There was much night-patrol work to do on the Aisne. Often we ran into German reconnaissance patrols. One night I was scouting with another man. Five or six hundred yards from our lines, we came upon a boche sentry. He was a big, heavy fellow, and I remember thinking that he looked as if the hard army life had not yet worked the surfeit of beer out of his system. He was leaning on the parapet, and appeared to be asleep. We wanted to get beyond, as he was on the German advance listening post, but, as a reconnaissance patrol must conceal from the enemy all evidence of its proximity, we dared not shoot him. So we crawled to one side of him, and my partner, who was slightly ahead, gave him a thud on the side of the neck, which only, as we thought, made him sleep the more soundly. He dropped into the trench. The next moment a head bobbed up and the dose was repeated with the result that the boche (whom we had mistaken for the first man) slid back again. We looked over to see whether the second blow had done its work; there were two forms instead of one. My partner took a helmet as a souvenir. He kept it for one day and then abandoned it as inconvenient to carry. He found that a souvenir the size of a boche's helmet could not be put between the leaves of his St. John's Gospel. * * * * * Being about the only Black Watch scout left of those that had first landed in France, I had been almost constantly on duty during the fighting at the Aisne. You can imagine then how happy I was when we were relieved from the trenches and billeted a short distance in the rear in hay lofts, cottages, and stables. On our way to billets we were looking forward to a "cushy" time, a good rest, a decent meal, and a wash, and hoping that the next section of trench we took over would be much quieter. It did not seem, however, as if I had had much more than the proverbial "forty winks" when we were sent back to support the Cameron Highlanders. It was the Camerons who had just relieved us and their headquarters were in a quarry where ours had been. A few "coal boxes" had landed in the quarry, and reduced it to a mass of debris. Only one officer and bugler had survived. It was here that Sergeant-Major Burt, of my native town, was killed. He was reputed to have the "best word of command" in the British army. We reached the scene in time to help the Scots Guards dig out some of them. It was a gruesome job. Some of the men had been pinned under heavy rocks for hours without losing consciousness. There was, in particular, one instance of an officer [I cannot recall his name] whose legs were crushed and pinned down. His head had been cut by a shell splinter. When we tried to dig him out, he ordered us to attend first to a private, a few feet away, whose ribs had been smashed in and who was bleeding from the nose and mouth. In all, about thirty officers and men lost their lives here.