Sam, a retired cavalry horse,
Longed to speak, but couldn’t, of course;
So, in times of distress
He’d tap out “S.O.S.”
With his teeth on a fence post in Morse.
According to the History Learning Site, over 8 million horses died on all sides in the Great War. Some 2.5 million were treated in veterinary hospitals, of which about two million returned to duty. By the way, Sam is named after Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the Morse system of “dots” and “dashes” letter-coding for telegraph transmission in the mid-1800s. His system was used extensively during World War I. Though diminishing in widespread importance, it is still in use today.
