Every boy and girl has heard of the wonderful valour and daring of the Sikhs and Gurkhas. Many people in this country fully believed that they would prove invincible on European battlefields. Too much was, perhaps, expected of them: they found themselves waging an entirely new kind of warfare in a cold, clammy land, which numbed their limbs and broke down their stamina. It was all so strange and new--the awful roar of the great howitzer shells, the fighting from holes in the ground, the endless stream of shrapnel, the bitter cold, and the absence of those fierce, furious charges in which they delight. At first their nerve was shaken, but they quickly recovered, and it must be remembered that when they broke they dashed forward just as frequently as they retired. Nevertheless, their splendid courage was not in doubt for a moment, and before long the enemy went in terror of them, as the following letter, published in a German newspaper, plainly shows:-- "To-day for the first time we had to fight against the Indians, and Heaven knows those brown rascals are not to be underrated. At first we spoke with contempt of the Indians. To-day we learned to look at them in a different light.... When for three days it had rained shells and the British thought we were beaten to a jelly, they had then in store for us a visit from their brown allies. Heaven only knows what the English had put into those fellows. Anyhow, those who stormed our lines seemed either drunk or possessed with an evil spirit. With fearful shouting, in comparison with which our hurrahs are like the whining of a baby, thousands of those brown forms rushed upon us as suddenly as if they were shot out of a fog, so that at first we were completely taken by surprise. At a hundred metres (109 yards) we opened a destructive fire which mowed down hundreds, but in spite of that the others advanced, springing forward like cats and surmounting obstacles with unexampled agility. In no time they were in our trenches, and truly these brown enemies were not to be despised. With butt-ends, bayonets, swords, and daggers we fought each other; and we had bitter hard work, which, however, was lightened by reinforcements which arrived quickly, before we drove the fellows out of the trenches."