Last night we had a concert. But soldiers’ concerts out here are different indeed from those at home. At home there are civilians and lots of smiling people in a well-lit hall. Here in Flanders it’s a whitewashed schoolhouse with a stone floor, and the light is penny dips and the audience is only the khaki coated Tommy with his pipe in his mouth. Often they sing with no accompaniment and the predominant note is a dull low dreary melancholy about ‘Dead for bread’ or something of that sort. Be the song dismal, be the singer a bass and be there no accompaniment and roll the song on without rhythm thro’ interminable stories of the woes of existence, the clamour and applause is great. Not that Tommy is downhearted or dull, on the contrary, but he is a bit of a sentimentalist as one understands as he joins with right good will in ‘Dear Homeland - goodbye’ or ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ or other suchlike sentimental ditties. But the pipes out here sound grand. It’s a great thing to be a Scotsman and it’s tremendous to be in a Scottish regiment with its pipes in this land of France. When the pipes play and we go swinging along we feel so much better than the poor, blue-coated Frenchy and we strut mightily proud thro’ the streets of France. And at concerts with the tobacco smoke and the songs and the atmosphere it awakens memories of the great broad moorlands and the swirl of the wind and the clean sky and how we hate the Sassenach intruder. It must be the remains of that primitive instinct that made the Highland raiders come from their mists and their hilltops with their plaids wound tightly round them, and holding a good claymore come down into the lowlands to garner what they could by force and steel. << less