Now it can be Told by Philip Gibbs — Read

To onlookers there were some of the signs of victory on that day of September 25th -- of victory and its price. I met great numbers of the lightly wounded men, mostly "Jocks," and they were in exalted spirits because they had done well in this ordeal and had come through it, and out of it -- alive. They came straggling back through the villages behind the lines to the casualty clearing-stations and ambulance-trains. Some of them had the sleeves of their tunics cut away and showed brown, brawny arms tightly bandaged and smeared with blood. Some of them were wounded in the legs and hobbled with their arms about their comrades' necks. Their kilts were torn and plastered with chalky mud. Nearly all of them had some "souvenir" of the fighting -- German watches, caps, cartridges. They carried themselves with a warrior look, so hard, so lean, so clear-eyed, these young Scots of the Black Watch and Camerons and Gordons. They told tales of their own adventure in broad Scots, hard to understand, and laughed grimly at the killing they had done, though here and there a lad among them had a look of bad remembrance in his eyes, and older men spoke gravely of the scenes on the battlefield and called it "hellish. " But their pride was high. They had done what they had been asked to do. The 15th Division had proved its quality. Their old battalions, famous in history, had gained new honor.

Thousands of those lightly wounded men swarmed about a long ambulance-train standing in a field near the village of Choques. They crowded the carriages, leaned out of the windows with their bandaged heads and arms, shouting at friends they saw in the other crowds. The spirit of victory, and of lucky escape, uplifted those lads, drugged them. And now they were going home for a spell. Home to bonny Scotland, with a wound that would take some time to heal.