The French were thrown back to Metz where they were forced to capitulate at the end of that October. However the Germans had to pay for this success with a huge number of casualties within the charging cavalry units. This was probably the last time in history that the result of a war was so much influenced by huge cavalry formations.

At the beginning of World War I, the German Emperor Kaiser Willhelm II had the opinion that he could repeat the previous successes by sending 118 highly motivated cavalry regiments into war. Regardless of the fact that the enemy now had even more modern guns, he called the cavalry corps "the queen of weapons". On the morning of August, 12^th 1914, 4000 German cavalry soldiers attacked the only cavalry division in the Belgian army through the waving crops fields around the Belgian village of Haelen. The Belgian General De Witte, a realistic man, dismissed the idea of a mounted counterattack and ordered his troops to fight dismounted with machine guns and artillery.

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