riends.

I shall not forget a talk that I had, some time since, with a Scottish
driver who had been very badly wounded during the first winter. He had
not been in the Army Service Corps in those days. He was in a certain
famous regiment of infantry--joined up in the first weeks of the war as
a recruit, and was sent to the front with a draft almost at once--by
some process which I do not now understand--to replace heavy casualties.
He was with them through that first winter in their miserable,
overflowing apology for a trench. It was a shallow ditch with a wretched
parapet, and all they could do for weeks on end was to send the men into
the trench over the top of the ground at night--they had actually to
approach this trench from the front, at times, because the rear was a
marsh--get into it over the parapet, and sit there on the back of the
trench until nightfall, sheltered only by the parapet, since the trench
was too wet to live in.

At last there came a dawn when the regiment charged, to cover operations
elsewhere. They left their ditch, and half-way across No Man's Land John
Henderson--it is not his name, but it will do as well as another--John
Henderson was hit. He lay out there for a day and a night. A brave
officer bandaged him and passed on to others. John Henderson was
brought in at last, delirious, with two bullets in him and a heavy
rheumatism. He was invalided out of the service, and as soon as he
thought himself well enough he came back and enlisted at another place,
under another name, in another corps; he could not face his native
village if he remained out of it, and at the same time he could not get
into the fight again if the authorities knew he had once been invalided.
His dread still was that they might find out. He would not ask for his
leave, when it became due, for fear of causing inquiries; he preferred
to stick it out at the front.

He was as stern against the German after two years as he was on the day
when he enlisted. "It's a funny thing," he said to me, "but Ah was no
worrying about anything at all that night, when Ah was lying out there
wounded, excepting that they might tak me a prisoner. Ah was kind of
deleerious, ye know, but there was always just that thought running
through ma head. I just prayed to God that He wad tak ma life."

And, oddly, I found that he was of the same mind still.

That spirit makes great fighting men; and the friendship between the
Scot and the Australian per