The British troops went to their positions silently but happily. There was no singing, because that was forbidden, but as the khaki-clad columns deployed and began to crawl to the trenches there were various sallies of humour in the different dialects of English, Irish, and Scottish counties. The Yorkshireman, for instance, would draw a comparison between the men they were going to fight and certain dogs that won't fight which the Yorkshire collier has not time to waste upon at the pit-head; the Cockney soldier was there with his sallies about "Uncle Bill," and every Irishman who went into the firing line wished he had the money to buy a little Irish horse, so that he could have a slap at the Uhlans. And the cavalry! Officers coming from the front declare that our cavalrymen charged the much-vaunted German horsemen as Berserks might have done. When they got into action with tunics open, and sometimes without tunics at all, they flung themselves at the German horsemen in a manner which surprised even their own officers, who had themselves expected great things of them. The Uhlans, whose name and fearful fame had spread terror among the Belgian peasants and the frontier villages of France, were just the sort of men the British troopers were waiting for. The Britishers, mostly Londoners, who, as Wellington said, make the best cavalry soldiers in the world, were dying to have a cut at them; and when they got into clinches the Uhlans had the surprise of their lives. From the scene of battle, the point of interest in the European war drama, as far as England is concerned, shifted in the small hours of this morning to the railway station at X, where officers and men of the Army Service Corps awaited the arrival of the wounded--the British wounded from the firing line. Everything was perfectly organised; there was no theatrical display; the officers and men of the British army waited silently and calmly for the toll of war, which they had been advised was on its way. The station at the time was crowded with Americans coming to England from Paris after their release from Switzerland, and cheer after cheer, in which the French in the station joined, echoed under the arched roof. Britishers who were there felt very proud of their Empire and their soldiers at that moment. The men who were waiting for the wounded had not been in the first line of battle it was true--that was not their job--but their work was probably the greatest of all. It was for them to watch and wait, while every fibre of their inmost being thrilled to the note of war; and yet to restrain their desires while they practised that which the Iron Duke called the wonderful "two o'clock in the morning" courage. So they waited in a draughty station for their comrades, thrown back temporarily from the scene of action, to fit them to return, if possible, immediately.