THE EXCELLENCE OF THE ARAB HORSE loi 



on one occasion writing to his Auditor-General that 

 ' if a man has not good weapons, horses, and 

 harness, he is as nought.' A fact which Cromwell 

 well knew. So did the Boers. 



If the War-Office had only learned from Crom- 

 well and the Arabs instead of from the pupils of 

 jockeys and bookmakers, and those Piccadilly 

 mashers and Bond Street swells who love to prance 

 about on leggy spindleshanks in the Parks to show 

 off before the dames of Park Lane ! 



The Major-General reminds us that several of the 

 greatest Generals of modern Europe have shown a 

 strong preference for Arab horses as chargers, and 

 that in the courtly circles of Persia and India this is 

 the horse which is prized above all others, and he 

 affirms that there can be no question that, for one 

 whose seat is not well down in the saddle, the 

 Arabian is the pleasantest and the safest of all the 

 chevaux de luxe of the world. He naively adds 

 that, as a rule, horses of this breed, when asked to 

 go in one direction, do not insist on going in another 

 direction, or fix themselves on their fore-legs and 

 curl up like hedgehogs, and he relates how, in the 

 brief but difficult campaign of 1856 in Persia, the 

 straight swords and Arab horses of the Bombay 

 Light Cavalry demoralized the Shah's forces, and 

 how chargers from the Euphrates have carried our 

 soldiers to Candahar and Cabul, to Pekin and to 

 Magdala, and how more recently in Burmah, where 

 it is extremely difficult to keep foreign horses healthy. 



