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But the Commanding Officer, Ogilvie, set his face against anybody applying for a commission. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘if I once start allowing members of U Company to go for commissions,’ he said, ‘I admit they’d make good officers, but we shall never get overseas because they are the backbone of the battalion.’ And, of course, you must remember that, at that time, the talk was that the war would be finished by Christmas – or would be finished early in 1915. And everybody was, naturally, anxious to get out to France. And for that reason nobody was allowed to apply for a commission.

But nobody cared much. U Company was high on enthusiasm but, on the whole, distinctly short of military ambition, and few of them had any desire to be ‘temporary gentlemen’. They were perfectly content to be temporary soldiers, to rough it, to stick it out together and, on every possible occasion, to enjoy themselves as best they could. Their singing was renowned and their repertoire was wide. They knew every chorus in the Students’ Songbook by heart, they were well-versed in traditional Scottish airs, they could harmonise like angels, and their impromptu performances in estaminets at la Clytte were generally appreciated by their comrades-in-arms in the 8th Brigade, even if they were not always understood by the men of the Suffolks and Middlesex. For some reason which was hard to fathom, the Sassenachs were especially fond of one particular song in the dialect of U Company’s native Aberdeenshire which rejoiced in the title of The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre’. It had a catchy tune, it went fast and furious, and it had a long string of verses, not one word of which the English soldiers could possibly have understood, still less joined in. But they could stamp their feet in accompaniment, faster and faster as the pace quickened, and when it reached its thunderous climax and Geordie’s byre had been well and truly mucked, they raised the roof with cheers and applause. But the ‘language problem’ caused occasional misunderstandings. ‘Give us another one, Jock,’ a Suffolk man called out in the course of one jolly evening. ‘Give us “Where’s Me Fourpence Charlie?”’ This, after some puzzlement, was interpreted as a request for a plaintive Jacobite song, more familiar to U Company as ‘Wae’s Me for Prince Charlie’. The story quickly spread, U Company sportingly adopted the revised version, and if the song thereafter lost some of its Highland charm it was always good for a laugh.

But since they had come to the front in February U Company’s sojourn had not been entirely carefree. They had had their share of discomfort in the trenches in bitter weather and pouring rain and out of them, on what the Army was pleased to describe as ‘rest’, they had spent weary hours on irksome fatigues, supplied scores of working parties, staggered up to the line with sacks of coke, with rolls of wire, with timber, with stakes and ammunition, and the thousand and one weighty loads of supplies that were needed in the trenches. They had dug and dug and dug. They had also had their share of excitement – going out with wiring parties into the shifting shadows beyond the parapet, when the ping of stretched wire released by a nervous hand or the muffled thud of a mallet, even the click of a rifle bolt, seemed loud enough to rouse the whole German Army, let alone a German sentry in the trenches across the way. And there had been patrols when men crept deep into No Man’s Land, fighting the instinct to run when the flares went up, freezing in the brilliant light in the mild hope of resembling a tree, or playing dead among the grisly scatter of corpses lying between the lines. They had buried their own dead too, and in early May, when U Company marched off from the ‘quiet’ sector in front of Kemmel on their way to the less desirable sector at Hill 60, they had left a dozen or so of their comrades behind in their own small cemetery. Many more had gone home wounded, and in such a small cohesive company the gaps were all too noticeable.

Now U Company