You will find it hard to discover anyone in domestic service to-day in Scotland.  The folk who used to keep servants sent them packing long since, to work where they would be of more use to their country.  The women of each household are doing the work about the house, little though they may have been accustomed to such tasks in the days of peace.  And they glory and take pride in the knowledge that they are helping to fill a place in the munitions factories or in some other necessary war work.

[ILLUSTRATION:  “Bang! went sixpence.”  HARRY LAUDER BUYING HIS BIT OF WHITE HEATHER (See Lauder04.jpg)]

Do not look along the Scottish roads for folk riding in motor cars for pleasure.  Indeed, you will waste your time if you look for pleasure-making of any sort in Scotland to-day.  Scotland has gone back to her ancient business of war, and she is carrying it on in the most businesslike way, sternly and relentlessly.  But that is true all over the United Kingdom; I do not claim that Scotland takes the war more seriously than the rest of Britain.  But I do think that she has set an example by the way she has flung herself, tooth and nail, into the mighty task that confronts us all—­all of us allies who are leagued against the Hun and his plan to conquer the world and make it bow its neck in submission under his iron heel.

Let me tell you how Scotland takes this war.  Let me show you the homecoming of a Scottish soldier, back from the trenches on leave.  Why, he is received with no more ceremony than if he were coming home from his day’s work!

Donald—­or Jock might be his name, or Andy!—­steps from the train at his old hame town.  He is fresh from the mud of the Flanders trenches, and all his possessions and his kit are on his back, so that he is more like a beast of burden than the natty creature old tradition taught us to think a soldier must always be.  On his boots there are still dried blobs of mud from some hole in France that is like a crater in hell.  His uniform will be pretty sure to be dirty, too, and torn, and perhaps, if you looked closely at it, you would see stains upon it that you might not be far wrong in guessing to be blood.

Leave long enough to let him come home to Scotland—­a long road it is from France to Scotland these days!—­has been a rare thing for Jock.  He will have been campaigning a long time to earn it—­months certainly, and maybe even years.  Perhaps he was one of these who went out first.  He may have been mentioned in dispatches:  there may be a distinguished conduct medal hidden about him somewhere—­worth all the iron crosses the Kaiser ever gave!  He has seen many a bloody field, be sure of that.  He has heard the sounding of the gas alarm, and maybe got a whiff of the dirty poison gas the Huns turned loose against our boys.  He has looked Death in the face so often that he has grown used to him.  But now he is back in Scotland, safe and sound, free from battle and the work of the trenches for a space, home to gain new strength for his next bout with Fritz across the water.