Frank Allen Ramsey - Office of Medical History - U.S. Army

Frank Allen RamseyVeterinary College let us use their facilities whenever we needed them to treatour animals.Q: Did you have any trouble with land mines with those horses when you wentinto these inaccessible areas?A: No, we had no trouble with land mines, strangely enough. A couple ofincidents with that Constabulary unit—while I was there it was disbanded.The troopers rode their horses from their stable to the Berlin Commandheadquarters building and went into formation in front of the building oneevening at retreat, and they had a disbanding ceremony there for that unit.When the troopers left, they all led their horses back to the barracks throughthe streets of Berlin. It was a very poignant ceremony.Some of these horses were quite old. I was told by Dr. Becker that oneparticular horse had come over from the United States for the 1936 Olympicsin Berlin, and I took an interest in him because the name of the horse wasTexas. He was over 20 years old, and we had him in the stable, and the menwould ride him on patrol periodically. But he was lame in all four legs, and hewould limp, especially if they rode him hard one day.Every three months we had an equestrian show there, and the French, theBritish, the Americans, and the Germans all competed in a horse show, andthey had the jumping events. The week before the horse show they wouldbegin to put up the bunting and the flags, and decorate the riding hall, gettingready for the show. Texas would see this, and he would perk up and startbeing very, very active, and prancing back and forth in the paddock. He alwaysentered in these jumping events. He was so old that he could not tuck up hishooves to clear all the jumps, but time-wise he almost invariably won thejumping event. But also invariably, by having a dangling hoof, he would knocka brick off the brick hurdle and they would penalize him, so he would come insometimes third or fourth in the contest. All the horses after the contest wouldbe in one end of the arena, and when the judges announced the winner, thehorse would trot to the other end to have the wreath put around his neck.19