Light Horse Boy by Dianne Wolfer

Light Horse Boy by Dianne Wolfer, illustrated by Brian Simmonds (Fremantle Press, 2013)

120 pages with charcoal sketches and facsimile letters

Subjects: World War One, Australia, Palestine, Egypt, horses, animals, junior fiction (Year 6-10)

Synopsis:

Jim is a young Australian boy, not yet 18, who works as a farrier (someone who trims and shoes horses’ hooves.) His best mate Charlie reckons that when the army recruiting officers see how well they can ride, they won’t ask for a birth certificate, and so it turns out. Jim and Charlie sail with the fleet from Albany in 1914, and wave goodbye to the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, Fay, who features in Lighthouse girl. 

The story is told in a mixture of narrative, illustrations, photographs, and Jim’s letters and postcards back to his younger sister Alice, who is working as a governess. On the way over, Jim is chosen to work as a farrier on the flagship Orvieto. That means he has to leave his mates and his own horse, Breaker, but on the Orvieto, he looks after Major General Bridge’s horse Sandy, and gets to know the Major himself.  He meets up with Charlie again in Egypt, where they camp in the desert, walk alongside the River Nile, visit the pyramids, race camels and leave their kangaroo mascot Rufus at the Cairo Zoo. They are sent to Gallipoli (without their horses) where they see the first of their good mates die in the landings on April 25^th 1915. Later Charlie dies in the battle of Lone Pine.

Back in Egypt, Jim takes part in the battles of the Desert Campaign. After being wounded in an explosion, he ends up on a hospital ship on his way to England, and is transferred to a hospital for the blind. Eventually, on his way back to Australia, he finds a surprise below decks that helps him start the process of inward healing. There are a couple more surprises in the final pages.

The book is full of good Aussie slang (Charlie says they will make ”crackerjack soldiers”, and Jim says it’s “bonza” being back with  his mates) and the story of the Light Horse soldiers is a fascinating one, that is less familiar than the stories of Gallipoli and the Western Front. Children who like horses will find it especially interesting as there are lots of descriptions of how the horses are cared for.

Reviews:
There are reviews of this book on the Aussie Reviews site and on Buzz Words books. (This latter reviewer points out that the black charcoal sketches suit the story because they capture "the seriousness and sadness of war".)

This interview and review describes some of the research behind the writing of the book. 

Questions:

At the end of the war, “many soldiers chose to shoot their beloved Walers [horses] rather than leave them behind to an unknown fate.” Why did they do that? What would have happened to the horses otherwise?

Author’s website:

Dianne Wolfer sounds like such a nice person!

Her website includes teaching notes about the book.

There is a bio of her on the Fremantle Press site.

The illustrator is Brian Simmonds and you can read about his work here. 

Other books you might like:

Light Horse Boy is a companion novel to Dianne Wolfer’s earlier book, Lighthouse girl, which is based on the true story of Fay Howe. Fay lived on the Breaksea Island lighthouse, near Albany where the troopships departed from. She was proficient at semaphore and used to take down messages for the troops and send them to their families, as their last farewell before they left Australia.

Evan’s Gallipoli tells a very different story, but one that overlaps in time and sometimes in location.

New Zealand connections:

The New Zealand Mounted Rifles fought with the Australian Light Horse in the deserts of the Middle East during World War One. You can read about the different units here.

The New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade left New Zealand with the Main Body of the NZEF in October 1914. The mounted riflemen fought in Gallipoli, Egypt and Palestine. They sometimes fought from horseback, and sometimes (as when they went to Gallipoli) they left their horses behind. But usually they would ride to the scene of action and then dismount before going into battle. One man in each group of four would then look after those four horses, as happens in Light Horse Boy.

They were fine horses, and not many of them ever came back to Australia or New Zealand. Dianne Wolfer says in her introduction that of the 136,000 horses that left Australia, only one returned. That was Sandy, the horse belonging to Major General Sir William Bridges. The Major General was killed at Gallipoli and was the only Australian to be returned to his homeland for burial. 

Four of the 10,000 New Zealand horses returned home, and the most famous of them is Bess. You can read about her on pg 32 of Anzac Day:the New Zealand story. There is a memorial to her near Bulls. Bess was also the model for the horse on top of the Cenotaph in Wellington.

 'Memorial to Bess the horse', URL: http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/memorial-bess-horse, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 19-Sep-2013

Other links:

A mounted rifleman in uniform sits among a group of farriers, photographed by Laurie Mackie in the World War I military camp at Zeitoun in Egypt, 1914. The farriers are holding equipment for horse shoeing, including hammers and bars.

The farriers, Zeitoun camp, Egypt. Ref: PA1-o-308-10-3. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22534019

Members of the Mounted Rifles Regiment in Nelson during World War One. Ref: 1/2-026531-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.http://natlib.govt.nz/records/23081874

The Great War by Joe Sacco

This post is a bit of a cheat. I haven't seen this book yet; I've only been told about it and read about it online. But it sounds so fascinating I wanted to mention it straightaway.

Someone said to me recently that they hoped I would be covering books written some time ago as well as books that are being published now, and that is certainly my intention - but it's hard to keep up! I just checked out a list from Publishers Weekly about children's war books coming out in 2013 and the list is enormous.

The Great War is a graphic novel (whether or not not you like that term) showing the first day of the battle of the Somme in fold out pages: "an epic 24ft portrayal of the events of 1 July 1916." It's one long drawing with no speech bubbles or words, taking us through the events of that first day.  

You can see some of the pictures here. 

Most of the men sent to the Somme are New Army volunteers. 
At the height of every recruitment, 30,000 men enlisted each day

It's a stunning idea, described in this Guardian interview with Joe Sacco as "the Bayeux Tapestry as a silent movie". The descriptions in this interview of how he did it are fascinating (he broke the photocopier at London's Imperial War Museum by copying so many research photographs and images.)  

Joe Sacco is described as "a Maltese-American comic book artist and journalist" although in this interview he tells how he grew up in Australia, the impact that Anzac Day services had on him as a child and his childhood interest in World War One with its new technology. He also has some great stuff to say about the advantages of his style of illustration in telling stories - for example: "With the written word, you can describe the architecture, but you’re not going to keep mentioning it as a figure is walking down the street, you’re not going to keep mentioning what the background is. With comics you can do that."

And also this: "The other thing I think a comic does well is that it can take the reader into the past, very seamlessly. Because your drawing style is the same now as if you’re drawing something a hundred years ago, and so the reader has an easier transition, which can be difficult to do with a documentary film; sometimes documentary film relies on acting to bring the past to life, and that always seems strange — it rubs up against the nature of documentary film.

You can read another review from the Washington Post here. I'm really looking forward to seeing a copy of this book and I'll try and track down some of Joe Sacco's earlier work as well. 

Joe Sacco (Credit: Don Usner)