And indeed it was a formidable rush. They came on in such numbers that an officer afterwards said the attacking force reminded him of a crowd coming on the ground after a football match. Shoulder to shoulder they advanced, much in the same way as their ancestors fought under Frederick the Great, and though for spectacular purposes at Grand Manoeuvres their mass formations were very effective, in actual warfare against modern weapons they proved to be a costly failure. The German General Staff had studied the question of the attack with the usual German thoroughness. It had carefully considered whether it should adopt the formation evolved by the British Army from the South African war or not, and had come to the conclusion that the personal equation played too large a part in an advance in extended order, and that for a conscript army the only possible formation was close order, in which the small percentage of cowards would be carried forward by the great majority of brave men. Nevertheless, in spite of their solid phalanxes, it was said that the German officers advanced with revolvers in their hands, to shoot men who lagged behind. For our men the difficulty was to shoot the Germans quick enough. Ever since the South African war the men had been taught to fire at a little brown smudge on a green background painted on the target, an artistic triumph of the musketry authorities, supposed to represent all that a man would be able to see of his enemy in a modern battle. But here were full-length Germans not a hundred yards off, alarmingly visible, and in such numbers that even for the worst shot there was not the slightest difficulty in hitting them, especially as they were often three or four deep. In spite of this, however, the apparently hopeless impossibility of stopping so many, and the futility of killing a few out of such a crowd, made some of our men sometimes shoot very wildly. Major Stucley disdained all cover and dashed forward at the head of the King's Company, determined to save the situation. In the hail of bullets he fell shot through the head, and soon afterwards Captain Lord Richard Wellesley was killed in the same way. Major Weld-Forester, Captain Ponsonby, and Lieutenant the Hon. A. G. S. Douglas-Pennant, who had necessarily to expose themselves, were wounded. Captain Ponsonby recovered, but Major Weld-Forester and Lieutenant Douglas-Pennant died two days later.