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The center rider mid-yell. The regiment took up the Highland cry as it passed through the infantry, and the painting is named for it.

At about two in the afternoon at Waterloo, with the French infantry columns of d'Erlon's corps grinding up the ridge and into the Allied line, the British heavy cavalry was released, and among them came the Royal North British Dragoons, the only greys-mounted regiment in the army, known by their horses: the Scots Greys. They came through their own infantry, took up the Highlanders' yell of Scotland forever, and fell on the columns downhill. For ten minutes it was annihilation: the leading French brigades broke, and Sergeant Charles Ewart of the Greys took the eagle standard of the 45th of the Line in a hacking single combat he later described with a butcher's precision. The eagle stands in Edinburgh Castle now. Then the charge did what heavy charges did: it kept going. Blown horses, blood up, deep in the French position among the gun lines, the brigade was caught by fresh lancers and cut apart on the way home; the Greys took casualties near half their strength, and the brigade commander, Ponsonby, was killed in the mud. Whether Napoleon really muttered about those terrible grey horses is past proving and past dislodging. The charge entered the language as both glory and warning, the finest and least repeatable ten minutes of the cavalry arm. The painting is by a woman who was never allowed near a battle. Elizabeth Thompson had become nationally famous in 1874 with The Roll Call, a Crimean picture so mobbed at the Academy that a policeman was posted at it and Queen Victoria bought it out of the exhibition; in 1879 she missed election to the Royal Academy by two votes, the closest any woman came for another 40 years, and the institution then adjusted its rules to keep the question from recurring. Her method was reporting by proxy: she interviewed veterans, made soldiers charge her position on maneuvers so she could study horses coming head-on, and painted from the receiving end. That is the radical fact of Scotland Forever: the viewer is placed in front of the charge, where the French stood, watching the wall of grey horses arrive at gallop with no intention of stopping. She finished it in 1881; Leeds owns it. Both sides in the First World War later reworked the image for posters, changing only the uniforms, which the painter, who outlived that war too, reportedly regarded as the horses' final service.