A Minstrel In France by Harry Lauder

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That is rank superstition, you say? Aye, it may be! But in the region
of the front everyone you meet has become superstitious, if that is
the word you choose. That is especially true of the soldiers. Every
man at the front, it seemed to me, was a fatalist. What is to be will
be, they say. It is certain that this feeling has helped to make them
indifferent to danger, almost, indeed, contemptuous of it. And in
France, I was told, almost everywhere there were shrines in which
figures of Christ or of His Mother had survived the most furious
shelling. All the world knows, too, how, at Rheims, where the great
Cathedral has been shattered in the wickedest and most wanton of all
the crimes of that sort that the Germans have to their account, the
statue of Jeanne d'Arc, who saved France long ago, stands untouched.

How is a man to account for such things as that? Is he to put them
down to chance, to luck, to a blind fate? I, for one, cannot do so,
nor will I try to learn to do it.

Fate, to be sure, is a strange thing, as my friends the soldiers know
so well. But there is a difference between fate, or chance, and the
sort of force that preserves statues like those I have named. A man
never knows his luck; he does well not to brood upon it. I remember
the case of a chap I knew, who was out for nearly three years, taking
part in great battles from Mons to Arras. He was scratched once or
twice, but was never even really wounded badly enough to go to
hospital. He went to London, at last, on leave, and within an hour of
the time when he stepped from his train at Charing Cross he was
struck by a 'bus and killed. And there was the strange ease of my
friend, Tamson, the baker, of which I told you earlier. No--a man
never knows his fate!

So it seemed to me, as we drove toward Arras, and watched that
mysterious figure, that God Himself had chosen to leave it there, as
a sign and a warning and a promise all at once. There was no sign of
life, at first, when we came into the town. Silence brooded over the
ruins. We stopped to have a look around in that scene of desolation,
and as the motors throbbed beneath the hoods it seemed to me the
noise they made was close to being blasphemous. We were right under
that hanging figure of the Virgin and of Christ, and to have left the
silence unbroken would have been more seemly.

But it was not long before the silence of the town was broken by
another sound. It was marching men we heard, but they were scuffling
with their feet as they came; they had not the rhythmic tread of most
of the British troops we had encountered. Nor were these men, when
they swung into sight, coming around a pile of ruins, just like any
British troops we had seen. I recognized them as once as Australians--
Kangaroos, as their mates in other divisions called them--by the way
their campaign hats were looped up at one side. These were the first
Australian troops I had seen since I had sailed from Sydney, in the
early days of the war, nearly three years before. Three years! To
think of it--and of what those years had seen!

"Here's a rare chance to give a concert!" I said, and held up my hand
to the officer in command.

"Halt!" he cried, and then: "Stand at ease!" I was about to tell him
why I had stopped them, and make myself known to them when I saw a
grin rippling its way over all those bronzed faces--a grin of
recognition. And I saw that the officer knew me, too, even before a
loud voice cried out:

"Good old Harry Lauder!"

That was a good Scots voice--even though its owner wore the
Australian uniform.

"Would the boys like to hear a concert?" I asked the officer.

"That they would! By all means!" he said. "Glad of the chance! And
so'm I! I've heard you just once before--in Sydney, away back in the
summer of 1914."

Then the big fellow who had called my name spoke up again.

"Sing us 'Calligan,'" he begged. "Sing us 'Calligan,' Harry! I heard
you sing it twenty-three years agone, in Motherwell Toon Hall!"

"Calligan!" The request for that song took me back indeed, through
all the years that I have been before the public. It must have been
at least twenty-three years since he had heard me sing that song--all
of twenty-three years. "Calligan" had been one of the very earliest
of my successes on the stage. I had not thought of the song, much
less sung it, for years and years. In fact, though I racked my
brains, I could not remember the words. And so, much as I should have
liked to do so, I could not sing it for him. But if he was
disappointed, he took it in good part, and he seemed to like some of
the newer songs I had to sing for them as well as he could ever have
liked old "Calligan."

