The response from the readers was overwhelmingly supportive - in fact they were so moved they sent her the equivalent of £20K in today's money to help end the horses' suffering. Living in Egypt in the 1930s, Dorothy Brooke was moved by the encounters she had with these maltreated horses, and felt compelled to write a letter to the Morning Post to expose their plight. Warrior was posthumously awarded the Dickin Medal, regarded as the highest accolade an animal can receive for serving in military conflict. Previous recipients have included 32 pigeons, 29 dogs, four horses including Warrior, and one cat.Īs World War II approached, many of the WW1 war horses bred in England that had been sold as surplus in Europe and Egypt were in a very poor state. They had been so overworked and abused they were practically skeletons. Warrior was born on the Isle of Wight, and served on the front line for the duration of the war after arriving on the Western Front on 11 August 1914, only returning to the UK by Christmas 1918. He lived until 1941, when he was put down, as his owner Jack Seely felt that the extra corn rations needed to keep the 33-year-old hero going could not be justified in wartime. The horse pictured in this painting by Alfred Munning was called Warrior, and he became well-known among the troops for his incredible story. He was victim to machine gun attacks by air and falling shells at the Battle of the Somme, buried under debris and stuck in mud at Passchendaele, twice trapped under the burning beams of his stables, and survived. No wonder that he was dubbed "the horse the Germans couldn't kill".
0 kommentar(er)
