For the first time in the life of each of us Phœbe and I have been to Scotland. It is excusable in Phœbe, who is so many years my junior and only paid her first visit to the British Isles in 1904, but I am ashamed to think I have been going to and fro upon the earth and the sea for nearly half a century without once crossing the Border. And yet the postponement of this excursion into the near unknown is not without advantages. One has heard of people who had neither permission nor opportunity to read the Bible till they were grown up, and to them it came as a revelation of wonder and beauty. That is what the Highlands have been to us whose minds have already been filled with impressions of various shapes, colours, sizes, and consistencies till it is surprising there should be one corner left, one spot of absorbent tissue upon which the imprint of a new sensation may be received. The long journey, undertaken at a moment when London was like a basement kitchen and even Perth no better than a stuffy attic, ended in the aromatic ethereal sweetness of a six-mile drive through heather, bog-myrtle, and bracken, past twisted firs, red-barked and shaggy-headed, standing crookedly against a blushing sunset sky.

We woke next morning with the waters of Lochalsh plashing and murmuring not many yards from our beds. Ten huge seagulls screamed and squabbled over their breakfast on a field of orange seaweed slashed with silver pools and embossed with blue-black knobs of granite; and with them, grudgingly tolerated as humble retainers, were three hoodie crows and a yellow hen with nine chicks of mixed parentage. Beyond the pools lay a stretch of darkling water shadowed by the black velvet hills of Skye—twin hills that faced us with a narrow strait between them leading south. It was hard to dress quickly with half one’s attention flying out of the window, but the prospect of eating real porridge was alluring, and after breakfast the exploration of a new world. We would not have changed places with Columbus.

We were the only visitors at the comfortable grey-gabled hotel at Z— and absorbed and gladly held the friendly, if undemonstrative, attention of the tiny village, a row of little houses set by the lochside on a sheep-trimmed sward where bare-legged children with dark bright eyes kept holiday from dawn to dusk in company with a couple of sheep dogs and a pack of wise-faced, short-legged terriers. Thatched cottages from whose moss-grown roofs grass and ferns sprouted, and low stone houses whose walls were gay with scarlet fuchsias and blazing tropœlum crouched behind fenced gardens in which the prose of potatoes and cabbages was enlivened by the invasion of tall blood-red poppies with navy-blue hearts and grey-green leaves.

We had been a week at Z—, a week of undiminished fervour as explorers within a three-mile radius, favoured with warm sunshine and blessed by the sight of mountains, sea, and sky varying almost from minute to minute in colour, character and atmosphere, when the Highland Anzac descended from a dog-cart at our very door. We had lazily breakfasted in our rooms, and I was dressing at the moment but peeped behind the blind in time to catch a glimpse of the broad-brimmed hat of the tall soldier. Instantly I pinned my Australia brooch (the shoulder and hat badge of the Australian Imperial Force) into my tie and sent my maid to tell Phœbe of her countryman’s approach. Before I was ready to leave my room I heard her welcoming the new-comer. Had he been the last and least of Australia’s soldiers he must have responded to the friendship in her warm, deep tones; but he was of the true and the best type—the type now familiar to English eyes, yet, somehow, exotic still. Nearly six feet high is Donald Macleod, rose-bronze of skin, broad of shoulder and lean of limb; square-browed and endowed with well-opened eyes of a blue, now bright, now shadowed, like the waters of a mountain tarn, and fringed with thick black lashes. When he laughs he squeezes up his eyes till the dark fringes interlace, and his small teeth flash white between lips not full but kindly and humorous. He is a corporal, and we believe him to be twenty-four. Born in New South Wales and educated at the best of Sydney’s schools—and they are very good—he travelled westward like the rising sun to Perth (W.A.). A pearl-fisher of Broome by choice and occupation, he basked for a few years in and on the sunny waters of a tropical archipelago, and when the Empire wanted him he came, one of twenty-two Macleods, expatriated patriots of his clan who, from the simple private to the distinguished colonel, have left their all at the Antipodes to follow the old flag. He was in the first division of the A.I.F. to see service in Flanders, and there to the slight wound he had received at Gallipoli he added five others, all in his left side, which chiefly interest him as providing a reason for his joining the Australian Flying Corps, a service in which he would not have to carry a pack.

