The rank and file keep closer to earth in their prognostications.  In fact, some of them cleave to the dust.  With them it is a case of hope deferred.  Quite half of them enlisted under the firm belief that they would forthwith be furnished with a rifle and ammunition and despatched to a vague place called “the front,” there to take pot-shots at the Kaiser.  That was in early August.  It is now early April, and they are still here, performing monotonous evolutions and chafing under the bonds of discipline.  Small wonder that they have begun to doubt, these simple souls, if they are ever going out at all.  Private M’Slattery put the general opinion in a nutshell.

“This regiment,” he announced, “is no’ for the front at all.  We’re jist tae bide here, for tae be inspeckit by Chinese Ministers and other heathen bodies!”

This withering summary of the situation was evoked by the fact that we had once been called out, and kept on parade for two hours in a north-east wind, for the edification of a bevy of spectacled dignitaries from the Far East.  For the Scottish, artisan the word “minister,” however, has only one significance; so it is probable that M’Slattery’s strictures were occasioned by sectarian, rather than racial, prejudice.

Still, whatever our ultimate destination and fate may be, the fact remains that we are now as fit for active service as seven months’ relentless schooling, under make-believe conditions, can render us.  We shall have to begin all over again, we know, when we find ourselves up against the real thing, but we have at least been thoroughly grounded in the rudiments of our profession.  We can endure hail, rain, snow, and vapour; we can march and dig with the best; we have mastered the first principles of musketry; we can advance in an extended line without losing touch or bunching; and we have ceased to regard an order as an insult, or obedience as a degradation.  We eat when we can and what we get, and we sleep wherever we happen to find ourselves lying.  That is something.  But there are certain military accomplishments which can only be taught us by the enemy.  Taking cover, for instance.  When the thin, intermittent crackle of blank ammunition shall have been replaced by the whistle of real bullets, we shall get over our predilection for sitting up and taking notice.  The conversation of our neighbour, or the deplorable antics of B Company on the neighbouring skyline, will interest us not at all.  We shall get down, and stay down.

We shall also be relieved of the necessity of respecting the property of those exalted persons who surround their estates with barbed wire, and put up notices, even now, warning off troops.  At present we either crawl painfully through that wire, tearing our kilts and lacerating our legs, or go round another way.  “Oot there,” such unwholesome deference will be a thing of the past.  Would that the wire-setters were going out with us.  We would give them the place of honour in the forefront of battle!