Brief as an official report is this story, and as pithy, giving as it does an outline of the work in which the Royal Scots have been engaged from the time of Landrecies onwards. For it is not what is actually written that counts in such a sincere piece of writing as this, but the facts that appear between the lines. The brief reference to the hardships of the retreat, the queer washing day, and the interrupted meal, are chapters of war in themselves, reported with a brevity and conciseness which stamp the document as authentic. Another man of the regiment was in the first of the fighting at Landrecies, and went on to the positions of the Marne and the Aisne, returning wounded from the latter, with four splinters of shrapnel in his back, one in his ribs, and a bullet wound in his head--surely enough to send any man back from the firing line. At Landrecies he and his fellows encountered a looting party of Germans, who carried large quantities of jewellery, clothing, and other articles: practically every account of the first of the fighting tells of German attention to details of this kind. At the position of the Aisne, the Royal Scots had a stiff struggle in the holding of a pontoon bridge, and the man who tells this story was wounded there during a rain of shell fire to which his battalion was subjected. After he was hit, he lay unconscious for seven hours, and in order to escape after regaining his senses he had to propel himself, feet first, along a sort of furrow or ditch. It was a weary business, and, exposing himself momentarily, he was hit again on the head by a bullet, though the lead failed to penetrate to any depth; and during his journey he was for a time between the fire of Germans and British. He came on a German trench full of dead men, and was struck by the elaborate arrangement of the trench, for there were tables and chairs, and a quantity of champagne bottles, both full and empty--the trench was well stocked with wine. Previously to being wounded, this man made one of a party that captured a number of Germans, one of whom spoke English well, and told his captors that he had a wife and five children in Glasgow, and that the only way to get back to them was to court capture. This German had been in employment in Glasgow, and was called up _five months_ before the war broke out--a significant fact when it is remembered how German statesmen are still insisting that Britain made the war.