purchased. Captain James Jack of the Cameronians had already been mobilised when he heard that his two remaining hunters, ‘Ardskull Boy and Home Park, have been taken for the army – the first war wrench’. When remount sergeants visited the Buckinghamshire village of Tysoe in August: ‘Every farmhouse … had some shock and grief that day.’ Kathleen Ashby’s family lost their much-loved aged carthorse Captain, who was still useful ‘if you humoured him and knocked off promptly after his stint of work, but under new men and at hard tasks he must break down’.180 The disappearance of Sammy and Rob Roy, Titan and Jupiter, cast an early shadow over a land still unused to loss, and some families, proud that their boys should go, could not bear to lose their animals. Three Lancashire children, ‘troubled little Britishers’, wrote to ‘Dear good Lord Kitchener’ with a picture of their pony and begged that she might be spared. Two others had already gone, and three of the family were ‘now fighting for you in the Navy. Mother and I will do anything for you, but do, do please let us keep old Betty.’ Kitchener’s private secretary, no less, immediately replied that he had spoken to Kitchener and ‘if you show the enclosed note to anyone who asks about your pony he thinks it will be left to you quite safely’.181
Newly-purchased horses went to remount depots where officers entitled to a charger could take their pick. James Pennycuik of the Royal Engineers tells how:
An enormous horse depot was formed at the Curragh racecourse to hold wonderful animals requisitioned from all over … Ireland, a sight never to be forgotten in that green land of horses. We young officers had great fun picking our requirements, and it was a great time for anyone with an eye for a horse.182
Henry Owens, a hunting doctor instantly commissioned into the RAMC, collected ‘a nice horse, a long-tailed bay, well bred, nice mouth and manners and nice paces’.183 And Major Tom Bridges of the 4th Dragoon Guards secured ‘one Umslopagaas, a powerful weight-carrying hunter with a wall eye, who could jump railway gates’.184 The unlucky Private Garrod, however, lost his favourite horse, who had to be destroyed when she broke a leg, and was allocated the worst horse in the troop, ‘who was such a bastard that he was known as Syphilis’ because nobody wanted to catch him. He kicked out and broke the farrier sergeant major’s arm when the horses were being embarked at Southampton, and then reared back ‘over the dock into the water and was never seen again’.
By June 1915, long before it began to conscript men, the army had taken 8 percent of the heavy horses in use on the land, and 25 percent of saddle horses had gone from farms. At one point in 1917 the army had nearly a million animals on its strength, with 436,000 of them in France. It is small wonder that fodder was, by a narrow margin, the heaviest single item shipped to France, heavier even than ammunition. The pressing need to supply and feed horses helped break down the barriers that had hitherto kept women, apart from nurses, out of uniform. The Women’s Forage Corps, which had 6,000 members by 1918, worked at baling and transporting hay, and the Women’s Remount Depot played a valuable part in breaking in newly-bought horses. There were the inevitable suggestions that women would not be up to the heavy work, but, in the event, they did it very well, freeing men for military service. Edith Maudslay, a farmer’s daughter, joined the Women’s Remount Depot in 1915, worried about her gunner brother (reported missing in March 1918 after returning alone to his battery’s gun-line to try to amend the day’s fortunes with his revolver), and lived on to drive an ambulance in the London Blitz in the Second World War.185
The sheer weight of fodder shipped to France must not be used as evidence of the logistic burden imposed by the cavalry. By 1917 only about 27,000 of the British horses on the Western Front (falling to some 16,000 by early 1918) mounted the remaining cavalry. The overwhelming majority pulled guns or wagons, just as they did in the French, German and United States armies at that time. In December 1918 the BEF fed a total of 394,443 animals. Of these just 25,414, riding and draught horses, were in the Cavalry Corps, and 48,822 served on the lines of communication. The number of motor vehicles on the Western Front grew enormously: in August 1914 the Army Service Corps had just 507 motor vehicles at its disposal, and in January 1918 it had almost 22,000 trucks in France alone. However, for the average infantry soldier ‘transport’ invariably meant horse
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