WORK IN THE ARMY 235 
institutions of the unions at the front owned 58,447 horses, and 
they required 24,000 more horses before January 1, 1917.3 A con- 
siderable number of the horses were used for the transport of the 
wounded, and the others were employed in connection with the 
depots. 
The organization of the veterinary service was along the same 
lines as that of the medical service, with a central bureau and veteri- 
nary boards attached to the commissioner of the Zemstvo Union for 
each army; they maintained a large number of veterinary hospitals 
at the front and behind it, and they opened a number of first aid 
stations near the front lines, served by visiting veterinary surgeons. 
The numbers of the trained veterinary staff, especially in the lower 
ranks, were small, so that it was necessary to open special training 
schools in hospitals behind the front. The veterinary service of the 
zemstvos attended not only to the medical treatment of horses be- 
longing to the Union, but it also undertook purely sanitary meas- 
ares. Thus, it saw to it that all the horses acquired by the Union 
were Inoculated against infectious diseases. By the middle of 1916 
each front had about ten permanent veterinary hospitals accommo- 
dating from one hundred to five hundred animals each, apart from 
the dispensary service established. 
The Auxiliary Institutions of the Union. 
We have already stated that numerous auxiliary services had been 
established to meet the needs of the hospitals and canteens of the 
Union. Bakeries, tailors’ shops, bathing and disinfecting chambers, 
farriers’ shops, boilers for supplying hot water, and many similar 
undertakings, had been organized both at the front and behind it. At 
first these establishments catered only to the needs of the Zemstvo 
Union; gradually, however, they were obliged to extend their activi- 
ties and, in response to the wish of the military authorities, to adapt 
them to the requirements of the army as well as their own. In any 
regiment one was sure to find a sufficient number of artisans and 
skilled workers capable of carrying out all necessary repairs. Under 
the conditions prevailing at the front, however, no one in the regi- 
ment could possibly undertake the burden of organizing this work 
® Kratki Obgor Deyatelnosti (Outline) of the work of the Union of 
Zemstvos, Moscow, 1917, p. 64.