About noon, however, the scales of victory were suddenly turned in our favour in the following manner. The day was bright, clear, and warm, and though the battlefield immediately in front of the knoll occupied by King Albert and his Staff (to which I had attached myself) was completely free from powder-smoke, the horizon behind the Russians all at once began to grow clouded with a long line of thick yellow dust, which floated ever nearer and nearer to us in dense billowy volumes like a huge, irregular wave of muddy sea foam. I saw the King exchange glances of intelligent meaning with the various members of his Staff, but did not myself comprehend the meaning of the phenomenon, until the rolling dust-cloud began to be relieved by sparks and glintings such as are emitted by mica from a grey hillside, and then it flashed upon me all at once that these coruscations of light in a whirlwind of dust could only come from the flashing of the sun’s rays on the sabres, helmets, and lances of our cavalry. And so it was. For our Two Divisions of Horse, numbering in all thirty-two squadrons, starting betimes, had stolen away through Lowitz, up the right bank of the Bzura, and fording this stream above its confluence with the Ravka, had mounted this other brook and crossed it at Bolimoff, where they were fairly in the rear of the Russian right, on which they thus came thundering down. I had seen operations of this kind repeatedly carried out at the autumn manœuvres in Germany, but deemed them _Kriegspiel_ in the literal sense of the word—and not to be thought of or hazarded in real warfare. Yet here was a vivid proof that the Germans are terribly earnest, even in their military pastimes, and that they only apply in war what they practise in peace. I daresay, however, King Albert would never have sanctioned so bold a venture had he not discovered early in the day that the Russians had shifted the bulk of their cavalry to their left flank as being the more exposed of the two, and only left a weak Brigade of Dragoons to strengthen the natural inaccessibility of their right. It had never occurred to them as a physical possibility that the Germans, unperceived by their Cossack scouts, could positively work two Cavalry Divisions round to their rear; but the Germans had done so, and, riding down the Dragoon Brigade in question, it rushed with a ringing cheer like a whirlwind upon the Russian battalions and smote them hip and thigh.