The Man Who Fed the World

What does it mean to love something you might have to let go of forever? In As Told By the Boys Who Fed Me Apples, playwright R. Johns invites you into the emotional heart of World War I through the eyes of a single horse—Sandy, the only Australian horse to return home from war out of 136,000. This isn’t your usual war story of soldiers, trenches, and gallantry. It’s a meditation on compassion, loyalty, and the silent suffering shared between man and animal in the shadow of unimaginable loss.

The play is structured around three voices: Major General William Throsby Bridges, the veteran Veterinary Officer, and Archibald Jordan, a humble groom who accompanies Sandy home. Each man reveals a different facet of humanity’s connection to the horse—authority, responsibility, and love. Together, their monologues, entwined with mime and symbolic gesture, form a haunting chorus for the voiceless, for both men and animals destroyed by war.

The Forgotten Story of 136,000 Horses

R. Johns discovered Sandy’s story accidentally, after seeing War Horse in 2012. In the theater foyer, a stranger told her that her grandfather’s horse had been sold to the Indian Army after the war—a common fate for thousands of others. Most horses were shot by their riders rather than left to suffer starvation or abuse abroad. Only one returned home: Sandy. That simple fact struck Johns as deeply unjust, and it became the spark for a story that humanizes history through an animal’s silent perspective.

It’s a story that starts with mythic overtones but grows intensely human. Sandy becomes more than a horse—he becomes a symbol for loyalty beyond logic and the damage done when love collides with duty. By interlacing historical record with poetic imagination, Johns transforms Australian military history into something visceral and modern: a meditation on grief, divided loyalties, and the longing for home.

Three Journeys That Mirror the Human Soul

In Episode One, General Bridges personifies the heroic ideal—formality, courage, and obligation. Mortally wounded at Gallipoli, he reflects on Sandy, his steadiest companion. The play’s imagery—bogong moths, white coronets, the sands of the desert—creates a visceral connection between soldier and animal, blurring the line between humanity and nature. When Bridges whispers Sandy’s name as he dies, it’s more than affection; it’s a prayer for redemption.

Episode Two takes us to France, where the Veterinary Officer endures what he calls “an hour in hell.” Surrounded by mangled men and disembowelled horses, he wrestles with moral exhaustion. His bond with Sandy becomes his last thread of sanity. Through him, Johns captures the dual suffering of all living beings trapped in industrial warfare—humans mutilated by shrapnel and horses poisoned by gas. The officer’s compassion persists, but it’s haunted by futility: saving one horse while millions suffer.

Finally, in Episode Three, Archibald Jordan speaks not as a hero but as a survivor. Broken but gentle, he’s chosen to accompany Sandy back to Australia. His tenderness toward the horse borders on reverence. When he learns Sandy will be euthanized for health reasons, he faces another form of loss: peace’s cruelty, which often demands killing what reminded you of survival. For Jordan, burying Sandy at Maribyrnong becomes an act of grace—a way to give voice to the forgotten beings who served and suffered.

Why This Story Matters Now

At its heart, this play is a rare fusion of historical inquiry, poetic drama, and ethical meditation. It challenges you to ask what it means to serve, to feel empathy across species, and to grieve for those—animal or human—who cannot speak. In doing so, Johns not only restores Sandy’s story to memory but also illuminates the broader moral questions of war itself: What are we willing to sacrifice, and what does that sacrifice cost the human spirit?

Through the interplay of mime and monologue, the play becomes less a linear narrative and more an elegy. Each man’s story folds into the next, converging around Sandy as the shared heart of human conscience. As you move through these scenes, you begin to see the horse as both witness and participant in the century-old trauma of modern warfare—a stand-in for innocence itself, dragged through mud and smoke.

Johns’s work, supported by the La Mama Theatre and the Australian Government’s Anzac Centenary Fund, stands out not simply because it recounts an extraordinary event, but because it rewrites the script of remembrance. Instead of celebrating victory, it mourns mutual suffering. It invites you to honor the quiet resilience of all those—soldiers and horses alike—whose service was rooted in trust that the world would one day be kind again.

By the time the final scene fades to darkness, with the sound of a single shot and Jordan whispering goodbye, you realize that Sandy’s story is not about death at all. It’s about transformation—of pain into empathy, of loss into memory, and of war into witness. And in that transformation lies the enduring question: when all we love must face war’s inevitable parting, can compassion itself survive?

R. Johns constructs her play around three intertwined monologues, performed by a single actor who inhabits different soldiers’ bodies and voices. Each character offers a lens into humanity’s bond with the animal world and—by extension—our struggle to hold onto empathy in brutality. The horse, Sandy, though silent, anchors their stories as a shared point of emotional gravity.

William Throsby Bridges: Leadership and Mortality

Major General Bridges is the archetype of command—a man bred for duty, shaped by discipline, and undone by mortality. In his dying hallucinations at Gallipoli, his thoughts don’t fixate on strategy or glory but on Sandy. Through him, Johns strips military leadership to its human core: vulnerability. In the play’s first act, as Bridges re-enacts his own wounding three times, his repetition mimics the repetitive nightmares of trauma. Sandy becomes his tether to sanity and his reminder of gentleness amid horror.

