The Horrors of War Theme Analysis

“Father,” said Albert with resolution in his voice, “I’ll train Joey—I’ll train him to plow all right—but you must promise never to raise a whip to him again. He can’t be handled that way. I know him, Father, I know him as if he were my own brother.”

“You train him, Albert, you handle him. Don’t care how you do it. I don’t want to know,” said his father dismissively. “I’ll never go near the brute again. I’d shoot him first.”

But when Albert came into the stable, it was not to soothe me as he usually did nor to talk to me gently. Instead he walked up to me and looked me hard in the eye. “That was plain stupid,” he said sternly. “If you want to survive, Joey, you’ll have to learn.”

“Mother says there’s likely to be a war,” he said sadly. “I don’t know what it’s about—something about some old duke that’s been shot at somewhere. Can’t think why that should matter to anyone, but she says we’ll be in it all the same. But it won’t affect us, not down here. We’ll go on just the same [...]. But I tell you, Joey, if there is a war, I’d want to go. I think I’d make a good soldier, don’t you? Look fine in a uniform, wouldn’t I? And I’ve always wanted to march to the beat of a band. Can you imagine that, Joey? If it comes to that, you’d make a good war horse yourself, wouldn’t you, if you ride as well as you pull, and I know you will. We’d make quite a pair. God help the Germans if they ever have to fight the two of us.”

He must have known that I would follow old Zoey because he roped me up to her saddle and led us both quietly out of the yard down the path and over the bridge. Once in the road, he mounted Zoey swiftly and we trotted up the hill and into the village. He never spoke a word to either of us. I knew the road well enough, of course, for I had been there often enough with Albert, and indeed I loved going there because there were always other horses to meet and people to see. It was in the village only a short time before that I had met my first motorcar outside the post office and had stiffened with fear as it rattled past, but I had stood steadily, and I remember that Albert had made a big fuss over me after that.

It’s just Jamie and me—we’re the only ones that don’t agree, Joey. We have our doubts, I can tell you that. We have our doubts. None of them in there seems to have heard of machine guns and artillery. I tell you, Joey, one machine gun operated right could wipe out an entire squadron of the best cavalry in the world—German or British. I mean, look what happened to the Light Brigade at Balaclava when they took on the Russian guns—none of them seem to remember that. And the French learned the lesson in the Franco-Prussian War. But you can’t say anything to them, Joey. If you do, they call you a defeatist, or some such rubbish. I honestly think that some of them in there only want to win this war if the cavalry can win it.

The officer led us at first, limping along beside me with his stick, but he was soon confident enough to mount the cart with the two orderlies and take the reins. “You’ve done a bit of this before, my friend,” he said. “I can tell that. I always knew the British were crazy. Now that I know that they use horses such as you as cart horses, I am quite sure of it. That’s what this war is all about, my friend. It’s about which of us is the crazier. And clearly you British started with an advantage. You were crazy beforehand.”

All that afternoon and evening while the battle raged, we trudged up to the lines […]. The artillery barrage from both sides was continuous. It roared overhead all day as the armies hurled their men at one another across no-man’s-land, and the wounded that could walk poured back along the roads.

Once, after we had plodded on, too tired to be fearful, through a devastating barrage […] one of the soldiers with his tunic covered in blood and mud, came and stood by my head and threw his good arm around my neck and kissed me.

“Thank you, my friend,” he said. “I never thought they would get us out of that hellhole. I found this yesterday, and thought about keeping it for myself, but I know where it belongs.” And he reached up and hung a muddied ribbon around my neck. There was an Iron Cross dangling on the end of it. “You’ll have to share it with your friend,” he said. […] The waiting wounded outside the hospital tent clapped and cheered us to the echo, bringing doctors, nurses, and patients running out of the tent to see what there could be to clap about in the midst of all this misery.

Suddenly the war was no longer distant. We were back among the fearful noise and stench of battle, hauling our gun through the mud, urged on and sometimes whipped on by men who displayed little care or interest in our welfare just so long as we got the guns where they had to go. It was not that they were cruel men, but just that they seemed to be driven now by a fearful compulsion that left no room and no time for pleasantness or consideration either for each other or for us.

Food was scarcer now. We received our corn ration only sporadically as winter came on again, and there was only a meagre hay ration for each of us. One by one, we began to lose weight and condition. At the same time, the battles seemed to become more furious and prolonged [...].

“There’s fine breeding here—too fine, perhaps, Herr Major. Could well be his undoing. He’s too fine to pull a gun. I’d pull him out, but you have no horse to take his place, have you? He’ll go on, I supposed, but go easy on him, Herr Major. Take the team as slow as you can, else you’ll have no team, and without your team your gun won’t be a lot of use, will it?”

