Memorial of the British 58th Division, the London Division.
This is the only memorial to the horse on the continent. It sits opposite the Church in Chipilly, in France on the Somme River.
While motorized vehicles were used more and more as the war progressed even to the bringing of London double-decker buses for transport of men and supplies from the channel to the front, there was still a tremendous amount of work done by the horse particularly during wet weather when the fields and roads turned to mud.
English Schoolgirl, Elizabeth Owen : “ Then we heard that the khaki men were coming to take away all the horses from the village. Everything in the village was done by horses. The station was a mile or a mile and a half away and the train was met by a brake drawn by horses. The milk was delivered by horses and the butter used to be collected from the farms and brought in by horses to the butter market. There was a farmer who had a lovely pair who we called the prancers. He thought he would try to hide these horses but the khaki men found them. They tied them all together on a long rope, I think there were about twenty – all horses we used to know and love and feed. Then they started trotting them out of the village and as they went out of sight we were all terribly sad.”
375,000 horses died during the Great War.