young Scots lay motionless on those chalky slopes, with
their kilts riddled with bullets. Others, hit in the head, or arms, or
legs, writhed like snakes back to the cover of broken trenches.

"Where are the supports?" asked the Scottish officers. "In God's name,
where are the troops who were to follow on? Why did we do all this
bloody fighting to be hung up in the air like this?"

The answer to their question has not been given in any official
despatch. It is answered by the tragedy of the 21st and 24th Divisions,
who will never forget the misery of that day, though not many are now
alive who suffered it. Their part of the battle I will tell later.

X

To onlookers there were some of the signs of victory on that day of
September 25th--of victory and its price. I met great numbers of the
lightly wounded men, mostly "Jocks," and they were in exalted spirits
because they had done well in this ordeal and had come through it, and
out of it--alive. They came straggling back through the villages behind
the lines to the casualty clearing--stations and ambulance-trains.
Some of them had the sleeves of their tunics cut away and showed brown,
brawny arms tightly bandaged and smeared with blood. Some of them were
wounded in the legs and hobbled with their arms about their comrades'
necks. Their kilts were torn and plastered with chalky mud. Nearly
all of them had some "souvenir" of the fighting--German watches, caps,
cartridges. They carried themselves with a warrior look, so hard, so
lean, so clear-eyed, these young Scots of the Black Watch and Camerons
and Gordons. They told tales of their own adventure in broad Scots, hard
to understand, and laughed grimly at the killing they had done, though
here and there a lad among them had a look of bad remembrance in his
eyes, and older men spoke gravely of the scenes on the battlefield and
called it "hellish." But their pride was high. They had done what they
had been asked to do. The 15th Division had proved its quality. Their
old battalions, famous in history, had gained new honor.

Thousands of those lightly wounded men swarmed about a long
ambulance-train standing in a field near the village of Choques. They
crowded the carriages, leaned out of the windows with their bandaged
heads and arms, shouting at friends they saw in the other crowds. The
spirit of victory, and of lucky escape, uplifted those lads, drugged
them. And now they were going home for a spell. Home to bonn