A Minstrel In France by Harry Lauder

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After we had driven for a space we came to something that lay by the
roadside that was a fitting occupant of such a spot. It was like the
skeleton of some giant creature of a prehistoric age, incredibly
savage even in its stark, unlovely death. It might have been the
frame of some vast, metallic tumble bug, that, crawling ominously
along this road of death, had come into the path of a Colossus, and
been stepped upon, and then kicked aside from the road to die.

"That's what's left of one of our first tanks," said Godfrey. "We
used them first in this battle of the Somme, you remember. And that
must have been one of the very earliest ones. They've been improved
and perfected since that time."

"How came it like this?" I asked, gazing at it, curiously.

"A direct hit from a big German shell--a lucky hit, of course. That's
about the only thing that could put even one of the first tanks out
of action that way. Ordinary shells from field pieces, machine-gun
fire, that sort of thing, made no impression on the tanks. But, of
course----"

I could see for myself. The in'ards of the monster had been pretty
thoroughly knocked out. Well, that tank had done its bit, I have no
doubt. And, since its heyday, the brain of Mars has spawned so many
new ideas that this vast creature would have been obsolete, and ready
for the scrap heap, even had the Hun not put it there before its
time.

At the Butte de Marlincourt, one of the most bitterly contested bits
of the battlefield, we passed a huge mine crater, and I made an
inspection of it. It was like the crater of an old volcano, a huge
old mountain with a hole in its center. Here were elaborate dugouts,
too, and many graves.

Soon we came to Bapaume. Bapaume was one of the objectives the
British failed to reach in the action of 1916. But early in 1917 the
Germans, seeing they had come to the end of their tether there,
retreated, and gave the town up. But what a town they left! Bapaume
was nearly as complete a ruin as Arras and Albert. But it had not
been wrecked by shell-fire. The Hun had done the work in cold blood.
The houses had been wrecked by human hands. Pictures still hung
crazily upon the walls. Grates were falling out of fire-places. Beds
stood on end. Tables and chairs were wantonly smashed and there was
black ruin everywhere.

We drove on then to a small town where the skirling of pipes heralded
our coming. It was the headquarters of General Willoughby and the
Fortieth Division. Highlanders came flocking around to greet us
warmly, and they all begged me to sing to them. But the officer in
command called them to attention.

"Men," he said, "Harry Lauder comes to us fresh from the saddest
mission of his life. We have no right to expect him to sing for us
to-day, but if it is God's will that he should, nothing could give us
greater pleasure."

My heart was very heavy within me, and never, even on the night when
I went back to the Shaftesbury Theater, have I felt less like
singing. But I saw the warm sympathy on the faces of the boys.

"If you'll take me as I am," I told them, "I will try to sing for
you. I will do my best, anyway. When a man is killed, or a battalion
is killed, or a regiment is killed, the war goes on, just the same.
And if it is possible for you to fight with broken ranks, I'll try to
sing for you with a broken heart."

And so I did, and, although God knows it must have been a feeble
effort, the lads gave me a beautiful reception. I sang my older songs
for them--the songs my own laddie had loved.

They gave us tea after I had sung for them, with chocolate eclairs as
a rare treat! We were surprised to get such fare upon the
battlefield, but it was a welcome surprise.

We turned back from Bapaume, traveling along another road on the
return journey. And on the way we met about two hundred German
prisoners--the first we had seen in any numbers. They were working on
the road, under guard of British soldiers. They looked sleek and
well-fed, and they were not working very hard, certainly. Yet I
thought there was something about their expression like that of
neglected animals. I got out of the car and spoke to an intelligent-
looking little chap, perhaps about twenty-five years old--a sergeant.
He looked rather suspicious when I spoke to him, but he saluted
smartly, and stood at attention while we talked, and he gave me ready
and civil answers.

"You speak English?" I asked. "Fluently?"

"Yes, sir!"

"How do you like being a prisoner?"

"I don't like it. It's very degrading."

"Your companions look pretty happy. Any complaints?"

"No, sir! None!"

"What are the Germans fighting for? What do you hope to gain?"

"The freedom of the seas!"

"But you had that before the war broke out!"

"We haven't got it now."

I laughed at that.

"Certainly not," I said. "Give us credit for doing something! But how
are you going to get it again?"

"Our submarines will get it for us."

"Still," I said, "you must be fighting for something else, too?"

"No," he said, doggedly. "Just for the freedom of the seas."

I couldn't resist telling him a bit of news that the censor was
keeping very carefully from his fellow-Germans at home.

"We sank seven of your submarines last week," I said.

He probably didn't believe that. But his face paled a bit, and his
lips puckered, and he scowled. Then, as I turned away, he whipped his
hand to his forehead in a stiff salute, but I felt that it was not
the most gracious salute I had ever seen! Still, I didn't blame him
much!

