That nobody had caught the great Confederate cavalryman did not console them; they had to listen to the jeers of the infantry, blaming them for Stuart’s great raid around the entire Union army; in sickening reiteration came the question:  “Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?” And, besides, one morning in a road near camp, some of the 8th Lancers heard comments from a group of general officers which were not at all flattering to their own cavalry.

“You see,” said a burly colonel of engineers, “that this army doesn’t know what real cavalry looks like—­except when it gets a glimpse of Jeb Stuart’s command.”

An infantry colonel coincided with him, profanely: 

“That damned rebel cavalry chases ours with a regularity and persistence that makes me ill.  Did the world ever see the like of it?  You send out one of our mounted regiments to look for a mounted rebel regiment, and the moment it finds what it’s lookin’ for the rebs give a pleased sort of yell, and ours turn tail.  Because it’s become a habit:  that’s why our cavalry runs!  And then the fun begins!  Lord God Almighty! what’s the matter with our cavalry?”

“You can’t make cavalry in a few months,” observed a colonel of heavy artillery, stretching his fat, scarlet-striped legs in his stirrups.  “What do you expect?  Every man, woman, and child south of Mason and Dixon’s Line knows how to ride.  The Southerners are born horsemen.  We in the North are not.  That’s the difference.  We’ve got to learn to be.  Take a raw soldier and send him forth mounted on an animal with which he has only a most formal acquaintance, and his terrors are increased twofold.  When you give him a sabre, pistol, and carbine, to take care of when he has all he can do to take care of himself, those terrors increase in proportion. Then show him the enemy and send him into battle—­and what is the result?  Skedaddle!

“Don’t make any mistake; we haven’t any cavalry yet.  Some day we will, when our men learn to ride faster than a walk.”

“God!” muttered a brigadier-general under his white moustache; “it’s been a bitter pill to swallow—­this raid around our entire army by fifteen hundred of Jeb Stuart’s riders and two iron guns!”

The half dozen lancers, lying on their bellies in the grass on the bank above the road where this discussion took place remained crimson, mute, paralysed with mortification.  Was that what the army thought of them?

But they had little time for nursing their mortification that morning; the firing along the river was breaking out in patches with a viciousness and volume heretofore unheard; and a six-gun Confederate field battery had joined in, arousing the entire camp of Claymore’s brigade.  Louder and louder grew the uproar along the river; smoke rose and took silvery-edged shape in the sunshine; bugles were calling to the colours regiments encamped on the right; a light battery trotted out across a distant meadow, unlimbered and went smartly into action.