But, of course, there was a tremendous gap between this result and the needs of the New Armies. A wise prescience at the very outset decided to reinforce horse strength with mule strength. Before the end of 1914 mules imported from abroad were being tried as substitutes for horses in the Army. Some of the experiments did not give promising results. The mule, for example, did not prove possible in gun teams. But it established itself in a very wide range of general utility and materially helped to win the war.
The improvisation of remount depôts and of training centres for horses and for men who for the first time had to handle horses was the first big problem. The winter of 1914-15 was a hard time. But extraordinary results were won by the cordial co-operation of the "horsey" men of the country. The hunting, coaching, and racing stables were great pillars of strength. By the spring of 1915 the position in the United Kingdom was good.
In the winter of 1915-16 most of the difficulty had to be faced by the B.E.F., France. We had a great concentration of troops in Flanders. The mounted units were made up in the main of men new to horse-management. The animals had to be nursed through a winter in what was the wickedest country conceivable for horses. Stable accommodation was, of course, absent. Not 1 per cent. could be housed in existing stables. Labour and material were lacking for the building of new stables. Most of the animals spent the winter in the open. The mud was a cruel enemy. In that highly manured country a horse standing out in the mud had its hoofs attacked at once. A "greasy heel" soon became a purulent sore.
The "Mud Season" opens in Flanders in October and lasts until June; and Flanders mud has a body and aroma all its own. A great French Marshal of a by-gone age committed himself without reserve to the opinion that "Flanders was no place to fight in." Thomas Atkins, as he pushed obstinately and irresistibly through the mud towards some pill-box objective, has endorsed that high strategical judgment. Perhaps in a future war, if there is going to be a future war, Flanders will be a closed area and no Army will be allowed to go there to fight under penalty of a procès-verbal. That should be done if only for the sake of the horses.
THE EAST RAMPARTS
As every civilian stay-at-home knows, the Army is an entirely foolish organisation with no knowledge of practical affairs. But I doubt whether any civil organisation would have carried the same number of horses through the same conditions with the same small percentage of losses. The Army did not tackle the problem in any hide-bound way. A good deal was left to the initiative and enthusiasm of individual officers. Some general principles were set down. Within the boundaries of those principles there was wide scope for personal ingenuity, and as the good thing that one officer worked out soon became the property of all the Division, a very high standard of horse-management was reached.
Will it shock some old retired officers to hear that authority, the highest authority, abolished the clipping of horses that year in Flanders? Horse-clipping was once a sacred institution, with its fixed dates and ritual, in the Army. That year in Flanders horse-clipping was abolished, and the horses became wild and woolly but withal happy. I used to love to see their flowing locks streaming in the cold wind as they stood out in the lines, coated like St. Bernard dogs, and quite comfortable. "Stables" became more arduous as horse-coats became longer, but the horses flourished in the open with just break-winds, and sometimes thatch rain-shelter overhead. I would never want to see a finer lot of horses than those of the early Spring of 1916. They were hairy and they were lean, and they would eat their nosebags, if given a minute's grace after the feed was finished; but they were full of heart and of work.
The enemy was the mud. We found that if the horses were given good standings and their feet kept out of the mud the rain did not trouble them at all, and the wind troubled them little. But once off the pavé roads all Flanders was semi-liquid, and the problem at horse-lines was first to secure a solid "standing," next to secure a solid road in and out to that standing, and finally to secure a solid road to and from a solid watering place. A unit that built for its horses elegant brick standings in the middle of a field, and forgot the rest, found after the first rain that its lines were surrounded by a sea of mud. Then the horses had to be given temporary refuge in the paved street of an evacuated town, whilst a saddened unit faced scorn and obloquy and the necessity of constructing another brick standing on another site, not an island site this time.