We shall remember them 🙏🏻🐎💜🇳🇿🇦🇺 Proud to attend Windsor RSL Branch ANZAC service early this morning and see thousands of locals doing the same thing. We’ve never seen so many of our community gather to pay their respect to our fallen soldiers who sacrificed themselves for our country and our freedom. As always the Richmond Windsor Lighthorseman were present to remind us of that over 8 million horses, donkeys and mules went to war in WW1 and most perished in their service. Australia sent over 120,000 horses of which none were returned. This excerpt from an army poet says it all. ‘I don’t think I could stand the thought of my old fancy hack Just crawling round old Cairo with a ’Gyppo on his back. Perhaps some English tourist out in Palestine may find My broken hearted waler with a wooden plough behind. No, I think I’d better shoot him and tell a little lie:– “He floundered in a wombat hole and then lay down to die.” Maybe I’ll get court martialled; but I’m damned if I’m inclined To go back to Australia and leave my horse behind.’c With these words one of the AIF’s best-known soldier-poets, Major Oliver Hogue (“Trooper Bluegum”), expressed what may have been a common sentiment in Palestine in 1919: that it would be better to see the mounts of the light horse shot rather than sold to the local population. Hogue may or may not have been the starting point, but since then there has persisted a common belief that light horsemen shot their horses in significant numbers so they would be spared a hard and cruel postwar existence. #generations #walers #australianstockhorse #australian #day #windsorrsl #hawkesbury #hawkesburynsw #anzacday #anzac #proud #proudaustralian #horse #warhorse #lighthorse #brave #courage #anzac104years #lestweforget #lestweforget🌹 #lastpost #respect #nomorewar #adf #raaf #army #navy #love (at Windsor, New South Wales) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bwp6JA1guYW/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=shf1ci3dcobm
