A Minstrel In France by Harry Lauder

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For he knew fully now what it was that he was going back to. He knew
the hell the Huns had made of war, which had been bad enough, in all
conscience, before they did their part to make it worse. And he was
high strung. He could live over, and I make no doubt he did, in those
days after he had his orders to go back, every grim and dreadful
thing that was waiting for him out there. He had been through it all,
and he was going back. He had come out of the valley of the shadow,
and now he was to ride down into it again.

And it was with a smile he left us! I shall never forget that. His
thought was all for us whom he was leaving behind. His care was for
us, lest we should worry too greatly and think too much of him.

"I'll be all right," he told us. "You're not to fret about me, any of
you. A man does take his chances out there--but they're the chances
every man must take these days, if he's a man at all. I'd rather be
taking them than be safe at home."

We did our best to match the laddie's spirit and be worthy of him.
But it was cruelly hard. We had lost him and found him again, and now
he was being taken from us for the second time. It was harder, much
harder, to see him go this second time than it had been at first, and
it had been hard enough then, and bad enough. But there was nothing
else for it. So much we knew. It was a thing ordered and inevitable.

And it was not many days before we had slipped back into the way
things had been before John was invalided home. It is a strange thing
about life, the way that one can become used to things. So it was
with us. Strange things, terrible things, outrageous things, that, in
time of peace, we would never have dared so much as to think
possible, came to be the matters of every day for us. It was so with
John. We came to think of it as natural that he should be away from
us, and in peril of his life every minute of every hour. It was not
easier for us. Indeed, it was harder than it had been before, just as
it had been harder for us to say good-by the second time. But we
thought less often of the strangeness of it. We were really growing
used to the war, and it was less the monstrous, strange thing than it
had been in our daily lives. War had become our daily life and
portion in Britain. All who were not slackers were doing their part--
every one. Man and woman and child were in it, making sacrifices.
Those happy days of peace lay far behind us, and we had lost our
touch with them and our memory of them was growing dim. We were all
in it. We had all to suffer alike, we were all in the same boat, we
mothers and fathers and sweethearts of Britain. And so it was easier
for us not to think too much and too often of our own griefs and
cares and anxieties.

John's letters began to come again in a steady stream. He was as
careful as ever about writing. There was scarcely a day that did not
bring its letter to one of the three of us. And what bonnie, brave
letters they were! They were as cheerful and as bright as his first
letters had been. If John had bad hours and bad days out there he
would not let us know it. He told us what news there was, and he was
always cheerful and bright when he wrote. He let no hint of
discouragement creep into anything he wrote to us. He thought of
others first, always and all the time; of his men, and of us at home.
He was quite cured and well, he told us, and going back had done him
good instead of harm. He wrote to us that he felt as if he had come
home. He felt, you ken, that it was there, in France and in the
trenches, that men should feel at home in those days, and not safe in
Britain by their ain firesides.

It was not easy for me to be cheerful and comfortable about him,
though. I had my work to do. I tried to do it as well as I could, for
I knew that that would please him. My band still went up and down the
country, getting recruits, and I was speaking, too, and urging men
myself to go out and join the lads who were fighting and dying for
them in France. They told me I was doing good work; that I was a
great force in the war. And I did, indeed, get many a word and many a
handshake from men who told me I had induced them to enlist.

"I'm glad I heard you, Harry," man after man said to me. "You showed
me what I should be doing and I've been easier in my mind ever since
I put on the khaki!"

I knew they'd never regret it, no matter what came to them. No man
will, that's done his duty. It's the slackers who couldn't or
wouldn't see their duty men should feel sorry for! It's not the lads
who gave everything and made the final sacrifice.

It was hard for me to go on with my work of making folks laugh. It
had been growing harder steadily ever since I had come home from
America and that long voyage of mine to Australia and had seen what
war was and what it was doing to Britain. But I carried on, and did
the best I could.

That winter I was in the big revue at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in
London, that was called "Three Cheers." It was one of the gay shows
that London liked because it gave some relief from the war and made
the Zeppelin raids that the Huns were beginning to make so often now
a little easier to bear. And it was a great place for the men who
were back from France. It was partly because of them that I could go
on as I did. We owed them all we could give them. And when they came
back from the mud and the grime and the dreariness of the trenches,
they needed something to cheer them up--needed the sort of production
we gave them. A man who has two days' leave in London does not want
to see a serious play or a problem drama, as a rule. He wants
something light, with lots of pretty girls and jolly tunes and people
to make him laugh. And we gave him that. The house was full of
officers and men, night after night.

Soon word came from John that he was to have leave, just after
Christmas, that would bring him home for the New Year's holidays. His
mother went home to make things ready, for John was to be married
when he got his leave. I had my plans all made. I meant to build a
wee hoose for the two of them, near our own hoose at Dunoon, so that
we might be all together, even though my laddie was in a home of his
own. And I counted the hours and the days against the time when John
would be home again.

While we were playing at the Shaftesbury I lived at an hotel in
Southampton Row called the Bonnington. But it was lonely for me
there. On New Year's Eve--it fell on a Sunday--Tom Vallance, my
brother-in-law, asked me to tea with him and his family in Clapham,
where he lived. That is a pleasant place, a suburb of London on the
southwest, and I was glad to go. And so I drove out with a friend of
mine, in a taxicab, and was glad to get out of the crowded part of
the city for a time.

