One of the 2nd Dragoons, wounded in this engagement, says the Bays were desperately eager for the order to charge, and exultant when the bugle sounded.  “Off they went, ‘hell for leather,’ at the guns,” is how he described it.  “There was no stopping them once they got on the move.”

“No stopping them.”  That sums up what every eye-witness of the British cavalry charges says.  The coolness and dash of the men in action was amazing.  Their voices rang out as they spurred their horses on, and when they crashed into the enemy, the British roar of exultation was terrific, and the mighty clash of arms rent the air.  “Many flung away their tunics,” writes a Yeomanry Officer with General Smith-Dorrien’s Division, “and fought with their shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbow.  Some of the Hussars and Lancers were almost in a horizontal position on the off-side of their mounts when they were cutting right and left with bare arms.”

Most intimate details of the fighting at close quarters are given by another officer.  “I shall never forget,” he says, “how one splendidly-made trooper with his shirt in ribbons actually stooped so low from his saddle as to snatch a wounded comrade from instant death at the hands of a powerful German.  And then, having swung the man right round to the near side, he made him hang on to his stirrup leather whilst he lunged his sword clean through the German’s neck and severed his windpipe as cleanly as ——­ would do it in the operating theater.”

And here is another incident:  “A young lancer, certainly not more than twenty, stripped of tunic and shirt, and fighting in his vest, charged a German who had fired on a wounded man, and pierced him to the heart.  Seizing the German’s horse as he fell, he exchanged it for his own which had got badly damaged.  Then, his sword sheathed like lightning, he swung round and shot a German clean through the head and silenced him forever.”

The soldiers’ letters throb with such stories, and the swiftness, vigor, and power of expression revealed in them is astonishing.  Most of them were written under withering fire, some scribbled even when in the saddle, or when the writers were in a state of utter exhaustion at the end of a nerve-shattering day. “‘Hell with the lid off’ describes what we are going through,” one of the 12th Lancers says of it.  But the men never lose spirit.  Even after eighteen or nineteen hours in the saddle they still have a kindly, cheering message to write home, and a jocular metaphor to hit off the situation.  “We are going on all right,” concludes Corporal G.W.  Cooper, 16th Lancers; “but still it isn’t exactly what you’d call playing billiards at the club.”

VI

WITH THE HIGHLANDERS