or
the blue coats and silver aiguillettes and towering bearskins which
served to impress the simple country-folk made splendid targets for
the German marksmen. This medley of picturesque and brilliant
uniforms was wonderfully effective, of course, and whenever I came
upon a group of lancers in sky-blue and yellow lounging about the
door of a wayside tavern or met a patrol of guides in their green
jackets and scarlet breeches trotting along a country-road, I always
had the feeling that I was looking at a painting by Meissonier or
Detaille.

At the beginning of the war the Belgian cavalry was as well mounted
as that of any European army, many of the officers having Irish
hunters, while the men were mounted on Hungarian-bred stock. The
almost incessant campaigning, combined with lack of proper food
and care, had its effect upon the horses, however, and before the
campaign in Flanders was half over the cavalry mounts were a raw-
boned and sorry-looking lot. The Belgian field artillery was horsed
magnificently: the sturdy, hardy animals native to Luxembourg and
the Ardennes making admirable material for gun-teams, while the
great Belgian draught-horses could scarcely have been improved
upon for the army's heavier work.

Speaking of cavalry, the thing that I most wanted to see when I went
to the war was a cavalry charge. I had seen mounted troops in
action, of course, both in Africa and in Asia, but they had brown
skins and wore fantastic uniforms. What I wanted to see was one of
those charges such as Meissonier used to paint--scarlet breeches
and steel helmets and a sea of brandished sword-blades and all
that sort of thing. But when I confided my wish to an American army
officer whom I met on the boat going over he promptly discouraged
me. "Cavalry charges are a thing of the past," he asserted. "There
will never be one again. The modern high-power rifle has made
them impossible. Henceforward cavalry will only be used for
scouting purposes or as mounted infantry." He spoke with great
positiveness, I remember, having been, you see, in both the Cuban
and Philippine campaigns. According to the textbooks and the
military experts and the armchair tacticians he was perfectly right; I
believe that all of the writers on military subjects agree in saying that
cavalry charges are obsolete as a form of attack. But the trouble
with the Belgians was that they didn't play the war-game according
to the rules in the book. They were very