at day
did not have time to "get on" the cavalry when they were registered on
different targets--which is suggestive of what might come if the line
were cleft over a broad front. A steel band is strong until it breaks,
which may be in many pieces.

"Did you see the charge?" you ask. No, nor even the ride up the slope,
being busy elsewhere and not knowing that the charge was going to take
place. I could only seek out the two squadrons who participated in the
"incident," as the staff called it, after it was over. Incident is the
right word for a military sense of proportion. When the public in
England and abroad heard that the cavalry were "in" they might expect to
hear next day that the Anglo-French Armies were in full pursuit of the
broken German Armies to the Rhine, when no such outcome could be in the
immediate program unless German numbers were cut in two or the Prussian
turned Quaker.

An incident! Yes, but something to give a gallop to the pen of the
writer after the monotony of gunfire and bombing. I was never more eager
to hear an account of any action than of this charge--a cavalry charge,
a charge of cavalry, if you please, on the Western front in July, 1916.

In one of the valleys back of the front out of sight of the battle there
were tired, tethered horses with a knowing look in their eyes, it
seemed to me, and a kind of superior manner toward the sleek, fresh
horses which had not had the luck to "go in"; and cavalrymen were lying
under their shelters fast asleep, their clothing and accoutrements
showing the unmistakable signs of action. We heard from their officers
the story of both the Dragoon Guards and the Deccan Horse (Indian) who
had known what it was to ride down a German in the open.

The shade of Phil Sheridan might ponder on what the world was coming to
that we make much of such a small affair; but he would have felt all the
glowing satisfaction of these men if he had waited as long as they for
any kind of a cavalry action. The accounts of the two squadrons may go
together. Officers were shaving and aiming for enough water to serve as
a substitute for a bath. The commander with his map could give you every
detail with a fond, lingering emphasis on each one, as a battalion
commander might of a first experience in a trench raid when later the
same battalion would make an account of a charge in battle which was
rich with incidents of hand-to-hand encounters and prisoners breached
from dugouts into