War Horse Study Guide

Michael Morpurgo’s parents were both British actors who married during WWII. Morpurgo’s father was stationed abroad when both he and his older brother were born. Following the end of the war, his parents divorced, and his mother subsequently remarried Jack Morpurgo. It wasn’t until he was nearly an adult that Morpurgo learned his biological father’s identity; although Jack Morpurgo never formally adopted the boys, both took his last name and grew up as his children. After a relatively undistinguished (and rather unhappy) educational career in boarding schools and college, Morpurgo became a schoolteacher. It was in this job that he began telling stories to his students and discovered his own vocation for writing. Since the early 1980s, Morpurgo has produced no fewer than 50 novels, poetry collections, anthologies, and adaptations, several of which have been adapted into operas, stage plays, and films. In addition to his work as a writer, Morpurgo and his wife founded a charity in the late 1970s with the poet Ted Hughes that provides rural, farm-based activities and experiences to urban children.

World War I provides the primary backdrop for War Horse. This conflict began in the Balkans in 1914 and quickly engulfed all of Europe in hostilities, pitting the German Empire and Austria-Hungary against Russia, Britain, and France. In addition to its length and brutality, WWI is notable for its trench warfare—Joey frequently finds himself bogged down in the muddy hellscape of the no-man’s-land between the opposing sides’ trenches, which were often close enough for soldiers to talk to each other from under cover. WWI also saw the widespread adoption of modern military technologies and strategies, even though older tactics from the previous centuries were still widespread in the early years of the conflict, including the use of cavalry (soldiers mounted on horseback) against machine guns and long-range artillery. Over the course of the conflict, newer and more protective technologies, like armored tanks, replaced cavalry units. Nevertheless, both sides in the conflict relied heavily on the use of horses and other pack animals to move men and materiel to and from the front lines. Additionally, Joey carries soldiers wounded by chemical weapons to the German field hospital; one of the unique horrors of the so-called “Great War” was the use of chemical weapons including mustard and chlorine gasses.

War Horse filters the horror, inhumanity, and cruelty of war through the experience of its equine protagonist, Joey. It therefore has connections both to anti-war literature and animal fiction. Perhaps the most widely regarded novel about the extreme mental and physical trauma that soldiers endured during the first World War, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was first published in German in 1928. A runaway bestseller, this book had been translated into 22 languages and sold 2.5 million copies in its first 18 months in print. It explores themes related to the role of fate and chance as well as the damage done to the hundreds of thousands of young men who enlisted on both sides of the war. War Horse also filters human experience through the consciousness of an animal, in part to critique the blind spots and failures of human civilization. It thus participates in a long tradition of social critique via animal stories in English literature that includes Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and George Orwell’s Animal Farm.