Captain Godfrey meant to show us another village that day.

"Rather an interesting spot," he said. "They differ, these French
villages. They're not all alike, by any means."

Then, before long, he began to look puzzled. And finally he called
a halt.

"It ought to be right here," he said. "It was, not so long ago."

But there was no village! The Hun had passed that way. And the
village for which Godfrey was seeking had been utterly wiped off the
face of the earth! Not a trace of it remained. Where men and women
and little children had lived and worked and played in quiet
happiness the abominable desolation that is the work of the Hun
had come. There was nothing to show that they or their village
had ever been.

The Hun knows no mercy!

CHAPTER XXVII

There had been, originally, a perfectly definite route for the
Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour--as definite a route as is mapped
out for me when I am touring the United States. Our route had called
for a fairly steady progress from Vimy Ridge to Peronne--like
Bapaume, one of the great unreached objectives of the Somme
offensive, and, again like Bapaume, ruined and abandoned by the
Germans in the retreat of the spring of 1917. But we made many side
trips and gave many and many an unplanned, extemporaneous roadside
concert, as I have told.

For all of us it had been a labor of love. I will always believe that
I sang a little better on that tour than I have ever sung before or
ever shall again, and I am sure, too, that Hogge and Dr. Adam spoke
more eloquently to their soldier hearers than they ever did in
parliament or church. My wee piano, Tinkle Tom, held out staunchly.
He never wavered in tune, though he got some sad jouncings as he
clung to the grid of a swift-moving car. As for Johnson, my
Yorkshireman, he was as good an accompanist before the tour ended as
I could ever want, and he took the keenest interest and delight in
his work, from start to finish.

Captain Godfrey, our manager, must have been proud indeed of the
"business" his troupe did. The weather was splendid; the "houses"
everywhere were so big that if there had been Standing Room Only
signs they would have been called into use every day. And his company
got a wonderful reception wherever it showed! He had everything a
manager could have to make his heart rejoice. And he did not, like
many managers, have to be continually trying to patch up quarrels in
the company! He had no petty professional jealousies with which to
contend; such things were unknown in our troupe!

All the time while I was singing in France I was elaborating an idea
that had for some time possessed me, and that was coming now to
dominate me utterly. I was thinking of the maimed soldiers, the boys
who had not died, but had given a leg, or an arm, or their sight to
the cause, and who were doomed to go through the rest of their lives
broken and shattered and incomplete. They were never out of my
thoughts. I had seen them before I ever came to France, as I traveled
the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, singing for the men in
the camps and the hospitals, and doing what I could to help in the
recruiting. And I used to lie awake of nights, wondering what would
become of those poor broken laddies when the war was over and we were
all setting to work again to rebuild our lives.

And especially I thought of the brave laddies of my ain Scotland.
They must have thought often of their future. They must have wondered
what was to become of them, when they had to take up the struggle
with the world anew--no longer on even terms with their mates, but
handicapped by grievous injuries that had come to them in the noblest
of ways. I remembered crippled soldiers, victims of other wars, whom
I had seen selling papers and matches on street corners, objects of
charity, almost, to a generation that had forgotten the service to
the country that had put them in the way of having to make their
living so. And I had made a great resolution that, if I could do
aught to prevent it, no man of Scotland who had served in this war
should ever have to seek a livelihood in such a manner.

So I conceived the idea of raising a great fund to be used for giving
the maimed Scots soldiers a fresh start in life. They would be
pensioned by the government. I knew that. But I knew, too, that a
pension is rarely more than enough to keep body and soul together.
What these crippled men would need, I felt, was enough money to set
them up in some little business of their own, that they could see to
despite their wounds, or to enable them to make a new start in some
old business or trade, if they could do so.

A man might need a hundred pounds, I thought, or two hundred pounds,
to get him started properly again. And I wanted to be able to hand a
man what money he might require. I did not want to lend it to him,
taking his note or his promise to pay. Nor did I want to give it to
him as charity. I wanted to hand it to him as a freewill offering, as
a partial payment of the debt Scotland owed him for what he had done
for her.

And I thought, too, of men stricken by shell-shock, or paralyzed in
the war--there are pitifully many of both sorts! I did not want them
to stay in bare and cold and lonely institutions. I wanted to take
them out of such places, and back to their homes; home to the village
and the glen. I wanted to get them a wheel-chair, with an old,
neighborly man or an old neighborly woman, maybe, to take them for an
airing in the forenoon, and the afternoon, that they might breathe
the good Scots air, and see the wild flowers growing, and hear the
song of the birds.

That was the plan that had for a long time been taking form in my mind.
I had talked it over with some of my friends, and the newspapers had
heard of it, somehow, and printed a few paragraphs about it. It was
still very much in embryo when I went to France, but, to my surprise,
the Scots soldiers nearly always spoke of it when I was talking with
them. They had seen the paragraphs in the papers, and I soon realized
that it loomed up as a great thing for them.

