The Thirteenth Hussars in the Great War

The book matters because it captures a dying breed of warfare. The Thirteenth Hussars rode into World War I on horses, expecting the kind of mounted charges that had defined British cavalry for centuries. What they found was a new kind of war - one that would render their skills almost obsolete within months. H. Mortimer Durand, drawing on firsthand accounts and official records, traces the regiment's journey from the opening mobile campaigns through the grinding horror of trench warfare. We see the Hussars adapting, becoming infantry, conducting reconnaissance, maintaining communications - doing whatever the war demanded of them while their horses stood idle in quiet corners of the Western Front. This is both tribute and elegy: a record of men who embodied an older ideal of warfare, confronting the industrial slaughter of the twentieth century. The accounts are vivid, the details precise. For anyone seeking to understand how traditional military virtue survived and transformed amid the mechanized annihilation of the Great War, this remains an essential document.