{"id":621,"date":"2008-12-13T09:29:01","date_gmt":"2008-12-13T13:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thegreathorse.com\/blog\/?p=621"},"modified":"2016-10-23T13:03:15","modified_gmt":"2016-10-23T17:03:15","slug":"the-paradox-of-horses-in-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/2008\/12\/the-paradox-of-horses-in-war\/","title":{"rendered":"The Paradox of Horses in War"},"content":{"rendered":"

One thing you notice when researching historical fiction like “Eclipsed by Shadow”<\/strong> is how much human history is owed to the horse. Civilization advanced through adapting to the horse’s outlook.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Horsemanship is a civilized encounter with an alien mind. Horses are a \u201cprey\u201d species whose code is: \u201che who quickly runs away, lives to run another day.\u201d The horse is perpetually alert, suspicious and ready to flee, and 6000 years of domestication have not changed this basic instinct.<\/p>\n

The horse is an unlikely creature to ride into the chaos of battle, yet no animal so conjures the image of war. Horsemanship is one of mankind\u2019s oldest and most perfected technologies, and the battlefield was its testing ground for thousands of years. It would seem an impossible feat to ask a timid, flighty animal to carry men into a smoking, stinking cacophony of fire and noise\u2014yet that is exactly the result needed, and produced.<\/p>\n

The Book of Job in Bible has a passage which relates this paradox<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cHast thou given the horse strength?
\nHast thou clothed his neck with thunder?
\nCanst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course the horse is only an instrument; war is an invention of man. Strangely, the speed and physical strength of the animal made him a formidable weapon, but the great challenge of horsemanship through the ages was how to get this four-legged weapon onto the battlefield at all. Anyone who has seen a horse \u201cshy\u201d or bolt in terror from a blowing leaf will understand the achievement of enlisting cooperation from what is essentially a saddled rabbit.<\/p>\n

Skittishness in horses varies between individuals and isn\u2019t completely explainable, as with Saki\u2019s famous \u201cBrogue,\u201d<\/a> a horse so named \u201cin recognition of the fact that, once acquired, it was extremely difficult to get rid of.\u201d<\/em> According to the author\u2019s description: \u201cMotors and cycles he treated with tolerant disregard, but pigs, wheelbarrows, piles of stones by the roadside, perambulators in a village street, gates painted too aggressively white, and sometimes, but not always, the newer kind of beehives, turned him aside from his tracks in vivid imitation of the zigzag course of forked lightning.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The secret of man\u2019s partnership with the horse is trust. A wild band of equines operates through friendships and roles, and with proper instruction the trained horse learns to place his rider in the leadership position. This trust must be earned through the process of schooling, and can easily be lost, but it is one of the miracles of riding that only through an exchange of trust can the incredible potential of a horse\u2019s ability be unlocked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One thing you notice when researching historical fiction like “Eclipsed by Shadow” is how much human history is owed to the horse. Civilization advanced through adapting to the horse’s outlook. Horsemanship is a civilized encounter with an alien mind. Horses are a \u201cprey\u201d species whose code is: \u201che who quickly runs away, lives to run … Continue reading “The Paradox of Horses in War”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[360,154],"tags":[40,28,30,108,56,383],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14726,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621\/revisions\/14726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}