I asked a Highlander, one day, how long he thought the war would last.
"Forty years," he said, never batting an eyelid. "We'll be fighting
another year, and then it'll tak us thirty-nine years more to wind up
all the wire!"
Off to my right there was a network of steel strands, and as I gazed
at it I saw a small dark object hanging from it and fluttering in the
breeze. I was curious enough to go over, and I picked my way
carefully through the maze-like network of wire to see what it might
be. When I came close I saw it was a bit of cloth, and immediately I
recognized the tartan of the Black Watch--the famous Forty-second.
Mud and blood held that bit of cloth fastened to the wire, as if by a
cement. Plainly, it had been torn from a kilt.
I stood for a moment, looking down at that bit of tartan, flapping in
the soft summer breeze. And as I stood I could look out and over the
landscape, dotted with a very forest of little wooden crosses, that
marked the last resting-place of the men who had charged across this
maze of wire and died within it. They rose, did those rough crosses,
like sheathed swords out of the wild, luxurious jungle of grass that
had grown up in that blood-drenched soil. I wondered if the owner of
the bit of tartan were still safe or if he lay under one of the
crosses that I saw.
There was room for sad speculation here! Who had he been? Had he
swept on, leaving that bit of his kilt as evidence of his passing?
Had he been one of those who had come through the attack, gloriously,
to victory, so that he could look back upon that day so long as he
lived? Or was he dead--perhaps within a hundred yards of where I
stood and gazed down at that relic of him? Had he folks at hame in
Scotland who had gone through days of anguish on his account--such
days of anguish as I had known?
[ILLUSTRATION: Berlin struck off this medal when the "Lusitania" was
sunk: on one side the brutal catastrophe, on the other the grinning
death's head Teutonically exultant.
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