From the first break of dawn the battle had raged; now, at mid-day, it was at its height. Hour after hour the fighting had continued under a shadowless sky, blue as steel, hard as a sheet of brass. The Germans had attacked the Belgians and French with the first streak of light.
Circling, sweeping, silently, swiftly, a marvelous whirlwind of force, the Germans had rushed on. Swift, as though wind-driven, they moved. An instant, and the Allies broke into violent movement. Half-clothed sleepers poured out. Perfect discipline did the rest.
With marvelous and matchless swiftness and precision they got under arms.
There were but fifteen hundred or so in all—six squadrons of French
Lancers, the only French troops yet to reach Belgian soil, and a small
body of infantry, without artillery.
Yet, rapid as the action of the Allies was, it was not as rapid as the downward sweep of the German horde that rushed to meet them.
There was a crash, as if rock were hurled upon rock, as the Lancers, the flower of the French cavalry, scarce seated in the saddle, rushed forward to save the pickets, to encounter the first blind ford of the attack and to give the Belgian infantry, farther in, time to prepare for defense.
The hoofs of rearing chargers struck each other's breasts, and these bit and tore at each other's throats and manes, while their riders reeled down dead. The outer wings of the Germans were spared the shock, and swept on to meet the bayonets of the infantry.
The cavalry was enveloped in the overwhelming numbers of the center. 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.