Of War-Horses

The ancients gave far more attention to their war-horses than we do to ours, and I think they were right in this, though it is not fashionable to say so. A Roman general knew his horse as a craftsman knows his best tool — knew its temperament and its limits, what noise would startle it and what would not, how it responded to the weight of armour, how far it could be pushed before it became a danger rather than an aid. This knowledge was considered part of the education of a man of war, not a peripheral matter for grooms and stable-hands.

The Parthians and the Numidians rode without saddle or bridle, guiding their horses by inclination of the body and pressure of the knee alone — a skill that strikes us as so improbable that we tend to disbelieve the accounts of it. But there are men in our own time, among the peoples of the eastern plains, who manage horses in ways that any European cavalryman would find astonishing. The relationship between horse and rider, when it has been cultivated through years and daily intimacy, becomes something that neither party could quite replicate with another partner. The horse knows the rider’s intention before the rider has expressed it; the rider knows the horse’s fear before it manifests as shying or bolting.

“A good war-horse is not a vehicle. It is a companion in the very particular sense that it shares the danger, feels the fear, and must be persuaded — not merely commanded — to go where courage is required.”

What strikes me most, reading the ancient accounts, is how much sentiment the great soldiers of antiquity permitted themselves toward their horses. Alexander’s grief for Bucephalus was not thought unworthy of him. Caesar was known for the care he took of his mounts. These were men who understood that the horse’s willingness — which must be earned and maintained, never simply assumed — was a military asset as real as the quality of the steel or the steadiness of the infantry. We have grown too mechanical in our thinking about cavalry, treating horses as instruments to be maintained rather than creatures to be known. The accounts of the ancient battles suggest we have lost something real.