Our Infantry then took up the beaten path, charging the enemy trenches, and Fritz was an easy prey that morning.

Inside of half an hour after our tanks reached the lines of Fritz, the prisoners in gray commenced to stream toward our lines; for a distance of seven miles the road was jammed with captured Huns.  Some of them passing by our battery spoke to me in English, as good as, if not better, than my own, and asked me what in hell was the meaning of waging war in such fashion; they referred to the tank as Landfuerchtenichts.  I told them that was nothing to what was in store for them.  “Why,” I said, “I’ve got reserved seats on one of them for Berlin.”

“You’ll never get that far,” he retorted.

* * * * *

The action on the Somme was well under way when one morning at daybreak, making my way to the cookhouse, I was greeted, “Hello, Grant, hoos awa’ wi’ ye, laddie?  Ma sontes, but you’re lookin’ fine!  An’ damned if he isn’t a Sergeant!” It was Scotty, reinstated in our unit in his former capacity of cook, and he had brought with him his nerve, his twinkle, his bow legs and all.  I must confess I was glad to see him, and when we had a few minutes together he told me, with all the gusto imaginable, of his exploits in London.

With his little eyes twinkling like pin points, he related how England needing every available man, he was reinstated, and having observed strict military discipline while in the camp he was, under the rule, entitled to back pay, so that he had a year’s wages coming.  He obtained leave of absence, hastened to London and procured in some manner a British Major’s uniform, in which he disported himself in first-class hotels, restaurants and the like, receiving the homage that became a returned fighting man, in the shape of dinner engagements, theater invitations and drinks galore.  The deception was discovered and he was clinked for thirty days, at the end of which he was packed off to the front lines.

He wound up by telling me that, he expected to get into the game shortly, as he wanted to be in it when the Germans got what was coming to them.

We were occupying at this time some splendid dugouts and trenches that we had taken from Fritz; they were made of chalk as was also the cookhouse.  Of our battery of sixteen guns at this point my gun was nearest to the cookhouse, and I was mightily tickled at the prospect of having an opportunity now and again to slip in and have a drink of hot tea, or something of the kind, with my old friend.

[Illustration:  Ex-German “Pill Box” That Is Now a British Dugout]

That night I dropped in on Scotty and casually remarked that our guns would speak shortly and I expected we would bring the German fire upon us, as was the usual result.  Scotty’s voice quavered I thought, as he asked me when we would begin.  “Oh, in an hour, maybe.  Have you got a sup of hot tea, Scotty?” “No, I hae na tea, Grant; you’ll get your tea at the proper time and not before.”  “Well, of all the——.”  I couldn’t find words, and then I remembered his old-time habit of thriftiness, and I made up my mind to keep a sharp lookout, and if I caught him profiteering in rations he had saved from the men, I mentally resolved I would show him no mercy.