I sang for these Kangaroos a song I had not sung before in France,
because it seemed to be an especially auspicious time to try it. I
wrote it while I was in Australia, with a view, particularly, to
pleasing Australian audiences, and so repaying them, in some measure,
for the kindly way in which they treated me while I was there. I call
it "Australia Is the Land for Me," and this is the way it goes:

There's a land I'd like to tell you all about
It's a land in the far South Sea.
It's a land where the sun shines nearly every day
It's the land for you and me.
It's the land for the man with the big strong arm
It's the land for big hearts, too.
It's a land we'll fight for, everything that's right for
Australia is the real true blue!

Refrain:

It's the land where the sun shines nearly every day
Where the skies are ever blue.
Where the folks are as happy as the day is long
And there's lots of work to do.
Where the soft winds blow and the gum trees grow
As far as the eye can see,
Where the magpie chaffs and the cuckoo-burra laughs
Australia is the land for me!

Those Kangaroos took to that song as a duck takes to water! They
raised the chorus with me in a swelling roar as soon as they had
heard it once, to learn it, and their voices roared through the ruins
like vocal shrapnel. You could hear them whoop "Australia Is the Land
for Me!" a mile away. And if anything could have brought down that
tottering statue above us it would have been the way they sang. They
put body and soul, as well as voice, into that final patriotic
declaration of the song.

We had thought--I speak for Hogge and Adam and myself, and not for
Godfrey, who did not have to think and guess, but know--we had
thought, when we rolled into Albert, that it was a city of the dead,
utterly deserted and forlorn. But now, as I went on singing, we found
that that idea had been all wrong. For as the Australians whooped up
their choruses other soldiers popped into sight. They came pouring
from all directions.

I have seen few sights more amazing. They came from cracks and
crevices, as it seemed; from under tumbled heaps of ruins, and
dropping down from shells of houses where there were certainly no
stairs. As I live, before I had finished my audience had been swollen
to a great one of two thousand men! When they were all roaring out in
a chorus you could scarce hear Johnson's wee piano at all--it sounded
only like a feeble tinkle when there was a part for it alone.

I began shaking hands, when I had finished singing. That was a
verrainjudeecious thing for me to attempt there! I had not reckoned
with the strength of the grip of those laddies from the underside of
the world. But I had been there, and I should have known.

Soon came the order to the Kangaroos: "Fall in!"

At once the habit of stern discipline prevailed. They swung off
again, and the last we saw of them they were just brown men,
disappearing along a brown road, bound for the trenches.

Swiftly the mole-like dwellers in Albert melted away, until only a
few officers were left beside the members of the Reverend Harry
Lauder, M.P., Tour. And I grew grave and distraught myself.

CHAPTER XXV

One of the officers at Albert was looking at me in a curiously intent
fashion. I noticed that. And soon he came over to me. "Where do you
go next, Harry?" he asked me. His voice was keenly sympathetic, and
his eyes and his manner were very grave.

"To a place called Ovilliers," I said.

"So I thought," he said. He put out his hand, and I gripped it, hard.
"I know, Harry. I know exactly where you are going, and I will send a
man with you to act as your guide, who knows the spot you want to reach."

I couldn't answer him. I was too deeply moved. For Ovilliers is the
spot where my son, Captain John Lauder, lies in his soldier's grave.
That grave had been, of course, from the very first, the final, the
ultimate objective of my journey. And that morning, as we set out
from Tramecourt, Captain Godfrey had told me, with grave sympathy,
that at last we were coming to the spot that had been so constantly
in my thoughts ever since we had sailed from Folkestone.

And so a private soldier joined our party as guide, and we took to
the road again. The Bapaume road it was--a famous highway, bitterly
contested, savagely fought for. It was one of the strategic roads of
that whole region, and the Hun had made a desperate fight to keep
control of it. But he had failed--as he has failed, and is failing
still, in all his major efforts in France.

There was no talking in our car, which, this morning, was the second
in the line. I certainly was not disposed to chat, and I suppose that
sympathy for my feelings, and my glumness, stilled the tongues of my
companions. And, at any rate, we had not traveled far when the car
ahead of us stopped, and the soldier from Albert stepped into the
road and waited for me. I got out when our car stopped, and joined
him.

"I will show you the place now, Mr. Lauder," he said, quietly. So we
left the cars standing in the road, and set out across a field that,
like all the fields in that vicinity, had been ripped and torn by
shell-fire. All about us, as we crossed that tragic field, there were
little brown mounds, each with a white wooden cross upon it. June was
out that day in full bloom. All over the valley, thickly sown with
those white crosses, wild flowers in rare profusion, and thickly
matted, luxuriant grasses, and all the little shrubs that God Himself
looks after were growing bravely in the sunlight, as though they were
trying to hide the work of the Hun.

