What is an example of symbolism in the novel, The Women in the Castle?

Gilda the horse in Chapter Ten represents the complexities of war and survival. It also symbolizes the animal instincts that each human being is debased to, when faced with choices of survival. When the Russians in the barn ask to eat the horse, Marianne is shocked feeling, “they were not really men . . . but animals” (121). She does not notice the irony of the men camping out in the barn for safety. But when she gives the Russians the horse, she realizes that they were all merely animals now, doing whatever it takes to survive. When she sees the horse’s carcass hanging over the spit, looking “obscene” with its abdomen “blackened and hacked” this scene shows the animal and the soldiers literally and figuratively exposed. But truly, it is complicated to assign blame, since Ania and Marianne made the choice to give them the horse (that was not even theirs to give). They chose their own survival and the survival of their children above Herr Kellerman, or the horse. At the very end of the novel when Marianne is speaking at the ceremony dedicated to her, she thinks back to the horse and the Russians and thinks of her bond with Ania based on their “shared determination to keep their children safe” (342).