With the horses it is otherwise sad you have no idea of their sufferings. An officer of cavalry needs to be more horse-doctor than soldier, and no one has tried the discouragement to Company commanders in these long and continuos marches. You are a slave to your horse, you work like a dog yourself, and you exact the most extreme care from your Sergeants, and you see diseases creeping on you day by day and your horses breaking down under your eyes, and you have two resources, one to send your horse to the reserve camps and strip yourself of your command, and the other to force your horse on until he can't go any farther and then go and steal horses so you can remount your men, and keep up the strength of your command. The last course is the one I adopt, I do my best for my horses and am sorry for them; but all war is cruel and it is my business to bring every man I can into the preserve, and so war will be short. So I have but one rule, a horse must go 'til he can't be sparred any future, and then the rider must get another horse as soon as he can siege on one. To estimate the wear and tear of horse flesh you must bear in mind that, in the service of the country, a cavalry horse when loaded carries an average of 225 lbs. on his back. His saddle, when packed without a rider in it, weights no less than fifty pounds.

          The horse is, a hectic campaign, saddled on an average about fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. His food is normally ten pounds of grain a day and, in reality, he averages about eight pounds. He has no hay and only such other feed as he can pick up during halts. The usual water he obtains book water, so muddy by the passage of all the others, makes the water the color of chocolate. Of course, sore backs are our greatest trouble. Backs soon get feverish under the saddle and the first day's march swells them; after that day by day the trouble grows. No care can stop it. Every night after a march, no matter how late it may be, tired or hungry, I am if permission is given to unsaddle, I examine all the horses backs and do what I can do to make them fell better, and yet with every care the marching of the last four weeks destroyed ten of my horses, and put ten more on the road to disability, and this out of sixteen horses in three. Image a horse with his withers swollen to three times the natural size, and with a volcanic, running some fiery matter down both sides, and your have a case with which every cavalry officer is daily called upon to deal, and you imagine a horse which has still to he ridden until he lays down in sheer suffering under the saddle then we seize the first horse we come to and put the dismounted men on his back. The air of Virginia is literally burdened today with the stench of dead horses, federal and confederate. You pass them on every road and find them in every army that moves.

          On the last raid dying horses lined the road on which Stoneman's divisions had passed, and we marched over a road made pestilent by the dead horses of the vanished rebels. How it would astonished and terrify your and all others at home with your sleek, well fed animals, to see the weak , gaunt, rough animals with each rib visible and hipbones starting through the flesh can which these "dashing cavalry raids" were executed. It would knock romance out of you. So much for my cares as a horse master, and they are the carrier of all. For, I can safely assure you, my horses are not the worst in the regiment, and I am repeated no unsuccessful chief groom. I put 20 horses in the field on the 13th of April not many other Captains in the service did much.