We looked at him rather hard.

“You see, they can understand our jokes,” he said.  “They don’t seem to take us too serious like.”

And I think he had just hit it.  The Australian has a habit of pulling his mate’s leg, and being on his guard against a leg-pull in return.  He has sharpened his conversation against the conversation of his friends from the time he could speak—­his uncles are generally to blame for it; they started him on the path of repartee by pulling his legs before those same legs had learnt to walk.  As a result he is always sparring in conversation—­does not mean to be taken seriously.  And the Scotsman, cautious and always on the look-out for a feint, is seldom caught by it.  If he is, the chances are he gives it back—­with interest.

It is a grim, old, dry variety of humour, and it goes with a wonderful, grim, sturdy nature.  Few people here see a Scottish regiment passing without waiting, if they have the time, to watch the last square figure disappear down the road.  Many look at the perfect swing of the kilts, and the strong bare knees.  For myself I can never take my eyes off their faces.  There is a stalwart independence in their strong mouths and foreheads and chins which rivets one’s interest.  Every face is different from the next.  Each man seems to be thinking for himself, and ready to stand up for his own decision against the world.  There is a sort of reasoned determination uniting them into a single whole, which, one thinks, must be a very terrible sort of whole to meet in anger.

And it is.  The Scotsman is, I think, the most unrelenting fighter that I have come across.  The Australian is a most fierce fighter in battle, but he is quite ready to make friends afterwards with his enemy.  Once he has taken a German prisoner, he is apt to treat him more liberally than most troops—­more so even, I think, than the English soldier—­and that is saying a good deal.  To the Scotsman, when he escorts his prisoners home, those prisoners are Germans still.  He has never forgotten the tremendous losses which Scottish regiments suffered at the beginning of the war.  He does not feel kindly towards the men who inflicted them.  With the Australian, once the fight is over, the bitterness is left behind.  The Scotsman makes prisoners, but he does not make friends.

I shall not forget a talk that I had, some time since, with a Scottish driver who had been very badly wounded during the first winter.  He had not been in the Army Service Corps in those days.  He was in a certain famous regiment of infantry—­joined up in the first weeks of the war as a recruit, and was sent to the front with a draft almost at once—­by some process which I do not now understand—­to replace heavy casualties.  He was with them through that first winter in their miserable, overflowing apology for a trench.  It was a shallow ditch with a wretched parapet, and all they could do for weeks on end was to send the men into the trench over the top of the ground at night—­they had actually to approach this trench from the front, at times, because the rear was a marsh—­get into it over the parapet, and sit there on the back of the trench until nightfall, sheltered only by the parapet, since the trench was too wet to live in.