Horses

Horses are among the war’s most persistent witnesses in Journey to the End of the Night: compelled to carry soldiers and equipment, driven through dangerous terrain, and made to endure alongside people who claim to act for patriotic causes. The narrator repeatedly sets their bodily suffering against military authority and human fear. In one of the novel’s sharpest contrasts, he observes that horses may be unfortunate, but no one expects them to approve of the war or pretend to believe in it.

War’s Working Animals

Early in the war, the narrator and the colonel occupy a road exposed to enemy fire, while the colonel’s orderly has taken the colonel’s horse away, apparently seeking a safer place. The episode places the animal within the practical calculations of survival: even a military horse can be removed from the danger of the road, while the narrator remains beside the colonel, holding his orderly book as orders are written. The horses are not participants in the reasons offered for fighting, yet their presence and use are integral to military life.

The narrator’s later account of a badly injured mount makes that cost explicit. The horse has no sound back beneath the saddle, and riding aggravates its condition; its gait makes it writhe. The narrator recognizes its pain and calls it patient, even more patient than people, but continues to ride it because the military routine gives him little alternative. Its suffering is not an incidental spectacle: the animal’s damaged body turns the army’s burden into something visible and immediate, while the soldiers themselves are also exhausted under the steel they carry.

Movement, Exhaustion, and Exposure

Military movement repeatedly binds the horses’ lives to the soldiers’ own. After a short rest, the unit remounts and heads north into the cold, with gunfire nearby. Encounters with German soldiers bring sudden deaths among both sides’ horsemen. The riderless horses then gallop toward the survivors, their stirrups clanking and their saddles and leather still appearing neat. The detail gives the animals a movement beyond the control of the men who have fallen: they approach one another readily, as though making friends, while the surviving soldiers cannot share that ease.

The supply detail offers a different measure of the same forced labor. At night, men collapse from fatigue beside their cart, but the sergeant-major still insists that the horses must be watered. The human bodies are treated as if they can simply fall asleep where they stand; the animals, meanwhile, remain a task to be managed even amid disorder. The episode shows how military logistics perpetuate themselves through routine care for the animals required to keep transport moving, while the exhausted people performing that work receive no comparable relief.

Fear and the Possibility of Freedom

When the narrator considers the slim possibility of being taken prisoner, he reflects on the difference between humans and horses. Both are trapped in the war, but only the people are expected to display enthusiasm and act as if they believe in its purposes. Horses, he says, are unfortunate but free of that performance. The distinction does not mean that the animals escape military control; they are ridden, worked, and exposed to danger. Rather, their apparent freedom lies in not having to justify their suffering with patriotic language.

That contrast continues when the narrator and Robinson walk through a street with a horse following behind them. Its slow hoofbeats echo through the night, seeming to push the men onward. The horse’s untroubled pace stands against their fear and their expectation of danger; it does not share their attempts to interpret every sound or decide whether they are safe. Later, near a river, they lead it by the bridle, and it follows like a large dog. In these scenes, an animal used as transport also becomes a steady presence beside the two men, though the narration does not suggest that it understands their predicament.

Narrative Significance

Horses connect the war’s large claims to the ordinary demands placed on living bodies. The army’s movement depends on them, but their pain and fatigue receive no heroic meaning: a wounded back remains wounded, a tired animal must still be ridden, and a horse must still be watered during a night when men themselves are collapsing. The narrator’s attention to these practical circumstances exposes the war not as an abstraction but as an order imposed on bodies that cannot refuse it.

The animals also sharpen the novel’s criticism of human conduct. Soldiers are expected to accept the war’s language of duty and enthusiasm; horses are not. That difference makes the animals a measure of how much of military life is performance, and how little of its burden is freely chosen. Their recurring presence offers no escape from the violence, but it makes the violence harder to disguise.