A Minstrel In France by Harry Lauder

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There was much work for me to do beside my share in the campaign to
increase enlistments. Every day now the wards of the hospitals were
filling up. Men suffering from frightful wounds came back to be
mended and made as near whole as might be. And among them there was
work for me, if ever the world held work for any man.

I did not wait to begin my work in the hospitals. Everywhere I went,
where there were wounded men, I sang for those who were strong enough
to be allowed to listen, and told them stories, and did all I could
to cheer them up. It was heartrending work, oftentimes. There were
dour sights, dreadful sights in those hospitals. There were wounds
the memory of which robbed me of sleep. There were men doomed to
blindness for the rest of their lives.

But over all there was a spirit that never lagged or faltered, and
that strengthened me when I thought some sight was more than I could
bear. It was the spirit of the British soldier, triumphant over
suffering and cruel disfigurement, with his inevitable answer to any
question as to how he was getting on. I never heard that answer
varied when a man could speak at all. Always it was the same. Two
words were enough.

"All right!"

CHAPTER V

As I went about the country now, working hard to recruit men, to
induce people to subscribe to the war loan, doing all the things in
which I saw a chance to make myself useful, there was now an ever
present thought. When would John go out? He must go soon. I knew
that, so did his mother. We had learned that he would not be sent
without a chance to bid us good-by. There we were better off than
many a father and mother in the early days of the war. Many's the
mother who learned first that her lad had gone to France when they
told her he was dead. And many's the lassie who learned in the same
way that her lover would never come home to be her husband.

But by now Britain was settled down to war. It was as if war were the
natural state of things, and everything was adjusted to war and those
who must fight it. And many things were ordered better and more
mercifully than they had been at first.

It was in April that word came to us. We might see John again, his
mother and I, if we hurried to Bedford. And so we did. For once I
heeded no other call. It was a sad journey, but I was proud and glad
as well as sorry. John must do his share. There was no reason why my
son should take fewer risks than another man's. That was something
all Britain was learning in those days. We were one people. We must
fight as one; one for all--all for one.

John was sober when he met us. Sober, aye! But what a light there was
in his eyes! He was eager to be at the Huns. Tales of their doings
were coming back to us now, faster and faster. They were tales to
shock me. But they were tales, too, to whet the courage and sharpen
the steel of every man who could fight and meant to go.

It was John's turn to go. So it was he felt. And so it was his mother
and I bid him farewell, there at Bedford. We did not know whether we
would ever see him again, the bonnie laddie! We had to bid him good-by,
lest it be our last chance. For in Britain we knew, by then, what were
the chances they took, those boys of ours who went out.

"Good-by, son--good luck!"

"Good-by, Dad. See you when I get leave!"

That was all. We were not allowed to know more than that he was
ordered to France. Whereabouts in the long trench line he would be
sent we were not told. "Somewhere in France." That phrase, that had
been dinned so often into our ears, had a meaning for us now.

And now, indeed, our days and nights were anxious ones. The war was
in our house as it had never been before. I could think of nothing
but my boy. And yet, all the time I had to go on. I had to carry on,
as John was always bidding his men do. I had to appear daily before
my audiences, and laugh and sing, that I might make them laugh, and
so be better able to do their part.

They had made me understand, my friends, by that time, that it was
really right for me to carry on with my own work. I had not thought
so at first. I had felt that it was wrong for me to be singing at
such a time. But they showed me that I was influencing thousands to
do their duty, in one way or another, and that I was helping to keep
up the spirit of Britain, too.

"Never forget the part that plays, Harry," my friends told me.
"That's the thing the Hun can't understand. He thought the British
would be poor fighters because they went into action with a laugh.
But that's the thing that makes them invincible. You've your part to
do in keeping up that spirit."

So I went on but it was with a heavy heart, oftentimes. John's
letters were not what made my heart heavy. There was good cheer in
everyone of them. He told us as much as the censor's rules would let
him of the front, and of conditions as he found them. They were still
bad--cruelly bad. But there was no word of complaint from John.

The Germans still had the best of us in guns in those days, although
we were beginning to catch up with them. And they knew more about
making themselves comfortable in the trenches than did our boys. No
wonder! They spent years of planning and making ready for this war.
And it has not taken us so long, all things considered, to catch up
with them.

