But Jack Seely, a former Cabinet Minister tough enough to row in the local lifeboat was no shrinking violet. The officer in charge would normally be a young (and disposable) lieutenant. To do this a 20-man signal group would first have to lead the way. Jack Seely with a thousand men of the Canadian Cavalry behind him decided desperate times needed desperate measures and set to gallop his men and horses across open ground to storm the enemy in Moreuil Wood. The Germans had broken through and they threatened Amiens with the Allied Fifth Army in ragged retreat. Then on March 30, 1918, his life and Jack’s were ultimately on the line. "There was a good deal of rifle fire around and many of the horses behind us were hit but Warrior’s luck held and although he was the leading horse, he escaped without a scratch.” ![]() Then misfortune befell the adventure, for with a frightful bang the bridge collapsed and the tank fell through into the canal. Seely said: “Down the main street we went together, Warrior’s nose nearly touching the tank. He was waiting behind the lines for the never-to-happen breakthrough on the first day of the Somme, he sank in the mud in the horrors of Passchendaele and he was behind the lead tank in an ill-fated attack near Cambrai. Three times his stable was shelled and he escaped. On one occasion the horse beside him was cut in half by a shell, on another the horse whose nose he was touching was shot through the neck. “Here’s old Warrior” would be the cry and soldiers would crowd round to touch him in the hope some of the magic would rub off. With his bold head and fearless eye he became a symbol of indomitability. But if Warrior had grooms and often stables on the Western Front he never shirked danger and considering Grandpa was galloping around wearing a red general’s cap he must have often been nothing less than a bullet magnet. Warrior was a horse the general had bred and rode throughout his life in peace and war. Joey was Albert the farm boy’s horse, bought at auction to pull the plough before being conscripted into the army and heading for the front line. In almost every way Warrior was the exact social opposite of the fictional Joey who will steal so many hearts in Spielberg’s new film. ![]() He was pretending to be brave and succeeding in his task.” ![]() I could feel him tremble a little between my legs, but he pretended to be quite unperturbed. “To my amazement,” Jack Seely later wrote, “Warrior made no attempt to run away. Any normal thoroughbred would have bolted in terror. But what Grandpa and Warrior did was way off that scale.Īs early as August 30, 1914, as the British Expeditionary Force retreated from the Battle of Mons, a cluster of shells fell within yards of them. On August 11, 1914, Jack led Warrior off the boat in Le Havre, France, and for the five years of the First World War the pair cheated death a thousand times culminating in leading one of history’s last ever cavalry charges, against the Germans near Amiens, on March 30, 1918.īy then they said “the bullet has not been made that could finish Warrior” and when he died in 1941 at the grand age of 33, he was granted an unprecedented obituary in The Times under the title “The Horse The Germans Could Not Kill”.Īs a jockey I rode brave horses over the Grand National fences and at places like Cheltenham, Ascot, Haydock and Sandown. Warrior was a small sturdy bay thoroughbred, born in April 1908, a couple of miles from my grandfather General Jack Seely’s home on the Isle of Wight. But in our family we treasure the memory of a real war horse called Warrior. From today filmgoers will marvel at Steven Spielberg’s War Horse.
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