It
was a frightful tangling of men and brutes.
The Lancers could not charge; they were hemmed in, packed between bodies
of horsemen that pressed them together as between iron plates; now and
then they cut their way through clear enough to reach their comrades, but
as often as they did so, so often the overwhelming numbers of the Germans
surged in on them afresh like a flood, and closed upon them, and drove
them back.
It was bitter, stifling, cruel work; with their mouths choked with dust,
with their throats caked with thirst, with their eyes blind with smoke;
while the steel was thrust through nerve and sinew, or the shot plowed
through bone and flesh.
The answering fire of the infantry kept the Germans farther at bay, and
mowed them down faster--but in the Lancers' quarter of the field--parted
from the rest of their comrades, as they had been by the rush of that
broken charge with which they had sought to save the town and arrest the
foe--the worst pressure of the attack was felt, and the fiercest of the
slaughter fell.
The general in command of the cavalry had been shot dead as they had
first swept out to encounter the advance of the German horsemen; one by
one the officers had been cut down, singled out by the keen eyes of their
enemy, and throwing themselves into the deadliest of the carnage with
impetuous self-devotion characteristic of their service.
At the last there remained but a bare handful of the brilliant squadrons
of 600 men that had galloped down in the gray of dawn to meet the
whirlwind of German fury.
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