Hats Off to August Belmont

Who Has Set Our War-Time Government Up in the Breeding Business

O'NEILL SEVIER

IT is manifest that every citizen, whatever his age, position or circumstances can do his share to bring success to the American arms. Vanity Fair is impelled to take its hat off to August Belmont who has done so large a bit for real preparedness and for the economic welfare of the country by setting the Government up in the horse breeding business with gifts of splendid thoroughbred stallions from his private stud. He has by his gifts of stallions founded and inaugurated a national bureau of breeding.

SIX years ago—in August, 1911, to be exact —Mr. A. D. Melvin, Chief of the Bureau of Animal Industry in the Department of Agriculture at Washington, issued a circular in which he made the astonishing statement that unless something was done immediately and on a national scale by the Federal Government to establish a suitable breed of horses for the military service of the United States and to encourage farmers everywhere to breed in vastly increased numbers the types acceptable to expert opinion, it would soon be impossible for the quartermasters' department of the army to find suitable animals in sufficient numbers for the cavalry, artillery and transport services. Mr. Melvin's statement astonished for two reasons. The census of 1910 which the country had hardly finished digesting showed that there were upwards of 22,000,000 horses of various breeds on the farms of the country, while the man strength of the army, which had no more serious duties to perform than the guarding of the Mexican frontier and the policing of the Philippines, was only about 90,000. For such a force no more than 18,000 horses were required for the purposes of mobilization and no more than 1,800 annually to meet ordinary losses, American military opinion having accepted the European theory that the proportion of horse strength to man strength of modern armies should be about two to five and the annual loss by death in peace times about 10 per cent.

But Mr. Melvin pointed out that few of the 22,000,000 horses in the United States were of a kind that could be used by an army efficient in a modern sense. The rural trolley, the railroad and the cheap automobile had all but driven the trotter, the old-fashioned roadster, the hackney and the morgan out of existence by wiping out the industrial demand for them. The only types still obtainable in considerable numbers, he showed, were of the heavy draught breeds—Shires, Clydesdales, Normans, Percherons and Belgians—which were unserviceable, save for dragging heavy artillery, because of their awkwardness and lack of spirit.

ITHOUT committing himself to the advocacy of the development of any particular breed, Mr. Melvin pointed out that the nondescript cavalry and artillery horses of the United States army, and even the officers' mounts, which were generally picked up wherever horses of any sort could be obtained, had long been the objects of the polite derision of foreign military men, who visited the United States from time to time to witness our miniature manoeuvers, and that for twenty-five years or more the officers of the United States army had continually complained that the animals assigned to them by the government had showed a steady deterioration in quality. The warning and recommendations of Mr. Melvin were supplemented by the strongest representations to the military and agricultural committees of both Houses of Congress by Generals Wood, Scott and Aylshire, Colonel Henry T. Allen, and other distinguished officers of the staff and line.

Yet Congress was deaf alike to the warning of Mr. Melvin and the appeals of the officers, and it was not until a gentleman in private life, Mr. August Belmont, chairman of the Jockey Club, and one of the most considerable breeders of thoroughbred race horses in the country, gave the government a start in the business of developing its own military horses, by presenting to the army the thoroughbred stallions Henry of Navarre and Octagon, that anything was done. After these horses had been accepted and turned over to the Department of Agriculture for stud service, Congress made one reluctant appropriation of $25,000 for the further promotion of the work and since that first donation an additional $50,000 has been obtained.

BUT Congress has by no means kept pace with Mr. Belmont in the development of a national bureau of breeding because Mr. Belmont has added to his original contribution the younger stallions Vestibule, Belfry, Footprint and Top Hat, and given Defendum to General Wood, while part of the congressional appropriations has been expended for the purchase of fifteen or twenty stallions of questionable value because they are not of thoroughbred blood. Experimentation in Europe, extending over a period of a century and a quarter, that has cost upwards of $200,000,000, has proven, be it understood, that the thoroughbred, and his half bred offspring, are beyond comparison the most suitable horses for military service.

