Michael Morpurgo on horses' military service

"War Horse," a production of the National Theatre of Great Britain, tells the story of a farm boy whose horse is sold to the British Army to serve on the front lines in World War I. Based on the young adult novel by Michael Morpugo, it is having its New York premiere this week. The author spoke with Martha Teichner about the genesis of his story ...

MICHAEL MORPURGO: Funnily enough, my fascination for World War I came from World War II. I'm a war baby, I was born in 1943. So I grew up in a world in London which was bombed, and my first playground was a bomb site. I suppose the first time I saw my mother upset, properly upset, was age five, when she was remembering her brother, who had been killed in Second World War in the RAF. He was a photograph on the mantelpiece back home, my Uncle Peter.

And from then on, I looked at that photograph, and I remembered my mother's grief, which went on all her life. She went on really grieving quite regularly about this, right the way through to her death some ten years ago. And it made me always, I think, remember that war isn't a thing that just happens and passes, that the grief goes on, and the suffering goes on afterwards. It's not about the millions that die, it's about the millions that survive, and survive in grief. So that was the first thing.

It's sort of, I think, there inside me that war does this thing not just to buildings but to people. And then I got to the stage where my wife, Claire, and I decided to move down to Devon to start a project to get kids to come to the countryside from the big cities. We called it Farms and City Children.

We set up near a village and got to know a village community for the very, very first time in a place called Iddesleigh, middle of nowhere, middle of Devon. So there we are, trying to fit into totally rural community, not being rural people necessarily ourselves, but having a great appreciation of it. We are the biggest employer locally. So we were very involved in the community. And I got to know people for the first time living next to me that knew where their parents were buried in the church yard, and their histories, and who planted that tree, and who dug that ditch - some sort of sense of how this place had been for hundreds of years.

I was talking one day to an old man in the pub. And I knew he'd been to First World War - there were three old men who'd been to First World War. And this old bloke was sitting there, and he had a pint of beer in his hand: "Yeah, yeah, I was there, I was there."

He was 17 when he went over with the Devon Yeomanry. I said, "What sort of regiment was that?" He said, "I was there with horses." And he started talking. I didn't have to ask him - he just went on talking, talking, talking. And eventually, he took me back to his house and showed me some of the things that he'd brought back and some photographs. And the more he talked, the more upset he became, and the more engaged I became in what had happened to him - this young man who'd come away from a completely pastoral background and had been thrust into this hideous, hideous trench warfare.

The only thing that kept him sane was that he said he would talk to his horse. And I didn't even think at the time [that] this is just sentimentality, because he is a farm worker - he was a hard nut. But he said, "That was all that kept me surviving. 'Cause I would go to horse lines each night to feed the horses, and I would talk to my horse, and I'd talk about my mother, and I'd talk about my sweetheart and about home. And about being frightened. Terrified. Particularly the last one. Being terrified you could not talk about amongst your chums, amongst your pals, 'cause everyone was terrified. You couldn't talk about it. People were dying all around you and you saw things that you simply couldn't talk about."

And the more he talked, the more I realized this was something very important which people didn't know much about, young people or old people. And I had my head focused on the horse, the fact that the horses went there. And I remember picking up the phone quite soon afterwards, maybe a week or so later, and ringing the Imperial War Museum in London and saying, "Do you know how many horses went to the First World War from this country, from Britain?" And they said, "Yes, we think we do. We think about a million went." And I said, "And how many came back?" And they said, "65,000."

That is roughly, not exactly, but roughly how many men died from Britain as well in that war. Almost a million died, and almost a million horses.

The stage magic of "War Horse"

And I also learned something dreadful, which was that even the 65,000 that survived, of those 65,000, huge numbers never even got back to England because the government thought, in their wisdom, "They're not worth bringing back 'cause the price of horses was so low, so we'll sell-- send them to French butchers." They were slaughtered. Having done all this four years, sometimes, surviving and surviving against terrible odds, and serving and serving, you know, the will of the soldiers, so to speak, they then found themselves being sold off for meat.

So I thought this is such a tragic story, but it represents the tragedy of the people who went to that war and didn't come back.

They died from shell blast. They died from wire. They died from machine guns. They died from drowning in the mud. Gas. All those same horrible ghastly things that happened in that war.

So you think to yourself, "This is not just a metaphor, but I could be a metaphor for all wars." So would it be interesting, I thought then, to write a story about not war from one side or the other - from British, from French, from German, Belgian, American,. Write a story, if you could, that is universal, that takes a horse's eye view of this war, a horse that starts on one side, is captured by another side, lives with some people over whose land this whole thing is being fought. Maybe you can get some sort of insight into how ghastly this war thing is that we seem powerless to stop doing, even now. How ghastly it is for the people who take part in it. And then of course for the people back home. So that was really the genesis for the story.

MARTHA TEICHNER: Most of the people who were in World War I have died off. What did you want your young adult readers to know about World War I that maybe they had no concept of?

MICHAEL MORPURGO: I'm not sure I'm that specific about it. I wanted to know myself. When I write a story, I'm in a way teaching myself. I'm trying to talk to myself and enthuse myself and engage myself. And the research I do [is] for me. It then becomes so important I want to pass the story on.

I mean, all storytellers do - whether you're writing for little children or grown up children - all you're doing is passing stories on. That's what we do. And you cannot pass a story on unless you believe in that story and it really matters to you, that you really care about it.

Well, this was not a difficult story to care about. I cared very, very much immediately for the horses concerned and of course for the men concerned. So I think that's what it was. But I would have to add that I think deep inside me, growing up, I'd known about the First World War in Britain. And if you study English literature, you almost always study the poets of the First World War. These are very important figures. My first insight, I suppose, into the First World War, came from the pen of other people, from these great, great poets. And then it would come from films, like "All Quiet on the Western Front." And there was music.

So by the time an educated Englishman gets to the point of being 20 or 25, the First World War is almost inside your bones. Which I don't think is necessarily the case in the U.S. I'm not sure which war it is, it's probably the Second World War or the Civil War, I expect. Because what's interesting, I suppose, is that that war, the Civil War, if I know my history well, was also a time when the ghastly machinery of war, the cleverness of shell fire (if you can call it "cleverness") and of rifle fire, decimated large, large numbers of soldiers for the first time. And we didn't learn from that when it came to the First World War. So we're still dressing up in fancy uniforms and riding horses into machine gun.

In England, we lost a lot, of course we did. But you'd have to go to France, or you'd have to go to Germany, and then look on the village war memorials and find out just the numbers of people in remote little villages that were simply wiped out. And very often, the villages ceased to exist afterwards. That happened a great deal.

MARTHA TEICHNER: Gone, a whole generation.

MICHAEL MORPURGO: The whole generation. But what it did was to knock the stuffing out of Europe in the most extraordinary way. Massive, massive depression.

How do you rise yourself up from this horror that you've been living through and try to get on? Europe has managed it, in sense. There's a good story to tell. And the good story is that, at some point, people got together and thought, 'We've done this. We've had this. We don't do war anymore. We play football, play rugby, and have arguments about butter and sausages.' And it sort of works better. But it's taken two world wars starting in Europe to make that happen.

MARTHA TEICHNER: When you found out how many horses died in World War I, how did you feel, as this staggering number began to percolate through your thoughts?

MICHAEL MORPURGO: All I thought was that it's important to tell the story of one of them. Because in a sense, numbers are impossible to deal with. When I think of six million Jews dying in the holocaust, I can't think of six million people. I can think of Anne Frank. I can think of Primo Levi. I can deal with that - and then I can multiply, if I've got to.

But actually, it's the suffering of individuals that's important that we pass on. Massive numbers of innocent people went to early deaths - old men sending young men to war, in the case of the First World War.

MARTHA TEICHNER: When you think of the treatment of the horses, these horses didn't volunteer to go to World War I. Men may have, but the horses didn't. What was their plight, as opposed to the situation with the people?

MICHAEL MORPURGO: Their plight was total innocence. As you said, there's no blame for the horses. I mean English people, Welsh people, German people, French people went to that war either because they wanted to or because people ordered them to do it. Nonetheless, they were part of the conspiracy of making the war.

Horses had no part in a conspiracy. They were simply being used, exploited, for cavalry and for pulling ambulances, for pulling guns. They were simply being used, and sacrificed. And so their sacrifice, in a sense, it's clearer to see. It's cleaner to see. It's like the death of a child in a bombing raid in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Iraq.

The total innocence. There's no way you can actually say that that child did anything wrong. And in fact, if we think of a child, and we think of a horse being destroyed, having a life cut short, or being brutally maimed or whatever, it does bring the horror of war to us all, I suppose much more readily, than if we start thinking of the numbers and the politics of it, because there are always arguments as soon as you get into that.

The absolute is that people suffer the most terrible deaths, and then subsequently, sometimes those that are maimed, lives which are blighted forever, and then the grief that goes on, as I've spoken about. All that happens because of this war thing. And we don't seem to learn.

And I think of what the horse represents, I think, to me. There's a moment in this show of "War Horse," in the play, where the horse rears up, caught on the wire, and screams. And it's like the scream in the picture by Edward Munch. It's a scream of agony about being alive in this ghastly world and being put through this pain. And it's a scream which seems to touch the hearts.

