Belgians bagged many a German, man and horse, dead and alive.
Brussels and London and New York, too, thrilled over these exploits
supplied to eager readers. It was the Uhlan week of the war; for every
German cavalryman was a Uhlan, according to popular conception.
These Uhlans seemed to have more temerity than sense from the
accounts that you read. But if one out of a dozen of these mounted
youths, with horses fresh and a trooper's zest in the first flush of war,
returned to say that he had ridden to such and such points without
finding any signs of British or French forces, he had paid for the loss
of the others. The Germans had plenty of cavalry. They used it as the
eyes of the army, in co-operation with the aerial eyes of the planes.

A peasant woman came out of the house beside the battlefield with
her children around her; a flat-chested, thin woman, prematurely old
with toil. "Les Anglais!" she cried at sight of us. Seeing that we had
some lances in the car, she rushed into her house and brought out
half a dozen more. If the English wanted lances they should have
them. She knew only a few words of French, not enough to express
the question which she made understood by gestures. Her eyes were
burning with appeal to us and flashing with hate as she shook her fist
toward the Germans.

When were the English coming? All her trust was in the English, the
invincible English, to save her country. Probably the average
European would have passed her by as an excited peasant woman.
But pitiful she was to me, more pitiful than the raging officer and his
dog battery, or the infantry awkwardly intrenching back of Louvain, or
flag-bedecked Brussels believing in victory: one of the Belgians with
the true schipperke spirit. She was shaking her fist at a dam which
was about to burst in a flood.