HORSES
One of the greatest difficulties with which the cavalry had to contend throughout the operations arose from the constant struggle to keep the horses sufficiently fit to carry on. This is, of course, always the case in war time, but the difficulties in the Syrian campaign were probably greater than in any previous one in which the British Army had taken part.
Climate.—To begin with, the climate encountered included every extreme of heat, cold, drought, and rain. For the first three weeks from the commencement of the 1917 campaign, the weather was extremely hot, the temperature running up to 110° in the shade. For two days, November the 10th and 11th, matters were rendered worse by a burning hot east wind, which raised clouds of suffocating dust. Then the rains broke, and, for the next six weeks, constant wet, deep mud and piercing cold winds were the order of the day. After a short period of good weather, the cavalry moved to the Jordan Valley, where they spent the summer of 1918, under conditions of heat and discomfort which have already been described. Finally, in the following winter, the horses found themselves sometimes standing in six inches of snow.[28]
Condition.—In the second place, the health of the horses was in an unsatisfactory state when the cavalry operations commenced.
Whatever their outward appearance might have been, and it varied considerably in different units, their internal condition was by no means good. The great bulk of them had taken part in the advance across Sinai, and had been in Egypt for a long time prior to that. Two years of unaccustomed and indifferent forage, added to the large quantities of sand they had consumed in their food while in the desert, had more or less permanently injured their digestive organs. It is true that sand colic, that scourge of the desert, had almost ceased to trouble the force by the end of the summer of 1917, but the dire effects of the sand were evident in every post-mortem. In a large number of cases the membrane of the stomach and intestines was freely marked with the scars of old ulcers, and in some instances large portions of it had sloughed away. Sand muzzles were almost universally employed up to the commencement of the advance on Beersheba, but it was impossible to prevent sand getting into the forage; indeed quantities of it had been purposely placed there by the dishonest native merchants, in order to increase the weight of bales and sacks.
It is probable that 90 per cent. of the draught horses of the artillery and transport had strained their hearts to some extent during the terrible work in the heavy sands of the desert. The writer carried out, or was present at, upwards of twenty post-mortems on draught horses that died during the advance across Sinai, and, in every case, found an enlargement of the heart greater than could possibly be accounted for by the age of the horse. In one instance, the wall of the heart was ruptured right through. This horse had been led four miles back to camp after first showing signs of extreme distress. On arriving in camp he drank well, ate a bran mash, and lived for six hours afterwards, a wonderful example of endurance.
The experience of the campaign proved that horses cannot be in too 'big' condition at the commencement of operations, provided they have been kept adequately exercised while being conditioned. The really fat, round horses finished both series of operations in better condition than those which had looked harder and more muscular, but not so fat, at the beginning. This was especially the case in the first series, during which the shortage of water was so acute.
Forage.—During both campaigns the forage was of very poor quality and woefully scanty. Up to the commencement of the 1917 operations, the daily issue had consisted of 10 lb. of barley, gram or maize and 10 lb. of tibben (chopped barley straw) and bursȳm (a kind of hay made of a coarse species of lucerne, of good feeding value and much liked by the horses). The food value of the whole daily ration was about 23 per cent. below that of an average horse in England doing the same work. The barley and tibben, being produced in Egypt, were very dusty, and contained a large proportion of earth and small stones. The gram and maize were of fair quality, but the latter was sometimes issued whole, and, when issued crushed, was often very dusty. The daily ration during operations in both campaigns was 9½ lb. of grain per day, and nothing else. So that the horses were called upon to do very much harder work on less than half the amount of food to which they had been accustomed, and only about 36 per cent. of the normal ration for such horses in England.