Warrior: The true story of the real war horse

Epigraph

Warrior saw action on all the major battlefields of the Western Front during the First World War

They said he was ‘the horse the Germans couldn’t kill’

His owner recommended him for the Victoria Cross

He was one man’s best friend

A saviour of men

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Warrior

Bonded forever

Farewell to home

‘Three cheers for old Warrior!’

The winter of mud

Hard winter on the Somme

The Canadian Cavalry: ‘Seely’s Lions’

Warrior meets the tanks

The last crusade

‘All my life had led to this’

Warrior the conquering hero

A picture paints …

Coming soon from Isabel George …

Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

Write for Us

Copyright

About the Publisher

Warrior

‘Warrior, the time has come to live up to your name. We are needed over the water in France, but don’t worry; we will face this war together. We will go there, do what needs to be done and return home, please God, unscathed. So what do you say, my Warrior? What do you say?’

General Jack Seely spoke softly to his beloved horse who leant in to rest his warm cheek against his master’s. Seely knew what Warrior’s answer would be. The horse was made of the same fibres as his owner: nothing scared him. Already a war hero having seen conflict in the Boer War, Seely had carved a name for himself as an able horseman. Galloping across the South African veldt, he had tested the spirit of man and horse against an unforgiving environment and a merciless enemy – and won. ‘Galloper Jack’, as he was affectionately known, was ready to take up arms for his country once more.

It was August 1914 and Britain was at war with Germany. Seely was preparing to join a troop ship to the Western Front and this time his adventure would include his horse, Warrior, an unusually short-legged, 15.2 hands bay thoroughbred with a bright white star on his forehead. A horse whose iron will and brave heart would protect one man and inspire a nation.

Bonded forever

Warrior was born in the spring of 1908 and raised on the family estate on the Isle of Wight, where he enjoyed all the love and privilege any horse could ever need for a healthy and happy start in life. Seely was working at the Colonial Office in London when he received a telegram announcing the new arrival: ‘Fine child for Cinderella born at Yafford this morning. Both doing well.’ Seely was overjoyed and excitedly shared the news with colleagues, although not all of them understood why the birth of a foal warranted the sending of a telegram. To Seely, this was family news; he was pleased to hear that the foal had delivered safely and relieved that his beloved charger, Cinderella, was doing well after the birth.

The fields of the Mottistone Downs that pitched and dipped their way to the sea were Warrior’s playground. Feeling at home there, and seldom more than a few feet away from his mother, he grew into a calm and affectionate youngster. As he galloped and frolicked across the rolling countryside, Warrior also began to show that he was every bit his father’s son. His sire – a handsome chestnut stallion called Straybit – had speed in his bloodline. His ancestors included horses such as Voltigeur, who won the Derby and the St Leger in 1850. The year after Warrior was born, Straybit romped home to win the Isle of Wight Lightweight race, leaving his competitors tasting the earth he kicked up in his wake.

So Warrior developed into a reflection of all that was good in his parents’ characters, but there was something inside Warrior that shone beyond the good looks, gentle nature and his speed, which his master soon discovered. When Seely first rode Warrior, it was unfortunate that he chose entirely different clothes to those he had been wearing when he’d made his many visits to Cinderella and her son in the fields. Taking one look at the new outfit, Warrior wasn’t sure if he wanted this man on his back! He pulled his ears back, snorted and pawed the air with his front legs. After the third time of being pitched onto the ground, Seely decided to have a quiet word with his horse and explain that they could carry on like this forever, but he would really rather they became friends. He even suggested they might be ‘friends together for all our lives’. Warrior, comforted by Seely’s gentle tones, dipped his head and rubbed his warm, dewy nose against his master’s cheek. From that moment the two were inseparable.

