"War Horse" in Vancouver

I was excited to see "War Horse", the stage adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's novel. What makes the play unique is the fact that the central character is Joey, a horse, who goes to war with the British cavalry in 1914. Brought to life by the amazing puppets that play the horses, as designed by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, the horses steal the show. They buck and rear, they snort, and they gallop--straight toward the audience in a sequence that transports watchers to the bitter fields of artillery-torn France.
There are explosions and gunfire aplenty, and a strong scene where Joey is caught on the wire in No Man's Land. The novel was written for young readers and comes with a Hollywood ending, with many a tear trickling down cheeks in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
The performance I attended was a matinee, so I wondered for a while if there might not be school children attending, but that was not the case. There was an awful lot of grey hair on display, with most members of the audience middle-aged or older. Too bad, as there is lots in the story to hint at some of our at times bloody history.

To read my prize-winning novel about real war horses, and the men that rode them, see "Soldier of the Horse" here.

The Canadian Cavalry in the Last 100 Days (Part 3)

One of the Canadians caught up in the 2nd Battle of Le Cateau was S. H. Williams, author of “Stand to Your Horses”. He was temporarily attached to the 6^th Brigade, and watched while two British regiments went at full gallop across an open stretch of land some 2,000 yards long, where there was no cover for man or horse. They were being shelled by the Germans, and in the midst of it a flight of “aeroplanes, which I took to be ours until their actions proved them to be enemy,” attacked from the air. Williams’ assessment of the situation was that it made for an “exciting few moments”. In his view, though, in that particular incident the guns and aircraft didn’t do more damage than hitting a few men and horses, due to the speed of their gallop. Probably not enough to ruffle the feathers of Williams, a tough officer who had been through four years of war by this time.

The Canadian Cavalry in the Last 100 Days (Part 2)

The Second Battle of Le Cateau

In October 1918 Le Cateau was an important transportation hub some eight or ten miles behind the German front lines. Early in the Great War General Horace Smith-Dorrien fought a brutal delaying action against the onrushing Germans in the same location. But now, the Allies were driving the Germans back.The immediate aim of the Allies was to take the town and cut the enemy’s lines of communication. They attacked with artillery and infantry over a wide front. The infantry had pushed as hard as they could but were stopped due to the enemy’s resistance and the fatigue of their men. 
The cavalry was ordered to carry out an attack. Centred on a Roman road, with the (British) 6^th Cavalry Brigade to the right of it, and the Canadian Cavalry Brigade to the left, the mounted troops charged up through the stalled infantry.

The ferocity of the battle can be imagined from the comment by a British cavalry officer, Lieutenant Bickersteth: “the bursting H.E. (high explosive), the rattle of machine-gun fire, both from the ground and from the air, the explosion of the bombs dropped by the aeroplanes—all contributed to make the noise absolutely deafening.”