John's letters were cheery and they came regularly, too, for a time.
But I suppose it was because they left out so much, because there was
so great a part of my boy's life that was hidden from me, that I
found myself thinking more and more of John as a wee bairn and as a
lad growing up.

He was a real boy. He had the real boy's spirit of fun and mischief.
There was a story I had often told of him that came to my mind now.
We were living in Glasgow. One drizzly day, Mrs. Lauder kept John in
the house, and he spent the time standing at the parlor window
looking down on the street, apparently innocently interested in the
passing traffic.

In Glasgow it is the custom for the coal dealers to go along the
streets with their lorries, crying their wares, much after the manner
of a vegetable peddler in America. If a housewife wants any coal, she
goes to the window when she hears the hail of the coal man, and holds
up a finger, or two fingers, according to the number of sacks of coal
she wants.

To Mrs. Lauder's surprise, and finally to her great vexation, coal
men came tramping up our stairs every few minutes all afternoon, each
one staggering under the weight of a hundredweight sack of coal. She
had ordered no coal and she wanted no coal, but still the coal men
came--a veritable pest of them.

They kept coming, too, until she discovered that little John was the
author of their grimy pilgrimages to our door. He was signalling
every passing lorrie from the window in the Glasgow coal code!

I watched him from that window another day when he was quarreling
with a number of playmates in the street below. The quarrel finally
ended in a fight. John was giving one lad a pretty good pegging, when
the others decided that the battle was too much his way, and jumped
on him.

John promptly executed a strategic retreat. He retreated with
considerable speed, too. I saw him running; I heard the patter of his
feet on our stairs, and a banging at our door. I opened it and
admitted a flushed, disheveled little warrior, and I heard the other
boys shouting up the stairs what they would do to him.

By the time I got the door closed, and got back to our little parlor,
John was standing at the window, giving a marvelous pantomime for the
benefit of his enemies in the street. He was putting his small,
clenched fist now to his nose, and now to his jaw, to indicate to the
youngsters what he was going to do to them later on.

Those, and a hundred other little incidents, were as fresh in my
memory as if they had only occurred yesterday. His mother and I
recalled them over and over again. From the day John was born, it
seems to me the only things that really interested me were the things
in which he was concerned. I used to tuck him in his crib at night.
The affairs of his babyhood were far more important to me than my own
personal affairs.

I watched him grow and develop with enormous pride, and he took great
pride in me. That to me was far sweeter than praise from crowned
heads. Soon he was my constant companion. He was my business
confidant. More--he was my most intimate friend.

There were no secrets between us. I think that John and I talked of
things that few fathers and sons have the courage to discuss. He
never feared to ask my advice on any subject, and I never feared to
give it to him.

I wish you could have known my son as he was to me. I wish all
fathers could know their sons as I knew John. He was the most
brilliant conversationalist I have ever known. He was my ideal
musician.

He took up music only as an accomplishment, however. He did not want
to be a performer, although he had amazing natural talent in that
direction. Music was born in him. He could transpose a melody in any
key. You could whistle an air for him, and he could turn it into a
little opera at once.

However, he was anxious to make for himself in some other line of
endeavor, and while he was often my piano accompanist, he never had
any intention of going on the stage.

When he was fifteen years old, I was commanded to appear before King
Edward, who was a guest at Rufford Abbey, the seat of Lord and Lady
Sayville, situated in a district called the Dukeries, and I took John
as my accompanist.

I gave my usual performance, and while I was making my changes, John
played the piano. At the close, King Edward sent for me, and thanked
me. It was a proud moment for me, but a prouder moment came when the
King spoke of John's playing, and thanked him for his part in the
entertainment.

There were curious contradictions, it often seemed to me, in John.
His uncle, Tom Vallance, was in his day, one of the very greatest
football players in Scotland. But John never greatly liked the game.
He thought it was too rough. He thought any game was a poor game in
which players were likely to be hurt. And yet--he had been eager for
the rough game of war! The roughest game of all!

