"I don't mind saying," said a petty officer who had fought in several naval actions during the war and is a man of mark, "that I had a fair fright when I was doing duty on the fire-step. 'I suppose I've got to look through a periscope,' I said. 'Not you,' said the sergeant. 'At night you puts your head over the parapet.' So over the parapet I put my head, and presently I saw something moving between the lines. My rifle began to shake. Germans! Moving, sure enough, over the open ground. I fixed bayonet and prepared for an attack... But I'm blessed if it wasn't a swarm of rats!"
The soldiers were glad to show Jack the way about the trenches, and some of them played up a little audaciously, as, for instance, when a young fellow sat on the top of the parapet at dawn.
"Come up and have a look, Jack," he said to one of the bluejackets.
"Not in these trousers, old mate!" said that young man.
"All as cool as cucumbers," said a petty officer, "and take the discomforts of trench life as cheerily as any men could. It's marvelous. Good luck to them in the new year!"
Behind the lines there was banqueting by men who were mostly doomed to die, and I joined a crowd of them in a hall at Lillers on that New-Year's day.
They were the heroes of Loos--or some of them--Camerons and Seaforths, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordons and King's Own Scottish Borderers, who, with the London men, were first on Hill 70 and away to the Cite St.-Auguste. They left many comrades there, and their battalions have been filled up with new drafts--of the same type as themselves and of the same grit--but that day no ghost of grief, no dark shadow of gloom, was upon any of the faces upon which I looked round a festive board in a long, French hall, to which their wounded came in those days of the September battle.
There were young men there from the Scottish universities and from Highland farms, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a jolly comradeship which burst into song between every mouthful of the feast. On the platform above the banqueting-board a piper was playing, when I came in, and this hall in France was filled with the wild strains of it.
"And they're grand, the pipes," said one of the Camerons. "When I've been sae tired on the march I could have laid doon an' dee'd the touch o' the pipes has fair lifted me up agen."