Dawn of the Horse Warriors by Duncan Noble

Dawn of the Horse Warriors by Duncan Noble

Book Review by caldrail 

What does the horse mean to you? A beast of burden? A cultural symbol? A faithful pet or companion? Or perhaps something to wager upon every weekend? The relationship between man and horse is a long one and for many, it's the romantic ideal of that relationship that is more important than the actual result. It does seem however that our concepts of that relationship date from much more recent times.  But Duncan Noble isn't talking about our modern experience. He goes right back to the very beginning of our relationship with the horse and in particular its place and function in military pursuits...

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This is more about  questions than comments regarding Dawn of the Horse Warriors and the caldrail review.

First, does Mr. Noble devote any text to logistics? I'm a lifelong horse-person and any discussion has to start with that. From where I stand, moving horses over long distances is a lot rougher, riskier (to the horses) and slower than non-horsemen think. No one ever deals with this. Horses need to graze. For a few days, you can keep up their nutrition with grain which you might carry. But after a little while, failure to move a lot of dry grasses through that huge intestine weakens it. It will rupture where the large and small intestines meet and you have a dead horse. Lose 10% of your horses and how are you going to move your stuff? (Not to mention fighting -- and that the horse may not feel well enough to make a good fight.) If a foot soldier can make 20 miles a day, every day for a long time, I don't think a horse cavalry can. And the larger the group, the slower it must be. The horses should be stopped every few days, and set out to graze. If there are a lot of horses, they'll need a much larger area for grazing, perhaps miles from the camp, and it could certainly mean two or three days with no miles traveled.

My second question would be about training. Caldrail mentioned four-horse chariots. Is that a big thing in the book? You don't need four horses to pull a driver and a couple of archers, especially if, as suggested, these rigs were not huge and heavy. The wheel horse is going to take 60% of the load, whether you use two or four horses. Four horses is less maneuverable, more subject to problems on a littered battleground, and vastly harder to correctly harness and drive. So why would they ever use four horses, except in ceremonies? And apart from Xenophon, who has written about training?

Third, is the author planning a sequel -- starting at 600BC? All the really fun stuff that I know about is much later. How did the Visigoths, Huns and other later horse warriors become so effective? Just collecting and covering accounts of fighting techniques, even without tactical diagrams, would be interesting and worthwhile to cover in one book.

-N

Your point about travel with horses is well made. However, it is also true that in antiquity horsemen were capable of considerable distances. Modern horses are fussier than the ones the Huns used for instance. The value of the horse for long distance raiding in the late classical period is a matter of established history. we know they did. The Germans even raided long distances carrying an infantryman behind the rider. Now the speed they rode over long distance is another matter of course, but the Huns were well infamous for their ability to appear over the horizon and disappear afterward.

The issue of four horses is a response to evidence. Techniques for handling certainly existed. It was standard practice for Romans to run four horse chariots over a seven lap race, and on occaision, for visual treats, they ran with many more. The ability to manoever must have existed because otherwise the team could not make the turns at each end.  However, I'm not aware that manoever was as emphasised on the ancient battlefield in the same way that horse riders were described with. A horse and rider in battle was all about manoever. Descriptions have them galloping back and forth almost pointlessly, and indeed, the risk of tiring the horse was a tactical issue. Chariots were far less subtle or frivolous.