Ah, but that was not a game to him! He was not one of those who went
to war with a light heart, as they might have entered upon a football
match. All honor to those who went into the war so--they played a
great part and a noble part! But there were more who went to war as
my boy did--taking it upon themselves as a duty and a solemn
obligation. They had no illusions. They did not love war. No! John
hated war, and the black ugly horrors of it. But there were things he
hated more than he hated war. And one was a peace won through
submission to injustice.

Have I told you how my boy looked? He was slender, but he was strong
and wiry. He was about five feet five inches tall; he topped his Dad
by a handspan. And he was the neatest boy you might ever have hoped
to see. Aye--but he did not inherit that from me! Indeed, he used to
reproach me, oftentimes, for being careless about my clothes. My
collar would be loose, perhaps, or my waistcoat would not fit just
so. He'd not like that, and he would tell me so!

When he did that I would tell him of times when he was a wee boy, and
would come in from play with a dirty face; how his mother would order
him to wash, and how he would painstakingly mop off just enough of
his features to leave a dark ring abaft his cheeks, and above his
eyes, and below his chin.

"You wash your face, but never let on to your neck," I would tell him
when he was a wee laddie.

He had a habit then of parting and brushing about an inch of his
hair, leaving the rest all topsy-turvy. My recollection of that
boyhood habit served me as a defense in later years when he would
call my attention to my own disordered hair.

I linger long, and I linger lovingly over these small details,
because they are part of my daily thoughts. Every day some little
incident comes up to remind me of my boy. A battered old hamper, in
which I carry my different character make-ups, stands in my dressing
room. It was John's favorite seat. Every time I look at it I have a
vision of a tiny wide-eyed boy perched on the lid, watching me make
ready for the stage. A lump rises, unbidden, in my throat.

In all his life, I never had to admonish my son once. Not once. He
was the most considerate lad I have ever known. He was always
thinking of others. He was always doing for others.

It was with such thoughts as these that John's mother and I filled in
the time between his letters. They came as if by a schedule. We knew
what post should bring one. And once or twice a letter was a post
late and our hearts were in our throats with fear. And then came a
day when there should have been a letter, and none came. The whole
day passed. I tried to comfort John's mother! I tried to believe
myself that it was no more than a mischance of the post. But it was
not that.

We could do nought but wait. Ah, but the folks at home in Britain
know all too well those sinister breaks in the chains of letters from
the front! Such a break may mean nothing or anything.

For us, news came quickly. But it was not a letter from John that
came to us. It was a telegram from the war office and it told us no
more than that our boy was wounded and in hospital.

CHAPTER VI

"Wounded and in hospital!"

That might have meant anything. And for a whole week that was all we
knew. To hope for word more definite until--and unless--John himself
could send us a message, appeared to be hopeless. Every effort we
made ended in failure. And, indeed, at such a time, private inquiries
could not well be made. The messages that had to do with the war and
with the business of the armies had to be dealt with first.

But at last, after a week in which his mother and I almost went mad
with anxiety, there came a note from our laddie himself. He told us
not to fret--that all that ailed him was that his nose was split and
his wrist bashed up a bit! His mother looked at me and I at her. It
seemed bad enough to us! But he made light of his wounds--aye, and he
was right! When I thought of men I'd seen in hospitals--men with
wounds so frightful that they may not be told of--I rejoiced that
John had fared so well.

And I hoped, too, that his wounds would bring him home to us--to
Blighty, as the Tommies were beginning to call Britain. But his
wounds were not serious enough for that and so soon as they were
healed, he went back to the trenches.

"Don't worry about me," he wrote to us. "Lots of fellows out here
have been wounded five and six times, and don't think anything of it.
I'll be all right so long as I don't get knocked out."

He didn't tell us then that it was the bursting of a shell that gave
him his first wounded stripe. But he wrote to us regularly again, and
there were scarcely any days in which a letter did not come either to
me or to his mother. When one of those breaks did come it was doubly
hard to bear now.

For now we knew what it was to dread the sight of a telegraph
messenger. Few homes in Britain there are that do not share that
knowledge now. It is by telegraph, from the war office, that bad news
comes first. And so, with the memory of that first telegram that we
had had, matters were even worse, somehow, than they had been before.
For me the days and nights dragged by as if they would never pass.

