into line!” he bellowed.  Two long lines—­one the guides, in green and scarlet, the other the lancers, in blue and yellow—­spread themselves across the fields.  “Trot!” The bugles squealed the order.  “Gallop!” The forest of lances dropped from vertical to horizontal and the cloud of gaily fluttering pennons changed into a bristling hedge of steel.  “Charge!” came the order, and the spurs went home.  “Vive la Belgique!  Vive la Belgique!” roared the troopers—­and the Germans, not liking the look of those long and cruel lances, fell back precipitately into the wood where the troopers could not follow them.  Then, their work having been accomplished, the cavalry came trotting back again.  Of course, from a military standpoint it was an affair of small importance, but so far as colour and action and excitement were concerned it was worth having gone to Belgium to see.

After the German occupation of Brussels, the first engagement of sufficient magnitude to be termed a battle took place on August 25 and 26 in the Sempst-Elewyt-Eppeghem-Vilvorde region, midway between Brussels and Malines.  The Belgians had in action four divisions, totalling about sixty thousand men, opposed to which was a considerably heavier force of Germans.  To get a clear conception of the battle one must picture a fifty-foot-high railway embankment, its steeply sloping sides heavily wooded, stretching its length across a fertile, smiling country-side like a monstrous green snake.  On this line, in time of peace, the bloc trains made the journey from Antwerp to Brussels in less than an hour.  Malines, with its historic buildings and its famous cathedral, lies on one side of this line and the village of Vilvorde on the other, five miles separating them.  On the 25th the Belgians, believing the Brussels garrison to have been seriously weakened and the German communications poorly guarded, moved out in force from the shelter of the Antwerp forts and assumed a vigorous offensive.  It was like a terrier attacking a bulldog.

They drove the Germans from Malines by the very impetus of their attack, but the Germans brought up heavy reinforcements, and by the morning of the 26th the Belgians were in a most perilous position.  The battle hinged on the possession of the railway embankment had gradually extended, each army trying to outflank the other, until it was being fought along a front of twenty miles.  At dawn on the second day an artillery duel began across the embankment, the German fire being corrected by observers in captive balloons.  By noon the Germans had gotten the range and a rain of shrapnel was bursting about the Belgian batteries, which limbered up and retired at a trot in perfect order.  After the guns were out of range I could see the dark blue masses of the supporting Belgian infantry slowly falling back, cool as a winter’s morning.  Through an oversight, however, two battalions of carabineers did not receive the order to retire and were in imminent danger of being cut off and destroyed.