wee hoose at Dunoon. It was a true highway of war that those
whippets of the sea had made the Channel crossing.

Ahm, but I was proud that day of the British navy! It is a great task
that it has performed, and nobly it has done it. And it was proud and
glad I was again when we sighted land, as we soon did, and I knew
that I was gazing, for the first time since war had been declared,
upon the shores of our great ally, France. It was the great day and
the proud day and the happy day for me!

I was near the realizing of an old dream I had often had. I was with
the soldiers who had my love and my devotion, and I was coming to
France--the France that every Scotchman learns to love at his
mother's breast.

A stir ran through the men. Orders began to fly, and I went back to
my place and my party. Soon we would be ashore, and I would be in the
way of beginning the work I had come to do.

[ILLUSTRATION: Harry Lauder preserves the bonnet of his son, brought
to him from where the lad fell. "The memory of his boy, it is almost
his religion." (See Lauder05.jpg)]

[ILLUSTRATION: A tatter of plaid of the Black Watch on a wire of a
German entanglement barely suggests the hell the Scotch troops have
gone through. (See Lauder06.jpg)]

CHAPTER XIII

Boulogne!

Like Folkestone, Boulogne, in happier times, had been a watering
place, less fashionable than some on the French coast, but the
pleasant resort of many in search of health and pleasure. And like
Folkestone it had suffered the blight of war. The war had laid its
heavy hand upon the port. It ruled everything; it was omnipresent.
From the moment when we came into full view of the harbor it was
impossible to think of anything else.

Folkestone had made me think of the mouth of a great funnel, into
which all broad Britain had been pouring men and guns and all the
manifold supplies and stores of modern war. And the trip across the
narrow, well guarded lane in the Channel had been like the pouring of
water through the neck of that same funnel. Here in Boulogne was the
opening. Here the stream of men and sup-plies spread out to begin its
orderly, irresistible flow to the front. All of northern France and
Belgium lay before that stream; it had to cover all the great length
of the British front. Not from Boulogne alone, of course; I knew of
Dunkirk and Calais, and guessed at other ports. There were other
funnels, and into all of them, day after day, Britain was pouring her
tr