There was more news in John's letters now. We took some comfort from
that. I remember one in which he told his mother how good a bed he
had finally made for himself the night before. For some reason he was
without quarters--either a billet or a dug-out. He had to skirmish
around, for he did not care to sleep simply in Flanders mud. But at
last he found two handfuls of straw, and with them made his couch.

"I got a good two hours' sleep," he wrote to his mother. "And I was
perfectly comfortable. I can tell you one thing, too, Mother. If I
ever get home after this experience, there'll be one in the house
who'll never grumble! This business puts the grumbling out of your
head. This is where the men are. This is where every man ought to be."

In another letter he told us that nine of his men had been killed.

"We buried them last night," he wrote, "just as the sun went down. It
was the first funeral I have ever attended. It was most impressive.
We carried the boys to one huge grave. The padre said a prayer, and
we lowered the boys into the ground, and we all sang a little hymn:
'Peace, Perfect Peace!' Then I called my men to attention again, and
we marched straight back into the trenches, each of us, I dare say,
wondering who would be the next."

John was promoted for the second time in Flanders. He was a captain,
having got his step on the field of battle. Promotion came swiftly in
those days to those who proved themselves worthy. And all of the few
reports that came to us of John showed us that he was a good officer.
His men liked him, and trusted him, and would follow him anywhere.
And little more than that can be said of any officer.

While Captain John Lauder was playing his part across the Channel, I
was still trying to do what I could at home. My band still travelled
up and down, the length and width of the United Kingdom, skirling and
drumming and drawing men by the score to the recruiting office.

There was no more talk now of a short war. We knew what we were in
for now.

But there was no thought or talk of anything save victory. Let the
war go on as long as it must--it could end only in one way. We had
been forced into the fight--but we were in, and we were in to stay.
John, writing from France, was no more determined than those at home.

It was not very long before there came again a break in John's
letters. We were used to the days--far apart--that brought no word.
Not until the second day and the third day passed without a word, did
Mrs. Lauder and I confess our terrors and our anxiety to ourselves
and one another. This time our suspense was comparatively short-lived.
Word came that John was in hospital again--at the Duke of Westminster's
hospital at Le Toquet, in France. This time he was not wounded; he was
suffering from dysentery, fever and--a nervous breakdown. That was what
staggered his mother and me. A nervous breakdown! We could not reconcile
the John we knew with the idea that the words conveyed to us. He had
been high strung, to be sure, and sensitive. But never had he been the
sort of boy of whom to expect a breakdown so severe as this must be if
they had sent him to the hospital.

We could only wait to hear from him, however. And it was several
weeks before he was strong enough to be able to write to us. There
was no hint of discouragement in what he wrote then. On the contrary,
he kept on trying to reassure us, and if he ever grew downhearted, he
made it his business to see that we did not suspect it. Here is one
of his letters--like most of them it was not about himself.

"I had a sad experience yesterday," he wrote to me. "It was the first
day I was able to be out of bed, and I went over to a piano in a
corner against the wall, sat down, and began playing very softly,
more to myself than anything else.

"One of the nurses came to me, and said a Captain Webster, of the
Gordon Highlanders, who lay on a bed in the same ward, wanted to
speak to me. She said he had asked who was playing, and she had told
him Captain Lauder--Harry Lauder's son. 'Oh,' he said, 'I know Harry
Lauder very well. Ask Captain Lauder to come here?'

"This man had gone through ten operations in less than a week. I
thought perhaps my playing had disturbed him, but when I went to his
bedside, he grasped my hand, pressed it with what little strength he
had left, and thanked me. He asked me if I could play a hymn. He said
he would like to hear 'Lead, Kindly Light.'

"So I went back to the piano and played it as softly and as gently as
I could. It was his last request. He died an hour later. I was very
glad I was able to soothe his last moments a little. I am very glad
now I learned the hymn at Sunday School as a boy."

[ILLUSTRATION: "'Carry On!' were the last words of my boy, Captain
John Lauder, to his men, but he would mean them for me, too." (See
Lauder03.jpg)]

Soon after we received that letter there came what we could not but
think great news. John was ordered home! He was invalided, to be
sure, and I warned his mother that she must be prepared for a shock
when she saw him. But no matter how ill he was, we would have our lad
with us for a space. And for that much British fathers and mothers
had learned to be grateful.

