e going to give the Boches a hard knock," said grizzled men, who
remembered in their boyhood another war. "The English army is ready. How
splendid they are, those boys! And ours are on the right of them. This
time--!"

"Mother of God, hark at the guns!"

At night, as dark fell, the people of Bethune gathered in the great
square by the Hotel de Ville, which afterward was smashed, and listened
to the laboring of the guns over there by Vermelles and Noeux-les-Mines,
and Grenay, and beyond Notre Dame de Lorette, where the French guns were
at work. There were loud, earth--shaking rumblings, and now and then
enormous concussions. In the night sky lights rose in long, spreading
bars of ruddy luminance, in single flashes, in sudden torches of scarlet
flame rising to the clouds and touching them with rosy feathers.

"'Cre nom de Dieu!" said French peasants, on the edge of all that,
in villages like Gouy, Servins, Heuchin, Houdain, Grenay, Bruay, and
Pernes. "The caldron is boiling up... There will be a fine pot-au-feu."

They wondered if their own sons would be in the broth. Some of them
knew, and crossed themselves by wayside shrines for the sake of their
sons' souls, or in their estaminets cursed the Germans with the same old
curses for having brought all this woe into the world.

IV

In those villages--Heuchin, Houdain, Lillers, and others--on the edge
of the Black Country the Scottish troops of the 15th Division were in
training for the arena, practising attacks on trenches and villages,
getting a fine edge of efficiency on to bayonet-work and bombing,
and having their morale heightened by addresses from brigadiers and
divisional commanders on the glorious privilege which was about to be
theirs of leading the assault, and on the joys as well as the duty of
killing Germans.

In one battalion of Scots--the 10th Gordons, who were afterward the
8/10th--there were conferences of company commanders and whispered
consultations of subalterns. They were "Kitchener" men, from Edinburgh
and Aberdeen and other towns in the North. I came to know them all after
this battle, and gave them fancy names in my despatches: the Georgian
gentleman, as handsome as Beau Brummell, and a gallant soldier, who was
several times wounded, but came back to command his old battalion, and
then was wounded again nigh unto death, but came back again; and Honest
John, slow of speech, with a twinkle in his eyes, careless of shell
splinters flyin