The Colonel was now in charge of the Lancer regiment and was, as I learned, a great believer in the lance as a weapon. “Other things being equal,” he told me, “I believe in giving the soldiers what they want. They do want the lance, and this is proved by the fact that in this entire campaign not one of my troopers has lost his lance. The moral effect is good on our troops, for it gives them confidence, and it is bad on the enemy, for it strikes terror into their hearts. Before this war it was supposed that cavalry could never get near infantry. My regiment has twice attacked infantry and broken them up both times. In both cases they broke while we were still three or four hundred yards distant, and of course the moment they broke they were at our mercy.” For an hour or more we motored over the dusty roads before we dipped over a crest and dropped down into a little village not far from the Dniester, where were the head-quarters of the regiment that the Lancers were coming in to relieve. As we turned the corner of the village street a shrapnel shell burst just to the south of us, and I have an idea that someone had spotted our dust as we came over the crest. The cavalry here was a regiment drawn from the region of the Amur river, and as they were just saddling up preparatory to going back into reserve for a much-needed rest, I had a good chance to note the condition of both men and mounts, which were excellent. The latter were Siberian ponies, which make, I think, about the best possible horses for war that one can find. They are tough, strong, live on almost anything, and can stand almost any extremes of cold or heat without being a bit the worse for it. These troops have had, I suppose, as hard work as any cavalry in the Russian Army, yet the ponies were as fat as butter and looked as contented as kittens. The Russians everywhere I have seen them are devoted to their horses, and what I say about the condition of the animals applies not only to the cavalry but even to the transport, to look at which, one would never imagine that we were in the twelfth month of war. The Colonel of the Amur Cavalry gave us tea and begged us to stay on, but as it was getting late and the road we had to travel was a new one to us, and at points ran not far from the lines of the enemy, we deemed it wiser to be on our way. Some sort of fight started after dark, and to the south of us, from the crests of the hills that we crossed, we could see the flare of the Austrian rockets and the occasional jagged flash of a bursting shell; further off still the sky was dotted with the glow of burning villages. In fact for the better part of the week I spent in this vicinity I do not think that there was a single night that one could not count fires lighted by the shells from the artillery fire.