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Chapter 14
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in War Horse, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Dignity and Humanity
Hope and Loss
Love and Loyalty
The Horrors of War
Summary
Analysis
Joey remains by the bodies of Topthorn and Friedrich all day, despite the ongoing shelling. He can’t imagine having to go on without Topthorn’s friendship and support. Only the arrival of several great, terrifying metal beasts—tanks—finally scares him into running. Joey runs wildly, crossing the river again and again, only trying to get as far from the noise of shelling as he can. He runs until he can run no further, and then he falls into an exhausted sleep. He wakes up to the sound of gunfire, which appears to surround him on all sides. He decides to stay in place, but then a machine gun opens fire and the bullets whiz past his body. He runs again, running until the forest ends and grass turns into deep, cratered mud.
Joey remains with his friend long after the rest of the troops have died or moved on, both out of fear for what the future will hold and out of love and loyalty. In this way, he proves himself to be a virtuous friend. This is one of the few points in the book where Joey seems to lose his natural sense of hope: without Topthorn, the future looks bleak, and he runs away out of fear and an instinct for self-preservation rather than because he believes he will find something better. The war, with its endless, grinding destruction, takes a toll on the noble horse.
Themes
In the darkness, Joey stumbles into barbed wire, badly tearing his foreleg. He manages to free himself and limps on in great pain and fear. He wishes Topthorn were there to tell him which way to go. Joey presses on, trying to put as much distance between himself and the sounds and flashes of gunfire as he can. He stumbles forward slowly, too scared to stop and in too much pain to properly go on. Eventually, he finds himself lost in an impenetrably thick mist.
Joey still misses Topthorn, and he’s still more animated by fear than hope at this point. The surrounding mist seems to metaphorically suggest the blindness of the war’s violence, which has torn so many friendships apart by death. And at this, the lowest point of Joey’s story, the war threatens to consume the horse entirely.
Themes
As dawn begins to illuminate the mist, Joey hears urgent whispers ahead of him. A soldier tells “Sarge” that he saw something—maybe a horse or cow—in the mist. Sarge maintains that there’s nothing there to see, and that young soldier just has the jitters. But, in a louder voice, Sarge wakes up the rest of the battalion and tells them to keep watch through the mist. Terrified and in agony, Joey limps away until he cannot bring himself to take another step. He looks desperately around himself for a blade of grass to eat and can find none. But then warm rays of sunlight begin to penetrate and lift the mist, and within minutes he sees enough to realize that he’s standing in a no-man’s-land, between two long lines of barbed wire fencing stretching into the distance.
The clearing mist metaphorically suggests the coming shift in Joey’s fortunes, although he’s not out of danger yet. Stumbling into no-man’s-land also parallels his feeling of hopelessness and loneliness without Topthorn or the kind friendship of Friedrich. Joey feels as desolate and alone as the decimated strip of land looks. Yet again, the fog represents the blindness with which the humans on either side of the war fight one another while unable to recognize their shared, universal humanity. And the soldiers whom Joey hears through the mist sound American, pointing toward a conflict that has blossomed to a global scale.
Themes
