Published: 27 January, 2012

• The sequel to the film War Horse should be War Donkeys.

In the 1914-18 war, on the Western Front, it was a case of Lions (soldiers) being led by Donkeys (officers).

In one day at the battle of the Somme the British lost more soldiers than the United States of America lost in the whole of the Vietnam war.

The donkeys shone on both sides, for example, at the battle of Verdun. At the height of the slaughter, when ordered forward, the French troops baa-ed like sheep and later mutinied.

Russian soldiers suffered even worse conditions on the Eastern Front until they rose up.

A Russian friend of mine who was an engineer on the front in 1917 said to me, with powerful feeling, “After 400 years of oppression did you think the peasants would stop and ask, politely, who is the Menshevik or who is the Bolshevik; they killed them all. They were not English gentlemen.”

So there is a vast amount of material for an American “blockbuster” and I’m sure that those of us from the “other ranks” will have our own ideas as to who should be cast as the donkeys.

Prime Minister’s Questions should give the film’s director plenty of inspiration as he or she watches both front benches and listens to the loud braying of the donkeys who still lead us over the top “to hang on the old barbed wire” – or hope to – after the next election.

Bob Davenport, WC1