“You’ll be needing your strength back before you can be going back, son,” I told him.  “If you fash and fret it will take you but so much the longer to get back.”

He knew that.  But he knew things I could not know, because I had not seen them.  He had seen things that he saw over and over again when he tried to sleep.  His nerves were shattered utterly.  It grieved me sore not to spend all my time with him but he would not hear of it.  He drove me back to my work.

“You must work on, Dad, like every other Briton,” he said.  “Think of the part you’re playing.  Why you’re more use than any of us out there—­you’re worth a brigade!”

So I left him on the Clyde, and went on about my work.  But I went back to Dunoon as often as I could, as I got a day or a night to make the journey.  At first there was small change of progress.  John would come downstairs about the middle of the day, moving slowly and painfully.  And he was listless; there was no life in him; no resiliency or spring.

“How did you rest, son?” I would ask him.  He always smiled when he answered.

“Oh, fairly well,” he’d tell me.  “I fought three or four battles though, before I dropped off to sleep.”

He had come to the right place to be cured, though, and his mother was the nurse he needed.  It was quiet in the hills of the Clyde, and there was rest and healing in the heather about Dunoon.  Soon his sleep became better and less troubled by dreams.  He could eat more, too, and they saw to it, at home, that he ate all they could stuff into him.

So it was a surprisingly short time, considering how bad he had looked when he first came back to Dunoon, before he was in good health and spirits again.  There was a bonnie, wee lassie who was to become Mrs. John Lauder ere so long—­she helped our boy, too, to get back his strength.

Soon he was ordered from home.  For a time he had only light duties with the Home Reserve.  Then he went to school.  I laughed when he told me he had been ordered to school, but he didna crack a smile.

“You needn’t be laughing,” he said.  “It’s a bombing school I’m going to now-a-days.  If you’re away from the front for a few weeks, you find everything changed when you get back.  Bombing is going to be important.”

John did so well in the bombing school that he was made an instructor and assigned, for a while, to teach others.  But he was impatient to be back with his own men, and they were clamoring for him.  And so, on September 16, 1916, his mother and I bade him good-by again, and he went back to France and the men his heart was wrapped up in.

“Yon’s where the men are, Dad!” he said to me, just before he started.

CHAPTER VII

John’s mother, his sweetheart and I all saw him off at Glasgow.  The fear was in all our hearts, and I think it must have been in all our eyes, as well—­the fear that every father and mother and sweetheart in Britain shared with us in these days whenever they saw a boy off for France and the trenches.  Was it for the last time?  Were we seeing him now so strong and hale and hearty, only to have to go the rest of our lives with no more than a memory of him to keep?