There were moments at home on the Isle of Wight, as Seely rode his young horse over the chalky Downs to the water’s edge, when Warrior showed his master that he had a gift for harnessing and for denying fear its power. At first Warrior wasn’t sure if he liked the sea and certainly not the breaking water, but his master encouraged him closer to the point where he could feel it ripple over his feet. He liked it. He didn’t allow it to frighten him. Little by little, with patience and understanding on his side, Seely was eventually able to walk his horse into the waves. There and then he realised the courage of this horse. He might have been trembling a little at first, but then Warrior absorbed his own fear. It was Warrior’s steadfast bravery as he faced the wall of tumbling water that made Seely realise his horse was not only fearless, but even radiated a sense of calm.

As a veteran of the Boer War, General Jack Seely had seen horses suffer in the most horrific ways and would not have wanted any of that for Warrior. Everyone was talking about signing up for King and Country and being home for Christmas, but Seely had devoted his civilian life to politics and he sincerely doubted the Great War would be over in four months. Even before he had returned from the war in South Africa he had been voted in as MP for the Isle of Wight, and alongside his great friend Winston Churchill (a war correspondent in the Boer conflict) he had nurtured a parliamentary career. By 1913, while Churchill accepted the role of First Lord of the Admiralty, Jack Seely was in the pivotal role of Secretary of State for War.

Seely did not rush into donating Warrior for the war effort. First, he pondered his concerns and talked them over with his friends in politics who also knew of Warrior’s qualities and his suitability for the task at hand. He had already made one leap of faith in his decision to train the youngster as a charger, not a racehorse. He heard from his trainer ‘Young Jim’ Joliffe how his young horse showed calm intelligence and that he was wise and lovable, but he also knew that he was brave and fearless. In the spirit of Empire and all that was considered good and honourable in the service of the monarch, Jack Seely signed up for war and volunteered Warrior, too.

Warrior had no idea that he would soon be wrenched from the comfort of his mother’s love. He was just four years old but he was about to embark on an episode that would require him to focus every ounce of his courage and resilience on survival. All he ever was and all he ever could be would converge at that moment.

The pair took one last gallop over the Downs together. The smell of the sea clung to their hair and clods of sweet earth spat up from the fields as Warrior pounded the ground. ‘My Warrior, we are about to go on an adventure and neither of us can know what it will bring. One thing is for sure: we will be together and we will care for each other until we can ride these fields again.’

Farewell to home

Warrior had hardly been away from his mother’s side since the day he was born, but early on 11 August 1914 he left behind the security and tranquillity of home to start his journey to the battlefields of the Western Front. He called to his mother as he was led from the field, and as the gate closed behind him he took one last look at home. Cinderella galloped along the edge of the field, watching her son being taken from her. She followed until she ran out of field, calling to Warrior in a language only the two of them could understand. It was a mournful, empty sound and when it stopped the silence was solid.

For weeks after her son’s departure, Cinderella paced Sidling Paul – the huge pasture she now had all to herself. Wandering around with her head bowed, she had no interest in anything or anyone, despite the best efforts of the Seely children to console her. She was missing Warrior and there was no doubt that he would be missing her.

When they reached Southampton docks Seely and Warrior met a scene of chaos. Men, horses, supplies and equipment were crowded together waiting to be loaded onto the troopships. One way or another, it all had to find a way to the men at the Front.

As an officer’s mount Warrior would be watched very closely by the men assigned to look after the horses during the Channel crossing. The majority of the horses around him were not so lucky. Taken from farms and fields all over Britain, the majority of the horses requisitioned by the Army that summer had never been further than their own stable, field and back yard. Now they were lined up, flanks quivering, eyes wide, waiting for their turn to be led up the gangway to the deck or settled in mass makeshift stalls in the hold.

Warrior didn’t need much coaxing up the gangway, but others found the experience traumatic. When panic set in with one or two horses, the others smelled fear. There were reports of some getting so agitated that they broke free of their ropes and bolted through the docks in a bid to escape. One who made it on deck with the bustling, stomping, snorting heave of horses decided to take a leap of faith, crashing the barrier and falling overboard. As the troopships pulled away from the quay, the men and the other horses could do nothing to help the horse destined to drown.

