Our New Remount Service

Destined, at Last, to Solve the Problem of Securing Army Horses in the Event of War

O'NEIL SEVIER

CONGRESS assenting, the United States will presently have a constructive remount system, a system that will make it possible for the war department properly to equip with serviceable horses any force that may be called to arms.

The failure of the makeshift remount service of the army to provide the A. E. F. in France in 1917 and 1918 with horses of the right sort and in sufficient numbers for the prosecution of the war, without seeking the aid of sorely pressed allies, brought to the hiern archs of the war department a realization of the need of creating a separate division of experts in remount problems, and of investing its members with the means and the authority to organize the production of American military horses of approved types.

Such a division was created last fall by the chief of the general staff, under the authorization of the Secretary of War.

The new service is known officially as the Remount Division. It is an integral part of the Quartermaster's Department. It is divided into two parts, one administrative, the other advisory. The officers who have been assigned to administrative tasks are active officers of the cavalry, artillery and quartermaster's departments, detailed for the service because of their special knowledge. These officers with the enlisted men who serve under them are designated as the Remount Service. Their chief is Colonel Frank Spear Armstrong of the cavalry. Under Colonel Armstrong, as heads of branches of production, purchase, training, etc., are Colonel Stanley Koch, Lieutenant Colonel Charles L. Scott, Major J. F. Taublee, Major A. A. Cederwald, Major John T. Sallee, and a staff of officers of lower grades. The headquarters of the Remount Sendee is in Washington.

THE advisory branch, which is called the Remount Board, is of mixed military and civilian membership. Its military members are now, and will be in the future, recruited from such members of the service as have given close study to military horse problems. It is intended that the civilian members shall be persons whose interests in horses and horse production give them special knowledge of breeds that will be invaluable to their military colleagues. The head of the Remount Board is always to be the chief of the Remount Division. The Remount Board is to meet periodically at the headquarters of the Remount Division in Washington or whenever the chief of the division calls the members together.

No civilian interest concerned in the production of blooded horses was slighted by General Peyton C. Marsh, chief of the general staff of the United States Army, when he named the Remount Board, the military members of which are Major Generals William J. Snow and Jesse Mcl. Carter, Colonels Armstrong and George H. Cameron and Lieutenant Colonel Scott, of the cavalry corps; Colonels John S. Fair and Bruce Palmer, of the general staff; Major Sallee, of the quartermaster's corps; and Major Charles W. Jewell, of the veterinary corps.

The civilian personnel consists of Dr. John H. Mohler, of the department of agriculture; Robert H. Strawbridge, of Pennsylvania; Captain Philip M. Walker, U. S. A. (retired), of Virginia; August Belmont, F. Ambrose Clark, Thomas Hitchcock and Algernon Da inger field, of New York; Arthur B. Hancock, of Kentucky; Hayden Charming, of Connecticut, and David M. Look, Matt S. Cohen, C. A. Benton and W. R. Brown. Of these civilian members Mr. Belmont, who is chairman of the Jockey Club of New York; Mr. Hancock and Captain Walker are actively engaged in the production on a grand scale of thoroughbred race horses. Mr. Belmont's Nursery Farm, which is in Kentucky, was the birthplace of Man o'War, Lucullite and Mad Hatter, three of the American racing heroes of the season of 1919; also, of the world famous Tracery, a son of Rock Sand and Topiary, for which a thoroughbred producer of the Argentine Republic resently paid the record price of $253,000.

Mr. Hancock's Claiborne stud, which is domiciled in Kentucky, sent to the races last season Blazes, winner of the Grab Bag Handicap at Saratoga and the Kentucky Futurity at Lexington.

THE Remount Board, as an advisory council, will be a permanent organization as regards its civilian personnel. Its non-military members will serve as long as they can worry along on salaries of one dollar a year. The military personnel, however, will be a shifting one.

The Remount Board is now unanimously of the opinion that the association between national defense and the two types of horses that in America are called thoroughbred—the running horse and the trotter—is of supreme importance.

The superiority of thoroughbred blood to all other in the military horse was established in Europe years before the outbreak of the great war by costly experimentation in which all breeds of horses were thoroughly tried. It was confirmed by the experiences of the various armies that struggled nearly five years for the mastery of Europe.

Mr. Belmont, who, in the last twenty years, has conducted instructive private experiments in cross breeding trotters and thoroughbreds, has been able to give his colleagues of the Remount Board some interesting information. He twice bred a stout trotting mare of a stock his father, the first August Belmont, developed at the Nursery Stud for service on the roads in pre-automobile days, to his brilliantly successful thoroughbred stallion, Fair Play, sire of Man o' War and Mad (Continued on page 90) Hatter, and, on each occasion, he got a foal of the thoroughbred type, a galloper rather than a trotter. The same mare was bred to Rock Sand at another time with a like result. More recently Mr. Belmont mated Souveraine, a racing mare and the dam of several winning race horses, with the celebrated trotting stallion, Peter the Great, and got a foal of the trotting type in conformation and gait. The results of Mr. Belmont's experiments would seem to indicate that the trotter, as well as the thoroughbred, possesses the quality of prepotency. And, inasmuch as it is the galloping type that is wanted for the army, the scheme of breeding likely to produce the most satisfactory results in the upbuilding of the American military horse will be the utilization at government base breeding stations of thoroughbred stallions and trotting mares.

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The first important work of the Remount Service will be to organize in five great breeding zones, or districts, into which the country is to be divided for purposes of remount administration, each zone to be under the command of a colonelspecialist, the production from thoroughbred stallions of half and threequarter bred types. These types are to be the offspring of stallions, government owned, and mares, privately owned, that have been inspected by members of the remount service and accepted as suitable matings for the government stallions. The stallions are to be maintained at government stations in some instances; on private estates, in others.

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Their custodians and managers are to be non-commissioned officers of the remount service. Nominal stud fees are to be charged to stockmen and farmers for the services of government stallions, the offspring of which are to be regularly registered in military horse stud books. At three years old such of these foals as pass muster are to be taken over by the government and at current market prices when market prices are not beyond the purses of buyers of the remount service. When the farmer-producer can sell his horse at a figure the government buyer cannot meet he will be at liberty to do so. But a record of foals privately disposed of will be kept so that in a military crisis they may be called to the colors. The new dispensation has abandoned for good the old practice of trying to buy military horses from producers at arbitrary fixed prices. The preposterous notion that the government has the right to say at what figure a farmer shall sell his horse for service has, properly, been scrapped.

After being taken over by the government these half-breds are to be assembled at training stations and put through a season's schooling for purposes of classification and elimination.

For the prosecution of the first year's work, which must necessarily be produc -tion, the remount service has asked Congress for a modest appropriation of S250,000. The lower house at Washington has indorsed this request. Whether the army is to get its appropriation and the remount service is to be able to institute immediately its indispensable and too long-deferred work, depends on the Senate.