an ear-splitting roar came hurtling through the air and an explosion followed that made the very earth tremble.  I knew it was somewhere in the neighborhood of our selected spot and I anxiously hastened my steps.  I got there to find every man of my gun crew with one exception blown to atoms, the exception being Scotty, but he too had paid the supreme price.  With the help of another soldier, we carried him to the rear of the cookhouse and covered him with a blanket.  When daylight broke I went over there with a party to give him as decent a burial as possible, and the new cook, who was a Scotchman, came out to have a look at the dead pal.

“Well, if it isn’t Jock Henderson!” he exclaimed.

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“Know him!  Why, mon, we were bakers taegither in Glascae.  I could tell him anywhere by his bow-legs, an’ he’s got a scar on one o’ them as big as your face.”

“Yes, I know he has, where the shell grazed him at Mons.”

“Shell grazed him at Mons?  Shell hell!  It was a pan o’ hot dough that fell on his leg in the bake-shop, and I’ll never forget his yell tae my dyin’ day.”

Like the last star of dawn the only remaining shred of poor Scotty’s valor faded away and was gone.

CHAPTER XII

BEHEMOTH

The Somme district is composed of chalk pits; wherever the ground was dug up it showed white.  This afforded an excellent opportunity for the enemy birds to spot any work we were doing.  While in this section every man in the ranks looked very much like a white-wash artist—­white dust everywhere, filling our eyes, ears, noses, mouths.  Lord! when I think of that chalk dust!

For five days after the first advance of the tanks they were lying, six of them, immediately at the right of our battery on the edge of the road; no one seemed to know what they were doing there or what was contemplated.  Then they moved up four miles to the edge of Pozieres Woods, where they believed they would be safer from view, and for the further reason that they would not have so far to travel when the next drive was pulled off.  They waddled in there at night, but the following morning Fritz’s keen eye searched them out, wirelessed the necessary directions to their heaviest battery, and in almost less time than it takes to write it tremendous shells came smashing around, damaging one of them pretty severely, and the other five immediately waddled back to a safer place in the rear.

That same night canvas dummies were drawn up by mules and set up in the same place.  Again the keen-eyed birds of the air spotted them, flashed their range back to their heaviest mouthpieces, and for the better part of the day the entire batteries of their heaviest caliber, expended their energies and their shells on the dummies; there was no kind or character of explosive shell that did not land on the frauds.