Our Cavalry

by Michael Frederic Rimington

The essentials of campaigning horse management only come to those who live with horses constantly, and have to get work out of them. Those who hand over their horse to a groom after a long day’s work, and who do not see him till they wish to ride again, cannot learn about horses.

That the ordinary hunting man in Great Britain knows very little indeed about economizing his horse’s strength is evident from the fact that not one in twenty is ever, after a sharp gallop, seen to dismount, loosen his horse’s girth, and turn his head to the wind. Ten to one, if any one does so, it is a soldier, and one who has served in South Africa.

First of all is the question, What is the most suitable animal for cavalry work? And here the mind runs into two lines: (1) There is the animal which will carry a moderately heavy man, whose weight is 11 stone, together with his saddle, arms, etc., which may total up to another 6 stone. For this the beau-ideal is the Irish horse of about 15·2 hands high. But these must be well and carefully fed and watered, and not overdone. Their recuperative power grows less also with every inch of height. (2) The other animal which will carry a lighter cavalryman is seen at its best in the modern type of polo pony about 15 hands high, and as nearly thoroughbred as possible. These latter are more able to withstand hardship than class (1).

Though the limit to the height of the horse suitable for a campaign should be 15·2 hands, it is more difficult to say how small a horse[16] is suitable to carry a cavalryman. Chest measurement is the best known test for stamina, and a good judge said truly that “a 13·2 hands pony sixty-four inches round, will do double the work of a 14·2 hands pony of equal girth.”

Whilst we do not wish for one moment to be understood to advocate unduly small horses for cavalry, we do wish the chest measurement standard to be adopted more widely. We cannot help advancing the theory that the natural height of the horse appears to be not more than 14 to 15 hands at most, and all above that are in the nature of forced exotics, obtained by selection and good food for mares and foals, and in these stamina has not been grown in proportion; take, for instance, the power of the heart, which has to pump blood farther to the extremities in a big horse.

Now, though it must be allowed that a squadron mounted on 15·2 hands horses will, in a charge, easily defeat one mounted on 14·2 hands horses, still the difficulty of maintaining the condition of the squadron mounted on 15·2 hands horses, the increased cost of food, the smaller amount of wear and tear which the horse, as it increases in height, can bear, are all factors for consideration.

It is because, unfortunately, our ideas in Great Britain are somewhat inflated in respect to the size of the horse required to mount cavalry, that we neglected at the beginning of the Boer War to collect every animal of suitable age, if only 14 hands high, for the remounting of our cavalry in South Africa, and went to other and far more unsuitable sources for our horse-supply. Had we later, as was suggested, commandeered all suitable animals in the Cape Colony, we should have obtained a most useful reserve, and incidentally deprived our opponents of a source of supply of which they took full advantage. The horse and transport animal of the country are always the most suitable for a campaign in that country. By the end of that war, many a cavalry officer had gladly exchanged his 16 hands horse for a Boer or Basuto pony of 14 to 14·2 hands high.

But this, the South African War, it should be here remarked, can only be regarded as giving us a view of one side of a great question. Campaigning in the fertile plains of Europe, where food and water are generally plentiful, where stabling may often shelter the animals, and where enormous distances, with no food beyond that carried in the waggons, are not necessarily covered, the larger horse may do his work well. But he must be treated with the greatest care and the weight carried, in his case, more rigorously reduced than in that of the smaller horse. For shock tactics he is the best animal on which to mount our cavalry, and our ideal is shock tactics.

But let the squadron leader not forget that, when long distances are to be traversed, a few ponies are perfectly invaluable (they can be driven in a mob with his second line transport and are available to mount men whose horses require a day or two’s rest, and which will, if they do not get it, “give in” and never be any more use to them).

In peace time, in the laudable desire for good appearance, these expedients of war are too apt to be forgotten; they only force themselves on us when it is too late. The animals usually described as only fit for mounted infantry are those which see the finish of a campaign, and must be available as reserves of remounts for cavalry.