At last there came a dawn when the regiment charged, to cover operations elsewhere.  They left their ditch, and half-way across No Man’s Land John Henderson—­it is not his name, but it will do as well as another—­John Henderson was hit.  He lay out there for a day and a night.  A brave officer bandaged him and passed on to others.  John Henderson was brought in at last, delirious, with two bullets in him and a heavy rheumatism.  He was invalided out of the service, and as soon as he thought himself well enough he came back and enlisted at another place, under another name, in another corps; he could not face his native village if he remained out of it, and at the same time he could not get into the fight again if the authorities knew he had once been invalided.  His dread still was that they might find out.  He would not ask for his leave, when it became due, for fear of causing inquiries; he preferred to stick it out at the front.

He was as stern against the German after two years as he was on the day when he enlisted.  “It’s a funny thing,” he said to me, “but Ah was no worrying about anything at all that night, when Ah was lying out there wounded, excepting that they might tak me a prisoner.  Ah was kind of deleerious, ye know, but there was always just that thought running through ma head.  I just prayed to God that He wad tak ma life.”

And, oddly, I found that he was of the same mind still.

That spirit makes great fighting men; and the friendship between the Scot and the Australian persisted into the fighting.  A Scottish unit has been alongside of the Australians for a considerable time.  I was told that an Australian working party, while digging a forward trench, was sniped continually by a German machine-gunner out in front of his own line in a shell-hole.  One or two men were hit.  The line on the flank of the working party happened to be held by Scottish troops.  An officer from the Australians had to visit the Scottish line in order to make some preparations for a forthcoming attack.

He found the Scotsmen there thirsting for that sniper’s blood, impatiently waiting for dark in order to go over the parapet and get him—­they could scarcely be held back even then, straining like hounds in the leash.

The sniper was bagged later, and his machine-gun.  It was a mixed affair, Scottish and Australian; and I believe there was an argument as to which owned the machine-gun.

CHAPTER XXIII

MOUQUET FARM

France, September 7th.

On the same day on which the British took Guillemont and reached Ginchy and Leuze Wood; on the same day on which the French pushed their line almost to Combles; at the same time as the British attacked Thiepval from the front, the Australians, for the fifth time, delivered a blow at the wedge which they have all the while been driving into Thiepval from the back, along the ridge whose crest runs northwards from Pozieres past Mouquet Farm.