whom I knew best of those who were at this service are all dead: one fell at Loos, one in Mesopotamia, and one on the Somme. The oldest of them, who was an officer in a Guards battalion, could not speak and his eyes were full of tears. There was no possibility here of the remark that one Lowlander made to another after listening to a very celebrated London preacher: 'Aye, it was beautiful, and he cud mak' ye see things too, whiles; but, man! there was nae logic in 't.'

It was about this time that we heard of the sinking of the Lusitania. Somehow from this moment we knew better where we were and for what we fought. Every one's thoughts were very grim. This was sheer naked wickedness done plainly and coldly in the sight of God and man.

III

One broiling afternoon as I sat talking with a friend in my tent an orderly came to the door and said to him, 'Message for you, sir.' He glanced at it. It was his orders to join his battalion at the front. We shook hands and he went off, glad to be on the move again after hanging about waiting so long. In five minutes the orderly was back with orders for me to proceed at once to the 2nd London Territorial Casualty Clearing Station. I said good-bye to Adams, my servant. No man was ever more fortunate in his batmen—Adams, a typical regular, fiercely proud of his regiment; Campion, the London Territorial, a commercial traveller in civil life; and Munro, the Royal Scot, who within a month or two of the outbreak of war could no longer suppress the fighting spirit of the Royal Regiment stirring within him, and voluntarily rejoined, leaving a wife and six children behind him. He was a foreman in the Edinburgh Tramways Company. Handy man that he was, he could turn his hand to anything, whether it was devising a ferrule for a broken walking stick out of the screw of a pickle bottle, or making a bleak-looking hut habitable, or producing hot tea from nowhere, or transforming a wet-canteen marquee into a decent place for Communion (empty tobacco boxes for table, beer barrels discreetly out of sight), or building a pulpit out of sandbags in the corner of a roofless saloon bar.

The supply train left at a very early hour, and by devious routes reluctantly approached the railhead. The journey took thirty hours. It was long enough to teach the lessons never to go on a military train in France without something to read, or to drink rashly from an aluminium cup containing hot liquid, or to rely on bully beef as a sole article of diet. Towards evening the Irishman in charge of the train had pity and took me along—we had stopped for the thirty-fifth time—to admire his Primus stove in full blast, and to share his excellent dinner. But (stove or no stove) the world is divided into those who can do that sort of thing and those who cannot; who, wrestling futilely with refractory elements, wish they had never been born.

He said that before we reached the railhead we would probably hear the sound of the guns. The phrase is used to barrenness, even to ridicule, but the reality when first heard rings a new emotion in your breast. The night was windless and warm, and about ten o'clock as we stood in a wayside station the Ulsterman came up to me and said, 'Listen, you can hear them now.' And away to the east could be heard a deep shaking sound rising and fading away in the still air—the sound of British artillery fighting day and night against yet overwhelming odds.

Twenty hours later, after many wanderings, a friendly Field Ambulance car deposited me at the door of the mess of the clearing station, where the arrival of a 'Scotch minister' had been awaited with a good deal of curiosity and possibly some apprehension.

A CLEARING STATION WHEN THERE IS 'NOTHING TO REPORT'

CHAPTER III

A CLEARING STATION WHEN THERE IS 'NOTHING TO REPORT'

I

We sometimes hear of some man who with leg smashed continues firing his machine-gun as though nothing had happened. How is this to be explained? The answer is one that is a real comfort to those at home. The most shattering wounds are not those which cause the greatest immediate pain. It is as though a tree fell across telegraph wires. The wires are down, and no message, or, at worst, a confused jangling message can come through to the brain. I have known a man carried into an aid-post in a state of great delight because he had 'got a Blighty one.' He lay smoking and talking, little realising that his wound was so grave that it would be many months before he could walk again—if indeed he would ever walk with two legs. By the time the realisation of the pain has come into full play the sufferer, in ordinary times, is in the clearing station or, at least, the field ambulance, and has the resources of science at his disposal.

Suppose that at three in the afternoon Jock is hit, in the front trench. 'Jock' is the name universally given to Scottish soldiers, Lowland or Highland. It is not a melodious name, but there it is! And it somehow expresses the Scotsman's character better than 'Tommy' does. He cannot be carried down the communication trench because it zigzags too much: he cannot be got round the angles. So he is taken into a dug-out and gets first aid, and a tablet of morphine perhaps. The M.O. may possibly come up to see him, but he may be too busy in his own aid-post. There are stretcher bearers in the trench able to bandage properly. The average 'S.B.,' by the way, is a man from the battalion, not from the R.A.M.C. As soon as it is dark the stretcher bearers lift him and carry him across the open to the aid-post, which is perhaps five hundred or a thousand yards behind the firing trench, near the battalion headquarters. It is an eerie journey, with a certain amount of risk. The brilliant Boche flares rise continually—the enemy is sometimes called 'the Hun,' more often 'the Boche,' in more genial moments 'Fritz,' but 'the Germans' never—and light up the ground vividly. These flares are very powerful. I have seen my own shadow cast from one when standing at the time in a camp fully five miles from the trenches, and when you are close up you feel that every eye in 'Germany' is fixed on you. The best thing to do is to stand quite still, for artificial light is very deceptive, and it is hard to make out what an object is. In any case, the real danger area is 'No-Man's-Land,' for it is on that mighty graveyard stretching from Switzerland to the sea that the enemy's eyes are bent. The regiments used to get various kinds of flares to experiment with. We used to laugh over an incident that occurred when a new type, a species of parachute, had been served out. The Second-in-command, who fired it, miscalculated the strength of the wind, which was blowing from the enemy's trench, and the flare was carried in a stately curve backwards until it was directly over battalion headquarters. Here it hung for a long time, showing up all details very successfully, to the C.O.'s great annoyance. Over this ground, very slowly and carefully, the stretcher is carried. When the