The Rein-hold in Driving
“With wheel-horses that will hold back at all, I will be bound,” says a clever writer and experienced coachman, “to take a loaded coach down most of the hills now met with on our great roads, without a drag-chain, provided I am allowed to pull up my horses at the top, and let them take it quietly the first hundred yards. This, it may be said, would be losing time, but, on the contrary, time would be gained by it; for, as soon as I perceived I was master of my coach, I should let her go, and by letting my horses loose at the bottom, I could spring them into a gallop, and cheat them out of half the hill, if there were one (as frequently happens) on the next portion of road. This advantage, it must be recollected, cannot be taken if the chain be to be put on; and I have therefore in my favour all the time required to put the chain on, and to take it off again.”
There are, however, some horses which no man can make to hold a loaded coach down hill. Of this description are, first, the stiff-necked one, as he is called, who turns his head away from his partner, and shoulders the pole; and, secondly, one who, when he feels the weight pressing upon him, begins to canter and jump, as coachmen term it; with these holding back properly is out of the question. With such cattle, the drag-chain must be had recourse to; as well as when there is the least reason to suspect the soundness of the harness. All this confirms the necessity of checking the force of a coach before descending a steep hill, and indeed in some cases—as with bad holders—before coming upon a slight descent. The term which coachmen have for this species of road, is “pushing ground;” and if the fall be long, it is astonishing how the pressure of a loaded coach upon wheel horses is increased before getting to the bottom of it, and how difficult it would be, with wheelers not of the very best stamp, to pull up short, if any accident should happen.
Young coachmen, in descending a hill, should take care that their leaders do not draw on the end of the pole, which many free ones do when they find the coach coming quickly after them; for this not only increases the pressure of the coach on the wheelers, but, should either of them stumble, it must assist in bringing him down. The following good and characteristic directions were given by a very experienced coachman, to a gentleman who undertook to take his coach a journey for him, but who, although he knew the road well, had never driven on it before. “That middle twelve miles of ground,” said he, “is a punisher, and you must mind what you are at with this load. You have two hills to go down, and three to go up, in the first seven miles. Don’t stop to put the chain on, as they’ll hold well, and the tackle is good; and don’t let them walk up the hills, for they are bad hands at that—you will lose a horse’s draught by it, and perhaps get hung up on one of them. You must take fifty minutes to do the first seven miles, and good work too. When you get at the top of the last hill, get down and put your near leader to the cheek, and they’ll toddle you over the last five miles in half an hour, with all the pleasure alive.”
The following observations on this subject from the number of the Quarterly Review already quoted, are too interesting to be omitted here.
“Many years have elapsed,” he says, “since I first observed that, somehow or other, the horses on the continent manage to pull a heavy carriage up a steep hill, or even along a dead level, with greater ease to themselves than our English horses. If any unprejudiced person would only attentively remark with what little apparent fatigue three small ill-conditioned horses will draw, not only his own carriage, but very often that huge over-grown vehicle the French diligence, or the German eilwagen, I think he would agree with me; but the whole equipment is so unsightly—the rope harness is so rude—the horses without blinkers look so wild—there is so much bluster with the postilion—that, far from paying any compliment to the turn-out, one is very much disposed at once to condemn the whole thing, and, not caring a straw whether such horses be fatigued or not, to make no other remark than that in England one would have travelled at nearly twice the rate with one-tenth of the noise. But neither the rate nor the noise is the point—our superiority in the former, and our inferiority in the latter, cannot be doubted. The thing to account for is, how such small, weak horses do actually manage to draw a heavy carriage up hill with so much ease to themselves. Now, in English, French, and German harness, there exists, as it were, three degrees of comparison as to the manner in which the head of the horse is treated; for, in England, it is elevated, or borne up, by what we call the bearing-rein,—in France it is left as Nature placed it (there being to common French harness no bearing-rein),—and, in Germany, the head is tied down to the lower extremity of the collar, or else the collar is so made that the animal is by it deprived of the power of raising his head. Now, passing over for a moment the French method, which is, in fact, the state of nature, let us for a moment consider which is better—to bear a horse’s head up, as in England, or to pull it downwards, as in Germany.”
Evidently fired with a favourite theme, he thus proceeds:—“In a state of nature, the wild horse, as every body knows (?), has two distinct gaits or attitudes. If man, or any still wilder beast, come suddenly upon him, up goes his head; and as he first stalks and then trots gently away—with ears erect, snorting with his nose, and proudly snuffing up the air, as if exulting in his freedom—as one fore-leg darts before the other, we have before us a picture of doubt, astonishment, and hesitation, all of which feelings seem to rein him, like a troop-horse, on his haunches; but, attempt to pursue him, and the moment he defies you—the moment, determining to escape, he shakes his head, and lays himself to his work—how completely does he alter his attitude! That instant down goes his head, and from his ears to the tip of his tail there is in his vertebræ an undulating action which seems to propel him, which works him along, and which, it is evident, you could not deprive him of without materially diminishing his speed. Now, in harness, the horse has naturally the same two gaits or attitudes, and it is quite true that he can start away with a carriage either in the one or the other; but the means by which he succeeds in this effort—the physical powers which he calls into action, are essentially different:—in the one case he works by his muscles, and in the other by his own dead, or rather living, weight. In order to grind corn, if any man were to erect a steam-engine over a fine, strong, running stream, we should all say to him, ‘Why do you not allow your wheel to be turned by cold water instead of hot? Why do you not avail yourself of the weight of the water, instead of expending your capital in converting it into the power of steam? In short, why do you not use the simple resource which Nature has presented ready-made to your hand?’ In the same way, the German might say to us, ‘We acknowledge a horse can drag a carriage by the power of his muscles, but why do you not allow him to drag it by his weight?’
“Let any one observe a pair of English post-horses dragging a heavy weight up a hill, and he will at once see that the poor creatures are working by their muscles, and that it is by sheer strength that the resistance is overcome: but how can it be otherwise; their heads are higher than nature intended them to be, even in walking in a state of liberty, carrying no weight but themselves: the balance of their bodies is therefore absolutely turned against, instead of leaning in favour of their draught; and if my reader will but pass his hands down the back sinews of our stage-coach or post-chaise horses, he will soon feel (though not so keenly as they do), what is the cruel and fatal consequence. It is true, that in ascending a very steep hill an English postilion will occasionally unhook his bearing-reins; but the jaded creatures, trained for years to work in a false attitude, cannot in one moment get themselves into the scientific position which the German horses are habitually encouraged to adopt. Besides this, we are so sharp with our horses,—we keep them so constantly on the qui vive, or, as we term it, in hand, that we are always driving them from the use of their weight to the application of their sinews. That the figure and attitude of a horse working by his sinews are infinitely prouder than when he is working by his weight, (there may exist, however, false pride among horses as well as men), I most readily admit; and therefore, for carriages of luxury, where the weight bears little proportion to the powers of the noble animals employed, I acknowledge that the sinews are more than sufficient; but, to bear up the head of a poor horse at plough, or at any slow, heavy work, is, I conceive, a barbarous error, which ought not to be persisted in.
“Whether there is most of the horse in a German, or of the German in a horse, is a nice point, on which people might argue a great deal: but the broad fact really is, that Germans live on more amicable terms with their horses, and understand their dispositions infinitely better, than the English; in short, they treat them as horses, while we act towards them and drill them as if they were men; and, in case any reader should doubt that Germans are better horse-masters than we are, I beg to remind him of what is perfectly well known to the British army,—namely, that in the Peninsular war the cavalry horses of the German Legion were absolutely fat, while those of our regiments were skin, and bone.”