“He will have to do what the others do, Herr Doctor,” said the major in a steely voice. “No more and no less. I cannot make exceptions. If you pass him fit, he’s fit, and that’s that.”

“He’s fit to go on,” said the vet reluctantly. “But I am warning you, Herr Major. You must take care.”

“I tell you, my friends,” he said one day, “I tell you that I am the only sane man in the regiment. It’s the others who are crazy, but they don’t know it. They fight a war and they don’t know what for. Isn’t that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different color uniform and speaks a different language? And it’s me they call crazy! You two are the only rational creatures I’ve met in this stupid war, and like me, the only reason you’re here is because you were brought here […]. As it is, I’m going to live out this war as ‘Crazy Old Friedrich,’ so that I can return again to Schleiden and become Butcher Friedrich that everyone knew and respected before all this mess began.”

“Don’t you ever think about anything else except horses, Rudi?” said his companion, keeping his distance. “Three years I’ve known you and not a day goes by without you going on about the wretched creatures. I know you were brought up with them on your farm, but I still can’t understand what it is that you see in them. They are just four legs, a head, and a tail, all controlled by a very little brain that can’t think beyond food and drink.”

“How can you say that?” said Rudi. “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.”

After a brief inspection he, too, pronounced Topthorn to be dead. “I thought so. I told you so,” he said almost to himself. “They can’t do it. I see it all the time. Too much work on short rations and living outside all winter. I see it all the time. A horse like this can only stand so much. Heart failure, poor fellow. It makes me angry every time it happens. We should not treat horses like this—we treat our machines better.”

“He was a friend,” said Friedrich simply, kneeling down again over Topthorn and removing his headcollar. 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. Perhaps it was because they had all known him for a long time and he had in some way become part of their lives.

“In an hour, maybe, or two,” he said, “we will be trying our best again each other to kill. God only know why we do it, and I think He has maybe forgotten why […] We have shown them, haven’t we? We have shown them that any problem can be solved between two people if only they can trust each other. That is all it needs, no?”

The little Welshman shook his head in disbelief as he took the rope. “I think if they would let you and me have an hour or two out here together, we could sort out this whole wretched mess. There would be no more weeping widows and crying children in my valley and no more in yours. If worst came to worst, we could decide it all on the flip of a coin, couldn’t we?”

Major Martin cleaned my wound and stitched it up, and although at first I could still put little weight on it, I felt in myself stronger with every day that passed. Albert was with me again, and that in itself was medicine enough; but properly fed once more with warm mash each morning and a never-ending supply of sweet-scented hay, my recovery seemed only a matter of time. Albert, like the other veterinary orderlies, had many other horses to care for, but he would spend every spare minute he could find fussing over me in the stable […].

But time passed and I did not get better.

That’s what they said it was—one stray shell out of nowhere and he’s gone. I will miss him, Joey. We’ll both miss him, won’t we? […] You know what he was, Joey, before the war? He had a fruit cart in London, outside Covent Garden. Thought the world of you, Joey. Told me often enough. And he looked after me, Joey. Like a brother he was to me. Twenty years old. He had his whole life ahead of him. All wasted now, ’cause of one stray shell. He always told me, Joey. He’d say, ‘At least if I go, there’ll be no one that’ll miss me. Only my cart—and I can’t take that with me, and that’s a pity.’ He was proud of his cart, showed me a photo of himself standing by it.

Sergeant Thunder carried a small tin box that was being passed around from one to the other and I heard the clink of coins as they were dropped in […]. I could just make out Sergeant Thunder’s low, growling voice. “That’s the best we can do, boys […]. I’m not supposed to tell you this—the major said not to—and make no mistake, I’m not in the habit of disobeying officers’ orders. But we aren’t at war anymore, and anyway, this order was more like advice, so to speak. So I’m telling you this ’cause I wouldn’t like you to think badly of the major. He knows what’s going on right enough. Matter of fact, the whole thing was his own idea […]. What’s more, boys, he’s given us every penny of his pay that he had saved up—every penny. It’s not much, but it’ll help.”

You do not understand at all. I will sell you this horse for one English penny, and for a solemn promise—that you will always love this horse as much as my Emilie did and that you will care for him until the end of his days. And more than this, I want you to tell everyone about my Emilie and about how she looked after your Joey and the big black horse when they came to live with us. You see, my friend, I want my Emilie to live on in people’s hearts. I shall die soon, in a few years, no more, and then no one will remember my Emilie as she was […]. I want you to tell your friends at home about my Emilie […]. That way she will live forever, and that is what I want. Is it a bargain between us?