It was a mournful journey, but, in some strange way, the peaceful
beauty of the day brought comfort to me. And my own grief was altered
by the vision of the grief that had come to so many others. Those
crosses, stretching away as far as my eye could reach, attested to
the fact that it was not I alone who had suffered and lost and laid a
sacrifice upon the altar of my country. And, in the presence of so
many evidences of grief and desolation a private grief sank into its
true proportions. It was no less keen, the agony of the thought of my
boy was as sharp as ever. But I knew that he was only one, and that I
was only one father. And there were so many like him--and so many
like me, God help us all! Well, He did help me, as I have told, and I
hope and pray that He has helped many another. I believe He has;
indeed, I know it.

Hogge and Dr. Adam, my two good friends, walked with me on that sad
pilgrimage. I was acutely conscious of their sympathy; it was sweet
and precious to have it. But I do not think we exchanged a word as we
crossed that field. There was no need of words. I knew, without
speech from them, how they felt, and they knew that I knew. So we
came, when we were, perhaps, half a mile from the Bapaume road, to a
slight eminence, a tiny hill that rose from the field. A little
military cemetery crowned it. Here the graves were set in ordered
rows, and there was a fence set around them, to keep them apart, and
to mark that spot as holy ground, until the end of time. Five hundred
British boys lie sleeping in that small acre of silence, and among
them is my own laddie. There the fondest hopes of my life, the hopes
that sustained and cheered me through many years, lie buried.

No one spoke. But the soldier pointed, silently and eloquently, to
one brown mound in a row of brown mounds that looked alike, each like
the other. Then he drew away. And Hogge and Adam stopped, and stood
together, quiet and grave. And so I went alone to my boy's grave, and
flung myself down upon the warm, friendly earth. My memories of that
moment are not very clear, but I think that for a few minutes I was
utterly spent, that my collapse was complete.

He was such a good boy!

I hope you will not think, those of you, my friends, who may read
what I am writing here, that I am exalting my lad above all the other
Britons who died for King and country--or, and aye, above the brave
laddies of other races who died to stop the Hun. But he was such a
good boy!

As I lay there on that brown mound, under the June sun that day, all
that he had been, and all that he had meant to me and to his mother
came rushing back afresh to my memory, opening anew my wounds of
grief. I thought of him as a baby, and as a wee laddie beginning to
run around and talk to us. I thought of him in every phase and bit of
his life, and of the friends that we had been, he and I! Such chums
we were, always!

And as I lay there, as I look back upon it now, I can think of but
the one desire that ruled and moved me. I wanted to reach my arms
down into that dark grave, and clasp my boy tightly to my breast, and
kiss him. And I wanted to thank him for what he had done for his
country, and his mother, and for me.

Again there came to me, as I lay there, the same gracious solace that
God had given me after I heard of his glorious death. And I knew that
this dark grave, so sad and lonely and forlorn, was but the temporary
bivouac of my boy. I knew that it was no more than a trench of refuge
against the storm of battle, in which he was resting until that hour
shall sound when we shall all be reunited beyond the shadowy
borderland of Death.

How long did I lie there? I do not know. And how I found the strength
at last to drag myself to my feet and away from that spot, the
dearest and the saddest spot on earth to me, God only knows. It was
an hour of very great anguish for me; an hour of an anguish
different, but only less keen, than that which I had known when they
had told me first that I should never see my laddie in the flesh
again. But as I took up the melancholy journey across that field,
with its brown mounds and its white crosses stretching so far away,
they seemed to bring me a sort of tragic consolation.

I thought of all the broken-hearted ones at home, in Britain. How
many were waiting, as I had waited, until they, too,--they, too,--
might come to France, and cast themselves down, as I had done, upon
some brown mound, sacred in their thoughts? How many were praying for
the day to come when they might gaze upon a white cross, as I had
done, and from the brown mound out of which it rose gather a few
crumbs of that brown earth, to be deposited in a sacred corner of a
sacred place yonder in Britain?

