The Scots and Coldstreamers are after them as hard as they can leg it.
The enemy on the flank try to swing round to meet the charge, but there is no time. The German guns mercilessly drop the range still more—what matter if they sweep away their own men as well.
One hundred yards! Fifty yards! A long, sickening crash—and the Greys and Lancers are in them. Hacking, slashing, hewing! The Scots are hard on their heels just to their left. A mighty heave as the bayonets get home. The first rank is through. There are no more ranks, only a vast confusion.
Five little minutes (it seems an eternity) and the enemy flank is crushed in, smashed to pulp as a block of stone smashes in the head of a man.
"Who goes home?" Who can? Ten men, a dozen, perhaps twenty have struggled through. A few will cover again the ground over which they charged. A few, such a tiny few, will get back under cover again. "The rest is silence."
But they have done it. The enemy have learned what a British charge is like. They know now what bayonet work is, and the lesson sinks deep. They will not face the steel again. Ask the men who fought at the Aisne, at Ypres.
[[1]] I have simply turned paragraphs of Sir John French's dispatch into imaginary spoken words.
[[2]] A German Cavalry Division numbered, approximately, 5,200, all ranks, including 2 batteries Horse Artillery and 1 machine-gun battery.