The Veterinary Officer: Rationality in Ruins

The second voice, the Veterinary Officer, speaks from the Western Front—a landscape of gas, nails, and shattered villages. He oscillates between dark humor and despair, counting the dead horses he can’t save. Johns uses his character to question utilitarian ethics: is survival the same as salvation? His brief moment of shelter beneath Sandy’s belly during a barrage captures their shared fragility. By giving the animal agency—the one calm presence in chaos—Johns flips the hierarchy: the beast becomes caretaker of man.

Archibald Jordan: Redemption Through Love

Archibald Jordan, the play’s final voice, is the heart of the piece. Classified “unfit” after the front lines, he rediscovers purpose in caring for Sandy. His humor, tenderness, and innocence contrast the intellectual distance of Bridges and the hardened pragmatism of the Officer. Through Jordan, the play becomes a love story—not romantic, but redemptive. When he feeds Sandy apples, shares silent films with him, and dreams of bringing him home, you feel how trauma can heal through connection. His grief at Sandy’s blinding and death is the audience’s grief; it’s the grief of humanity for all that war destroys.

Though Sandy never speaks, his silence fills the stage. The horse represents innocence, patience, and the instinctive compassion untouched by ideology. In a play where human voices are fractured, Sandy’s presence provides continuity—a living conscience in a fractured world. His interactions with the men define their humanity: Bridges finds faith, the Vet finds empathy, and Jordan finds love.

The Silent Witness

Unlike the lifelike puppet horses of War Horse, Sandy is portrayed by an actor through mime—an artistic choice that underscores the animal’s symbolic nature. The physical portrayal allows audiences to imagine the horse’s interior life rather than merely observe it. Sandy watches, reacts, trembles, and comforts, often becoming more human than the men who speak around him. He is conscience embodied in movement.

From Myth to Mortality

Johns weaves mythological imagery—the bogong moths, Achilles’ immortal horses—into Sandy’s identity. He is both an ancient archetype and a specific being, a link between the dream of nobility and the reality of suffering. By the final scene, when Sandy is blind and trembling, that myth dissolves into mortality. His death—an echo of thousands of unnamed horses—transforms the mythic into the sacredly human. In honoring him, we honor what remains pure in ourselves.

Throughout the play, Johns exposes the brutal cost of war not only on soldiers but also on the animals that serve them. In doing so, she expands the scope of remembrance beyond human heroism to include the voiceless participants of conflict. Horses, like soldiers, endure exhaustion, hunger, and terror; unlike men, they cannot articulate their suffering or consent to their fate.

The Reality of Animal Warfare

The play’s research is grounded in historical fact: approximately 136,000 Australian horses were sent to the war; only one—Sandy—returned. Disease, cost, and military policy made repatriation impossible. Many soldiers shot their own mounts rather than hand them over to foreign armies. Johns transforms these statistics into visceral imagery—horses sliding in dark holds, crushed under shellfire, or dying from thirst. These moments challenge audiences to recognize that the industrial brutality of modern warfare consumed all living things.

Empathy as Resistance

In every episode, compassion becomes a rebellious act. Bridges resists despair by recalling Sandy’s gentleness. The Vet defies dehumanization through empathy for dying animals. Jordan resurrects hope by loving a horse as a friend, not property. Johns suggests that surviving war isn’t just about physical endurance—it’s about protecting one’s capacity for tenderness in a system designed to erase it. In that sense, empathy itself becomes a form of moral courage.

What do we remember when we commemorate a war? The victories, or the lives that bore its cost? Johns’s play redefines remembrance as emotional, not statistical. Sandy’s story becomes a vehicle for Australia’s collective mourning—an alternative Anzac legend grounded not in victory but in compassion.

Turning History into Living Memory

By staging the play at La Mama Theatre and within the ANZAC Centenary Arts Program, Johns situates As Told By the Boys Who Fed Me Apples within national memory-making. Yet she avoids patriotic grandstanding. Instead, she resurrects the small narratives—the overlooked horse, the humble groom—that humanize monumental history. This focus on the ordinary echoes writers like Tim Winton and Sebastian Barry, who also transform war’s anonymity into intimate storytelling.

The Power of Poetic Ritual

Each episode is a ritual of remembrance, where the actors and audience participate in an act of collective empathy. The repetition of Sandy’s name functions like prayer, blurring performance and commemoration. When Jordan buries Sandy, his act mirrors the play itself—digging into forgotten history, laying memory to rest with tenderness. In that moment, war’s mythic grandeur gives way to something more sacred: the simple honor of bearing witness.

Johns calls her play a marriage of two forms: mime and dramatic monologue. This artistic duality mirrors one of the play’s central tensions—silence versus speech, animal versus human, body versus history. Through form, the play enacts the very relationship it describes, where language strives to articulate what can only be felt.

The Language of the Unsayable

Mime allows the actor portraying Sandy to communicate without words, relying solely on movement and presence. This silence becomes more eloquent than speech, reminding the audience that not all trauma or love can be verbalized. The human monologues, on the other hand, are torrents of speech—feverish, poetic, and confessional—grasping at meaning where none can be found. Together, they enact the process of translating the unspeakable into art.

Storytelling as Healing

Johns’s note makes clear: writing this play was her own act of mourning and recovery. In creating Sandy’s story, she joined a tradition of artists who turn history into emotional truth. Just as the “Friends of Sandy and the Australian Light Horse” preserve physical memory, Johns preserves the soul of that history through theatre. Art becomes both resurrection and continuation—a way to ensure Sandy’s story, and all those like it, will never again fall silent.