The mettle and temperament of the Anzac fit him peculiarly for dashing enterprises. He is wasted on slow and dogged nibbling and unsuited for the tame but valuable task of following up the pioneer. His psychological attitude and mental equipment, like his physique, are those of the race-horse: he may break his heart if he is badly ridden in a race, but he will surely break it if he is put to ploughing.

‘I’m ashamed of this jacket,’ said Donald Macleod, surveying his shabby sleeve with disfavour. ‘I bought it off a fellow the other day when I hadn’t a rag to my back, but I’ll get a tailored jacket, not an “issued” one, in London.’ ‘I hear the Anzacs’ measurements are an inch every way more than the English soldiers,’ said Phœbe proudly. ‘That’s right,’ answered the boy. ‘And an inch or so less in every way in boots,’ said I to myself. Corporal Macleod was wearing a pair of clumsy-looking English-made boots, and I remembered the beautifully cut boots and gaiters I had seen worn by a couple of newly arrived Australian Tommies in London a month or two ago. It is a fact that Australian khaki and leather equipment is vastly superior to that produced in England. Australian sheep and cattle have afforded their very best, and Australian factories have put their finest work into the Anzacs’ uniforms, so that the most ordinary private has a look of unusual smartness as long as his workaday rig holds together.

Our Anzac had been given ten days’ furlough as soon as ever he was fit to leave the hospital where he had been for ten weeks, and had come north to visit his unknown Highland ‘aunties’ a few miles from Z—. They were kind and hospitable, but it wasn’t ‘life,’ and Donald Macleod is very human, bubbling with vitality, eager for experiences. The lift he had been offered to Z— that morning gave him a chance to stretch a mind weary with answering questions about his family in Western Australia on his last morning in Scotland, and when his fellow-travellers, two elderly members of a School Board Committee, had been deposited at our door, he was free to browse around alone. But we did not let him browse alone. In our own sitting-room we gave him ‘morning tea,’ an institution dear to Australians and easily adopted by those who visit Australia, and then we went and sat on a great purple rock, crested with white and orange lichens and three parts surrounded by the falling tide, and talked about the war. Corporal Macleod was as completely free from shyness as he was from ‘swank,’ answering our questions frankly but minimising his own share in the world’s earthquake. ‘They’re awfully good to us in England, but the papers insist on making us all out heroes, whereas we’re really only good soldiers,’ was the refrain of his reminiscences. ‘And it’s the same in France, mind you. I talk French a bit (there’s all sorts to talk to up at Broome), but the French beat me once they begin to chat. They were ripping to us at Dijon; the French ladies couldn’t do enough for us at the railway station with flowers and fruit and what not. One of our chaps pondered a bit and then said to the leading lady: “Madame, le rose de Dijon est le gloire de Dijon, mais je dis les dames de Dijon est le vrai gloire de Dijon.” She seemed to grasp what he meant and went on talking nineteen to the dozen and smiled more than that. But some of the peasants were completely “boxed” by the Australian badges. They kept asking if we were Autrichiens. You see we were the first Australians to get over. They know all about it now, and nothing is too good for us.’

It was near Armentières that our Anzac was wounded. A bursting shell made five holes in him as he was lying on the ground. ‘I got the news of the Battle of Jutland when they were dressing my wounds, and, my word! it hurt more than the dressing. I said to myself, “This is my bad day, sure enough.” It beats me now how the papers made such a sad song about that victory. The day before I was near being wiped out by a shell. Only that something made me wait and talk to a parson—not a habit of mine—it would have got me clean. He was a good chap too, and I don’t mind owing him my life. You’d be surprised to see the way the French and the Belgians carry on their business as if nothing was happening. There was an old woman used to bring the newspapers into our trenches as regular as clockwork, no matter how the Boche was strafing us.’

