e contemptible as foes.
"They run like scalded cats when they see you," writes Captain N.G.
Stewart Richardson, of the North Irish Horse, to a friend in Belfast,
"and are always in close formation as if afraid to separate. I had a
grand hunt after twenty (there were five of us), and we got four dead,
picking up two more afterwards. We came on them round the corner of a
street, and they went like hunted deer."

The duties were discharged with varying good luck and bad. Corporal
Fred Lindsay tells how the North Irish Horse discovered one of those
minor tragedies of war and lost Troopers Jack Scott of Londonderry and
W. Moore of Limavady. "With a Sergeant Hicks they were sent to patrol
as far as a ford in the river which, unknown to us, was held by a
German force with a machine gun. When the three reached the ford they
found a British officer dead across his motor-car and some of his men
dead around the car. They were about to dismount to investigate when
the machine-gun fired upon them, instantly killing the two troopers.
Sergeant Hicks escaped on Moore's horse, his own being shot under
him." On another day, the same troop came upon a force of Uhlans in a
wood near a village, and succeeded in killing some, taking a good many
prisoners, and capturing a number of horses. "In this action,"
Corporal Fred Lindsay relates, "Trooper M'Clennaghan, of Garvagh,
accounted for three Uhlans and took two horses single-handed; and two
others and myself, firing simultaneously at an escaping Uhlan, brought
both horse and rider down at 900 yards' distance. Sitting on the
roadside later eating biscuits and bully beef with the rest of us
Viscount Massereene complimented us, saying, 'Boys, you have done a
good day's work. If we only had an opportunity like this every day!'"
Subsequently the North Irish Horse had the distinction of forming the
bodyguard of Sir John French. The South Irish Horse took service, like
the cavalry, in the trenches.

There is also to be told a story of a clever ambush and capture of a
long scattered line of German transport wagons loaded with food by a
party of the 5th (Royal Irish) Lancers after the Battle of the Marne.
Commanding a bridge over a stream, by which the convoy had to pass,
was a coppice in which the Lancers were able to conceal themselves and
the horses. They waited until the head of the column was straggling
across the bridge, and then they emptied their carbines into them
along a wide front that ga