I had warned John's mother, but it was I who was shocked when I saw
him first on the day he came back to our wee hoose at Dunoon. His
cheeks were sunken, his eyes very bright, as a man's are who has a
fever. He was weak and thin, and there was no blood in his cheeks. It
was a sight to wring one's heart to see the laddie so brought down--
him who had looked so braw and strong the last time we had seen him.

That had been when he was setting out for the wars, you ken! And now
he was back, sae thin and weak and pitiful as I had not seen him
since he had been a bairn in his mother's arms.

Aweel, it was for us, his mother and I, and all the folks at home, to
mend him, and make him strong again. So he told us, for he had but
one thing on his mind--to get back to his men.

"They'll be needing me, out there," he said. "They're needing men. I
must go back so soon as I can. Every man is needed there."

"You'll be needing your strength back before you can be going back,
son," I told him. "If you fash and fret it will take you but so much
the longer to get back."

He knew that. But he knew things I could not know, because I had not
seen them. He had seen things that he saw over and over again when he
tried to sleep. His nerves were shattered utterly. It grieved me sore
not to spend all my time with him but he would not hear of it. He
drove me back to my work.

"You must work on, Dad, like every other Briton," he said. "Think of
the part you're playing. Why you're more use than any of us out
there--you're worth a brigade!"

So I left him on the Clyde, and went on about my work. But I went
back to Dunoon as often as I could, as I got a day or a night to make
the journey. At first there was small change of progress. John would
come downstairs about the middle of the day, moving slowly and
painfully. And he was listless; there was no life in him; no
resiliency or spring.

"How did you rest, son?" I would ask him. He always smiled when he
answered.

"Oh, fairly well," he'd tell me. "I fought three or four battles
though, before I dropped off to sleep."

He had come to the right place to be cured, though, and his mother
was the nurse he needed. It was quiet in the hills of the Clyde, and
there was rest and healing in the heather about Dunoon. Soon his
sleep became better and less troubled by dreams. He could eat more,
too, and they saw to it, at home, that he ate all they could stuff
into him.

So it was a surprisingly short time, considering how bad he had
looked when he first came back to Dunoon, before he was in good
health and spirits again. There was a bonnie, wee lassie who was to
become Mrs. John Lauder ere so long--she helped our boy, too, to get
back his strength.

Soon he was ordered from home. For a time he had only light duties
with the Home Reserve. Then he went to school. I laughed when he told
me he had been ordered to school, but he didna crack a smile.

"You needn't be laughing," he said. "It's a bombing school I'm going
to now-a-days. If you're away from the front for a few weeks, you
find everything changed when you get back. Bombing is going to be
important."

John did so well in the bombing school that he was made an instructor
and assigned, for a while, to teach others. But he was impatient to
be back with his own men, and they were clamoring for him. And so, on
September 16, 1916, his mother and I bade him good-by again, and he
went back to France and the men his heart was wrapped up in.

"Yon's where the men are, Dad!" he said to me, just before he started.

CHAPTER VII

John's mother, his sweetheart and I all saw him off at Glasgow. The
fear was in all our hearts, and I think it must have been in all our
eyes, as well--the fear that every father and mother and sweetheart
in Britain shared with us in these days whenever they saw a boy off
for France and the trenches. Was it for the last time? Were we seeing
him now so strong and hale and hearty, only to have to go the rest of
our lives with no more than a memory of him to keep?

Aweel, we could not be telling that! We could only hope and pray! And
we had learned again to pray, long since. I have wondered, often, and
Mrs. Lauder has wondered with me, what the fathers and mothers of
Britain would do in these black days without prayer to guide them and
sustain them. So we could but stand there, keeping back our tears and
our fears, and hoping for the best. One thing was sure; we might not
let the laddie see how close we were to greeting. It was for us to be
so brave as God would let us be. It was hard for him. He was no boy,
you ken, going blindly and gayly to a great adventure; he had need of
the finest courage and devotion a man could muster that day.

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