Some men of the ---- Regiment, carried in the car, told me they had not slept for two nights and days, though they joked heartily enough! It was not therefore a surprise to see a number more dead asleep under a shanty. I walked past two, who lay a little apart. One stirred in his sleep on the stones. The other was dead. But death is now too common a shadow in this deadly mist of war, that drives and condenses in trench and grave-mound over the sunlit fields, to call for notice. A little group of English artillery formed another break in the monotony of fighting. They were preparing for the reception of fifteen hundred German horses just captured. Concerned only with the care and cure of their sick charges, they had no thought for the noise, turmoil, and incident of war about them. Give the trained man his own job, and he will see the world fall about him with only an absent glance! Further to the east I was shown the site of a curious incident. Some deep German trenches ran down a slope from the road to a wooded hollow. Here some thirty rearguard Germans had been captured. "We should have had 'em all, all the eighty, but the colonel was too kindhearted! He got one of our guns round and up there through that wood, just to sweep them trenches. And then he rode forward alone to ask 'em to surrender, some of them still firing at him! And most of them crept out there by the cross trench into the road again, and got away behind the rearguard lot. You see how? And one of the beggars we got had a gold watch; and the colonel wouldn't have us take it away from him!" The conviction grew stronger and stronger, as I followed the lines of gradually accelerating retreat and obviously slackening defence, that cavalry, cavalry, is what we want to give the tired enemy no rest, and prevent them reforming upon the supports that are being hurried from Berlin again on to this wing. Our own cavalry has done magnificently this campaign, and saved the critical days of retreat from Mons. If only they have been sufficiently rested and reinforced! The French cavalry does not seem to have been always fortunate. It has too often timed its brilliant charges too late, and only swept over a crest when the German guns had got the range and could mow them down. Hence their support has not always been available at the right moment. But their courage and dash have been characteristic. Under a rocky knoll in a sloping cornfield which I passed on my return the line of one of these costly charges was only too clearly marked.