When I first went aboard the transport I picked up a little gold stripe.  It was one of those men wear who have been wounded, as a badge of honor.  I hoped I might be able to find the man who had lost it, and return it to him.  But none of them claimed it, and I have kept it, to this day, as a souvenir of that voyage.

It was easy for them to know me.  I wore my kilt and my cap, and my knife in my stocking, as I have always done, on the stage, and nearly always off it as well.  And so they recognized me without difficulty.  And never a one called me anything but Harry—­except when it was ’Arry!  I think I would be much affronted if ever a British soldier called me Mr. Lauder.  I don’t know—­because not one of them ever did, and I hope none ever will!

They told me that there were men from the Highlands on board, and I went looking for them, and found them after a time, though going about that ship, so crowded she was, was no easy matter.  They were Gordon Highlanders, mostly, I found, and they were glad to see me, and made me welcome, and I had a pipe with them, and a good talk.

Many of them were going back, after having been at home, recuperating from wounds.  And they and the new men too were all eager and anxious to be put there and at work.

“Gie us a chance at the Huns—­it’s all we’re asking,” said one of a new draft.  “They’re telling us they don’t like the sight of our kilts, Harry, and that a Hun’s got less stomach for the cold steel of a bayonet than for anything else on earth.  Weel—­we’re carrying a dose of it for them!”

And the men who had been out before, and were taking back with them the scars they had earned, were just as anxious as the rest.  That was the spirit of every man on board.  They did not like war as war, but they knew that this was a war that must be fought to the finish, and never a man of them wanted peace to come until Fritz had learned his lesson to the bottom of Lie last grim page.

I never heard a word of the danger of meeting a submarine.  The idea that one might send a torpedo after us popped into my mind once or twice, but when it did I looked out at the destroyers, guarding us, and the airplanes above, and I felt as safe as if I had been in bed in my wee hoose at Dunoon.  It was a true highway of war that those whippets of the sea had made the Channel crossing.

Ahm, but I was proud that day of the British navy!  It is a great task that it has performed, and nobly it has done it.  And it was proud and glad I was again when we sighted land, as we soon did, and I knew that I was gazing, for the first time since war had been declared, upon the shores of our great ally, France.  It was the great day and the proud day and the happy day for me!

I was near the realizing of an old dream I had often had.  I was with the soldiers who had my love and my devotion, and I was coming to France—­the France that every Scotchman learns to love at his mother’s breast.