Animals rights' do-gooders deplore fox hunting (even though it is well known that the foxes love the challenge of it). But without it, Sydney's The World's News reported 100 years ago this week, Britain would have been ill-prepared for the Great War.
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"SAVED BY FOX-HUNTING. 170,000 HORSES READY FOR THE WAR.
" 'Our great popular national sport of fox-hunting saved our country when the war began,' Mr. Chaplin told a meeting of the English Farmers' Club.
" 'We can only come to that conclusion when we realise what was accomplished in the course of a few weeks. Once the war was declared the War Office secured 170,000 good horses suited to its requirements, which in the absence of hunting would have been an impossibility.' "
Meanwhile, in the same week, horses figured prominently in the latest despatches, published in Melbourne's Argus, from official war correspondent C.E.W. Bean. He had been watching, from far away and high on a hill and with a "bird's eye view", the Australians and New Zealanders on manoeuvres in the desert near Cairo.
Always writing beautifully and in detail about the desert and the light he reported how in the distance "one saw the cavalry only as a tornado of dust, moving columns of it, like those of a dust storm in the interior of Australia, sweeping across the far end of the plain".
Later he saw "the whole of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade, the men lying down, the sun glinting off the coats of a couple of thousand well-groomed horses".
