WAR HORSES NERVES

Evening Star, Issue 16626, 8 January 1918, Page 5

WAR HORSES NERVES

STRANGE MALADIES. In days of old when knights were hold the horse, dashed into the frav decked in his own jingling panoply, proud of the pomp, the masses of brilliant color, and the blare of the trumpets. But presentday warfare is not at all to the horse’s liking—the tugging in mud and dust to the roar and crash of a rain of exploding shells. As a result he suffers from nerves. In fact, the horse in modern warfare is presenting what might be termed a peculiar psychological study. \Vriting from tho front, a correspondent of the Kansas City Star ’ notes a strange malady that affects the faithful annuals when they have been for a time exposed to the horrors- of sight and sound that accompany the business of war-making to day. He says : At the beginning of the-war tho loss of horses was awful. The first photographs which I saw in Switzerland—they were Gorman army photographs circulated everywhere ill pridemarked the German swath in Belgium by—dead horses. In the battlefields of the German flight from the Marne the French films were dotted with—dead horses. Blboded hunters from the cavalry. smart roadsters, beasts of value from artillery, and requisitioned farm stock, from smashed waggon trains wandered over the' deserted plains, gaunt, thirsty, lame, and wounded, brokenwinded, frightened, ancl discouraged. Horses now are cared for and protected as carefully as soldiers. ‘ If, is, a war of artillery ; and cannons without horses are as useless as horses without cannons. So, after three years of war, there are 30 per cent, more horses iu ini'P 00 k°'day than there were in August, and this in spite of French shipments to Salonika and Palestine, From the beginning 0 f the war in France “war sickness’’ has been the chief malady of horses—no wound, no breakdown from over-exertion, no visible physiological ill. French officers call it neurasthenia in their nervous blooded stock; but all horses seem capable of going down with it equally. „ , v cterinni-ians cannot touch the malady/’ which they call “melancholy. Of course, the horse is typically a creature of habit, built up for countless generations on regular hours for sleep, digestion, work, Xn modern war he gets lost in “soul sickness.’’ Regularly they do not die of it. But regularly it is worse than sorrow. In the year 1916, ifc is calculated, there "were as many army horses invalided in France by “Avar nourasthenia” as there were killed in' battle! Because of this strange sickness among the war horses French army buyers in America havo been instructed to give the preference, -wherever , possible, to the mule, since it apparently, is not afflicted with, nerves. The great American army mule is enjoying hisf vindication. For the past year he has steadily forged, ahead in French and British army esteem, proving his merits. Already “it is being said that, next to men and guns, he is coming to _be the most valuable asset of the allied_ armies, and with the arrival of the American troops his triumph will be perfect. The mule, tho linmblo American mule, has inscribed the name on the scarlefc pages of Verdun and the Somme, end British tanks and French 75’s salute him. A mule can .stand more hardships and rougher use, is not so easily blemished, will stand more heat, and thrive on a lesser amount.of feed than tho horse, and a I,ooolb mule can easily do tho work of a 1,2001b horse, and is generally useful for a longer time—even out of war. Also, there is not tho same danger of overfeeding a mule. You could empty a sack of barley into his feed box, and ho would _not eat enough to founder or injure himself, while a horse would cat till he burst. The mrio does not get “ war neurasthenia.” Artillery and infantry, airplane bombs, grenades, searchlights, and falling fuses, long hours without food, and hauls in mud and hills, the smell of blood; and decay and shrieks of wo’nnded horse/ all fail to dismay tho mule. When, a hoSso’s mate is-Jrilled begide him he kicks and plunges. The mule stands and waits. The mule's nerves never give way while the horse, much like a human* being—without the props of pride, patriotism, and the reasoning faculty—goes down under the ordeal, becomes suddenly crazed or unmanageable, or else take’s neurasthenia ” for a long rest!