Making History: The Untold Story of WW1 Horses

Eight million horses, mules and donkeys died in the First World War. They hauled artillery through Flanders mud, charged the last cavalry actions in history, dragged ambulances under shellfire, and carried despatches between trenches when telephone lines went down. Of the million horses Britain sent to France between 1914 and 1918, just 62,000 returned.

This guide tells the full story of the horses in WW1: how the British Expeditionary Force mobilised them, where they came from, how the cavalry was eclipsed by the machine gun, the famous WW1 horses whose names survived the war, and how the Brooke Hospital for Animals grew from the rescue of abandoned army horses in Cairo.

How Many Horses Served in WW1

The British Army went to war in August 1914 with about 25,000 horses. By the Armistice in November 1918 it had used around 1.1 million. The combined Allied total reached approximately 6 million horses, mules and donkeys; the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire) used a further 2 million. Around 8 million animals died in the war from shellfire, gas, exhaustion, disease and the brutal Flanders winters.

Compare that with the human cost. Britain lost about 880,000 servicemen. The horses lost (roughly 480,000 to British service alone, depending on which records are counted) make the equine death toll proportionally even higher. The Western Front was the worst place to be either species.

Mobilising Horses for the British Expeditionary Force

When war broke out, the Army needed 160,000 horses within fourteen days to mobilise the British Expeditionary Force. Britain’s standing horse population in 1914 was around 1.2 million, but most were privately owned, in mining, farming and urban transport. Under the Army (Annual) Act and the Horse Mobilisation Scheme established in the years before the war, the War Office could requisition any suitable horse from any owner on payment of compensation set by an Army Inspector.

In the first two weeks of August 1914, Remount officers travelled town to town with a railway warrant book and a stamp pad. Hunters, hackneys, drays, costermongers’ ponies, omnibus horses and dock horses were inspected and impressed into service. The London General Omnibus Company alone gave up over 1,000 horses in those first days; many trams and bus routes ran on greatly reduced services as a result. Even some hunt horses and racing thoroughbreds were taken. Roughly 140,000 horses were requisitioned in those first two weeks.

It was not enough. Britain became, in the historian Stephen Badsey’s phrase, “the greatest single importer of horses in human history”. Between 1914 and 1918 around 600,000 horses were shipped to Britain from the United States and Canada, with a smaller stream from Australia, Argentina and Ireland. They arrived through Liverpool, Glasgow and Avonmouth, were rested at remount depots and shipped on to the front.

The Army Remount Service

The Army Remount Service ran the entire pipeline from acquisition to issue. Major remount depots opened at Romsey (Hampshire), Shirehampton (near Bristol), Ormskirk (Lancashire) and Swaythling (Hampshire). At their peak the depots processed thousands of horses per week, fitting them with army tack, vaccinating against glanders, branding with the broad-arrow War Department mark, and training them to ignore rifle fire and shell bursts before they crossed the Channel.

The Army Veterinary Corps (later Royal Army Veterinary Corps after George V granted the title in November 1918) ran field veterinary hospitals across France and Egypt. British figures show that 2.5 million horses passed through these hospitals over the course of the war, and around 2 million returned to active service. Mortality at the veterinary hospitals was about 20 per cent, far lower than the front-line death rate. By the standards of any earlier war, veterinary care in WW1 was a miracle. By modern equine standards it was butchery.

How Horses Were Used in WW1

Most horses in WW1 were not cavalry chargers. They were draught animals, beasts of burden, and pack animals. The war’s logistics ran on hooves.

• Artillery teams. A standard 18-pounder field gun was hauled by a six-horse team in two ranks of three (lead, centre and wheel pairs). A heavy howitzer needed eight or twelve horses. The British Army deployed around 5,500 guns to France; sustaining them meant tens of thousands of horses in continual draught service.
• Supply waggons. Two- and four-horse waggons hauled rations, ammunition, fodder, water and post from railhead to forward dump. Every infantry division needed around 5,500 horses to function.
• Cavalry mounts. Riding horses for cavalry regiments. About 165,000 cavalry mounts in the BEF at peak.
• Officers’ chargers. Personal mounts for officers, often privately purchased high-quality horses. Many were killed or worn out within months.
• Pack mules. Mules carried loads where waggons could not go: front-line ammunition resupply, mountain operations in Italy and the Balkans, Egyptian and Palestinian deserts. The British Army used about 200,000 mules during the war.
• Ambulance horses. Royal Army Medical Corps horse ambulances carried wounded men from regimental aid posts to dressing stations and casualty clearing stations.
• Despatch horses. Despatch riders on horseback (and later motorbike) carried orders when telephone wire was cut by shelling.
• Pit ponies. Shetlands and other small ponies hauled trucks through mine workings and tunnels in places like the Vimy and Messines sectors. The tunnellers’ war was a war of ponies as well as men.

The End of Cavalry on the Western Front

The opening month of the war saw the last classical cavalry actions in European history. At Casteau on 22 August 1914, the British 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards charged a German cavalry patrol; the first shot fired by the BEF in the war was fired from horseback. At Mons three days later, British cavalry skirmished and screened the retreat of the BEF.

Once the war of movement froze into trench warfare in late 1914, the cavalry’s role contracted. The combination of barbed wire, machine guns and entrenched artillery made mounted charges suicidal. There were still occasional successes: the Charge at Moreuil Wood on 30 March 1918, where Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew’s Lord Strathcona’s Horse charged a German position and won a Victoria Cross, was a desperate last-gasp affirmation that cavalry could still matter in extremis. But by 1916 the BEF’s cavalry divisions spent most of their time waiting for a breakthrough that never came on the Western Front, and using their horses for logistical work in the meantime.

In the Middle East theatres, cavalry had longer life. The Australian Light Horse mounted a famous charge at Beersheba on 31 October 1917, the last successful great cavalry charge in history. Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force used mounted formations of British, Indian, Australian and New Zealand cavalry to outmanoeuvre Ottoman forces across Sinai and Palestine, where the desert favoured horses over infantry. The horses of the Western Desert paid for that success with appalling thirst, heat and overwork.

How Many Horses Died in WW1

British Army horse losses on the Western Front alone were around 484,000, roughly equivalent to one horse killed for every two British soldiers killed. The causes were varied.

• Shellfire and gas. The leading cause of front-line equine death. Horses had no gas masks until 1918; mustard and chlorine gas inflicted appalling damage.
• Exhaustion. Hauling guns and waggons through deep Flanders mud for sustained operations broke horses physically. Many died in harness.
• Disease. Glanders, mange, equine influenza, strangles, and the parasitic skin conditions of overworked horses living rough. Mud fever (greasy heel) was endemic.
• Starvation and dehydration. Forage rations were calculated at 12 lb of oats and 10 lb of hay per horse per day; in practice horses often received much less. The Eastern Mediterranean theatres were chronically short.
• Cold. Horses standing on picket lines in winter, with inadequate rugs and shelter, died of pneumonia and exposure.
• Accidents. Falls, drowning in shell holes, kick injuries on overcrowded picket lines, road accidents.

Famous WW1 Horses

A handful of WW1 horses had names that survived the war. Most did not.

Warrior

The most famous British WW1 horse. Bred on the Isle of Wight by General Jack Seely’s family, Warrior crossed to France with Seely in August 1914 and remained with him through the war. He served at Mons, the Somme, Passchendaele and the great cavalry charge at Moreuil Wood in March 1918. Warrior survived the war, returned to the Isle of Wight, and lived until 1941. In 2014 he was awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal posthumously, honouring “all the animals that served in World War One”. Seely’s memoir My Horse Warrior, illustrated by Sir Alfred Munnings, became one of the great British animal books of the twentieth century.

Sandy

The charger of Major-General Sir William Bridges, commander of the Australian 1st Division at Gallipoli. Bridges was shot at Anzac Cove in May 1915 and died of his wounds. Sandy was the only Australian horse from the entire AIF to return to Australia after the war. Of the 136,000 horses Australia sent overseas, Sandy alone came home.

Old Bill

A bay gelding that served from 1914 to 1919 with the Royal Field Artillery on the Western Front. He survived four years in the line, returned home, and was kept as a regimental pet in retirement. Old Bill’s longevity made him a minor newspaper celebrity in the 1920s.

Murphy and the Donkeys of Gallipoli

Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick of the Australian and New Zealand Army Medical Corps used donkeys (one was reputedly called Murphy, possibly Duffy, the records disagree) to carry wounded down Shrapnel Gully at Gallipoli in April and May 1915. Simpson was killed by machine-gun fire on 19 May 1915. The donkeys he used became one of the central symbols of Anzac courage and compassion.

