CHAPTER VIII. 



THE SOLDIER HORSE. 



A habit of enlisting for campaigns has 

 given me some desultory training with British 

 irregular and auxiliary forces — Horse, Foot 

 and Guns. Without the slightest pretensions 

 as a soldier I have enjoyed, on active service, 

 watching the military practice in horsemaster- 

 ship in its amusing contrasts with the methods 

 of frontier life. 



It seems to me that the British and especially 

 the Irish horse-breeding, and the national 

 amusements for mounted men — hawking, stag- 

 hunting, fox-hunting, steeplechases, flat races, 

 and polo — for example, have given to British 

 mounted troops the basis of a horsemastership 

 which has been gratefully copied by civiUzed 

 armies and disabled the mobility of all ahke. 

 The cult of the pleasure horse has ousted 

 the old sober methods of war horsemanship. 

 This may in part account for the chasing of the 

 Spaniards and Portuguese by their lively 

 American colonists, of the British by the 



