Word: lipizzan
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...traced back to Spain and Arabia and whose world-famous, high-stepping, dancelike routines dated back to the 16th century. Fearing their capture by the advancing Russians in 1945, Podhajsky asked for help from fellow Horseman George Patton, who dispatched a convoy of tanks into Czechoslovakia to escort 200 Lipizzan mares and foals to safety...
...mixture of Spanish and Arab stock, and in 1565 Maximilian II of Austria made military news of some magnitude when he imported a string of steel-white Spanish steeds to his estate at Lipizza. In 1735 the Spanish Riding School was established in Vienna to train the finest Lipizzan stallions in the classic battle tactics devised by a French riding master named Antoine Pluvinel. Bonapartes and Habsburgs came and went. The horse itself became obsolete as a weapon of war. But in its great white temple, the great white breed, serving like a race of priests the cult of equitation...
Then came Hitler. By 1945, when this Walt Disney picture begins, Allied bombs are bursting in the courtyard of the academy and Russian columns are rushing toward Vienna. The Lipizzan stallions stand in mortal peril, but the Führer refuses to let them leave the city-the move might be interpreted as an admission of defeat. Colonel Alois Podhajsky (Robert Taylor), commandant of the academy, rebelliously horsenaps his own herd, ships it to safety in an isolated village. So much for the stallions, but what about the Lipizzan mares? They are prancing through Bohemia like a bunch of damn...
Dashing across Austria with his tanks in the spring of 1945, ex-Cavalryman George S. Patton paused long enough to watch a prancing white stallion being put through some remarkable parade-ground paces. General Patton had heard the story of Vienna's famed Spanish Riding School and its Lipizzan* horses. Their classical routines went back to the 16th Century, their bloodlines to Spain and Arabia. When Patton learned that the Nazis had appropriated the Lipizzans and sent 200 mares and foals to a town in Czechoslovakia, he acted with characteristic dash. He sent a tank column to bring them...
Among the most spectacular was the fighting pose of the courbette. Without apparent urging from its rider, the performing Lipizzan reared high on its hind legs, executed a series of forward jumps while pawing furiously, almost like a boxer, with its forelegs. Such a maneuver, Colonel Podhajsky explains, was naturally in high favor among medieval cavalrymen when ever they found themselves hemmed in by foot soldiers...