Songster

A trooper’s horse of the Warwickshire Yeomanry. He served at Gallipoli and through the Palestine campaign, and was one of the very few horses repatriated to Britain in 1919. He lived peacefully in Warwickshire until 1940. His tail forms part of the regimental collection.

What Happened to the Horses After the War

Of the 1.1 million horses Britain used in the war, only around 62,000 returned home. The rest were either killed in service, sold to French and Belgian farmers (where many were worked to death), or sold to local butchers in the Middle East and Egypt for meat or onward sale to Cairo and Alexandria carriage owners. The fate of the Egyptian horses in particular became a national scandal in 1930.

Dorothy Brooke, the wife of the British cavalry officer Brigadier Geoffrey Brooke, arrived in Cairo in the late 1920s and discovered hundreds of former British Army horses still being worked as cab and cart horses in appalling condition, in some cases more than a decade after the war ended. She wrote a letter to The Morning Post in London in 1931 that triggered a public outcry; British donations poured in, and Dorothy Brooke set up the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital in Cairo in 1934 to retire and care for these horses humanely. That hospital evolved into the modern Brooke Hospital for Animals, now an international working-equine charity active in twelve countries. The name on the door is the closest thing the WW1 cavalry horses have to a permanent monument.

Commemorating WW1 Horses Today

Several memorials honour WW1 horses in the UK and Commonwealth.

• Animals in War Memorial, Park Lane, London. Unveiled in 2004, dedicated to all animals that served in twentieth-century conflicts. The inscription reads “They had no choice”.
• Brooke Hospital for Animals. The living legacy of Dorothy Brooke’s Cairo rescue.
• National Army Museum, Chelsea. Permanent gallery on the Army horse, including Warrior’s bridle.
• Royal Army Veterinary Corps Memorial, Melton Mowbray. Honours the work of the AVC/RAVC vets and farriers.
• Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. First published in 1982, adapted as a National Theatre play in 2007 and a Steven Spielberg film in 2011. The story of Joey is fictional but the world it describes is closely researched. The puppet horses of the stage production toured the world and reawakened public memory of the WW1 horse.

Each November the BHS and Brooke join in Remembrance services to mark the equine contribution. A small ribbon, purple in colour, is sometimes worn alongside the poppy to acknowledge animals in war.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many horses were used in WW1?

Approximately 8 million horses, mules and donkeys served across all combatant armies. Britain alone used around 1.1 million horses; about 600,000 were imported from the United States and Canada to supplement domestic requisitions.

How many horses died in WW1?

Estimates put total equine deaths at around 8 million across all armies and theatres. British Army horse deaths on the Western Front alone were about 484,000.

What horse breeds were used in WW1?

Almost every working breed in Britain. Shire horses, Suffolk Punches and Clydesdales hauled the heavy artillery and supply waggons. Hackneys and hunters became cavalry mounts and officers’ chargers. Welsh Cobs, Dales and Fell Ponies pulled gun carriages and ambulance waggons. Shetland Ponies worked underground. Thoroughbreds and Hackneys carried despatch riders. Tens of thousands of American and Canadian Quarter Horses and mixed-breed remounts arrived after 1914.

Did horses have gas masks in WW1?

Horse gas masks were developed and issued from 1916 onward but never reached the whole force. They were canvas hoods soaked in chemical neutralisers, fitted over the muzzle. Many horses died in early gas attacks before any protection arrived.

Were the last cavalry charges in WW1?

The last great successful cavalry charge in military history was the Australian Light Horse charge at Beersheba on 31 October 1917. The last British charge on the Western Front was at Moreuil Wood on 30 March 1918. Both contributed to the myth and reality of cavalry’s final years.

How many British horses returned from WW1?

Only about 62,000 of the 1.1 million British Army horses returned to the UK after the war. Most were sold to French and Belgian farmers or to Egyptian buyers. The horses sold in Egypt were the focus of Dorothy Brooke’s rescue work in the early 1930s.

For more equine history see our biographies of famous racehorses including Red Rum, Arkle, and Aldaniti. For heavy-horse breed profiles see our guides to heavy horse breeds and the Shire Horse.