Warrior

He was bred on the Isle of Wight by Jack Seely and broken by him, and went to France with him in August 1914, four days after the war began. He was there for the whole of it. The list of what he came through was compiled by Seely afterwards: shellfire that killed the horses on either side of him, machine-gun fire, being buried in the wreckage of a collapsed dugout, being trapped under burning beams in a stable, and a direct hit on the stall he had left minutes before. The men of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade came to treat his survival as a fact of nature and called him the horse the Germans could not kill; his presence in a line of horses was reckoned to steady them. On 30 March 1918 at Moreuil Wood, with the German spring offensive breaking through, Seely rode him at the head of a charge into the wood against machine guns and infantry — one of the last mounted actions of the war. They came home together in 1918 and he lived another twenty-three years on the island, hunting and racing and winning the point-to-point in 1922. He died in 1941, aged thirty-three, when his wartime rations were cut. Seely wrote a book about him. In 2014 the PDSA gave him an honorary Dickin Medal on behalf of all the animals that served in the First World War.

Loved by · Jack Seely

Honours

• 1914–1918Served the whole war in France, surviving shellfire, machine guns and being buried twice
• 1918Led the charge at Moreuil Wood, 30 March
• 1922Won the point-to-point on the Isle of Wight, four years after coming home
• 2014Honorary Dickin Medal, on behalf of every animal that served in the First World War

Their kind

Bred in England from three imported stallions for speed over distance, and taken to war as a cavalry charger for exactly that.

A life in seasons