“But, by a sort of miracle, there was a piano inside that had come through all the trouble.  The building and all the rest of the furniture had been knocked to bits, but the piano was all right, although, as I say, I don’t know how that had happened.  Lauder spied it, and went clambering over all the debris and wreckage to reach it.  He tried the keys, and found that the action was all right.  So he began picking out a tune, and the rest of us began to sit up a bit.  And pretty soon he lifted his voice in a rollicking tune—­one of your songs it was, sir—­and in no time the men were all sitting up to listen to him.  Then they joined in the chorus—­and pretty soon you’d never have known they’d been tired or worn out!  If there’d been a chance they’d have gone at Fritz and done the day’s work all over again!”

After John was killed his brother officers sent us all his personal belongings.  We have his field-glasses, with the mud of the trenches dried upon them.  We have a little gold locket that he always wore around his neck.  His mother’s picture is in it, and that of the lassie he was to have married had he come home, after New Year’s.  And we have his rings, and his boots, and his watch, and all the other small possessions that were a part of his daily life out there in France.

Many soldiers and officers of the Argyle and Sutherlanders pass the hoose at Dunoon on the Clyde.  None ever passes the hoose, though, without dropping in, for a bite and sup if he has time to stop, and to tell us stories of our beloved boy.

No, I would no have you think that I would exalt my boy above all the others who have lived and died in France in the way of duty.  But he was such a good boy!  We have heard so many tales like those I have told you, to make us proud of him, and glad that he bore his part as a man should.

He will stay there, in that small grave on that tiny hill.  I shall not bring his body back to rest in Scotland, even if the time comes when I might do so.  It is a soldier’s grave, and an honorable place for him to be, and I feel it is there that he would wish to lie, with his men lying close about him, until the time comes for the great reunion.

But I am going back to France to visit again and again that grave where he lies buried.  So long as I live myself that hill will be the shrine to which my many pilgrimages will be directed.  The time will come again when I may take his mother with me, and when we may kneel together at that spot.

And meanwhile the wild flowers and the long grasses and all the little shrubs will keep watch and ward over him there, and over all the other brave soldiers who lie hard by, who died for God and for their flag.

CHAPTER XXVI