War-Horse Hospital

One of the war's strangest base hospitals is run by the Fifth Army just behind the lines in Italy. The patients: horses and mules. The doctors: six veterinarians. Nursing is done by 100 enlisted Italians.

In Italy's rugged mountains, mules and horses can go where a jeep can not go. So these animals, worth a few hundred dollars each in the U.S., are priceless in Italy. Each pack train has its own veterinarian to give first aid. He also decides which wounded animals must be shot, which can be hospitalized. The wounded are moved to the rear, usually tied between healthy animals. Then they are shipped in trucks to the base hospital, an abandoned farm.* There a concrete-floored paddock serves as a ward for wounded and a few sick animals (mules sometimes suffer from arthritis).

New York Timesman. Milton Bracker, who visited the hospital last week, noticed that the patients remain calm, even when planes roar overhead. Veterinarians say they can tell that a mule is in pain only by the expression in his eyes or by a quivering muscle. Only the "shellshocked" animals make any noise. A wounded animal first gets an antitetanus shot in the neck. Then metal fragments are removed and wounds dressed under anesthesia on a ten-by-ten-foot operating table covered with rubber. As in the U.S., there is a feed shortage. Instead of hay, the animal patients get. along on a straw substitute. About 60% of the patients go back into action in two weeks. The rest go to a more luxurious convalescent hospital. One such hospital is an old Italian cavalry post with fine stables, 10,000 acres of pasture.

*In Burma, wounded mules are sometimes flown out.

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