'A Cavalryman's Long Road East'
A soldier's memoir of campaigning with horses from 1939 to 1942 — the mud, the cold, and the animal that carried him through all of it.
It is one of the forgotten facts of the war that most of the armies which marched across Europe did so behind horses. This week's feature draws on the recollections of a cavalryman who served from the first day of the war to the depths of the winter fighting in the east, and whose memoir is above all a story about one animal.
"A man could complain," he wrote. "The horse could not. When the rations failed we shared what there was, and when the cold came I slept against his flank. I have never owed a living creature more."
The memoir follows the long road east at a walking pace — the dust of the summer advances, the bottomless mud of the autumn, and finally the frost that killed horses and men without distinction. It is a view of the war from below, without maps or grand strategy, in which the great events appear only as rumours passed down a column of tired riders.
What stays with the reader is the tenderness of it: an account of an industrial war written by a man whose closest comrade in it had four legs and no opinion about any of the causes at stake.