The Winter of 17-18 found us at Potijza and the horses in a ruin at Ypres, a lot of hard work but no action. One day Joan’s mate and her driver were struck down by her side at feeding time, and she was the only one left of the old seventy-five.

This made no difference to Joan, and all through the criticical Spring days of ’18 no extra work could change her spirit, no long, hot days of marching with short halts and quick watering and feeding could alter her condition. SHe had become the company’s pride, the personal friend of the oldest driver and the Seargeant himself, but those days allowed no proper care of men or horses.

And then the tide turned and we began to advance–Arras to Cambral in a week. For two or three hours each day men slept in ditches and horses were picketed in fields, and then up again and on. Ten of our poorest animals were lost from sheer fatigue, and some of our best were wounded and killed. Gradually half our transport was left behind, first all the pontoons, then some tool carts and limbers.

The rations lived a charmed existence. Each night, when we had rolled into our blankets, those who were still awake could hear the same cockney voice from the wagon calling a strange horse stranger names becayse he lagged behind his ‘Joan : but it meant to each a pleasant dream of bacon, bread and tea.

This was not surprising, for good horses will never lag behind, but next morning early when the wagon started for rations there were Darby and Joan-fresh as paint, traces taut, bite rattling like a pebble mill, ears forward, snorting and stepping out just as if there had been a week in the stable.

That Summer we lost horses. July, August, September, found them always on the move; sometimes Fritz got their range, sometimes they were bombed at night or shot while bringing up rations. We moved slowly forward, and sometimes backward, day and night in action, with the horses never far away in open fields’.

With the Autumn came rain, mud and cracked heels, and in the village of Souastre Darby had to go with open gashes on both hind feet. Standing in the lines, I watched him being led away. I saw him stop, raise and turn his fine head in time to see Joan being hooked in with another horse. This was too much for Darby-there was Joan with a strange animal; perhaps she wanted him; anyhow he was going. With a sharp tug at his halter he was free; in a minute he had caught the wagon, whinnying all the way; in another he was limping by Joan’s side.

In the literature evoked by the great war somewhere can be found a tribute to nearly every kind of living thing that worked and died for victory.

The human elements receive the lion’s share-perhaps it was theirs. Horses are portrayed sometimes in romantic colors-cavalry sweeping through a French valley, with flying pennants and drawn swords, perhaps a gun team coming into action in a cloud of dust. But these were isolated cases, thanks to barbed wire and mud. Yet every night on the western front essential things-food, water and ammunition- we’re brought forward along the roads or trails, too soft or dangerous for motor transport, by mules or horses whose work remains untold and unsung. The author had occasion to care for several horses in the British sector which glorified this service through many months of war-such a horse was Joan. Of whom the following story is true.

When I first saw her in ’15 she was already an old soldier-and I a green reinforcement-standing in a muddy, bleak field near the ruined village of Elverdinghe, on the first hard standing she had seen since Aldershot in August, ’14.

She was not the Major’s charger, nor the Quartermaster’s well groomed and overfed hackney, nor even the well-bred dun pony that was daily fed on lumps of sugar for delivering unnecessary dainties and necessary drinks to the officers’ kitchen, but only a typical English shire cart horse which, according to the stable piquet, had “ come through the retreat “ with several other horses in our string.

I remember seeing her little during those first strange weeks in that forward billet, but when we moved back into rest at the end of a long march I saw at the end of the column two steaming horses in an overloaded wagon almost touching the one in front-Joan and her teammate, of course called Darby.