charges of cavalry, the
perils of scouting and patrolling. It was little like the slow trench
warfare which followed.

The Black Watch--the regiment to which I belong--was one of the first to
cross the Channel. War was declared August 4th, which was Tuesday. The
first-class reservists, of which I was one, received their mobilization
orders the next day.

We assembled at Queens Barracks, Perth, the historic headquarters of what
we proudly maintain is the world's most famous fighting organization.
Twice before, since 1742, the Black Watch had outfitted in Perth to fight
in Flanders. Almost constantly since that date, battalions of the
regiment have been fighting for Britain in some far-off quarter of the
globe. For the third adventure in Flanders, which was to see the existing
personnel of the regiment practically wiped out in an imperatively
necessary campaign of blood sacrifice, our preparations were brisk and
businesslike. Within three hours of my arrival at the depot at Perth, I
was one of a thousand men, uniformed, armed, and fully equipped, who
entrained for Aldershot to join our first battalion stationed there.

On the thirteenth of August, after a week's stiff training, we boarded the
steamship _Italian Prince_ and the next day disembarked at Havre.

What awaited us there was much like the reception later given to the first
American troops to land in France. What followed was quite different. The
American troops, and millions of their friends and relatives, are all
wondering what awaits them--what war really will be like--what they will
have to do and the conditions under which they will do it.

It is an axiom of war that the first troops almost invariably suffer the
greatest losses. The first American units to go into the trenches have
suffered a low average of casualties. In one respect they are far better
off than were the first British and French troops to meet the Germans.
They know what they are going up against. Modern warfare is a determined
quantity. They know the methods of the men they will fight against and
they have allies able to instruct them in the art of fighting as it is
practised to-day.

We had nothing like that. It was as though we were groping in the dark
while an unseen foe was striking at us. For days we tramped through France
and Belgium hearing the roar of the German guns, feeling the sting of the
shrapnel, but not seeing our foes. Then came the shifty, open fighting,
now almost fo