Sidney D. Light's WWI Diary, Postcards & Letters, 329th Battery Book Accounts

         "Stand to heel! Commence grooming!"

         There is no better way to start this article because of all the introductions that come a-thronging in the life of an artillery rookie, that is the most enlightening. What he thought before was a horse–or a mule—becomes a nightmare of currycombs, disinfected brushes, and feet that always need cleaning. If he be from Detroit he murmurs—after he has forced some steed to agree with the Sarge that it can be done—"They’ll never believe me"; or never ceases to wonder "Why is a horse, anyway?"

         Well, here’s the answer, Buddy from Auto Town. Because the army can’t get along without the horse. He is as necessary as rations (really enables us to have them more times than not), and he goes, very often, where gasoline can’t flow. And, much as the drudgery of taking care of him palls on us, as much as we dislike his eccentricities, his mechanical appetite, his misguided attempts at playfulness, we’ve got to hand it to him in the long run. The "art" in artillery—our artillery—would be useless without him; verily, he is "man’s best friend" (grooming or no grooming), back of the lines or in them.

         On the long, long trail a-winding he may slip and slide on the icy road until his muscles ache and his head drops, but he carries on. Dare we begrudge him the twenty minutes’ grooming that sets his skin to tingling again? His home in the army is any old place there is room for a picket line. Do we regret the stable police labor that gave him comparative comfort at the garrison? Nay, though we clip through the long hours of the night to make his world unsafe for "horse cooties".

         "The mule is magnificent in war, and our battles have been won as much by mules as by men. The mule will eat anything, endure anything, and when understood and humored by its driver, will do anything. It works until it falls dead by the roadside. In the spring hundreds die in harness. In fact, few die except in harness. They die facing the foe, dragging rations along shell-swept roads to the men in the trenches.

        "The mule knows neither love nor offspring. Apart from a few gambols in the field, or while tethered to picket-lines, it knows nothing but work. It is the supreme type of drudge. It is one of the greatest factors in the war, and yet receives scarcely any recognition and more whipping than praise."

        So wrote Chaplain Thomas Tiplady in his book "The Soul of the Soldier." He could find soul enough among OUR men, were he to look for it, to give the horse and the mule their due.