War Horse At The Front Wars Scene

At the start of the war, the British Army had 25,000 horses. Another 115,000 were purchased compulsorily under the Horse Mobilisation Scheme. Over the course of the war, between 500 and 1000 horses were shipped to Europe every day.

Drawn from a children's novel by Michael Morpurgo and set before and during World War I, War Horse is the story of a young boy who trains andcomes to love a horse named Joey. But Joey is sold by the boy's father to the cavalry as it leaves for the front, and, when the boy becomes old enoughto enlist, he searches for the horse on the battle-scarred fields of France.Despite stunning stagecraft that evokes the horror of war in general, War Horse keeps its focus narrowly on the boy-stallion relationship,saying little about the First World War itself.

It sounds like the film treats the conflict in the same way. 'I didn't pay a lot of attention to the first WorldWar,” Spielberg.“I didn't know very much about it. And I also don't consider War Horse to be a war movie.

This is not one of my war movies. This is muchmore of a real story between the connections that sometimes animals achieve; the way animals can actually connect people together.' This is ironic. The war horses of the Western Front in fact offer a powerful metaphor for the war's mass human slaughter, as the old tactics of frontalcavalry and infantry assaults were crushed by the new technology of huge artillery, machine guns, tear gas, and barbed wire. War Horse, atleast as a play, thus fails to provide much context about the monumental dimensions of the Great War itself.

This fuller setting of the scene (beyondgeneralized horrors of battle) could, if handled with grace in a dramatic vehicle, have given the very personal story more poignancy-from thedestruction of a generation of young men to the end of 19th-century Europe. Regardless of issues with the play or film, though, the saga of the warhorses as a symbol of the war's larger themes is itself a striking tale. Chuzzle deluxe softonic.

(See (Halsgrove 2011)). For centuries, cavalry had been an important element of military strategy, giving commanders the ability to strike quickly and shock the enemy, eitherwith direct attacks or hit-and-run raids on the opponents' periphery. But, early in WWI, the casualties from such frontal cavalry assaults on theWestern Front were so appalling, and attacks behind lines impossible because of the miles of trenches and wire, that the cavalry largely disappeared asan offensive weapon.

(In the more open warfare on the Eastern Front and in the Middle East, war on horseback remained strategically important.). Because trucks were underpowered and incapable of moving through seas of mud, horses continued, as they had historically, to have great value in thetraditional role of hauling men, supplies, kitchens, the wounded, ammunition, and artillery. But the customary battleground risks to horses of diseaseor exhaustion or inadequate food were compounded by the new conditions of the Great War: tear gas, shell shock, drowning in craters or direct hits frommammoth artillery shells, machine gun fire or, increasingly, air attack. Knowing how valuable horses were, the armies often targeted them.And the death toll was fearsome.

During the war, the British had approximately one million horses and mules on the Western Front. Approximately half amillion died and tens of thousands were injured. (Some estimates are higher.) Those horses that survived were sold on the continent after the war(often for ). Onlya fraction of the horses under arms returned to Britain (the program notes at the Lincoln Center production of the play put the number at 62,000). Because of the terrible disjunction between the old tactics and the modern technology of battle, the human casualties of the Great War are almostbeyond comprehension: e.g.

The British Empire (900,000 dead, 2.1 million wounded); France (1.4 million dead, 4.3 million wounded); Germany (1.8 milliondead, 4.2 million wounded), with tens of thousands missing on all sides. (The United States had 116,000 dead, and 204,000 wounded.) Horses shared withsoldiers a sad similarity: a high percentage of those in the field were killed or wounded. WWI marked the end of the Great Powers' use of horses in war, almost exactly a century after horses had played a critical role in the last greatEuropean-wide conflict. According to the historian Dominic Lieven (, Viking 2010), the Russians' ability to maintain a healthy supply of horses and their offensive use of light cavalry was far superior to the Frenchand was a critical factor in defeating Napoleon first in the retreat from Moscow in 1812 and then in the European Wars of 1813-1814, which led toNapoleon's abdication. After 1918, most cavalry and other horse-centered units of the armed forces evolved into mechanized ones, as the uses of the first tanks in WWI gainedmomentum. Horses then served as just symbols of the British martial tradition. A team of black stallions that were in the artillery had the honor oftransporting the coffin of the Unknown Soldier to Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day (November 11), 1920.

And the Royal Horse Guards are, of course, onparade in London to this day.War Horseis a moving (if melodramatic) story of a single relationship taking place against the backdrop of a gargantuan, transformative conflict. But thebroader, more complex story of the war horses of the Western Front as comrades in arms to the soldiers who suffered casualties in the millions is noless compelling. Says one London memorial to the war horses: 'Most obediently and often most painfully they died—faithful unto death.' We want to hear what you think about this article.

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I had read the great war poets, seen All Quiet on the Western Front, Oh, What a Lovely War! But here was someone who had been there. Other old men in the village, Captain Budgett, a cavalryman, and Albert Weeks, told me more. The more I heard, the more I felt that any story I might want to write about this war had to be written not from a British perspective, nor even from a French or German or Belgian one. It had to be the story of the suffering and grieving on all sides, military and civilian, too.

I needed to tell a story that reflected the universal pity of war.In 1982, when it was published, the was liked well enough by those who read it, but sadly, not many did read it, and all too few bought it. Reviews were “mixed”. The publishers, Egmont, bless their hearts, kept it in print; and in France, Cheval de Guerre has never been out of print with Gallimard. The book was out to pasture on my backlist.Then one morning, some 25 years later, rings me up saying he’d like to make a play of War Horse, with puppets! Absurd, I thought, but it’s the National Theatre, for goodness sake. Maybe they know what they’re doing.

Then they showed me the work of Handspring Puppet Company. I heard the of John Tams and Adrian Sutton, saw the set design of Rae Smith, read the scripts, saw the rehearsals. Yes, they did know what they were doing.Four million theatre goers have seen it now in London, on Broadway, in Australia, Canada and on tour all over the United States. The play garnered awards by the dozen – unlike the book! And it’s about to go on a tour of the UK, and to Ireland, to so many places from which young men left all those years ago to go to war, so many of them never to return.

Their descendants will see a play that has been called “the greatest anthem to peace” ever performed.War Horse, as it was performed at the National TheatreIt has been wonderful enough for all this to happen, but for the play to go now to Berlin, where it is currently in rehearsals with a German cast, is truly momentous, and timely, too. A hundred years since Germans soldiers marched away to fight in France and Belgium, since British soldiers went across the Channel to confront them, a hundred years after the beginning of arguably the most terrible of all wars, in which over 10 million soldiers on all sides perished, and 10 million horses too, a British play about the First World War will be performed in Berlin by German actors, a play which is above all about our universal longing for peace and reconciliation.

It will be playing in England and Germany at the same time.I have lived all my life in a postwar world, post both world wars, though many consider them to be in effect one war with a 20-year interruption. My childhood was lived amongst the ruins of bombed out London. As I grew up I heard stories of pride, of heroism and cruelty, of grief and loss.

I played war games in amongst the ruins, shot Germans by the hundred, until I began to realise that in war there is suffering and loss on both sides, that anger lives on through grief, and that it is anger that leads so often to the next war.I learned also that it is rare for war to solve anything, and that we go to war because words and common sense and human kindness and mutual respect have failed us. In Europe, we have at long last, I hope, learned this, and at a terrible cost.

Now we argue about currency, and sausages, and agriculture, and fishing and football. The frontiers have gone. Our children and our grandchildren are hardly aware they are there. The bitterness and the anger has passed and we try to find common cause whenever we can, and when we can’t, we agree to disagree.Michael Morpurgo addresses the crowd in IddesleighI go often to Ypres to research my stories, and whenever I do I make a point of visiting the war cemeteries.

I am struck always by how many British people are there, Australians too, and Canadians, and New Zealanders, but how very few Germans are there. Yet their fathers and sons, their brothers and uncles, who left their homes a hundred years ago died in even greater numbers than ours. Their boys went to war for much the same reasons ours did, patriotism, pride, for adventure, because they were told to. Their deaths were as terrible, the sense of loss at home just as grievous. Yet it would seem that even now the shadow of the Hitler War does not allow them to remember, as we do, those who died in the First World War.The last of the old soldiers, theirs and ours, of the First World War, are now all gone.

There are fewer every year who knew and loved them. The hurt and anger, the grieving and the guilt is passing. In their place is a growing respect between the nations, and a determination to forge reconciliation and understanding.