Man is not a horse’s best friend. Ten million of them were requisitioned, sent to the front and sacrificed during the First World War. Nearly three million during the Second, in the German army alone. And even more so in the Red Army. This massacre left as few traces as a clod of earth fallen into the muddy water of the trenches.
We look in vain for a nag on the French war memorials. Only the Dantesque vision which opens Kaputt de Malaparte with the horses caught in the ice on the morning of a battle in the Finnish forest bears witness to this animal suffering in the great European killings.
Friend, Serko
The rider is an ungrateful being. There are many dog cemeteries but only one horse cemetery in the world. It dates from 1826, long before the creation of the SPA. The Iron Tsar Nicholas I would have liked Russia to obey him like a ride in Saumur. He showed as much delicacy for the favorite horse of his brother to whom he had just succeeded on the throne as he showed brutality in crushing the revolt of the Decembrists and that of the Poles. The animal was called The Friend.
It was on his back that Tsar Alexander, conqueror of Napoleon, entered Paris. They built him an English cottage for his old age. They surrounded him with a courtyard to prevent him from becoming depressed in his retirement home. And when he died, a beautiful marble plaque was erected on his grave recalling his deeds. The other horses of the imperial family were entitled to the same considerations. And even proletarian nags, like Serko, with whom the Cossack Peskov (not to be confused with the inexhaustible spokesperson for the Kremlin) crossed the 9,000 kilometers of Holy Russia in less than two hundred days, an unequaled record.
In total, 120 well-aligned tombs, in a corner of the Tsarskoye Selo estate, the Russian Versailles near Saint Petersburg. Then, the Bolshevik revolution, the war with the Germans, the Stalinist terror made Russia a vast cemetery. And this one, so special, sank into oblivion.
He traveled the world, sharing the intimacy of heads of state the fiercest
In 1988, a Frenchman such as we imagine in the distance when we love him, tireless and full of resources, set out in search of this necropolis mentioned in an 1880 issue of the Magasin Picturesque which is the true ancestor of the JDNews. Jean-Louis Gouraud is a living encyclopedia of horses. His life, a cavalcade. He traveled the world, sharing the intimacy of the fiercest heads of state and roadside stables. He has written dozens of books and received as many awards.
He made himself known in Russia by offering Gorbachev the two horses with which he had just reached the Kremlin from Fontainebleau. When perestroika turned into chaos, he returned to rescue his two companions from an abandoned national stud farm.
A wonderful museum
In 1988, the horse cemetery was a landfill. Through stubbornness, patience and friendship, Jean-Louis Gouraud managed to awaken the bureaucracy and save this cemetery which had to be razed. It is now a wonderful museum. It was inaugurated in the spring, four decades later. Sealed in a wall, a marble plaque as laudatory as a tombstone pays tribute to Jean-Louis Gouraud.
It was unveiled in his presence, alongside the directors of major Russian museums. The French embassy did not send anyone… This adventure deserves a film, a medal, a little attention in the media. The Unesco heritage prize? Applause from the SPA. And from the Quai d’Orsay! But it’s in St. Petersburg. That’s enough for us not even to talk about it.
