War Horse Read Online Free PDF Page B

pulling a milk float, but there’s no one to match my Topthorn for stamina – why he could have gone on for ever and ever. He’s an eight horse-power horse, and that’s a fact.’
    On the way back to the barracks that evening the two officers debated the virtues of their respective horses, whilst Topthorn and I plodded along shoulder to shoulder, heads hanging – our strength sapped by the sun and the long gallop. We were stabled side by sidethat night, and again on the boat the next day we found ourselves together in the bowels of the converted liner that was to carry us off to France and away to the war.

CHAPTER 6
    THERE WAS ALL about us on the ship an air of great exuberance and expectancy. The soldiers were buoyant with optimism, as if they were embarking on some great military picnic; it seemed none of them had a care in the world. As they tended us in our stalls the troopers joked and laughed together as I had never heard them before. And we were to need their confidence around us, for it was a stormy crossing and many of us became overwrought and apprehensive as the ship tossed wildly in the sea. Some of us kicked out at our stalls in a desperate effort to break free and to find ground that did not pitch and plunge under our feet, but the troopers werealways there to hold us steady and to comfort us.
    My comfort, however, came not from Corporal Samuel Perkins, who came to hold my head through the worst of it; for even when he patted me he did it in such a peremptory fashion that I did not feel he meant it. My comfort came from Topthorn who remained calm throughout. He would lean his great head over the stall and let me rest on his neck while I tried to obliterate from my mind the sinking surge of the ship and the noise of uncontrolled terror from the horses all around me.
    But the moment we docked the mood changed. The horses recovered their composure with solid still land under their hooves once more, but the troopers fell silent and sombre as we walked past unending lines of wounded waiting to board the ship back to England. As we disembarked and were led away along the quayside Captain Nicholls walked by my head turning his eyes out to sea so that no one should notice the tears in them. The wounded were everywhere – on stretchers, on crutches, in open ambulances, and etched on every man was the look of wretched misery and pain. The tried to put a brave face on it, but even the jokes and quips they shouted out as we passed were heavy withgloom and sarcasm. No sergeant major, no enemy barrage could have silenced a body of soldiers as effectively as that terrible sight, for here for the first time the men saw for themselves the kind of war they were going into and there was not a single man in the squadron who seemed prepared for it.
    Once out into the flat open country the squadron threw off its unfamiliar shroud of despondency and regained its jocular spirits. The men sang again in their saddles and laughed amongst themselves. It was to be a long, long march through the dust, all that day and the next. We would stop once every hour for a few minutes and would ride on until dusk before making camp near a village and always by a stream or a river. They cared for us well on that march, often dismounting and walking beside us to give us the rest we needed. But sweetest of all were the full buckets of cooling, quenching water they would bring us whenever we stopped beside a stream. Topthorn, I noticed, always shook his head in the water before he started to drink so that alongside him I was showered all over my face and neck with cooling water.
    The mounts were tethered in horse lines out in the open as we had been on manoeuvres back in England.So we were already hardened to living out. But it was colder now as the damp mists of autumn fell each evening and chilled us where we stood. We had plenty of fodder morning and evening, a generous ration of corn from our nosebags and we grazed whenever we could. Like the