No doubt it requires experience and trained intelligence to discriminate between the purchase of the large, fat, slow, hairy-heeled, podgy-muscled brute that has never yet gone fast enough to strain himself or be otherwise than perfectly sound, and the lean son of the desert or veldt whose early toil has developed wind-galls, splints, and so on, but whose conformation and muscular development are as complete as will be his ability to live and carry weight, when the other will fall down and die.
Stamina has been mentioned above; it is obviously the first essential in a cavalry horse. Next in rank to it comes good temper, usually accompanied by good digestion and boldness, and marked by a full kind eye and a broad forehead.
Xenophon recommends us to test a horse’s courage by unaccustomed sounds and sights before purchasing him as a war horse, and we recommend this practice to cavalry officers.
The Arabs, who have bred horses with a view to war for many generations, have handed down a great deal of old-world wisdom on the subject of the horse suitable for war.[17] The best Arabian horses are undoubtedly the outcome of centuries of breeding to a type, and that the type suitable to carry a light man throughout a long campaign, to face danger courageously, to possess fair speed, immunity from disease and sickness, especially pulmonary complaints, and to bear the jar of galloping on hard ground.
Our own British horses and the Australian Walers have unfortunately been bred for size, speed, and—in the case of the former—ability to carry a man in a burst over a big hunting country, and with, for the last fifty years, a disregard for stamina and temper which has gone far to remove many of them from the type of animal suitable for cavalry.
Situated as we are in regard to knowledge of horses, and hampered as we are in our preparation for war by the difficulty of teaching the essentials of campaigning horse management during peace time, we shall always find that it is in the early part of a war that our cavalrymen will fail to comprehend the necessity for nursing the strength of their horses, for discarding all unnecessary impedimenta, and limiting the task to what is absolutely necessary. In peace time, horses which are in regular work are not appreciably affected by their rider sitting on their backs for five or ten minutes at a halt instead of dismounting, or by his not allowing the horse to pick a few mouthfuls of grass twenty or thirty times in the day, or by his not watering him at every chance.
In peace time the horse will get food and water on his return home; but in war these little things in the aggregate matter greatly. They are like the snatches of sleep which a tired man gets when he can; they keep him going. The man can sustain himself by the hope of sleep at a future time. The man has certain traits in his nature which carry him through.
It is said that Murat, in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, though he crossed the Niemen with 43,000 horses, could only put 18,000 in the field two months later. Murat had worn them out by keeping them saddled up sixteen hours a day, by giving them insufficient food, and by chasing wisps of Cossacks. À propos of this, Nansouty said to Murat: “The horses of the cuirassiers not, unfortunately, being able to sustain themselves on their patriotism, fell down by the roadside and died.” Tired men soon express their feelings, the horse is unable to do so. Verb. sap.
Intimately connected with this question is the feeding of the horses. We know that no concentrated ration can constitute a substitute for bulk for continued periods, but it is not generally known how many articles of diet a horse will relish when hungry. In the Pamirs the ponies eat the offal of game which is thrown aside, thus recalling the story of our childhood of Black Bess, Dick Turpin’s celebrated mare, who had a beefsteak tied round her bit on the ride to York.
Ruskin once said in a lecture to the cadets at Woolwich: