were committed to their first charge in war.

Two hundred and fifty yards away the dark-blue men were firing madly in
a thin film of light-blue smoke. Their bullets struck the hard gravel
into the air, and the troopers, to shield their faces from the stinging
dust, bowed their helmets forward, like the Cuirassiers at Waterloo. The
pace was fast and the distance short. Yet, before it was half covered,
the whole aspect of the affair changed. A deep crease in the ground--a
dry watercourse, a khor--appeared where all had seemed smooth, level
plain; and from it there sprang, with the suddenness of a pantomime
effect and a high-pitched yell, a dense white mass of men nearly as
long as our front and about twelve deep. A score of horsemen and a dozen
bright flags rose as if by magic from the earth. Eager warriors sprang
forward to anticipate the shock. The rest stood firm to meet it. The
Lancers acknowledged the apparition only by an increase of pace. Each
man wanted sufficient momentum to drive through such a solid line. The
flank troops, seeing that they overlapped, curved inwards like the horns
of a moon. But the whole event was a matter of seconds. The riflemen,
firing bravely to the last, were swept head over heels into the khor,
and jumping down with them, at full gallop and in the closest order, the
British squadrons struck the fierce brigade with one loud furious shout.
The collision was prodigious. Nearly thirty Lancers, men and horses, and
at least two hundred Arabs were overthrown. The shock was stunning to
both sides, and for perhaps ten wonderful seconds no man heeded his
enemy. Terrified horses wedged in the crowd, bruised and shaken men,
sprawling in heaps, struggled, dazed and stupid, to their feet, panted,
and looked about them. Several fallen Lancers had even time to re-mount.
Meanwhile the impetus of the cavalry carried them on. As a rider tears
through a bullfinch, the officers forced their way through the press;
and as an iron rake might be drawn through a heap of shingle, so the
regiment followed. They shattered the Dervish array, and, their pace
reduced to a walk, scrambled out of the khor on the further side,
leaving a score of troopers behind them, and dragging on with the charge
more than a thousand Arabs. Then, and not till then, the killing began;
and thereafter each man saw the world along his lance, under his guard,
or through the back-sight of his pistol; and each had his own strange
tale to tell.