In just two weeks the British Army had requisitioned 140,000 horses from all over Britain and all had to be transported to France in overcrowded troopships as quickly as possible. The heave and swell of the water and the cramped, sweltering conditions below deck ensured a number of the horses never completed their journey. Some fell during the voyage and broke their legs, while others were claimed by the trauma. Warrior was one of the lucky ones. Later that day, on 11 August, he trotted ashore at Le Havre with Seely by his side.

As the Special Service officer of the British Expeditionary Force, Seely was attached to the Headquarters. By the time he arrived with Warrior the HQ had already moved 20 miles closer to Paris due to the German advance. Warrior had no time to acclimatise to the fear, stink and commotion of war – the white heat from a bursting shell, the violence, the noise and the smell of blood. He had to hit the ground running. Riding through the small French villages gathering and sharing information with the local people, Seely and his steed dodged the almost constant shellfire, but Warrior never shied away. On one occasion a shell hit a stable building directly ahead of them, sending a plume of fire into the sky. Later, Seely proudly told anyone who would listen how his horse had the uncanny ability to stall fear – he felt it, but did not show it. Many other horses would have run at that point, but not Warrior.

The experience of war had been a sudden one for Warrior. He had left the green and pleasant land of home and found himself in a place torn apart by fire and explosions. Everything a horse feared was there and it was inescapable. As Seely and Warrior joined the British Expeditionary Force’s advance on the Marne, their main enemy was exhaustion. In the space of just a few weeks Warrior had grown up. He was no longer a six-year-old green to the ways of life and war; he was a survivor in a place where death was strewn all around.

The swift advance of the French Army had cut off a section of the Germanadvance and their exhausted men were surrendering on all sides. Warrior, with Seely on his back, took a path through it all and on to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. Suddenly, Warrior and a group of other horses from the Expeditionary Force came to a halt just as a shell landed alongside them, blowing all around it into the air. Screams erupted from the stricken and bloodied, but out of the fire and mayhem stepped Warrior. As Seely gathered a group and ran ahead to the nearest village, the German machine guns rallied. All were killed except Seely. Warrior stood just a few hundred yards away.

Seely kissed Warrior on the nose. ‘If you are missing home, my Warrior, you should know that I am missing it, too. This hell is so far removed from our heaven at home, and I’m sorry I can’t give you a better shelter than this.’ Warrior did as he always did when his master spoke so softly to him; he nuzzled his cheek. There was a moment of thankfulness between the man and his horse for the fact that, by some miracle, they had survived the onslaught. Exhausted and covered in dirt and debris, Warrior took his rest. It was not for the war horse to know what would happen next, but Seely was aware that if there was any silence on the fields of Flanders that night it would be the calm before a storm. There was already talk of the hostilities building at Ypres, and few would be spared.

The fighting was desperate. The Allied forces faced overwhelming numbers and often superior artillery along the front line, and Warrior’s refusal to acknowledge fear was infectious. Every fighting man from the officer at General Headquarters to the Tommy in the trenches knew that if they slackened their grip on the enemy they would fail to hold the Channel ports and ultimately England could be lost. Seely went to report on activity at the Front only to find that it was being held by the brave survivors of an Indian contingent who refused to give in to the barrage of rifle and machine-gun fire. Warrior’s legs sank into the mud that had been stirred up in the wet gloom. He kept looking around warily. He had mastered his fear of fire and shells, but he still maintained a wise respect for rifle fire. He didn’t shy away or bolt, but there was unease in air. When Warrior suffered a bout of internal cramp and had to be taken back to GHQ at St-Omer, Seely breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed the unease was not unfounded – the horse Seely rode to the same spot the next day came under attack and was seriously wounded.