While I was in America, on my last tour, a woman wrote to me from a
town in the state of Maine. She was a stranger to me when she sat
down to write that letter, but I count her now, although I have never
seen her, among my very dearest friends.

"I have a friend in France," she wrote. "He is there with our
American army, and we had a letter from him the other day. I think
you would like to hear what he wrote to us.

"'I was walking in the gloaming here in France the other evening,' he
wrote. 'You know, I have always been very fond of that old song of
Harry Lauder's, 'Roamin' in the Gloamin'.'

"'Well, I was roamin' in the gloamin' myself, and as I went I hummed
that very song, under my breath. And I came, in my walk to a little
cemetery, on a tiny hill. There were many mounds there and many small
white crosses. About one of them a Union Jack was wrapped so tightly
that I could not read the inscription upon it. And something led me
to unfurl that weather-worn flag, so that I could read. And what do
you think? It was the grave of Harry Lauder's son, Captain John
Lauder, of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, and his little
family crest was upon the cross.

"'I stood there, looking down at that grave, and I said a little
prayer, all by myself. And then I rewound the Union Jack about the
cross. I went over to some ruins nearby, and there I found a red rose
growing. I do believe it was the last rose of summer. And I took it
up, very carefully, roots and all, and carried it over to Captain
Lauder's grave, and planted it there.'"

What a world of comfort those words brought me!

It was about eight o'clock one morning that Captain Lauder was
killed, between Courcellete and Poizieres, on the Ancre, in the
region that is known as the Somme battlefield. It was soon after
breakfast, and John was going about, seeing to his men. His company
was to be relieved that day, and to go back from the trenches to rest
billets, behind the lines. We had sent our laddie a braw lot of
Christmas packages not long before, but he had had them kept at the
rest billet, so that he might have the pleasure of opening them when
he was out of the trenches, and had a little leisure, even though it
made his Christmas presents a wee bit late.

There had been a little mist upon the ground, as, at that damp and
chilly season of the year, there nearly always was along the river
Ancre. At that time, on that morning, it was just beginning to rise
as the sun grew strong enough to banish it. I think John trusted too
much to the mist, perhaps. He stepped for just a moment into the
open; for just a moment he exposed himself, as he had to do, no
doubt, to do his duty. And a German sniper, watching for just such
chances, caught a glimpse of him. His rifle spoke; its bullet pierced
John's brave and gentle heart.

Tate, John's body-servant, a man from our own town, was the first
to reach him. Tate was never far from John's side, and he was
heart-broken when he reached him that morning and found that there
was nothing he could do for him.

Many of the soldiers who served with John and under him have written
to me, and come to me. And all of them have told me the same thing:
that there was not a man in his company who did not feel his death as
a personal loss and bereavement. And his superior officers have told
me the same thing. In so far as such reports could comfort us his
mother and I have taken solace in them. All that we have heard of
John's life in the trenches, and of his death, was such a report as
we or any parents should want to have of their boy.

John never lost his rare good nature. There were times when things
were going very badly indeed, but at such times he could always be
counted upon to raise a laugh and uplift the spirits of his men. He
knew them all; he knew them well. Nearly all of them came from his
home region near the Clyde, and so they were his neighbors and his
friends.

I have told you earlier that John was a good musician. He played the
piano rarely well, for an amateur, and he had a grand singing voice.
And one of his fellow-officers told me that, after the fight at
Beaumont-Hamul, one of the phases of the great Battle of the Somme,
John's company found itself, toward evening, near the ruins of an old
chateau. After that fight, by the way, dire news, sad news, came to
our village of the men of the Argyle and Sutherland regiment, and
there were many stricken homes that mourned brave lads who would
never come home again.

John's men were near to exhaustion that night. They had done terrible
work that day, and their losses had been heavy. Now that there was an
interlude they lay about, tired and bruised and battered. Many had
been killed; many had been so badly wounded that they lay somewhere
behind, or had been picked up already by the Red Cross men who
followed them across the field of the attack. But there were many
more who had been slightly hurt, and whose wounds began to pain them
grievously now. The spirit of the men was dashed.

John's friend and fellow-officer told me of the scene.

"There we were, sir," he said. "We were pretty well done in, I can
tell you. And then Lauder came along. I suppose he was just as tired
and worn out as the rest of us--God knows he had as much reason to
be, and more! But he was as cocky as a little bantam. And he was
smiling. He looked about.

