The above remarks are, of course, to be taken as applying to cavalry transport only.
There is one weakness in the L.G.S. wagon which is commended to the notice of the Royal Ordnance Corps. The bolt which fastens the wagon body on to the carriage passes through the axle. Towards the end of the campaign, after several years' hard and continuous work, a number of these axles began to break, and always at the place where the bolt passed through them. It is suggested that, in future manufacture, the fastening might consist of a steel collar over the axle, instead of a bolt through it.
_Horses._--The remarks on type, which have been made with regard to the cavalry riding horse, apply with equal force to the cavalry draught horse. Many of our English draught animals were of far too heavy a type, either for horse artillery or for cavalry transport. It is sometimes argued that a proportion of heavy horses is very useful when wagons begin to get stuck in boggy places. But it is not much use having these equine Samsons at all, if they are not available at the time their services are required. And this is what invariably happens. Nothing in the nature of a cart horse can live with cavalry in a march of forty miles, and, in this campaign, there was one of over ninety miles on end, and marches of forty, fifty and sixty miles were comparatively common. If heavy horses are forced to keep up with cavalry over such distances, they very soon give up the unequal fight and die; if they are allowed to go their own pace, they are a day's march in rear at the end of twenty-four hours, and the transport thus requires an escort of a size that can ill be spared from the fighting forces.
Another advantage of having a lighter-built, better-bred type of horse for transport, is that they then form a reserve for the cavalry. In the artillery it is the rule for riding and draught horses to change places frequently, thus resting both kinds in turn. This custom might profitably be employed occasionally in the cavalry.
The Australians have an admirable type of cavalry draught horse: 15 to 15.2 hands high, short-backed, well-coupled, and showing a good deal of breeding. The disappearance from our English roads first of the coaches and then of the horse-drawn buses, has deprived us almost entirely of our once fine type of light draught horse, and it seems as if we shall, in the future, have to depend more and more on the Dominions for our supply of such horses. There were a certain number of Canadian horses in the Corps transport. They were hard and sound, but of a coarser type, with heavier shoulders and less handy than those from Australia.