The informal armistice of Christmas 1914 brought a kind of peace that was welcomed by both sides. Seely heard later that soldiers from the Allied and German trenches had come together to play a game of football in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day. At the same time Seely had stood and looked at the hill above the town where the Expeditionary Force was stationed and thought of home. He had taken Warrior by the bridle and whispered his plan: ‘See that hill? That could be the Mottistone Downs, and for today it will be all ours. Come on, let’s go!’ The two galloped up the hill, taking a rare chance to ride as they would have done at home.

One of Warrior’s favourite games was racing the aeroplanes as they took off from the aerodrome. He wasn’t fazed by the noise of a plane’s engine, as perhaps he would have been in the old days. He was used to loud, strange and terrifying sounds and remained unmoved by the raw blast of the aircrafts as they reached for the sky. Racing the planes was the nearest thing to a game that he had enjoyed on these shores, and there was no rifle fire to dodge, no shellfire to challenge his nerves and the smell of blood was blasted from his nostrils by the clean, cold air.

‘Three cheers for old Warrior!’

As the New Year rang in, Lord Kitchener requested Seely’s presence at the War Office in London. But Seely did not travel alone. In a gesture of respect for him and his war horse, Warrior was granted a pass home, too. According to Seely in his book Warrior: The Amazing Story of a Real War Horse, Sir John French – Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Forces – allowed the horse special passage and went as far as to say: ‘I owe much to your young horse … As long as I am Commander in Chief, wherever you go, he shall go.’

Warrior travelled back home to Mottistone to visit his mother, Cinderella. Seely went to the War Office where he received his orders for the next phase of the war – he was to command the Canadian Cavalry, which comprised all the men they could muster from the bravest and best of their cavalry regiments: Lord Strathcona’s Horse, the Fort Garry Horse, the Royal Canadian Dragoons and the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery. Kitchener shared the news that the Allies had experienced the first chlorine gas attack of the war during the Second Battle of Ypres and reinforcements were now urgently needed in the trenches. Seely and Warrior were to join the Canadians right away while they were training on Salisbury Plain, to help prepare them for Flanders.

General Seely was well respected by the Canadians, but his horse was respected even more. Warrior was immediately given the honour of regimental mascot, and whenever he appeared the men would shout, ‘Here comes Warrior!’ patting his flanks and cheering as he proudly trotted by. The men loved their horses and they were proud of the fine Canadian stock they had brought with them, so perhaps more than anyone else they understood Seely’s bond with Warrior. This made the generals’s first order to his men all the harder to deliver.

In the early months of the war it was the cavalry regiments that suffered the heaviest losses. The cavalry charge seen near Mons was such a tactical disaster that it could have been the last of the war. Waves of galloping horses ridden by men lunging swords were cut down at a distance by the relentless stutter of the German machine guns. The horses made easy targets and carnage was all that was achieved. Suddenly, the cavalry – regarded as the elite of the British Army – looked out of place, a throwback from a bygone military era. Modern trench warfare, with its barbed wire and advanced artillery, had changed the face of the fighting, and that is why, in February 1915, Seely had to ask his Canadian Cavalry soldiers to go to war without their horses.

As the men boarded the troopship at Southampton, Seely escorted Warrior onboard and eased him into a corridor where there was space enough to fit in next to him for the night crossing. It was a rough passage, and Seely was pleased that he could talk Warrior through it till dawn and offer him titbits of corn to keep his spirits up. It was 6 a.m. by the time the ship docked in Boulogne and the men could gather their kitbags ready to disembark. Several looked sick and were eager to plant their feet on dry land, but it was the General and Warrior who were the first down the gangway, positioning themselves so they could greet every man as they came ashore. There was little chatter as the men readied themselves and their belongings to move on to the next stage of their journey, but suddenly a shout went out: ‘Three cheers for Warrior!’ His rider must have felt the horse’s body rise with pride and his head lift to acknowledge the cheering of his name. It was nothing new for Jack Seely to hear his horse praised in this way. After all, Warrior was a remarkable and lovable horse, as his owner knew only too well.

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