Khalil

From being central to war and peace alike, the animal has become, for the most part, an object of figurative art

- Tanuj Solanki

here are videos of Gaza and so one knows that there is, still, a Gaza. I must have seen thousands of them by now. In the early months, one saw mule carts carrying bodies—dead, alive, maimed, sizzled, punctured, blown—and there was, among other feelings, always that scintilla of consideration for the mules: those poor, poor beasts, burdened with raw panic, with devastation, whipped from hopelessness here to hopelessness there. One doesn't see mule carts in videos of Gaza any more. At least, I don't. Are the mules still alive? I wonder. What are they eating? Or have they been eaten?

All this, or at least most of it, in my year of reading War and Peace. I'm nearing the end of the novel now, and I can't remember if there are any mules in it. There are horses, though, loads of them, stallions and geldings and mares, all. And then there are the men on the horses, hussars and uhlans and dragoons and other cavalrymen.

As battles go on, the horses suffer and the men suffer. In describing all this suffering, Tolstoy sometimes turns to similes of utter simplicity, as if the subject matter itself forbade linguistic flourish. Blood flows from a shot horse like a spring. Blood flows from a shot arm like a bottle.

When the men suffer too much and there is no food to be found, they eat horsemeat—an act, I imagine, of mercy and betrayal both.

In the early 19th century, which is when Tolstoy's novel is set, there could be no war without horses. There could be no peace without horses either. It remained the same way for another century or so. And then, soon after World War I, the status of the horse, a status that had held its own for two-and-a-half millennia, if not more, was lost irretrievably, and from being central to war and peace alike, from being the stuff of songs and myths and sagas and, later, novels, the animal became, for the most part, an object of figurative art, wherein the beauty of its form (no doubt undeniable) became its main draw.