"Gie us a chance at the Huns--it's all we're asking," said one of a new draft. "They're telling us they don't like the sight of our kilts, Harry, and that a Hun's got less stomach for the cold steel of a bayonet than for anything else on earth. Weel--we're carrying a dose of it for them!" And the men who had been out before, and were taking back with them the scars they had earned, were just as anxious as the rest. That was the spirit of every man on board. They did not like war as war, but they knew that this was a war that must be fought to the finish, and never a man of them wanted peace to come until Fritz had learned his lesson to the bottom of Lie last grim page. I never heard a word of the danger of meeting a submarine. The idea that one might send a torpedo after us popped into my mind once or twice, but when it did I looked out at the destroyers, guarding us, and the airplanes above, and I felt as safe as if I had been in bed in my 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.