Despite being introduced with the warning that “this programme does show the realities of war” (as though we were about to see genocide footage from Kigali or Srebrenica), the predicating assumption of the documentary appeared to be that men and horses fought the First World War as equals. And although no one here ran away to war to get his pet back, I found that an alternative strain of the “Morpurgo problem” was immediately sparked into life. But War Horse might have been more moving if it had not been bodged together on the sepia-hued outskirts of SpielbergLand. In all, of the roughly one million that shipped out from Britain, only 60,000 returned. The rest were sloggers through the mud and toilers under the yoke – targeted all the more, perhaps, for their role in the vital supply-chain. Only two per cent of the horses were “glorious” cavalry, though. If you want to erect war memorials to donkeys and give medals to pigeons, knock yourself out Many months later, unbelievably, there were still deploying lancers – with pennants – at the Somme. Belief in the effect of cavalry charges still prevailed, but the cavalry’s first encounter with machine-gun fire reads like a salutary lesson out of Sharpe: they lost control of their mounts, were generally shot to shit, and “none of the cavalrymen got within 600 yards of the German guns”. At a time when the tank was about to become a reality, the army’s hunger for horse-flesh was insatiable, an entire logistical wing employed in drafting a million horses into service from Britain’s farms and villages.
As with all things Great War, of course, the stats were surreal and the circumstances appalling.
So I opted for Channel Four’s War Horse: the Real Story - and pretty much got what I expected.īilled as “extraordinary and deeply moving”, War Horse was actually rather lightweight, as these things go, and with long ad-breaks to boot.
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