And that is what Oeuf means, in English!
The soldiers were vastly amused. They were Gordon Highlanders, and I found a lot of chaps among them frae far awa' Aberdeen. Not many of them are alive to-day! But that day they were a gay lot and a bonnie lot. There was a big Highlander who said to me, very gravely:
"Harry, the only good thing I ever saw in a German was a British bayonet! If you ever hear anyone at hame talking peace—cut off their heads! Or send them out to us, and we'll show them. There's a job to do here, and we'll do it.
"Look!" he said, sweeping his arm as if to include all France. "Look at yon ruins! How would you like old England or auld Scotland to be looking like that? We're not only going to break and scatter the Hun rule, Harry. If we do no more than that, it will surely be reassembled again. We're going to destroy it."
On the way from Oeuf to Boulogne we visited a small, out of the way hospital, and I sang for the lads there. And I was going around, afterward, talking to the boys on their cots, and came to a young chap whose head and face were swathed in bandages.
"How came you to be hurt, lad?" I asked.
"Well, sir," he said, "we were attacking one morning. I went over the parapet with the rest, and got to the German trench all right. I wasn't hurt. And I went down, thirty feet deep, into one of their dugouts. You wouldn't think men could live so—but, of course, they're not men—they're animals! There was a lighted candle on a shelf, and beside it a fountain pen. It was just an ordinary-looking pen, and it was fair loot—I thought some chap had meant to write a letter, and forgotten his pen when our attack came. So I slipped it in my pocket.
"Two days later I was going to write a few lines to my mother and tell her I was all right, so I thought I'd try my new pen. And when I unscrewed the cap it exploded—and, well, you see me, Harry! It blew half of my face away!"
The Hun knows no mercy.
I was glad to see Boulogne again—the white buildings on the white hills, and the harbor beyond. Here the itinerary of the Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour, came to its formal end. But, since there were many new arrivals in the hospitals—the population of a base shifts quickly—we were asked to give a couple more concerts in the hospitals where we had first appeared on French soil.