JMW Turner’s celebrated painting of The Fighting Temeraire depicts the old warship being towed off to the breaker’s yard by a steam tug – the romantic past dispatched by the utilitarian present. Near the beginning of Ulrich Raulff’s remarkable book about the “Centaurian pact” between human and horse, there is an anecdote that neatly reverses this plot. Raulff describes how, as a child in Westphalia during the 1950s, he and his grandfather watched a heavy carthorse tow a stranded Mercedes out of the mud. But the moment of equine triumph was illusory. By then the horse was already disappearing from the countryside as well as city streets. It had become a “ghost of modernity”.
Raulff, a prize-winning historian, writes in his introduction about the “sense of digging in a bottomless pit” familiar to anyone who tries to write synthetic history. His book excavates and offers up an extraordinary amount of material on the horse in history, literature, art, cinema and philosophy. Farewell to the Horse consists of a series of linked essays loosely organised under the headings energy, knowledge and pathos. Raulff is concerned with the century and a half between Napoleon (Hegel’s “world-spirit on horseback”) and the years after the second world war. He reminds us that the horse had an essential role, although it is often lost to sight, in the familiar story of industrial and urban development. It was horses that worked in mines and serviced the railway, and it was horses that carried passengers and goods in the great modern metropolises. London was home to 300,000 horses in 1900, Manhattan to 130,000. Entire industries grew up to feed, water and house them. Even the raised pavement, or trottoir, was prompted by the need to separate horse-drawn vehicles from pedestrians.
Then, in the decades before the first world war, the horse started to be replaced by cheaper forms of mechanical energy. The retreat from the horse came later in rural areas, a byproduct of agricultural modernisation after 1945. It is a sign of how easily Raulff moves between history and literature that his markers of change include both the fate of the European sparrow, which had once lived symbiotically with the horse, pecking at the specks of grain in equine dung, and the lost world of the country doctors on horseback who populate the works of Balzac, Flaubert and Kafka.
The horse was a “speed machine par excellence”, in Raulff’s words, and he explores the uses of equine power as an instrument of domination. A chapter on the US offers the conclusion that the horse made possible both the conquest of the west and the invention of the western (originally dubbed “horse operas”). The role played by horses in the larger history of combat is complex. Even in the mechanised warfare of the 20th century horses were used – and misused – in astounding numbers: 16 million of them died in the first world war. Raulff credits Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse for drawing attention to this, although his own evidence suggests that others raised the theme of equine carnage earlier.
The need to pull heavy equipment led to an even greater use of horse traction in the second world war, above all on the eastern front. But the heroic days of the cavalry charge, seen in the era of Frederick the Great and Napoleon, started to wane after the middle of the 19th century. Heavy artillery, machine guns and barbed wire mocked the men on horseback. Highly mobile cavalry units still served a purpose, however, nowhere more than in Russia. Raulff has some tremendous pages on Isaac Babel’s stories about the Cossacks in Red Cavalry, and jolts us with the reminder that the Red Army’s cavalry units were not disbanded until the mid-1950s, a decade after Hiroshima.
The chapters on equine knowledge are among the best in the book. There were always horse experts, of course – connoisseurs, dealers, handlers, breeders, farriers, blacksmiths, riding instructors and cavalrymen. But Raulff persuades us that, beginning in the 18th century, expertise became more extensive, specialised and systematic, the same thing that was happening in other fields of knowledge. In the case of hippology, or the study of the horse, one driving force was the institutionalised form of racing that emerged in Britain in the 18th century and spread to other parts of Europe, with its system of record-keeping based on the racing calendar and the General Stud Book (the ultimate authority on bloodlines, which preceded Burke’s Peerage by 35 years).
Anatomically correct horse painting accompanied the rise of racing. George Stubbs is the great English name, his famously accurate equine portraits were based on 18 months spent in a rented Lincolnshire barn, in which he dissected horses (as many as a dozen altogether) and sketched muscles, tendons and veins. Raulff also writes with authority about the French school of Géricault, Delacroix, Vernet, Fromentin and the less well-known Rosa Bonheur, whose gigantic painting, The Horse Fair (1852-55), is reproduced in one of the book’s handsome colour plates. France was also where the veterinary school originated, an institution soon copied (as was English racing) across Europe.
It was in France, too, that the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey made a close study of the movements of horses and other animals that resulted in his 1873 work La Machine Animale, a book that helped trigger the series of celebrated photographs of the horse in motion taken by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge and funded by railway magnate, university founder and horse breeder, Leland Stanford Jr.
The stud farm, the clinic and the artist’s or photographer’s studio – all are places where Raulff tracks down an increasingly sophisticated scientific understanding of the horse. But he does not neglect the practical knowledge of the handlers and dealers, or the activities of conmen who knew how to make a horse seem at least temporarily more spirited and light-footed (one method involved peppercorns). He also stretches the category of knowledge to cover a host of passionate, even obsessive amateurs. One was the Prussian officer and writer Max Jähns, who collected the many different German words for horse (he came up with 63), as well as songs, rhymes and legends about the animal. Jähns became increasingly anti-English in later years, blaming “the land of racing and betting” for reducing the horse to a mere plaything – and for debasing the German language in the process. In 1896 he became president of the General Association for the German Language, an ultra-nationalist organisation.
Politics is woven through Farewell to the Horse. The opening chapter in the third part of the book has an epigraph from Carl Schmitt: “To rule is to ride”. Raulff draws the contrast between Napoleon, the man on horseback, and Robespierre, who declined to saddle up when advised to do so (“I don’t know how to ride”) on the day he was overthrown. The horse was a symbol of domination. Benito Mussolini and the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata both wanted to be represented on horseback in order to emphasise their authority. The horse was “the metaphorical animal par excellence” – an idea Raulff explores through a series of cameos on the instances (not hard to find) where the horse serves in literature or painting as an emblem of sexuality, violence or dread.
His discussion of the last of these is the least predictable and the most interesting, especially what he has to say about the menace represented by the pale rider, from Revelation and Norse legend to Clint Eastwood’s 1985 film.
Sometimes this book feels as if it lacks a central thread. The themes threaten to burst at the seams as the author packs his text with detail after detail. Farewell to the Horse is nonetheless easy to like and admire, and Raulff is erudite and engaged. He introduces us to a seemingly endless series of memorable characters, such as the German horse Clever Hans, an early 20th-century equine forerunner of Paul the octopus, who predicted results at the 2010 World Cup.
Raulff does a tremendous job of evoking the senses – the stench of the horse-painter’s studio, the sound of a cracking whip and hooves on cobblestones in the city street, or the blacksmith’s hammer on anvil in the countryside. That makes his account sound elegiac, which it sometimes is although never sentimental. It is a personal work, one that is hard to categorise. Both of these qualities may explain the intellectual energy displayed on every page of this wide-ranging and ambitious book.
• Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship is translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £21.25 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
