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I served in the war in the royal artillery following in my father’s footsteps. My father had also been royal artillery but a particular type of royal artillery.

We carried a gun which was designed in 1913, and yet was being used beginning in 1939 and was designed to carry on mules.

If you were with a gun which was towed in a county like Burma, where you’ve got appalling rains and mountains and all the rest of it, then the guns with wheels couldn’t get around, whereas we could go wherever the infantry went. The infantry went on foot, we were on foot and the guns were on the backs of mules.

Now the mule has a very evil reputation, it’s quite unjustified to say that it’s bad-tempered and all the rest of it. I grew very, very fond of my mules.

One day when the Japanese were mortaring us very hard after we’d crossed the River Irrawaddy, I heard a mule being hit by a shell. A mule being hit by a shell meant that you almost certainly had to kill it. It’s not like with us human beings, where we can go off to a hospital — there wasn’t a hospital for a mule to go to. So I got out of my trench where I was sitting, cowering from these mortar shells dropping. I walked out to find this mule in the pitch darkness and I carried my revolver with me because if a mule is badly hurt then nine times out of ten then it has to be killed. I found the mule and it had a broken leg.

I weep more over a mule dying than a man. A man knows why he’s there, but a mule doesn’t; so one felt great sentimentality when a mule was hit.

I just put the revolver to his head and shot that lovely mule — it’d been with me for two years against the Japanese.

When I got back to my slit trench, there was nothing left of it. It had been hit by a mortar bomb, so if I had been there I would not be here today! I was saved by my mule, so that increased my love for these animals that are so intelligent, yet people are so rude about them. They’re lovely creatures, incredibly intelligent — far more so than a horse.

That’s the mule, without which we would never have been able to keep up with the campaign.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Colonel Kenyon and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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