OUR NEIGHBOUR
_France, October 10th._
There are next to us at present some Scotsmen.
Australians and New Zealanders have fought alongside of many good mates
in this war. I suppose the 29th Division and the Navy and the Indian
Mountain Batteries and Infantry were their outstanding friends in
Gallipoli. In France--the artillery of a certain famous regular
division. And the Scotsmen.
It is quite remarkable how the Australian seems to forgather with the
Scotsman wherever in France he meets him. You will see them sharing each
other's canteens at the base, yarning round each other's camp fires at
the front. Wherever the pipers are, there will the Australians be
gathered together.
I asked an Australian the other day how it was that he and his mates had
struck up such a remarkable friendship with some of these Highland
regiments now camped near them. "Well, I think it's their sense of
humour," he said.
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.
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.