If agents of the Department of Agriculture had had to go into the open market to buy the thoroughbred stallions, Henry of Navarre, Octagon, Vestibule, Footprint, Belfry and Top Hat, they would have had to pay not less than $100,000. Henry of Navarre, which won the Suburban Handicap of 1896 at Sheepshead Bay from a field that included The Commoner and Clifford, horses that have since sired the winners of a couple of hundred thousand dollars, cost Mr. Belmont $35,000 in 1895. At the time of his presentation to the government—the autumn of 1911—he was at service, with Octagon, at Mr. Belmont's stud in Normandy. Octagon, which crossed the Atlantic with him to do his bit at the army remount station at Front Royal, Virginia, was bred by Mr. Belmont, himself, at his Nursery Stud in Kentucky. Twice winner of the Toboggan handicap and once of the Brooklyn Derby, Octagon was one of the cleverest racers of his time, and after his retirement to the stud he sent up to the races Beldame, the greatest mare of her time and the winner of the Suburban Handicap of 1905. Top Hat, the youngest of Mr. Belmont's contributions to the army, is a half brother of the celebrated Tracery, the greatest racer in Great Britain in 1913, a horse for which Mr. Belmont turned down an offer of $200,000 and then refused to price. Footprint, Vestibule and Belfry are sons of Rock Sand (sire of Tracery), an English runner of renown which Mr. Belmont imported in 1906 at, a cost of $130,000 and afterward sold to a syndicate of British, American and French breeders for service in France, where he died in 1915. Footprint was one of the smartest 2 and 3 year olds that raced in the United States and Canada in 1910 and 1911, and Belfry, beside claiming Rock Sand for sire, has the additional distinction of being a son of Beldame.

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AND now Mr. Belmont contemplates following the example of Major Hall Walker, an English soldier and sportsman, who, last year gave the British government his entire stud, which had been taxed on a valuation of $3,000,000, for the propagation of military horses, by presenting to the United States government a complete stud of young stallions and mares, chosen for their fitness in the qualities of temper, size, conformation and bone development for the service of breeding stallions to be used in a country-wide system for the production of half and three-quarter breeds for the military service. Mr. Belmont's decision to present thoroughbred stallions to the government in preference to any other sort was based on his knowledge of the superiority of this type. He reached this decision after an exhaustive study of the development of the remount systems of Germany, Austria, Hungary, France and Russia, which countries, he discovered, had long ago discarded the trotter, the hackney, the coach horse, the Orloff and the Arab in favor of the thoroughbred, the running horse having proven that he surpassed all other types in the essential attributes of stamina, docility, steadiness under fire, intelligence and ability to stand up longest under the most exhausting work.

He found that Austria-Hungary, which began experimenting with the thoroughbred as far back as 1783 and had, in 1910, the best equipped army as regards horse flesh in the entire world, had in the last twenty years given new proof of faith in the potency of thoroughbred blood by paying $80,000 in Great Britain for the racing stallion Robert le Diable, and $58,000 at Paris for Adam, a French horse that had had two seasons of stud service in this country, and by importing from the United States the Hanover stallion King Hanover and a score of other stallions. Also he found that Germany had within the last twenty years paid $110,000 each for the British Derby winners Ard Patrick and Galtee More and $97,000 in France for the Prix du Conseil Municipal winner Biniou and established them at the imperial studs at Trakenen and Graditz. And he found that Hermis, winner of the Suburban Handicap of 1904, was at the head of one of the French army studs, and that the republic was paying liberally for the male thoroughbred produce of private French studs and assigning them to duty at the military horse breeding establishments. France had not been a purchaser in foreign markets because she was not under the necessity of seeking thoroughbred stock abroad. By managing racing sanely for fifty years she had built up a thoroughbred industry that was second only in the volume and quality of its output to that of Great Britain.

IN Europe the practice generally followed in the production of military horses is to stand thoroughbred stallions in selected districts and invite the neighborhood farmers to breed their mares to them free of charge, or at a nominal fee, the government reserving the right to purchase the resultant offspring at 3 years old at a price fixed by a committee consisting of an officer of the remount service, a farmer and a veterinary. That scheme has been adopted for our own modest breeding establishment and, in the opinion of the men charged with the duty of providing horses for the army, its immediate extension to all parts of the country is imperative.

If the American contribution to the international military force which, in future, is to keep the world safe, numbers half a million men, two hundred thousand horses must be available for immediate mobilization. If our contingent is to be one million the number of horses available for immediate service must be four hundred thousand. And beside this there should be a reserve to meet the losses of war as numerous as the mobilization contingent. A horse lasts only about fifteen days under the gruelling conditions of modem war. Two thousand stallions would not be too many to be at this service right now. For a thoroughbred stallion would not account for more than sixty serviceable military horses annually and none of the produce of the government stallions would be ready for service before its fourth year. This is a phase of preparedness which should interest the farmer. It offers no prospect of profit to the munition manufacturer; the armor plate man or the makers of cannon, aircraft and motor vehicles. Horses are not turned out by factories. They are distinctly a product of the soil and there is no state in the Union in which they may not be raised profitably when there is a sure demand for them: