equipment and men across country from one point to another.
For most of recorded history, then, the horse has been an indispensable asset for the waging of war, whether between the shafts of a chariot, as a mount for archer, spearman, lancer, dragoon and hussar, as the mover of guns, ambulances, ration wagons and munitions, as the finder of routes and the discoverer of intelligence and, in the case of the Mongol armies at least, the provider of sustenance on the hoof. For much of the period the horse was far from looking like the noble beast we know today, certainly he did not at all resemble those hugely valuable animals painted by Stubbs, for all modern thoroughbreds date from only three Arabian type stallions, imported to England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and bred to English mares of the type we would now describe as light hunters. In the deserts of the Middle East the onager[1] and his humbler cousin the donkey were the first equines to be pressed into military service, until eventually being replaced by the horse and reverting to purely load carrying duties. The original warhorse was what we would today describe as a pony[2]; cobby, short coupled, shaggy and with plenty of bone. It could be fed on the coarsest of fodder, required little grooming and could plod on forever across most terrain, unlike today’s thoroughbred which looks wonderful but is choosey about what it can eat, requires hours of maintenance and is most at home galloping in a straight line on carefully tended and well grassed turf with an eight-stone midget on its back. As time wore on horses were bred for specific warlike duties: to be capable of carrying the weight of an armoured soldier, to be sufficiently agile for the rider to operate a bow and arrow with both hands, to be fast enough for vast outflanking sweeps. From the late bronze age to well into the twentieth century the story of warfare is synonymous with the story of the horse, and with it came a social cachet: the Roman Equites, French Chevalier, Spanish Caballero, German Ritter, all titles of nobility and all meaning the same thing: a man on horseback.
Ancient Egypt would never have survived as long as it did without its charioteers, and perhaps the best known battle of the late Bronze Age, that between the Egyptians and the Hittites at Kadesh, around 1300 BC, was almost entirely an equestrian battle, where it was said that a total of six thousand two-horse chariots were deployed. Even allowing for exaggeration in the texts, that is still a great many horses. The regional superpower of the ninth century BC, Assyria, based its army on the three horse chariot, and in the same region appears the first mounted archer. A thousand years later the Romans made much use of cavalry, mainly as auxiliaries drawn from allies accustomed to fighting on horseback, although it took them some time to work out how to deal with the Celtic Britons’ chariot-based resistance. The armies of the Huns could never have swept over Europe nor the Mongols Asia without the horse, and Charlemagne could never have established his northern European empire without recourse to cavalry. Early medieval armies were almost entirely dependent on the horse, William the Conqueror shipping perhaps 8,000 over to England in 1066, while by contrast the plans for Operation Sea Lion, the proposed invasion of England by Germany in 1940, postulated the shipment of 60,000 horses across in the first wave!
For several hundred years European warfare was decided by the heavily armoured mounted knight, on a horse bred to carry weight, built like but smaller than today’s heavy hunter, and while in the fourteenth century English armies had begun to fight on foot, they still relied on the horse for movement and the transport of stores. By the time of the thirty years war and the English civil wars the roles of cavalry had become formalised into dragoons, who moved on horseback but fought on foot, heavy cavalry for shock action and light for reconnaissance and pursuit, and these roles changed little through the seven years’ war, the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Crimea and South Africa right up to the twentieth century, albeit with the dragoon becoming another heavy cavalrymen and his role taken on by the infantryman on a horse. In the most intensive war that Britain and France have ever fought, that of 1914 – 1918, neither army could have been sustained without large numbers of horses. Despite the cavalry role having become subordinate to that of the infantry and the artillery, horses were still needed for transport and moving guns, and even an infantry battalion needed large numbers as the equivalent of the Land Rover of the day, with commanding officers, adjutants, quartermasters and company commanders each having an official horse. At the outbreak of war in 1914 the British army deployed 25,000 horses; soon to increase 165,000, the increase obtained from within the UK, and in the following years the British bought half a million horses from overseas, to say nothing of 280,000 mules.
The role of the horse in war changed according to terrain, other available assets, weapon systems and availability but far from being an aristocratic affectation, the mounted soldier was essential to the waging of war until very recent times.
[1] The Onager (Equus Hemionus) is almost certainly extinct, although the Mongolian Wild Ass is probably its nearest surviving relative. It looked like a large donkey (Equus Africanus Asinus) but with longer legs in proportion to its body and with the donkey’s stripe down the back but without the stripe across the shoulders.
[2] Equines are measured from the top of the withers (the highest point of the spine behind the neck), vertically to the ground, without shoes. The unit of measurement is the hand, which is four inches. A horse under 14.2 hh, that is fourteen hands and two inches, is a pony.
I found this your best yet. Plenty of interesting material. Would make a good print piece too for a history mag.