A returned soldier and his horse
May 20th 2009 22:50
An extraordinary animal story is told in a Letter to the Editor just published in a Melbourne, Australia, community newspaper.
The letter, written by Keith Ashton, says 169,000 horses left Australia for overseas during World War I. Of that huge number, just one horse returned.
The horse belonged to Major General William Throsby Bridges, who was hit by a sniper's bullet at Gallipoli on May 15, 1915. He died three days later.
His dying wish was that his favourite horse, named Sandy, which had remained in Egypt, should be sent home to Australia.
The dying wishes of generals are not to be ignored, and Sandy made his return journey. He spent the next six years at a remount depot in the Melbourne suburb of Maribyrnong, before going blind and being put down.
If Sandy was the only horse to come home, incredibly the only fallen Australian soldier's body to return from the World War I battlefields was that of Major General Bridges. He had been initially buried at a British war cemetery in Alexandria, but two months later his body was exhumed and brought to his final resting place, a hillside overlooking the elite Duntroon Military College in Canberra. Bridges had been its first commandant.
images: www.firstworldwar.com
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Comment by zeus
And I wonder about all the dogs that were tooken over there? I wonder how many of them made it home. I know the answer to the Viet Nam war dogs coming home, none, but how about WWI and those dogs? whoops, sorry I'm touchy about that thar subject being a dog an all.
Oh, mom wouldn't spell or nothing for me on this one, she says it's outta line.
Comment by Chris Champion
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I don't know a lot about dogs in the First World War, except the story of trained German shepherds being using in the trenches to carry messages. It was the first time the Brits had seen the breed, which had only existed for 30 or 40 years at that time, and after the war the first German shepherds were imported to the UK. The Brits called them Alsatians, after the Alsace area where they had first seen them during the war, and because things German weren't very popular for a while.
Comment by Janet Collins
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