possessions and his kit are on his back, so that he is
more like a beast of burden than the natty creature old tradition
taught us to think a soldier must always be. On his boots there are
still dried blobs of mud from some hole in France that is like a
crater in hell. His uniform will be pretty sure to be dirty, too, and
torn, and perhaps, if you looked closely at it, you would see stains
upon it that you might not be far wrong in guessing to be blood.

Leave long enough to let him come home to Scotland--a long road it is
from France to Scotland these days!--has been a rare thing for Jock.
He will have been campaigning a long time to earn it--months
certainly, and maybe even years. Perhaps he was one of these who went
out first. He may have been mentioned in dispatches: there may be a
distinguished conduct medal hidden about him somewhere--worth all the
iron crosses the Kaiser ever gave! He has seen many a bloody field,
be sure of that. He has heard the sounding of the gas alarm, and
maybe got a whiff of the dirty poison gas the Huns turned loose
against our boys. He has looked Death in the face so often that he
has grown used to him. But now he is back in Scotland, safe and
sound, free from battle and the work of the trenches for a space,
home to gain new strength for his next bout with Fritz across the
water.

When he gets off the train Jock looks about him, from force of habit.
But no one has come to the station to meet him, and he looks as if
that gave him neither surprise nor concern. For a minute, perhaps, he
will look around him, wondering, I think, that things are so much as
they were, fixing in his mind the old familiar scenes that have
brought him cheer so often in black, deadly nights in the trenches or
in lonely billets out there in France. And then, quietly, and as if
he were indeed just home from some short trip, he shifts his pack, so
that it lies comfortably across his back, and trudges off. There
would be cabs around the station, but it would not come into Jock's
mind to hail one of the drivers. He has been used to using Shank's
Mare in France when he wanted to go anywhere, and so now he sets off
quietly, with his long, swinging soldier's stride.

As he walks along he is among scenes familiar to him since his
boyhood. You house, you barn, yon wooded rise against the sky are
landmarks for him. And he is pretty sure to meet old friends. They
nod to him, pleasantly, and with a smile, but there is no ex