Wartime tales, especially those with Anzac links, have long held a fascination for my eldest son, now 14. So when Susan Brocker's Brave Bess and the Anzac Horses turned up, I thought we'd be on to a winner - on two scores, as his 12-year-old brother loves stories starring animals.
Brave Bess is subtitled A true story of courage and loyalty. At the outbreak of World War I, New Zealand's troops left for the battlefields with more than 3700 horses. Between 1914 and 1916, 10,238 had been sent to the Middle East. Bess was the only horse to return home.
Brocker, the granddaughter of a member of the Wellington Mounted Rifles, was inspired to tell the animals' war story and extensively researched the history of the campaign, reading diaries and letters from troopers from both the New Zealand Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse, who joined forces to become the Anzac Mounted division.
Brocker intertwines chronological facts of the war's progress with the story as experienced by the troopers and their mounts. While I initially had trouble accepting the anthropomorphism of Brocker's saying what Bess and her equine companions were thinking, I soon fell into the swing of things due to the cleverly combined excerpts of memories, which give a vivid picture of both the geography and the conditions faced by the Anzacs.
Brave Bess relates a grim side of the war overlooked by many. As for the verdict of my young readers: the 14-year-old appreciated how the events of the war were presented, while the 12-year-old was somewhat bored. Nor did he like talking horses in a "non-fiction" book.
-Sue Baxalle is the sub-editor of Canvas.
Brave Bess And The Anzac Horses, by Susan Brocker, HarperCollins $19.99
