42 THE HORSE AND THE WAR 



change. No blankets to wear when they travel, no knee boots and tail 

 bandages as a protection against possible disfigurement, but instead they are 

 sent to their destination on the first stage of their journey overseas eight or 

 nine in a truck. Once that same truck carried cattle, sheep or pigs to a market 

 town. Now it is the equipage de luxe of the charger or the mule. 



Every horse should have his proper job in the Army. That there may be 

 misfits is a matter for the buyer's conscience. Those at the head define the 

 types required and issue instructions accordingly. If an animal is neither a 

 heavy draught, a light draught, a charger, an officer's cob, a cavalry horse, 

 an artillery riding-horse nor a pack-horse, then there is only one class remaining 

 for him. He is a nondescript. He may have his uses in civil life, but most 

 certainly he should never have been bought at the public expense for some 

 obscure military purpose. I suppose it is human nature for one commissioned 

 critic to say contemptuously of the Remount buyer : " Whatever was he 

 thinking about to buy a thing like that ! " Yet when you come to think of 

 the hundreds of thousands bought here and abroad the number of nondescripts 

 or bad bargains has been extraordinarily few. And, of course, an animal 

 may degenerate, and frequently does, after wear and tear. Take the case 

 of the cavalry horse that develops faulty action. He becomes dangerous 

 to ride by reason of his susceptibility to lameness. His limited physique 

 does not fit him for transport, and he therefore loses his usefulness because 

 it is quite evident he would be too tall for pack purposes. One could pursue 

 this line of thought indefinitely, but after all there is far more satisfaction in 

 following the doings of the horse and mule while they are in training for active 

 service and later when they actually embark upon it. The same serious 

 attention must be paid to the riding-horses as to the draught animals. The 

 former have to be schooled just as the latter must learn their team work in 

 the batteries, or the wagons of the Divisional Ammunition Column, or Army 

 Service Corps Train Transport. 



The day comes, and that soon enough, when the gun horse is ready for 

 active service. Orders come for his transfer to France, and in pursuance 

 of them he is assembled at the great depot which is contiguous to the port 

 of embarkation. Actually, as well as in theory, he should now be fit for 

 the real thing. He is the finished article, the well-fed, clean and healthy 

 horse which has emerged from that steamer-soiled and ragged creature that 

 was put ashore here two or three months before. 



