THE novel War Horse, adapted for both screen and stage, tells of a young lad's love for his four legged friend in the carnage of the Great War.

Now, historian Tony Foster has unearthed a similar tale from Darwen, about a young lad and his own war horse ...

Both stories started about the same time when, in the early days of the war, the British Army was looking for horses.

Across the Channel, 15-year-old Victor Servais and his younger brother, were climbing aboard one of the last fishing boats to get away from the Belgian coast, as hordes of marauding, German soldiers poured through their homeland.

He made it to Darwen, where he stayed with Mrs Alice Taylor in Earnsdale Road and became a pupil of Darwen Secondary School.

He also joined the boy scouts and the congregation of Duckworth Street Chapel. His young brother lived during the war at Garden Village.

Victor spent almost two years dreaming of a return to Belgium to join the fight against the Hun, hopefully with a Belgian cavalry regiment.

Darwen, like so many towns, had welcomed hundreds of refugees and wounded soldiers. Grand houses were turned over to be used as hospitals, among them Moss Bridge, Thorncliffe and Spring Bank.

The soldiers – and young Victor – were desperate to get home and take up the fight.

By June 1916, Victor was back in Belgium and joined the cavalry. He wrote regularly to Mrs Taylor to tell her of his wonderful horse and his hope, when the war finally ended, of buying it and taking it back to the family's smallholding.

"He really loved that horse," Mrs Taylor told a friend.

But his hopes of taking his pal home with him at the end of the war were dashed, soon after his last letter to the elderly woman he always called "mother."

She last heard from him in November 1917, when he again told her of his hopes to have enough money for the horse and how devastated he would be to lose it.

But Vincent's hopes and dreams ended when he was badly wounded. Before he could be taken to hospital, he died on the battlefield a matter of weeks before the end of the war.

He is buried at De Panne Military Cemetery on the Belgian coast and is remembered in Darwen, on the war memorial at Duckworth Street Chapel.

• Research: Tony Foster

Captions:

War Horse: Joey and Albert (Jeremy Irvine) in a still from the Dreamworks film.

Victor Servais as a young boy scout in Darwen

Wounded Belgian soldiers at Moss Bridge House, Darwen, in October 1914