A Ride with a Mad Horse in a Freight-Car: 1898

This is a Civil War memoir like few others. Rather than recounting campaigns and strategies, W. H. H. Murray fixates on a single, devastating loss: the horse named Gulnare, whom he encounters riderless and beautiful amid the carnage of Malvern Hill. He names her, tends her wounds, and through the remainder of the war they become inseparable. She carries him through battles; he becomes her whole world. But the homecoming proves crueler than any fighting. Gulnare contracts phrenitis and slips into madness. Murray describes her suffering with excruciating precision, his desperate attempts at healing, and finally the freight-car where he holds her in his lap as she dies. This is not a war story with a triumphant ending. It is a meditation on love so complete that its absence becomes unsurvivable, and on the creatures who walk beside us through darkness only to be taken anyway.