War Horse: the Real Story - adding some historical heft to the fable At times the film War Horse was, he says, so slathered in sentimentality as to become ludicrous. "I watched people on Twitter saying, "I wept copiously in the film, it broke my heart," and I thought, "Come on!" " He highlights one scene in which a doctor is looking after men who have been gassed, and are in absolute agony. Joey the horse is brought for treatment and the doctor suggests the horse be shot, before being persuaded that the horse merits immediate treatment. Van Emden was unimpressed. I was thinking I do actually feel sorry for the men who are lying there critically injured in this advanced dressing station waiting to be tended while he goes and looks after a horse. Yet the broader message from the film - that the men loved their animals and that these relationships mattered - is valid, he says. When you've got men on the Western Front and they could be killed at any time, animals gave them an enormous amount of affection. Being in an all-male environment every day becomes stultifying. Despite the comradeship, men craved affection and if you were looking after horses or if you had a trench cat or dog, that gave you something that kept you going. And of course when these animals were killed you do read stories of men weeping, sitting there holding their horse's head in their laps. Researching his book, van Emden met one veteran who had his horse shot by a German sniper. He spent the next hour getting that German sniper and then spent the rest of the day burying his horse. He said it absolutely broke his heart. Regrettably, the story reminds me of that moment in the cinema. I put it, reluctantly, to van Emden - wouldn't the starving soldiers have just taken the war horse home and divvied him up for tea? Well, certainly the British were much better fed so by the end of the war in particular they had no need to. But the British soldiers often saw great hunks taken out of German horses, and the retreating Germans had no compunction about chopping off a bit of a horse and eating it. Because they were genuinely hungry. This, one would suggest, is one scene you're unlikely to see if and when War Horse II makes it to the cinema. "War Horse: the Real Story" is on Sunday, at 8.00pm on Channel 4