‘Aren’t you proud of being a Highlander?’ we asked, for our minds were so full of the charm of the place and the history of its people that we felt positively envious of the boy’s origin.

He smiled disarmingly and answered ‘I haven’t much of an eye for scenery: I don’t seem to notice it much, anyway; and, to say the truth, I’m keen on getting to a place in Hampshire called A— where a big swell a friend in Westralia gave me an introduction to lives. There’ll be more people there, and I’ve not seen many so far outside the hospital at X—.’ ‘Were they good to you there?’ I asked. ‘Good as gold, but uncommon strict, and there were more flowers to smell than food to eat on the table at meals some days. But they were kind, and no mistake. The ward-sister opened all the windows of the ward I was in to let me hear the gramophone in another wing spouting out “Australia will be there.” There were a lot of enterics among the patients, poor chaps. Queer, isn’t it? how the ones I’m most sorry for seem to get the least attention from visitors. Why, I wouldn’t wear my wound stripe in hospital for fear they’d feel out of it, but there were ladies, young and pretty and old and ugly, who’d come into the ward and, if they saw a man with a couple of fingers missing or a bandage round his head, it was “Oh, I am so sorry you are wounded! Does it hurt much? Would you care to come out for a motor-ride and have tea at our house this afternoon?” ... The wounded chap would say “My wound’s all right, thank you, I’m only wearing that bandage to please the doctor”; but she’d go on pouring out sympathy and invitations till the poor devil was forced to accept. Next bed, perhaps, there’d be an enteric, dead sick of hospital and feeling like nothing on earth. “Where were you wounded?” the lady would ask. “Not wounded, miss—enteric (or perhaps dysentery)’s my trouble.” “Ooo-hh!” says the sympathiser with wounded men only, and on she goes to the next bed. No drives or tea-parties for the men that were lying there weeks and weeks, while we that were well and fit, but for a bullet-hole or two or a scratch of a shell, would be fairly smothered with attention. My word! it used to make me feel sick and ashamed.’

Phœbe was in Cairo in March and had seen the shocked faces and up-raised hands of those who unsparingly condemned the mad pranks of idle Anzacs in that city, the most unsuitable headquarters for half-disciplined troops imaginable. ‘Were you one of the men who decorated Ibrahim Pasha’s equestrian statue by putting a nose-bag on his horse?’ she asked. ‘I wasn’t in that,’ said Corporal Macleod, ‘but I helped to throw a piano out of the window of one of the houses we wrecked in the quarter that ruined so many of our men. I wish the fire that followed had burnt the whole beastly place up.’ ‘So do I,’ Phœbe agreed. ‘Why, in the name of common sense, they didn’t create a camp city on the banks of the canal I shall never understand. It was a crazy thing to turn loose a pack of new-made soldiers, cramped and restless after a six weeks’ voyage on board crowded troopships, in a place like Cairo, that breeds more harpies and sharpers to the square yard than perhaps any other city in the world, unless it’s San Francisco.’

‘What about General Birdwood?’ I asked. ‘Have you ever spoken to him?’ The Anzac’s eyes disappeared behind their lashes and his teeth flashed in a glad grin. ‘Once,’ he answered. ‘There’s hardly one of us who can’t say he had the opportunity. He asked me when I thought the war’d be over, and I had to smile. My word! he’s a fine chap.’

The gentlemen of the School Board Committee had done their work, and when we saw the ‘machine’ drive round from the stables we left our rock and returned to the hotel. The minister climbed stiffly into the front seat, and our Anzac, after a warm handshake, saluted and took his place beside the white-haired grocer at the back. Phœbe and I gazed and waved from the door till the merry face with its strong oval framed in the curve of a brown chin-strap receded in a blur of white dust from the long straight road. ‘I wish he had seemed the least little bit impressed by the Highlands,’ I said regretfully.

‘You needn’t worry,’ answered Phœbe. ‘When he gets back to West Australia and has time to sort out his memories and talk things over with his people he’ll be just as proud of being a Highlander as he is of being an Anzac.’