It brought to my mind a tale I had heard at hame in Scotland.  There was a hospital in Glasgow, and there a man who had gone to see a friend stopped, suddenly, in amazement, at the side of a cot.  He looked down at features that were familiar to him.  The man in the cot was not looking at him, and the visitor stood gaping, staring at him in the utmost astonishment and doubt.

“I say, man,” he asked, at last, “are ye not Tamson, the baker?”

The wounded man opened his eyes, and looked up, weakly.

“Aye,” he said.  “I’m Tamson, the baker.”  His voice was weak, and he looked tired.  But he looked puzzled, too.

“Weel, Tamson, man, what’s the matter wi’ ye?” asked the other.  “I didna hear that ye were sick or hurt.  How comes it ye are here?  Can it be that ye ha’ been to the war, man, and we not hearing of it, at all?”

“Aye, I think so,” said Tamson, still weakly, but as if he were rather glad of a chance to talk, at that.

“Ye think so?” asked his friend, in greater astonishment than ever.  “Man, if ye’ve been to the war do ye not know it for sure and certain?”

“Well, I will tell ye how it is,” said Tamson, very slowly and wearily.  “I was in the reserve, do ye ken.  And I was standin’ in front of my hoose one day in August, thinkin’ of nothin’ at all.  I marked a man who was coming doon the street, wi’ a blue paper in his hand, and studyin’ the numbers on the doorplates.  But I paid no great heed to him until he stopped and spoke to me.

“He had stopped outside my hoose and looked at the number, and then at his blue paper.  And then he turned to me.

“‘Are ye Tamson, the baker?’ he asked me—­just as ye asked me that same question the noo.

“And I said to him, just as I said it to ye, ’Aye, I’m Tamson, the baker.’

“‘Then it’s Hamilton Barracks for ye, Tamson,’ he said, and handed me the blue paper.

“Four hours from the time when he handed me the blue paper in front of my hoose in Glasgow I was at Hamilton Barracks.  In twelve hours I was in Southhampton.  In twenty hours I was in France.  And aboot as soon as I got there I was in a lot of shooting and running this way and that that they ha’ told me since was the Battle of the Marne.

“And in twenty-four hours more I was on my way back to Glasgow!  In forty-eight hours I woke up in Stobe Hill Infirmary and the nurse was saying in my ear:  ‘Ye’re all richt the noon, Tamson.  We ha’ only just amputated your leg!’

“So I think I ha’ been to the war, but I can only say I think so.  I only know what I was told—­that ha’ never seen a damn German yet!”

That is a true story of Tamson the baker.  And his experience has actually been shared by many a poor fellow—­and by many another who might have counted himself lucky if he had lost no more than a leg, as Tamson did.

But the laddies of my battery, though they were shooting now at Germans they could not see, had had many a close up view of Fritz in the past, and expected many another in the future.  Maybe they will get one, some time, after the fashion of the company of which my boy John once told me.