Soldiers and their Horses

As ever, there’s a lot been happening at SoldiersandtheirHorses.com.

Earlier in the year, I gave a talk at The Peak Mining Museum, in Matlock Bath, Derbyshire. In April I was guest speaker at The Western Front Association’s Chesterfield branch. Ongoing projects include a chapter for Life With and Without Animals to be published in Humanimalia later next year. In it, I focus on the wartime illustration that ‘started it all’ – as they (who?) say!

Goodbye Old Man: An Incident on the Road to a Battery Position in Southern Flanders, has also been brought to the fore by my tutoring on The Brilliant Club’s Scholars Programme. I have been thoroughly enjoying introducing my students to the myth and reality of the soldier-horse relationship – and the assignments they write are truly inspiring.

There’s been a spot of reviewing of papers (for Society and Animals among others) and I’m now also a reviewer of student assignment nominations for The Scholar – The Brilliant Club’s student magazine.

More recently, I have had a chapter proposal accepted for another edited volume on War and Animals. I’m starting work on this as we speak – because I can’t bear ‘lastminute.com’ panics. Here is a taster of what it will be about:

“Poor Dolly … she also was suffering from shell-shock. …  The fact of the matter is she evidently remembers it as keenly as I do.”

In 1918, an article in The New York Times reported on the shared war experiences of horse and man. It described how horses, like soldiers, felt an understandable reluctance to return to a place where they had been ‘frightened or injured’. It argued that horses, like men, were also subject to ‘shell-shock’. Many soldiers not only recognised this shared suffering, but found they were better able to express their own physical and mental strain through the relationships formed with their horses. Conversely, their first-hand accounts also provide us with an opportunity to better understand how their horses responded to the difficult and dangerous conditions of war.

Soldiers and their horses daily encountered dangerous and stressful situations, and likewise a gradual ‘wearing down’ of their physical and mental resilience. During The Great War, it is notable that ‘debility’ was cited as having been a greater cause of ‘horse wastage’ than enemy action. The sympathetic consideration, or empathy, engendered by the soldier-horse relationship significantly slowed, but could not halt entirely, this deterioration of the horse’s well-being. The tragedy was of course that those (human and equine) who proved the most resilient were undoubtedly also those who suffered the hardest and the longest. As General Sir Jack Seely wrote, ‘Truly the horse might cry out more loudly than any other creature, “Give peace in our time O Lord”.’

It is only now that I realise quite how many conferences I’ve been busy with over the last couple of years. The difficulties created by the ‘ongoing situation’ has meant that most of these have been online, and so travel has not been a barrier to attendance. Realising that academia.edu now offer the ability to upload recordings and videos, I have been busy adding several of these papers to my site. All of these can be found by visiting my academia.edu page at:

https://independentresearcher.academia.edu/JaneFlynn

Papers include: “Songster’s Tale” – about a horse called Songster and the Loughborough Yeomanry; “So Much Meat in Various Shapes” – a cheerful little paper about the industrialization of horse disposal in The Great War; and “Poor Dolly” – about the shared impact of warfare on soldiers and their horses.

I hope you enjoy the new papers – please let me know how you get on. Either on here (in the comments) or on academia.edu!

On 2nd – 3rd June I will be presenting at the ‘Multispecies Knowledges and the Industrialization of Animal Exploitation’ conference. The conference comes out of the ‘Culture of Unsustainability’ research project based at the University of Turku, Finland. It promises to be a really interesting couple of days – with many countries, cultures, species, historical periods, animal-human relationships, and ethical considerations represented!

More information about the conference can be found at : https://sites.utu.fi/unsus/en/

At the conference, I will be talking about the industrialization of horse disposal during The Great War under the title, So Much Meat in Various Shapes.

I am delighted to announce that I will be presenting on Saturday 10th April (tomorrow!) at the New England Historical Society’s annual conference. This is the first time I will be presenting as part of a group who put forward a panel proposal, so it will be great to meet up with my fellow ‘Animal Historians’ and hear about their current work. Charlotte Carrington-Farmer (Roger Williams University) will be talking about Mule breeding for export in C18th New England, while Allen Horn (Eastern Connecticut State University) will be speaking about a horse called Little Sorrel in the American Civil War.

This time, I’ve also moved a little away from my usual presentation style; going for a more story-like approach. My aim is to talk about the soldier-horse relationship by following the exploits of Songster – The Leicestershire Yeomanry’s much-loved veteran of The Great War. To say that he was a ‘character’ is certainly an understatement – He was described as having been ‘as artful as a barrowload of monkeys’! Today, he is remembered as ‘Loughborough’s very own War Horse’. I am really looking forward to sharing Songster with a new audience in New England!

Here is a link to the conference:

https://neha.wildapricot.org/

And, here’s my abstract for the conference:

When peace was declared on 11^th November 1918, the painful process of mourning and reconciliation began. In the United Kingdom, and although horses rarely featured in official memorials to the War’s dead, the British people nevertheless found ways to remember its war horses. As a relatively ‘safe’ topic, veterans talked about their horses, and told stories of their shared adventures and exploits. Veterans wrote about their horses in their memoirs, and shared these memories with their families. Local communities celebrated their veteran war horses, and took great pride in each individual’s exploits and longevity well into the 1930s. This paper explores the soldier-horse relationship ‘in life and memory’ by following the wartime exploits and subsequent memorialisation of Songster – a notable equine veteran of The Great War whose memory is still cherished by the people of Loughborough today.

What strange times we are living in. And yet, and thank goodness, it seems Soldiers and their Horses is making its way out there in the big, locked-down craziness. I was delighted to find this (very positive) review by A.A. Nofi on the Strategy Page website:

Horses and Men in the Great War

In her first book Dr. Flynn, an independent scholar who writes and blogs on history and horses, has done an impressive job of telling the story of the horse in the British Army from the Boer War through the end of the Great War. This was a period that witnessed significant progress in the treatment of military horses.

Prior to the Boer War the British Army had been very negligent in its treatment of horses. Flynn notes that the army was surprisingly resistant to the establishment of an independent veterinary service, which did not occur until 1881. And even then, in her discussion of the early history of the army’s veterinary service, we that it lack influence and the army continued to neglect an adequate remount service. The result was horrendous losses of horseflesh during the South African War, due to a not only to poor procedures for recruiting horses, but also in the lack of proper care for them.

Flynn weaves together military requirements for horses, the development of an effective remount service, the linked questions of how to train horses and riders, the rise of Britain’s animal rights movement, problems of maintaining the feeding, health, and well being of the animals, and “wastage”. Of particular interest is Flynn’s look at the moral issues related to the military use – exploitation – of horses (and other animals) and the soldier-steed relationship against the brutal mathematics of war.

A volume in the Routledge series “Studies in Cultural History”, Soldiers and their Horses is an excellent book both for those interested in the Great War and those with an interest in the military horse.”

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs SymposiumReviewer: A. A. Nofi, Review Editor   

Find out more here:

https://www.strategypage.com/default.aspx