"Aye, it's a grand thing you're thinking of, Harry," they said, again
and again. "Now we know we'll no be beggars in the street, now that
we've got a champion like you, Harry."

I heard such words as that first from a Highlander at Arras, and from
that moment I have thought of little else. Many of the laddies told
me that the thought of being killed did not bother them, but that
they did worry a bit about their future in case they went home maimed
and helpless.

"We're here to stay until there's no more work to do, if it takes
twenty years, Harry," they said. "But it'll be a big relief to know
we will be cared for if we must go back crippled."

I set the sum I would have to raise to accomplish the work I had in
mind at a million pounds sterling--five million dollars. It may seem
a great sum to some, but to me, knowing the purpose for which it is
to be used, it seems small enough. And my friends agree with me. When
I returned from France I talked to some Scots friends, and a meeting
was called, in Glasgow, of the St. Andrews Society. I addressed it,
and it declared itself in cordial sympathy with the idea. Then I went
to Edinburgh, and down to London, and back north to Manchester.
Everywhere my plan was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm, and the
real organization of the fund was begun on September 17 and 18, 1917.

This fund of mine is known officially as "The Harry Lauder Million
Pound Fund for Maimed Men, Scottish Soldiers and Sailors." It does
not in any way conflict with nor overlap, any other work already
being done. I made sure of that, because I talked to the Pension
Minister, and his colleagues, in London, before I went ahead with my
plans, and they fully and warmly approved everything that I planned
to do.

The Earl of Rosebery, former Prime Minister of Britain, is Honorary
President of the Fund, and Lord Balfour of Burleigh is its treasurer.
And as I write we have raised an amount well into six figures in
pounds sterling. One of the things that made me most willing to
undertake my last tour of America was my feeling that I could secure
the support and cooperation of the Scottish people in America for my
fund better by personal appeals than in any other way. At the end of
every performance I gave during the tour, I told my audience what I
was doing and the object of the fund, and, although I addressed
myself chiefly to the Scots, there has been a most generous and
touching response from Americans as well.

We distributed little plaid-bordered envelopes, in which folk were
invited to send contributions to the bank in New York that was the
American depository. And after each performance Mrs. Lauder stood in
the lobby and sold little envelopes full of stamps, "sticky backs,"
as she called them, like the Red Cross seals that have been sold so
long in America at Christmas time. She sold them for a quarter, or
for whatever they would bring, and all the money went to the fund.

I had a novel experience sometimes. Often I would no sooner have
explained what I was doing than I would feel myself the target of a
sort of bombardment. At first I thought Germans were shooting at me,
but I soon learned that it was money that was being thrown! And every
day my dressing-table would be piled high with checks and money
orders and paper money sent direct to me instead of to the bank. But
I had to ask the guid folk to cease firing--the money was too apt to
be lost!

Folk of all races gave liberally. I was deeply touched at Hot
Springs, Arkansas, where the stage hands gave me the money they had
received for their work during my engagement.

CHAPTER XXVIII

I have stopped for a wee digression about my fund. I saw many
interesting things in France, and dreadful things. And it was
impressed upon me more and more that the Hun knows no mercy. The
wicked, wanton things he did in France, and that I saw!

There was Mont St. Quentin, one of the very strongest of the
positions out of which the British turned him. There was a chateau
there, a bonnie place. And hard by was a wee cemetery. The Hun had
smashed its pretty monuments, and he had reached into that sacred
soil with his filthy claws, and dragged out the dead from their
resting-place, and scattered their helpless bones about.

He ruined Peronne in wanton fury because it was passing from his
grip. He wrecked its old cathedral, once one of the loveliest sights
in France. He took away the old fleurs-de-lis from the great gates of
Peronne. He stole and carried away the statues that used to stand in
the old square. He left the great statue of St. Peter, still standing
in the churchyard, but its thumb was broken off. I found it, as I
rummaged about idly in the debris at the statue's foot.

It was no casual looting that the Huns did. They did their work
methodically, systematically. It was a sight to make the angels weep.

As I left the ruined cathedral I met a couple of French poilus, and
tried to talk with them. But they spoke "very leetle" English, and I
fired all my French words at them in one sentence.

"Oui, oui, madame," I said. "Encore pomme du terre. Fini!"

They laughed, but we did no get far with our talk! Not in French.

"You can't love the Hun much, after this," I said.

"Ze Hun? Ze bloody Boche?" cried one of them. "I keel heem all my
life!"

I was glad to quit Peronne. The rape of that lovely church saddened
me more than almost any sight I saw in France. I did not care to look
at it. So I was glad when we motored on to the headquarters of the
Fourth Army, where I had the honor of meeting one of Britain's
greatest soldiers, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, who greeted us most
cordially, and invited us to dinner.