And when you're in a theater and there's a thousand people there, you feel a thousand people screaming inside themselves. Because they know what that scream's all about. Don't want someone saying, "War is a terrible thing." The scream does it.

And that's because it's coming from a creature that has been totally ignored in terms of, yeah, the rights, I suppose. This creature has a right to life. Children have a right to life. People have a right to life. And war takes no account of that.

MARTHA TEICHNER: One of the most indelible images in the show is Joey rearing up and the tank rearing up. You have at the time of the First World War, a coming together of old warfare and new warfare, of mechanization versus men and animals.

MICHAEL MORPURGO: In that war that it really happened. When the war began, I think there was still, amongst all sides, this notion that it was a campaign thing. You went on campaigns. You probably see the French used to dress in the most beautiful blue and red uniforms, and wonderful helmets and breast plates and all sorts of things. We hadn't taken account at all that the weapons that we had also created, and the Germans had created, and the French had created, made all that completely redundant.

Finally, towards the end of the war, when the tank came along, which was absolutely the weapon which was going to crush all this, and wipe out any possible use for cavalry ... I mean they simply rolled over people, and they rolled through wire, and they obliterated horses. And it was that clash, then, of flesh and metal, of the machine and humankind, really. And we saw it with our own eyes, really, that this is the horrible future, this is the war of the worlds that's coming if we're not very careful.

And of course it was said at the time, and I think everyone knew it was horrible. And it was impossible to deal with. And they called it The War to End All Wars.

We don't seem to learn.

MARTHA TEICHNER: Horses were essential to that First World War, were they not?

MICHAEL MORPURGO: Yes, in terms of pulling things through the mud, absolutely. Ambulances could never have reached when they need to reach. Cavalry were useful at the beginning. But then, very, very soon, when it become the war that was completely in the trenches, they became redundant.

The pulling of the gun teams was going to be critical. Because motorized transport was there, but it was-- pretty rudimentary, and the tires didn't work very well in mud. And so horses, as the war went on, and as the roads became more and more impossible, became more and more important.

MARTHA TEICHNER: These horses, how were they treated during the war?

MICHAEL MORPURGO: Horses were treated rather same as the men were. They were fed, occasionally, when the food could get to them. They lived in the most appalling conditions. So for instance, the men used to get trench foot, which was, you know, finally something could lead to gangrene and terrible, terrible death, if it wasn't treated. Horses were living in the mud, as well. So their feet had terrible sores. They're a lot of them, again, had to be put down because of that. The food was never enough. There was never enough shelter. This is what was interesting about it. Man and beast were living through the same kind of treatment. Both expendable. Absolutely expendable.

And of course with the men, what they discovered was that if you left them in the line too long, this would send them mad with shellshock. The men couldn't stand more than a few days in the trenches. So it would be a few days in the trenches, and you'd go back behind the lines and rest for a few days. And then you'd come up again. Horses were only rested when they were perceived to be too exhausted to go on.

MARTHA TEICHNER: The story has a happy ending, in a manner of speaking.

MICHAEL MORPURGO: Yes, if war ever has a happy ending, there are some soldiers who come home. And that happens in this story. I think it's important, certainly I feel this anyway, as a person, to be optimistic, to find, if you can, some sense of redemption, even in the darkest stories. And there can be no darker war than the First World War. Nonetheless, life does go on, did go on. People did pick themselves up and try to make something of their lives. And to me, that's very, very important when you're writing a story. Young people do read my stories a lot. And I think it's important for them, if possible, not to tie a pink ribbon about it and say, 'Look, it's all right, it's just a story, don't worry,' you know?

No. You worry about it. This is what happened. And it was terrible to live through. But how important it is to be able to lift your eyes up and have the courage to get on with the next day, despite the tragedy that's gone on before. I think that's really important as a message. And it's what I feel anyway.

MARTHA TEICHNER: Can you talk about heroism, the kind of heroism we associate with human beings, with these horses?

MICHAEL MORPURGO: I don't know. It's very difficult how far you anthropomorphize. But what you do know is these creatures had extraordinary courage to go on, as the men did, through the most appalling conditions to charge on when they were being shot at.

They of course didn't have the comprehension of what was happening that we have. But nonetheless, the terror was quite clear to them. You know, the noise was ghastly. And they could feel, from all the soldiers around them, and for the other horses, a terrific sense, not of excitement at all, except right at the beginning of the war, but a sense of impending horror and death.

How much they can think about those things, who knows? That's the other interesting thing about exploring it. But what you do know is that there are sensitive, sensible creatures with a different intelligence from ours, but they have insights, just as we do. Now what those insights are, I don't know.

"Courage" may be too big a word to, if you like, put onto a horse. But you know they're big-hearted. You know that they take challenges ... So I suppose you could call it courage. But it's a different kind of courage from human courage.