William Ranney, Washington at the Battle of Princeton
Some months ago my friend John
Raimo, a young historian and an indefatigable bookman, sent me an engaging new
work by the German historian Ulrich Raulff: Farewell
to the Horse. This is one of those
brilliant essays in the “new” history in which once fundamental aspects of
material culture are studied as well from artistic and cultural angles that
first surprise and then delight a reader.
Raulff’s subject is the “compact” between Western culture and the horse
roughly in the period between Napoleon and the early decades of the twentieth
century. The horse was everywhere, and
everywhere indispensable. The horse
provided nearly all transportation. Dung-covered
city streets were clogged with every kind of horse-drawn conveyance. Work horses supplied agricultural labor and
commercial haulage on a huge scale. As
for warfare, the French Imperial army perhaps traveled on its stomach, but the
grub to feed it was hauled by horse, along with heavy artillery pieces and all
the other engines of death. World War I,
which killed about seventeen million human beings, killed also about seven million horses. And then, not quite instantly but with
astonishing speed, the millennial compact vanished beneath the triumph of the
internal combustion engine. This huge,
epochal change—still not complete at the time of my own birth—no longer even
enters the contemporary American consciousness.
But he horse might return one day as we choke on petroleum fumes.
Even a vanished cultural symbiosis
does leave its memories. Quite by chance, shortly after reading Raulff, I
needed to dip into Philip Sidney’s Defence
of Poesie (1595). I had forgotten,
if I ever noticed, that it begins with some “horse talk”. Sidney and his friend Wotton, while at the
imperial court of Maximilian II, determined to study the equestrian arts under
the tutelage of the famous Italian stable master, Gian Carlo Pugliano. Pugliano claimed that “no earthly thing bred
such wonder to a Prince, as to be a good horseman. Skill in government was but a Pedanteria, in comparison, then would he
adde certain praises by telling what a peerless beast the horse was, the onely
serviceable Courtier without flattery, the beast of most bewtie, faithfulnesse,
courage, and such more, that if I had not been a peece of a Logician before I came to him, I think
he would have perswaded me to have wished my self a horse.” Of course Sidney was not the only major figure
in English literature to be tempted toward extreme hippophilia. Remember poor Gulliver when banished from the
isle of the Houyhnhnms.
Then, too, I have also begun toying
with notes for a new essay on Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight, a fourteenth-century poem that examines the
ambiguities of late medieval chivalry with great subtlety. To talk about chivalry is to talk about horses—as the word for “knight” in most
European languages makes clear: chevalier,
caballero, cavaliere, cavaleiro, Ritter.
The most important thing about a chevalier? C’est le cheval! Amusing, yes, but also terrifying. Imagine yourself among foot soldiers in the
field being charged at full gallop by a one-ton equine killing machine in which
the power of murderous human dexterity was united to steaming animal
flesh. We know from accounts of the
Conquest of Mexico that the bravest of Indian warriors—themselves unflinching
murderers—fled in terror from this previously unknown hybrid horror. Memories of the aristocratic bond between
steed and rider survived in the horsiness of the fox-hunting gentry of rural
England, and its adolescent sentimentality is the stuff of such literary
perennials as Black Beauty and My Friend Flicka.
I wonder whether we could not now
persuade Raulff to write a sequel called Farewell
to the Cow. This suggestion, only
half facetious, arises from, first, my own early life experience among herds of
Herefords, but more directly from reading one of the chapters in Rysznard
Kapuscinski’s amazing African memoirs, The
Shadow of the Sun: My African Life—to which I shall shortly return. Raulff’s book is fascinating about the
iconography of the horse in its relation to political ideology and cultural
myth. Naturally he touches upon the
history of the American West, especially as reflected in Hollywood “horse
operas”. Raulff has lots of things to
say about cowboys, but he leaves unmentioned one of the most interesting things:
they spend their lives in the saddle, but we call them cowboys, not horseboys. Why
is that? I am a great believer in the
history part of word history. What do we
see in the word cattle? Well, we are invited to see chattels, moveable possessions, the
fundamental material elements of primitive human wealth. Likewise we are invited to see in the phrase
“head of cattle” the Latin caput (head) the “capital” that gives
its name to economic “capitalism”.
Getting back to Rysznard
Kapuscinski (1932-2007): he was a brilliant Polish journalist who spent forty
years, more or less, trampling throughout the African continent as its
disparate nations were emerging from European colonialism to a mainly chaotic
and often tragic independence in the later twentieth century. His Shadow
of the Sun (1998) is unlike any other “travel” book I have read. He went all over Africa, and in a couple of
dozen shortish chapters he displays a magnificent humanistic sympathy for a
dizzying diversity of individual Africans and the extraordinary physical and
cultural conditions in which they live.
Most of the essays in the book could be fairly described as “impressionistic,”
but one alone aspires to objective history.
It is called “A Lecture on Rwanda,” and it brought me as close as I am
ever likely to come to “understanding” the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s—an
orgy of “ethnic cleansing” in which at least half a million men women and
children were hacked, bludgeoned, stabbed, crushed, and incinerated to death by
their neighbors and fellow Rwandans. The
old colonial powers hardly helped; but Kapuscinski persuades me that the
genocide was, eventually, mainly about cows.
zebu cow
The historical scene Kapuscinski
invokes was not unlike that of Anglo-Norman England. You had in medieval Rwanda a tribal society
in which a small aristocratic group (Tutsis) lorded it over a large population
of agricultural serfs (Hutus). Both
were part of the Banyarwanda nation, speaking the same language. But the Tutsis were cattlemen, the Hutus dirt
farmers. “The greatest, and really sole
wealth [of the Tutsis] was cattle: the zebu cows, a breed characterized by
long, beautiful, swordlike horns. These
cows were never killed—they were sacred, immutable.” The Tutsi king’s personal herd was
enormous. The great annual ceremony was
a parade of cows. “A million of them
would pass before the monarch. This
lasted hours. The animals raised clouds
of dust that hung over the kingdom for a long time.” Open ground squandered on cattle grazing
could not be tilled for crops, and the Tutsi demands for expanding grazing
grounds was insatiable. Free range
cattle are a most inefficient means of delivering dietary protein. Free range cattle raised for symbolic wealth
accumulation demonstrate “savage capitalism” in embryo. By the mid-twentieth century there was a huge
population in Rwanda trying to live on far too little land. By then the ancient zebu herds might be more
racial memory than reality, but they were a very powerful memory.
“That is how the Rwandan drama is
engendered,” writes Kapuscinski, “the tragedy of the Banyarwanda nation, born
of an almost Israeli-Palestinian inability to reconcile the interests of two
social groups laying claim to the same scrap of land, too small and confined to
accommodate them both. Within this drama
is spawned the temptation, at first weak and vague, but with the passing of
years ever more clear and insistent, of the Endlosung—a
final solution.”