"'Here--this won't do!' he said. 'We've got to get these lads feeling
better!' He was talking more to himself than to anyone else, I think.
And he went exploring around. He got into what was left of that
chateau--and I can tell you it wasn't much! The Germans had been
using it as a point d'appui--a sort of rallying-place, sir--and our
guns had smashed it up pretty thoroughly. I've no doubt the Fritzies
had taken a hack at it, too, when they found they couldn't hold it
any longer--they usually did.

"But, by a sort of miracle, there was a piano inside that had come
through all the trouble. The building and all the rest of the
furniture had been knocked to bits, but the piano was all right,
although, as I say, I don't know how that had happened. Lauder spied
it, and went clambering over all the debris and wreckage to reach it.
He tried the keys, and found that the action was all right. So he
began picking out a tune, and the rest of us began to sit up a bit.
And pretty soon he lifted his voice in a rollicking tune--one of your
songs it was, sir--and in no time the men were all sitting up to
listen to him. Then they joined in the chorus--and pretty soon you'd
never have known they'd been tired or worn out! If there'd been a
chance they'd have gone at Fritz and done the day's work all over
again!"

After John was killed his brother officers sent us all his personal
belongings. We have his field-glasses, with the mud of the trenches
dried upon them. We have a little gold locket that he always wore
around his neck. His mother's picture is in it, and that of the
lassie he was to have married had he come home, after New Year's. And
we have his rings, and his boots, and his watch, and all the other
small possessions that were a part of his daily life out there in
France.

Many soldiers and officers of the Argyle and Sutherlanders pass the
hoose at Dunoon on the Clyde. None ever passes the hoose, though,
without dropping in, for a bite and sup if he has time to stop, and
to tell us stories of our beloved boy.

No, I would no have you think that I would exalt my boy above all the
others who have lived and died in France in the way of duty. But he
was such a good boy! We have heard so many tales like those I have
told you, to make us proud of him, and glad that he bore his part as
a man should.

He will stay there, in that small grave on that tiny hill. I shall
not bring his body back to rest in Scotland, even if the time comes
when I might do so. It is a soldier's grave, and an honorable place
for him to be, and I feel it is there that he would wish to lie, with
his men lying close about him, until the time comes for the great
reunion.

But I am going back to France to visit again and again that grave
where he lies buried. So long as I live myself that hill will be the
shrine to which my many pilgrimages will be directed. The time will
come again when I may take his mother with me, and when we may kneel
together at that spot.

And meanwhile the wild flowers and the long grasses and all the
little shrubs will keep watch and ward over him there, and over all
the other brave soldiers who lie hard by, who died for God and for
their flag.

CHAPTER XXVI

So at last, I turned back toward the road, and very slowly, with
bowed head and shoulders that felt very old, all at once, I walked
back toward the Bapaume highway. I was still silent, and when we
reached the road again, and the waiting cars, I turned, and looked
back, long and sorrowfully, at that tiny hill, and the grave it
sheltered. Godfrey and Hogge and Adam, Johnson and the soldiers of
our party, followed my gaze. But we looked in silence; not one of us
had a word to say. There are moments, as I suppose we have all had to
learn, that are beyond words and speech.

And then at last we stepped back into the cars, and resumed our
journey on the Bapaume road. We started slowly, and I looked back
until a turn in the road hid that field with its mounds and its
crosses, and that tiny cemetery on the wee hill. So I said good-by to
my boy again, for a little space.

Our road was by way of Poizieres, and this part of our journey took
us through an area of fearful desolation. It was the country that was
most bitterly fought over in the summer long battle of the Somme in
1916, when the new armies of Britain had their baptism of fire and
sounded the knell of doom for the Hun. It was then he learned that
Britain had had time, after all, to train troops who, man for man,
outmatched his best.

Here war had passed like a consuming flame, leaving no living thing
in its path. The trees were mown down, clean to the ground. The very
earth was blasted out of all semblance to its normal kindly look. The
scene was like a picture of Hell from Dante's Inferno; there is nothing
upon this earth that may be compared with it. Death and pain and agony
had ruled this whole countryside, once so smiling and fair to see.

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