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PORTSIDE CULTURE

STANDING WITH MY HORSES IN MY FIELDS IN MARYLAND  
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Lisa Couturier

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_ Poet Lisa Couturier considers what happens to horses and other
draught animals in wartime. _

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I stand with the horses of the Civil War who cantered across   these
grasses that stitched togethermen's fields of fighting, horses who
carried the cavalry, artillery,   wounded soldiers and supplies.I
stand with every ghost horse of the Civil War whose   extraordinary
panoramic vision meanthe saw--all around him, all at once--the 350
degrees of danger   he did not flee alone becausehorses remain
together, regardless, languishing, while   their sensitive ears,
scented with earthand sweat, could hear, over two miles in the
distance,   _the terrible grumble, and rumble, and__roar, / . . .
the battle was on once more_--as a poet wrote about   General
Sheridan's ride on his black horse Winchester,a steed who _Swept on,
with his wild eyes full of fire,_   and survived farlonger than the
1.5 million-plus horses, mules and ponies who   perished under my
Southern skiesthat at sunset and sunrise blush pink and red,   like
the fresh-torn flesh of horse, or human.

Pvt. Ezra E. Stickley lost his horse at Antietam:   _The third shell
struck and killed my horse__and bursting, blew him to pieces, knocked
me down, of course,__   and tore off my right arm . . ._ 

I stand with the ghosts of equines who, diseased with   "glanders,"
died from abscessedand ulcerated lungs, equines whose saddles and
harnesses   never fit their bony bodies covered

in infected sores, horses who were hungry, thirsty,   listless, who,
as one Uniongeneral observed, were destroyed by the soldiers' 
 _hard and unnecessary riding._

Horses' cracked hooves sunk in muddy creeks they slurped   from when
men lowered theirreins long enough for anything alive to close its
eyes in the    weather of war that hung over

these valleys where I stand with my horses, where wind howls   all
day across the foothills ofthe Appalachians, across the bodies of the
mules who pulled   carriages carrying cannons for

miles until, utterly drained, they dropped, only to be shot.   A
captain in a Massachusetts cavalrywrote to his mother about horses:
_You have no idea of their__   sufferings . . . I do the best I can
. _. .

_but war is cruel. . . .  So I have one rule, a horse must go
until__   he can't be spurred any further,__and then the rider must
get another horse as soon as possible __   he can seize one._

Out of the forgotten millions, some were storied:   Robert E. Lee's
"Traveller," Stonewall Jackson's"Little Sorrel," Ulysses Grant's
"Cincinnati,"   Philip Sheridan's "Winchester."

As for the rest, _Shoot the horses,_ men commonly   called out and,
heaped with pain, horses collapsed._The number . . . was high_, said a
general.   _They lay like the men, in all attitudes.__Lisa Couturier
comments, "Horses and mules in the Civil War did as they were told. As
our captives, we placed them in peril, something we continue to do
today--to racehorses, carriage horses, and work horses (and donkeys,
mules, and ponies) all over the world."_

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* animal rights
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