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CHAPTER ONE
The morning of 16th November 1915 was cold, grey and miserable. It had rained for most of the night and showed no sign of letting up; it was half light and looked like being one of those November days when it really wouldn’t get much lighter. The wind howled around the corners of the warehouses and whistled through the gantries of the cranes on the dockside. These were Southampton docks, and the long train that had arrived at dawn after travelling overnight from Thetford in Norfolk carrying the horses that belonged to a Brigade of Field Artillery was about to be unloaded. Several hundred horses had travelled overnight in what had once been cattle trucks, but since the beginning of the war had been used for nothing other than ferrying horses to the dockside.
Southampton was their port of embarkation and they were on their way to the muddy, squalid horrors of the Western Front. In one of these trucks was Cupid, a pretty five-year-old bay mare, and as the sliding door of the truck was opened she felt the rush of the cold air flooding in, and it made her shiver. Slowly the horses were led from the train. When Cupid’s turn came, the wooden ramp which was used to lead the horses down from the truck, which had once been covered with coconut matting to provide some sort of grip, was in such a slimy state that it was almost impossible for a horse to pass over it and remain upright. Some had shied at it, some had tried to jump over it; each horse was led by two men, one either side to steady their perilous descent. Cupid managed by chance to stay upright and soon found herself standing with her companions tied to a rail in what had been, at the beginning of the war, hastily erected and temporary horse lines which now showed signs of the wear and tear caused by the many thousands of horses that had passed through them in the first fifteen months of the war.
After the long journey in the stifling heat of the cramped and badly-ventilated wagon, where the steam and stench of the horse dung hung heavily in the damp air, the chill of this November morning made the horses hunch. They were stiff from lack of movement and the only shelter was the flapping canvas of the walls and roof of the so called horse lines. Not only was it perishing cold, it was frightening. The unfamiliar noises from the ship’s sirens and the swarming flocks of screeching seagulls that landed all about them, scavenging for any scrap of food and fighting each other over the freshly-laid horse droppings for any morsel that could be found, were very disconcerting. There were men everywhere, shouting, running, marching. Hundreds of soldiers were stacking kit-bags on the dockside. Others were manhandling the guns, ammunition wagons, forage wagons and all manner of other equipment required by a brigade of artillery. All of this was being made ready to be winched aboard one of the ships. The dockers would argue with the soldiers, and the ship’s crew would argue with the dockers, and all the time the rain lashed down in torrents. The whole place stank of coal smoke from the trains, and the ships, and the chimneys of the fires that heated the offices on the quayside. The smoke swirled in the damp air, and everything seemed to be the same cold grey colour.
At last the horses were watered and fed. It was now over twelve hours since they had last been watered, and although the water was foul and black with coal dust, they relished every last drop of it. Cupid had been with the Brigade since the day after war had been declared on 4th August 1914, and the last fifteen months had changed her life beyond all description.
Cupid was a hunter, a lightweight, standing at about fifteen hands high. She had been born in 1909 and bought in 1911 as a fifteenth birthday present for a boy called Vernon. Both she and Vernon loved hunting and she had had three idyllic years in the Essex countryside. The flat grasslands which still covered much of south Essex in those happy days before the war were ideal for her. The country was dotted with huge elm trees now long gone, and the fields on the home farm where she lived grew the sweetest grass during the long summer months. Life for Cupid was perfect. Vernon’s father, who had bought Cupid for his son in 1911, commanded the local Territorial Field Artillery Battery. On the day that war was declared, the Battery had been mobilised and become part of the Brigade that now languished on the dockside at Southampton. On the day of mobilisation all the horses, bar one, from Cupid’s stable were press-ganged into the Battery; namely, Cupid, Flashlight, Nimrod and Polly, also one of the carriage horses. Frolic, the only horse to be left behind, was old and not very sound, otherwise she too no doubt would have been called up. One of Vernon’s father’s first duties on mobilisation was to buy horses for the Battery, and on 22nd August 1914 he wrote home:
