A Minstrel In France by Harry Lauder

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Tramecourt was to be our home, the headquarters of the Reverend Harry
Lauder, M.P., Tour, during the rest of our stay at the front. We were
to start out each morning, in the cars, to cover the ground appointed
for that day, and to return at night. But it was understood that
there would be days when we would get too far away to return at night,
and other sleeping quarters would be provided on such occasions.

I grew very fond of the place while I was there. The steady pounding
of the guns did not disturb my peace of nights, as a rule. But there
was one night when I did lie awake for hours, listening. Even to my
unpracticed ear there was a different quality in the sound of the
cannon that night. It had a fury, an intensity, that went beyond
anything I had heard. And later I learned that I had made no mistake
in thinking that there was something unusual and portentous about the
fire that night. What I had listened to was the preliminary drum fire
and bombardment that prepared the way for the great attack at
Messines, near Ypres--the most terrific bombardment recorded in all
history, up to that time.

The fire that night was like a guttural chant. It had a real rhythm;
the beat of the guns could almost be counted. And at dawn there came
the terrific explosion of the great mine that had been prepared,
which was the signal for the charge. Mr. Lloyd-George, I am told,
knowing the exact moment at which the mine was to be exploded, was
awake, at home in England, and heard it, across the channel, and so
did many folk who did not have his exceptional sources of
information. I was one of them! And I wondered greatly until I was
told what had been done. That was one of the most brilliantly and
successfully executed attacks of the whole war, and vastly important
in its results, although it was, compared to the great battles on the
Somme and up north, near Arras, only a small and minor operation.

We settled down, very quickly indeed, into a regular routine. Captain
Godfrey was, for all the world, like the manager of a traveling
company in America. He mapped out our routes, and he took care of all
the details. No troupe, covering a long route of one night stands in
the Western or Southern United States, ever worked harder than did
Hogge, Adam and I--to say nothing of Godfrey and our soldier
chauffeurs. We did not lie abed late in the mornings, but were up
soon after daylight. Breakfast out of the way, we would find the cars
waiting and be off.

We had, always, a definite route mapped out for the day, but we never
adhered to it exactly. I was still particularly pleased with the idea
of giving a roadside concert whenever an audience appeared, and there
was no lack of willing listeners. Soon after we had set out from
Tramecourt, no matter in which direction we happened to be going, we
were sure to run into some body of soldiers.

There was no longer any need of orders. As soon as the chauffeur of
the leading car spied a blotch of khaki against the road, on went his
brakes, and we would come sliding into the midst of the troops and
stop. Johnson would be out before his car had fairly stopped, and at
work upon the lashings of the little piano, with me to help him. And
Hogge would already be clearing his throat to begin his speech.

The Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour, employed no press agent, and
it could not boast of a bill poster. No hoardings were covered with
great colored sheets advertising its coming. And yet the whole front
seemed to know that we were about. The soldiers we met along the
roads welcomed us gladly, but they were no longer, after the first
day or two, surprised to see us. They acted, rather, as if they had
been expecting us. Our advent was like that of a circus, coming to a
country town for a long heralded and advertised engagement. Yet all
the puffing that we got was by word of mouth.

There were some wonderful choruses along those war-worn roads we
traveled. "Roamin' in the Gloamin'" was still my featured song, and
all the soldiers seemed to know the tune and the words, and to take a
particular delight in coming in with me as I swung into the chorus.
We never passed a detachment of soldiers without stopping to give
them a concert, no matter how it disarranged Captain Godfrey's plans.
But he was entirely willing. It was these men, on their way to the
trenches, or on the way out of them, bound for rest billets, whom, of
course, I was most anxious to reach, since I felt that they were the
ones I was most likely to be able to help and cheer up.

The scheduled concerts were practically all at the various rest
billets we visited. These were, in the main, at chateaux. Always, at
such a place, I had a double audience. The soldiers would make a
great ring, as close to me as they could get, and around them, again,
in a sort of outer circle, were French villagers and peasants, vastly
puzzled and mystified, but eager to be pleased, and very ready with
their applause.

It must have been hard for them to make up their minds about me, if
they gave me much thought. My kilt confused them; most of them
thought I was a soldier from some regiment they had not yet seen,
wearing a new and strange uniform. For my kilt, I need not say, was
not military, nor was the rest of my garb warlike!

I gave, during that time, as many as seven concerts in a day. I have
sung as often as thirty-five times in one day, and on such occasions
I was thankful that I had a strong and durable voice, not easily worn
out, as well as a stout physique. Hogge and Dr. Adam appeared as
often as I did, but they didn't have to sing!

Nearly all the songs I gave them were ditties they had known for a
long time. The one exception was the tune that had been so popular in
"Three Cheers"--the one called "The Laddies Who Fought and Won." Few
of the boys had been home since I had been singing that song, but it
has a catching lilt, and they were soon able to join in the chorus
and send it thundering along. They took to it, too--and well they
might! It was of such as they that it was written.

We covered perhaps a hundred miles a day during this period. That
does not sound like a great distance for high-powered motor cars, but
we did a good deal of stopping, you see, here and there and
everywhere. We were roaming around in the backwater of war, you might
say. We were out of the main stream of carnage, but it was not out of
our minds and our hearts. Evidences of it in plenty came to us each
day. And each day we were a little nearer to the front line trenches
than we had come the day before. We were working gradually toward
that climax that I had been promised.

I was always eager to talk to officers and men, and I found many
chances to do so. It seemed to me that I could never learn enough
about the soldiers. I listened avidly to every story that was told
to me, and was always asking for more. The younger officers,
especially, it interested me to talk with. One day I was talking
to such a lieutenant.

"How is the spirit of your men?" I asked him. I am going to tell you
his answer, just as he made it.

"Their spirit?" he said, musingly. "Well, just before we came to this
billet to rest we were in a tightish corner on the Somme. One of my
youngest men was hit--a shell came near to taking his arm clean off,
so that it was left just hanging to his shoulders. He was only about
eighteen years old, poor chap. It was a bad wound, but, as sometimes
happens, it didn't make him unconscious--then. And when he realized
what had happened to him, and saw his arm hanging limp, so that he
could know he was bound to lose it, he began to cry.

"'What's the trouble?' I asked him, hurrying over to him. I was sorry
enough for him, but you've got to keep up the morale of your men.
'Soldiers don't cry when they're wounded, my lad.'

"'I'm not crying because I'm wounded, sir!' he fired back at me. And
I won't say he was quite as respectful as a private is supposed to be
when he's talking to an officer! 'Just take a look at that, sir!' And
he pointed to his wound. And then he cried out:

"'And I haven't killed a German yet!' he said, bitterly. 'Isn't that
hard lines, sir?'

"That is the spirit of my men!"

I made many good friends while I was roaming around the country just
behind the front. I wonder how many of them I shall keep--how many of
them death will spare to shake my hand again when peace is restored!
There was a Gordon Highlander, a fine young officer, of whom I became
particularly fond while I was at Tramecourt. I had a very long talk
with him, and I thought of him often, afterward, because he made me
think of John. He was just such a fine young type of Briton as my boy
had been.

Months later, when I was back in Britain, and giving a performance at
Manchester, there was a knock at the door of my dressing-room.

"Come in!" I called.

The door was pushed open and a man came in with great blue glasses
covering his eyes. He had a stick, and he groped his way toward me. I
did not know him at all at first--and then, suddenly, with a shock, I
recognized him as my fine young Gordon Highlander of the rest billet
near Tramecourt.

"My God--it's you, Mac!" I said, deeply shocked.

"Yes," he said, quietly. His voice had changed, greatly. "Yes, it's
I, Harry."

He was almost totally blind, and he did not know whether his eyes
would get better or worse.

"Do you remember all the lads you met at the billet where you came to
sing for us the first time I met you, Harry?" he asked me. "Well,
they're all gone--I'm the only one who's left--the only one!"

There was grief in his voice. But there was nothing like complaint,
nor was there, nor self-pity, either, when he told me about his eyes
and his doubts as to whether he would ever really see again. He
passed his own troubles off lightly, as if they did not matter at
all. He preferred to tell me about those of his friends whom I had
met, and to give me the story of how this one and that one had gone.
And he is like many another. I know a great many men who have been
maimed in the war, but I have still to hear one of them complain.
They were brave enough, God knows, in battle, but I think they are
far braver when they come home, shattered and smashed, and do naught
but smile at their troubles.

The only sort of complaining you hear from British soldiers is over
minor discomforts in the field. Tommy and Jock will grouse when they
are so disposed. They will growl about the food and about this
trivial trouble and that. But it is never about a really serious
matter that you hear them talking!

I have never yet met a man who had been permanently disabled who was
not grieving because he could not go back. And it is strange but true
that men on leave get homesick for the trenches sometimes. They miss
the companionships they have had in the trenches. I think it must be
because all the best men in the world are in France that they feel
so. But it is true, I know, because I have not heard it once, but a
dozen times.

Men will dream of home and Blighty for weeks and months. They will
grouse because they cannot get leave--though, half the time, they
have not even asked for it, because they feel that their place is
where the fighting is! And then, when they do get that longed-for
leave, they are half sorry to go--and they come back like boys coming
home from school!

A great reward awaits the men who fight through this war and emerge
alive and triumphant at its end. They will dictate the conduct of the
world for many a year. The men who stayed at home when they should
have gone may as well prepare to drop their voices to a very low
whisper in the affairs of mankind. For the men who will be heard, who
will make themselves heard, are out there in France.

CHAPTER XX

It was seven o'clock in the morning of a Godly and a beautiful day
when we set out from Tramecourt for Arras. Arras, that town so famous
now in British history and in the annals of this war, had been one of
our principal objectives from the outset, but we had not known when
we were to see it. Arras had been the pivot of the great northern
drive in the spring--the drive that Hindenburg had fondly supposed he
had spoiled by his "strategic" retreat in the region of the Somme,
begun just before the British and the French were ready to attack.

What a bonnie morning that was, to be sure! The sun was out, after
some rainy days, and glad we all were to see it. The land was sprayed
with silver light; the air was as sweet and as soft and as warm as a
baby's breath. And the cars seemed to leap forward, as if they, too,
loved the day and the air. They ate up the road. They seemed to take
hold of its long, smooth surface--they are grand roads, over you, in
France--and reel it up in underneath their wheels as if it were a tape.

This time we did little stopping, no matter how good the reason looked.
We went hurtling through villages and towns we had not seen before.
Our horn and our siren shrieked a warning as we shot through. And it
seemed wrong. They looked so peaceful and so quiet, did those French
towns, on that summer's morning! Peaceful, aye, and languorous, after
all the bustle and haste we had been seeing. The houses were set in
pretty encasements of bright foliage and they looked as though they had
been painted against the background of the landscape with water colors.

It was hard to believe that war had passed that way. It had; there
were traces everywhere of its grim visitation. But here its heavy
hand had been laid lightly upon town and village. It was as if a wave
of poison gas of the sort the Germans brought into war had been
turned aside by a friendly breeze, arising in the very nick of time.
Little harm had been done along the road we traveled. But the thunder
of the guns was always in our ears; we could hear the steady,
throbbing rhythm of the cannon, muttering away to the north and east.

It was very warm, and so, after a time, as we passed through a
village, someone--Hogge, I think--suggested that a bottle of ginger
beer all around would not be amiss. The idea seemed to be regarded as
an excellent one, so Godfrey spoke to the chauffeur beside him, and
we stopped. We had not known, at first, that there were troops in
town. But there were--Highlanders. And they came swarming out. I was
recognized at once.

"Well, here's old Harry Lauder!" cried one braw laddie.

"Come on, Harry--gie us a song!" they shouted. "Let's have 'Roamin' in
the Gloamin', Harry! Gie us the Bonnie Lassie! We ha' na' heard 'The
Laddies Who Fought and Won,' Harry. They tell us that's a braw song!"

We were not really supposed to give any roadside concerts that day,
but how was I to resist them? So we pulled up into a tiny side
street, just off the market square, and I sang several songs for
them. We saved time by not unlimbering the wee piano, and I sang,
without accompaniment, standing up in the car. But they seemed to be
as well pleased as though I had had the orchestra of a big theater to
support me, and all the accompaniments and trappings of the stage.
They were very loath to let me go, and I don't know how much time we
really saved by not giving our full and regular programme. For,
before I had done, they had me telling stories, too. Captain Godfrey
was smiling, but he was glancing at his watch too, and he nudged me,
at last, and made me realize that it was time for us to go on, no
matter how interesting it might be to stay.

"I'll be good," I promised, with a grin, as we drove on. "We shall go
straight on to Arras now!"

But we did not. We met a bunch of engineers on the road, after a
space, and they looked so wistful when we told them we maun be
getting right along, without stopping to sing for them, that I had
not the heart to disappoint them. So we got out the wee piano and I
sang them a few songs. It seemed to mean so much to those boys along
the roads! I think they enjoyed the concerts even more than did the
great gatherings that were assembled for me at the rest camps. A
concert was more of a surprise for them, more of a treat. The other
laddies liked them, too--aye, they liked them fine. But they would
have been prepared, sometimes; they would have been looking forward
to the fun. And the laddies along the roads took them as a man takes
a grand bit of scenery, coming before his eyes, suddenly, as he turns
a bend in a road he does not ken.

As for myself, I felt that I was becoming quite a proficient open-air
performer by now. My voice was standing the strain of singing under
such novel and difficult conditions much better than I had thought it
could. And I saw that I must be at heart and by nature a minstrel! I
know I got more pleasure from those concerts I gave as a minstrel
wandering in France than did the soldiers or any of those who heard me!

I have been before the public for many years. Applause has always
been sweet to me. It is to any artist, and when one tells you it is
not you may set it down in your hearts that he or she is telling less
than the truth. It is the breath of life to us to know that folks are
pleased by what we do for them. Why else would we go on about our
tasks? I have had much applause. I have had many honors. I have told
you about that great and overwhelming reception that greeted me when
I sailed into Sydney Harbor. In Britain, in America, I have had
greetings that have brought tears into my eye and such a lump into
my throat that until it had gone down I could not sing or say a word
of thanks.

But never has applause sounded so sweet to me as it did along those
dusty roads in France, with the poppies gleaming red and the
cornflowers blue through the yellow fields of grain beside the roads!
They cheered me, do you ken--those tired and dusty heroes of Britain
along the French roads! They cheered as they squatted down in a
circle about us, me in my kilt, and Johnson tinkling away as if his
very life depended upon it, at his wee piano! Ah, those wonderful,
wonderful soldiers! The tears come into my eyes, and my heart is sore
and heavy within me when I think that mine was the last voice many of
them ever heard lifted in song! They were on their way to the
trenches, so many of those laddies who stopped for a song along the
road. And when men are going into the trenches they know, and all who
see them passing know, that some there are who will never come out.

Despite all the interruptions, though, it was not much after noon
when we reached Blangy. Here, in that suburb of Arras, were the
headquarters of the Ninth Division, and as I stepped out of the car I
thrilled to the knowledge that I was treading ground forever to be
famous as the starting-point of the Highland Brigade in the attack of
April 9, 1917.

And now I saw Arras, and, for the first time, a town that had been
systematically and ruthlessly shelled. There are no words in any
tongue I know to give you a fitting picture of the devastation of
Arras. "Awful" is a puny word, a thin one, a feeble one. I pick
impotently at the cover-lid of my imagination when I try to frame
language to make you understand what it was I saw when I came to
Arras on that bright June day.

I think the old city of Arras should never be rebuilt. I doubt if it
can be rebuilt, indeed. But I think that, whether or no, a golden
fence should be built around it, and it should forever and for all
time be preserved as a monument to the wanton wickedness of the Hun.
It should serve and stand, in its stark desolation, as a tribute,
dedicated to the Kultur of Germany. No painter could depict the
frightfulness of that city of the dead. No camera could make you see
as it is. Only your eyes can do that for you. And even then you
cannot realize it all at once. Your eyes are more merciful than the
truth and the Hun.

The Germans shelled Arras long after there was any military reason
for doing so. The sheer, wanton love of destruction must have moved
them. They had destroyed its military usefulness, but still they
poured shot and shell into the town. I went through its streets--the
Germans had been pushed back so far by then that the city was no
longer under steady fire. But they had done their work!

Nobody was living in Arras. No one could have lived there. The houses
had been smashed to pieces. The pavements were dust and rubble. But
there was life in the city. Through the ruins our men moved as
ceaselessly and as restlessly as the tenants of an ant hill suddenly
upturned by a plowshare. Soldiers were everywhere, and guns--guns,
guns! For Arras had a new importance now. It was a center for many
roads. Some of the most important supply roads of this sector of the
front converged in Arras.

Trains of ammunition trucks, supply carts and wagons of all sorts,
great trucks laden with jam and meat and flour, all were passing
every moment. There was an incessant din of horses' feet and the
steady crunch--crunch of heavy boots as the soldiers marched through
the rubble and the brickdust. And I knew that all this had gone on
while the town was still under fire. Indeed, even now, an occasional
shell from some huge gun came crashing into the town, and there would
be a new cloud of dust arising to mark its landing, a new collapse of
some weakened wall. Warning signs were everywhere about, bidding all
who saw them to beware of the imminent collapse of some heap of masonry.

I saw what the Germans had left of the stately old Cathedral, and of
the famous Cloth Hall--one of the very finest examples of the guild
halls of medieval times. Goths--Vandals--no, it is unfair to seek
such names for the Germans. They have established themselves as the
masters of all time in brutality and in destruction. There is no need
to call them anything but Germans. The Cloth Hall was almost human in
its pitiful appeal to the senses and the imagination. The German fire
had picked it to pieces, so that it stood in a stark outline, like
some carcase picked bare by a vulture.

Our soldiers who were quartered nearby lived outside the town in
huts. They were the men of the Highland Brigade, and the ones I had
hoped and wished, above all others, to meet when I came to France.
They received our party with the greatest enthusiasm, and they were
especially flattering when they greeted me. One of the Highland
officers took me in hand immediately, to show me the battlefield.

The ground over which we moved had literally been churned by
shell-fire. It was neither dirt nor mud that we walked upon; it was a
sort of powder. The very soil had been decomposed into a fine dust by
the terrific pounding it had received. The dust rose and got into our
eyes and mouths and nostrils. There was a lot of sneezing among the
members of the Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour that day at Arras!
And the wire! It was strewn in every direction, with seeming
aimlessness. Heavily barbed it was, and bad stuff to get caught in.
One of the great reasons for the preliminary bombardment that usually
precedes an attack is to cut this wire. If charging men are caught in
a bad tangle of wire they can be wiped out by machine gun-fire before
they can get clear.

I asked a Highlander, one day, how long he thought the war would last.

"Forty years," he said, never batting an eyelid. "We'll be fighting
another year, and then it'll tak us thirty-nine years more to wind up
all the wire!"

Off to my right there was a network of steel strands, and as I gazed
at it I saw a small dark object hanging from it and fluttering in the
breeze. I was curious enough to go over, and I picked my way
carefully through the maze-like network of wire to see what it might
be. When I came close I saw it was a bit of cloth, and immediately I
recognized the tartan of the Black Watch--the famous Forty-second.
Mud and blood held that bit of cloth fastened to the wire, as if by a
cement. Plainly, it had been torn from a kilt.

I stood for a moment, looking down at that bit of tartan, flapping in
the soft summer breeze. And as I stood I could look out and over the
landscape, dotted with a very forest of little wooden crosses, that
marked the last resting-place of the men who had charged across this
maze of wire and died within it. They rose, did those rough crosses,
like sheathed swords out of the wild, luxurious jungle of grass that
had grown up in that blood-drenched soil. I wondered if the owner of
the bit of tartan were still safe or if he lay under one of the
crosses that I saw.

There was room for sad speculation here! Who had he been? Had he
swept on, leaving that bit of his kilt as evidence of his passing?
Had he been one of those who had come through the attack, gloriously,
to victory, so that he could look back upon that day so long as he
lived? Or was he dead--perhaps within a hundred yards of where I
stood and gazed down at that relic of him? Had he folks at hame in
Scotland who had gone through days of anguish on his account--such
days of anguish as I had known?

[ILLUSTRATION: Berlin struck off this medal when the "Lusitania" was
sunk: on one side the brutal catastrophe, on the other the grinning
death's head Teutonically exultant. "And so now I preach the war on
the Hun my own way," says Harry Lauder. (See Lauder09.jpg)]

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