“You’d better keep it on, Harry,” Captain Godfrey advised me.  “This district is none too safe, even right here, and it gets worse as we go along.  A whistling Percy may come along looking for you any minute.”

That is the name of a shell that is good enough to advertise its coming by a whistling, shrieking sound.  I could hear Percies whistling all around, and see them spattering up the ground as they struck, not so far away, but they did not seem to be coming in our direction.  So I decided I would take a chance.

“Well,” I said, as I took the steel hat off, “I’ll just keep this bonnet handy and slip it on if I see Percy coming.”

But later I was mighty glad of even an ill-fitting steel helmet!

Several staff officers from the Highland Brigade had joined the Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour by now.  Affable, pleasant gentlemen they were, and very eager to show us all there was to be seen.  And they had more sights to show their visitors than most hosts have!

We were on ground now that had been held by the Germans before the British had surged forward all along this line in the April battle.  Their old trenches, abandoned now, ran like deep fissures through the soil.  They had been pretty well blasted to pieces by the British bombardment, but a good many of their deep, concrete dugouts had survived.  These were not being used by the British here, but were saved in good repair as show places, and the officers who were our guides took us down into some of them.

Rarely comfortable they must have been, too!  They had been the homes of German officers, and the Hun officers did themselves very well indeed when they had the chance.  They had electric light in their cave houses.  To be sure they had used German wall paper, and atrociously ugly stuff it was, too.  But it pleased their taste, no doubt.  Mightily amazed some of Fritz’s officers must have been, back in April, as they sat and took their ease in these luxurious quarters, to have Jock come tumbling in upon them, a grenade in each hand!

Our men might have used these dugouts, and been snug enough in them, but they preferred air and ventilation, and lived in little huts above the ground.  I left our party and went around among them and, to my great satisfaction, found, as I had been pretty sure I would, a number of old acquaintances and old admirers who came crowding around me to shake hands.  I made a great collection of souvenirs here, for they insisted on pressing trophies upon me.

“Tak them, Harry,” said one after another.  “We can get plenty more where they came from!”

One laddie gave me a helmet with a bullet hole through the skip, and another presented me with one of the most interesting souvenirs of all I carried home from France.  That was a German sniper’s outfit.  It consisted of a suit of overalls, waterproofed.  If a man had it on he would be completely covered, from head to foot, with just a pair of slits for his eyes to peep out of, and another for his mouth, so that he could breathe.  It was cleverly painted the color of a tree—­part of it like the bark, part green, like leaves sprouting from it.