There was room for sad speculation here!  Who had he been?  Had he swept on, leaving that bit of his kilt as evidence of his passing?  Had he been one of those who had come through the attack, gloriously, to victory, so that he could look back upon that day so long as he lived?  Or was he dead—­perhaps within a hundred yards of where I stood and gazed down at that relic of him?  Had he folks at hame in Scotland who had gone through days of anguish on his account—­such days of anguish as I had known?

[ILLUSTRATION:  Berlin struck off this medal when the “Lusitania” was sunk:  on one side the brutal catastrophe, on the other the grinning death’s head Teutonically exultant.  “And so now I preach the war on the Hun my own way,” says Harry Lauder. (See Lauder09.jpg)]

[ILLUSTRATION:  HARRY LAUDER “Laird of Dunoon.” (See Lauder10.jpg)]

I asked a soldier for some wire clippers, and I cut the wire on either side of that bit of tartan, and took it, just as it was.  And as I put the wee bit of a brave man’s kilt away I kissed the blood-stained tartan, for Auld Lang Syne, and thought of what a tale it could tell if it could only speak!

     “Ha’ ye seen a’ the men frae the braes and the glen,
      Ha’ ye seen them a’ marchin’ awa’? 
      Ha’ ye seen a’ the men frae the wee but-an’-ben,
      And the gallants frae mansion and ha’?”

I have said before that I do not want to tell you of the tales of atrocities that I heard in France.  I heard plenty—­ayes and terrible they were!  But I dinna wish to harrow the feelings of those who read more than I need, and I will leave that task to those who saw for themselves with their eyes, when I had but my ears to serve me.  Yet there was one blood-chilling story that my boy John told to me, and that the finding of that bit of Black Watch tartan brings to my mind.  He told it to me as we sat before the fire in my wee hoose at Dunoon, just a few nights before he went back to the front for the last time.  We were talking of the war—­what else was there to talk aboot?

It was seldom that John touched on the harsher things he knew about the war.  He preferred, as a rule, to tell me stories of the courage and the devotion of his men, and of the light way that they turned things when there was so much chance for grief and care.

“One night, Dad,” he said, “we had a battalion of the Black Watch on our right, and they made a pretty big raid on the German trenches.  It developed into a sizable action for any other war, but one trifling enough and unimportant in this one.  The Germans had been readier than the Black Watch had supposed, and had reinforcements ready, and sixty of the Highlanders were captured.  The Germans took them back into their trenches, and stripped them to the skin.  Not a stitch or a rag of clothing did they leave them, and, though it was April, it was a bitter night, with a wind to cut even a man warmly clad to the bone.