NaPM April 8 2014

[ChristopherSea]

This is one written from some brief history notes we have of the farm here. (not that this matters to the poem but i found them interesting so I'm adding them to the post below the poem).

War horse.
Accustomed to turning left, Olive,
14.2 pony – Exbourne muster,
tried to take her usual route
to the chapel, just as she should;
instead she was whipped on
beyond the fields of Solland.

After the train, at Portsmouth
she was belly-flopped onto the deck,
and assigned by lot. Down below,
her new family stood by, nervous,
all of them led by bullying hands
beyond the fields of England.

Ranked by the command on the reins,
she pulled small carts on numerous tasks.
No warm stall at the end of the day;
In all weathers she stood to attention
harness in place, ready for action.
In foreign fields, in the quiet of pre-dawn,
beyond the pain, she saw a Solland morn.

For four years of rain, sleet and mud scald
and shell shock, with only a token of praise
she laboured and toiled away, until one day - it stopped.
Her men marched off, but she was left
at her post as they boarded the boats
and floated beyond her field of view.

The men who came were harassed;
unharnessed and lined up, tied by a strap,
she was taken with other walking carcasses
to the muster point for the market.
One voice of hope – English, female.
Beyond the battlefield, the hammer fell.

Some WWI info taken from the “Sampford Courtenay” book
During the First World War, horses were requisitioned from the farms for service at the front. Olive a bay mare who was used by the Hawkins family as a ridding horse and to pull the trap was taken from Solland.
Her departure was recorded in John Hawkins accounts books: 10.8.1914 – “Olive pony commandeered at Exbourne. £40”
Olive when pulling the trap was accustomed to turning left at the Sampford chapel crossroads to go down to the village and the Methodist chapel. When taken away by the soldiers, presumably to Sampford Courtenay station, instead of going straight ahead she went to turn down the lane as usual and had to be whipped on. This was reported to hr owners by the neighbours living at Chapel Inn near the crossroads. The Hawkins girls cried when they heard what had happened. Olive of course, like most of the other horses requisitioned for the war, never came back.
Half a million horses used by the British army during the conflict were killed. At the end of the war, many of the surviving animals were abandoned by the armed forces and starved as a result or were auctioned off to French butchers.

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As a second point of interest (all be it to me only perhaps) My husbands great Aunt was so stirred by the plight of the horses abandoned by the war office that she started a rescue charity. although this did not start intime to save the horses from WWI it as gone from strength to strength, remaining at the original farm near Bristol, run by the aunty and is now called Horse world.
...hence the odd referance to the female voice at the end...I know too abstract for a reader but i wanted it in there!

AJ, this is a potent and poignant poem and my favorite of this lot. Bittersweet, as I had to fight tears this morning when I read this. Thank you for sharing the background and family history associated with the poem as well. Your great Aunt in-law was a wonderful woman./Chris