After dinner we drove on toward Amiens. We were swinging back now,
toward Boulogne, and were scheduled to sleep that night at Amiens--
which the Germans held for a few days, during their first rush toward
Paris, before the Marne, but did not have time to destroy.

Adam knew Amiens, and was made welcome, with the rest of us, at an
excellent hotel. Von Kluck had made its headquarters when he swung
that way from Brussels, and it was there he planned the dinner he
meant to eat in Paris with the Kaiser. Von Kluck demanded an
indemnity of a million dollars from Amiens to spare its famous old
cathedral.

It was late when we arrived, but before I slept I called for the
boots and ordered a bottle of ginger ale. I tried to get him to tell
me about old von Kluck and his stay but he couldn't talk English, and
was busy, anyway, trying to open the bottle without cutting the wire.
Adam and Hogge are fond, to this day, of telling how I shouted at
him, finally:

"Well, how do you expect to open that bottle when you can't even talk
the English language?"

Next day was Sunday, and we went to church in the cathedral, which
von Kluck didn't destroy, after all. There were signs of war; the
windows and the fine carved doors were banked with sand bags as a
measure of protection from bombing airplanes.

I gave my last roadside concert on the road from Amiens to Boulogne.
It was at a little place called Ouef, and we had some trouble in
finding it and more in pronouncing its name. Some of us called it
Off, some Owf! I knew I had heard the name somewhere, and I was
racking my brains to think as Johnson set up our wee piano and I
began to sing. Just as I finished my first song a rooster set up a
violent crowing, in competition with me, and I remembered!

"I know where I am!" I cried. "I'm at Egg!"

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.

A good many thousand Canadians had just come in, so I sang at Base
Hospital No. 1, and then gave another and farewell concert at the
great convalescent camp on the hill. And then we said good-by to
Captain Godfrey, and the chauffeurs, and to Johnson, my accompanist,
ready to go back to his regiment now. I told them all I hoped that
when I came to France again to sing we could reassemble all the
original cast, and I pray that we may!

On Monday we took boat again for Folkestone. The boat was crowded
with men going home on leave, and I wandered among them. I heard many
a tale of heroism and courage, of splendid sacrifice and suffering
nobly borne. Destroyers, as before, circled about us, and there was
no hint of trouble from a Hun submarine.

On our boat was Lord Dalmeny, a King's Messenger, carrying dispatches
from the front. He asked me how I had liked the "show." It is so that
nearly all British soldiers refer to the war.

They had earned their rest, those laddies who were going home to
Britain. But some of them were half sorry to be going! I talked to
one of them.

"I don't know, Harry," he said. "I was looking forward to this leave
for a long time. I've been oot twa years. My heart jumped with joy at
first at the thought of seeing my mother and the auld hame. But now
that I'm started, and in a fair way to get there, I'm no so happy.
You see--every young fellow frae my toon is awa'. I'm the only one
going back. Many are dead. It won't be the same. I've a mind just to
stay on London till my leave is up, and then go back. If I went home
my mother would but burst out greetin', an' I think I could no stand
that."

But, as for me, I was glad, though I was sorry, too, to be going
home. I wanted to go back again. But I wanted to hurry to my wife,
and tell her what I had seen at our boy's grave. And so I did, so
soon as I landed on British ground once more.

I felt that I was bearing a message to her. A message from our boy. I
felt--and I still feel--that I could tell her that all was well with
him, and with all the other soldiers of Britain, who sleep, like him,
in the land of the bleeding lily. They died for humanity, and God
will not forget.

And I think there is something for me to say to all those who are to
know a grief such as I knew. Every mother and father who loves a son
in this war must have a strong, unbreakable faith in the future life,
in the world beyond, where you will see your son again. Do not give
way to grief. Instead, keep your gaze and your faith firmly fixed on
the world beyond, and regard your boy's absence as though he were but
on a journey. By keeping your faith you will help to win this war.
For if you lose it, the war and your personal self are lost.

My whole perspective was changed by my visit to the front. Never
again shall I know those moments of black despair that used to come
to me. In my thoughts I shall never be far away from the little
cemetery hard by the Bapaume road. And life would not be worth the
living for me did I not believe that each day brings me nearer to
seeing him again.

I found a belief among the soldiers in France that was almost
universal. I found it among all classes of men at the front; among
men who had, before the war, been regularly religious, along
well-ordered lines, and among men who had lived just according to
their own lights. Before the war, before the Hun went mad, the young
men of Britain thought little of death or what might come after death.
They were gay and careless, living for to-day. Then war came, and with
it death, astride of every minute, every hour. And the young men began
to think of spiritual things and of God.

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