ane--Retiring in
good order--Just enough casualties to give the fillip of danger to
recollection.

Sometimes a squadron of cavalry, British or Indian, survivors of the
ardent past, intruded in a mechanical world of motor trucks and tractors
drawing guns. With outward pride these lean riders of burnished, sleek
horses, whose broad backs bore gallantly the heavy equipment, concealed
their irritation at idleness while others fought. They brought
picturesqueness and warm-blooded life to the scene. Such a merciless war
of steel contrivances needed some ornament. An old sergeant one day,
when the cavalry halted beside his battalion which was resting, in an
exhibit of affectionate recollection exclaimed:

"It's good to stroke a horse's muzzle again! I was in the Dragoon Guards
once, myself."

Sometimes the cavalry facetiously referred to itself as the "Dodo"
band, with a galling sense of helplessness under its humor; and others
had thought of it as being like the bison preserved in the Yellowstone
Park lest the species die out.

A cynical general said that a small force of cavalry was a luxury which
such a vast army of infantry and guns might afford. In his opinion, even
if we went to the Rhine, the cavalry would melt in its first charge
under the curtains of fire and machine gun sprays of the rearguard
actions of the retreating enemy. He had never been in the cavalry, and
any squadron knew well what he and all of those who shared his views
were thinking whenever it passed over the brow of a hill that afforded a
view of the welter of shell fire over a field cut with shell-craters and
trenches which are pitfalls for horses. Yet it returned gamely and with
fastidious application to its practice in crossing such obstacles in
case the command to "go in" should ever come. Such preparations were
suggestive to extreme skeptics of the purchase of robes and the
selection of a suitable hilltop of a religious cult which has appointed
the day for ascension.

Excepting a dash in Champagne, not since trench warfare began had the
cavalry had any chance. The thought of action was an hypothesis
developed from memory of charges in the past. Aeroplanes took the
cavalry's place as scouts, machine guns and rifles emplaced behind a
first-line trench which had succumbed to an attack took its place as
rearguard, and aeroplane patrols its place as screen.

Yet any army, be it British, French, or German, which expected to carry
through