They were exotic cavalry for long-dead empires: Carthage and Macedon, the Mughals and the Khmer. But there is one corner of the planet — and only one — where war elephants persist into the 21st century.

The war elephant’s main use was to charge the enemy, breaking their ranks and instilling terror. Elephantry are military units with elephant-mounted troops. War elephants played a critical role in several key battles in antiquity, but their use declined with the spread of firearms in the early modern period.

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The Romans used elephants in their wars against Macedonia, Antiochus III, Celtiberians in Hispania, the Carthaginians in the Third Punic War, and the Gauls. Elephants were active in nearly all the battles and performed consistently well.

According to some, elephants are afraid of mice, because they fear that mice will crawl up their trunks. This could cause irritation and blockage, making it hard for elephants to breathe.

The very idea of the war elephant is almost synonymous with the great Carthaginian general: Hannibal. He was able to win battles with them on their sheer terror factor alone. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a soldier in a Roman army. You’ve never seen an elephant before.

It is frequently stated that Alexander the Great did not use elephants, and that this arm was only introduced into the west by his Successors. Such a view can be found for instance in Gaebel’s recent (2002) book “Greek Cavalry Operations”.

The elephants were Asian elephants, and were recruited from southern provinces of Iran and India but also possibly Syrian elephants from Syria and westernmost Iran. While on the move, the elephants required large paths to cut to accommodate their passage.

The noun elephant comes from the Latin ‘elephantus’ which was derived from a Greek word meaning ivory or elephant. It was first used in English in the 14th century, replacing the earlier term ‘oliphant’ which came from Old French.

Napoleon intended the elephant to be cast in bronze and be big enough for visitors to ascend on an interior staircase to a tower on its back (Schama, 3). So the elephant was cast in plaster instead of bronze, and two years later when Napoleon’s Empire collapsed the “Elephant of Revolutionary Oblivion” was left to rot.

Simon Schama, in the first chapter of Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), tells the story of the Elephant of the Bastille, which he uses as a symbol of the failed hopes of the French Revolution.

Their commander Hannibal marched his troops, including cavalry and African war elephants, across a high pass in the Alps to strike at Rome itself from the north of the Italian peninsula. In December he smashed apart the Roman forces in the north, assisted by his awesome elephants, the tanks of classical warfare.