I did not feel right that day. Holiday times were bad, hard times for
me then. We had always made so much of Christmas, and here was the
third Christmas that our boy had been away. And so I was depressed.
And then, there had been no word for me from John for a day or two. I
was not worried, for I thought it likely that his mother or his
sweetheart had heard, and had not time yet to let me know. But,
whatever the reason, I was depressed and blue, and I could not enter
into the festive spirit that folk were trying to keep alive despite
the war.

I must have been poor company during that ride to Clapham in the
taxicab. We scarcely exchanged a word, my friend and I. I did not
feel like talking, and he respected my mood, and kept quiet himself.
I felt, at last, that I ought to apologize to him.

"I don't know what's the matter with me," I told him. "I simply don't
want to talk. I feel sad and lonely. I wonder if my boy is all right?"

"Of course he is!" my friend told me. "Cheer up, Harry. This is a time
when no news is good news. If anything were wrong with him they'd let
you know."

Well, I knew that, too. And I tried to cheer up, and feel better, so
that I would not spoil the pleasure of the others at Tom Vallance's
house. I tried to picture John as I thought he must be--well, and
happy, and smiling the old, familiar boyish smile I knew so well. I
had sent him a box of cigars only a few days before, and he would be
handing it around among his fellow officers. I knew that! But it was
no use. I could think of John, but it was only with sorrow and
longing. And I wondered if this same time in a year would see him
still out there, in the trenches. Would this war ever end? And so the
shadows still hung about me when we reached Tom's house.

They made me very welcome, did Tom and all his family. They tried to
cheer me, and Tom did all he could to make me feel better, and to
reassure me. But I was still depressed when we left the house and
began the drive back to London.

"It's the holiday--I'm out of gear with that, I'm thinking," I told
my friend.

He was going to join two other friends, and, with them, to see the
New Year in in an old fashioned way, and he wanted me to join them.
But I did not feel up to it; I was not in the mood for anything of
the sort.

"No, no, I'll go home and turn in," I told him. "I'm too dull tonight
to be good company."

He hoped, as we all did, that this New Year that was coming would
bring victory and peace. Peace could not come without victory; we
were all agreed on that. But we all hoped that the New Year would
bring both--the new year of 1917. And so I left him at the corner of
Southhampton Row, and went back to my hotel alone. It was about
midnight, a little before, I think, when I got in, and one of the
porters had a message for me.

"Sir Thomas Lipton rang you up," he said, "and wants you to speak
with him when you come in."

I rang him up at home directly.

"Happy New Year, when it comes, Harry!" he said. He spoke in the same
bluff, hearty way he always did. He fairly shouted in my ear. "When
did you hear from the boy? Are you and Mrs. Lauder well?"

"Aye, fine," I told him. And I told him my last news of John.

"Splendid!" he said. "Well, it was just to talk to you a minute that
I rang you up, Harry. Good-night--Happy New Year again."

I went to bed then. But I did not go to sleep for a long time. It was
New Year's, and I lay thinking of my boy, and wondering what this
year would bring him. It was early in the morning before I slept. And
it seemed to me that I had scarce been asleep at all when there came
a pounding at the door, loud enough to rouse the heaviest sleeper
there ever was.

My heart almost stopped. There must be something serious indeed for
them to be rousing me so early. I rushed to the door, and there was a
porter, holding out a telegram. I took it and tore it open. And I
knew why I had felt as I had the day before. I shall never forget
what I read:

"Captain John Lauder killed in action, December 28. Official.
War Office."

It had gone to Mrs. Lauder at Dunoon first, and she had sent it on to
me. That was all it said. I knew nothing of how my boy had died, or
where--save that it was for his country.

But later I learned that when Sir Thomas Lipton had rung me up he had
intended to condole with me. He had heard on Saturday of my boy's
death. But when he spoke to me, and understood at once, from the tone
of my voice, that I did not know, he had not been able to go on. His
heart was too tender to make it possible for him to be the one to
give me that blow--the heaviest that ever befell me.

CHAPTER VIII

It was on Monday morning, January the first, 1917, that I learned of
my boy's death. And he had been killed the Thursday before! He had
been dead four days before I knew it! And yet--I had known. Let no
one ever tell me again that there is nothing in presentiment. Why
else had I been so sad and uneasy in my mind? Why else, all through
that Sunday, had it been so impossible for me to take comfort in what
was said to cheer me? Some warning had come to me, some sense that
all was not well.

Realization came to me slowly. I sat and stared at that slip of
paper, that had come to me like the breath of doom. Dead! Dead these
four days! I was never to see the light of his eyes again. I was
never to hear that laugh of his. I had looked on my boy for the last
time. Could it be true? Ah, I knew it was! And it was for this moment
that I had been waiting, that we had all been waiting, ever since we
had sent John away to fight for his country and do his part. I think
we had all felt that it must come. We had all known that it was too
much to hope that he should be one of those to be spared.

The black despair that had been hovering over me for hours closed
down now and enveloped all my senses. Everything was unreal. For a
time I was quite numb. But then, as I began to realize and to
visualize what it was to mean in my life that my boy was dead there
came a great pain. The iron of realization slowly seared every word
of that curt telegram upon my heart. I said it to myself, over and
over again. And I whispered to myself, as my thoughts took form, over
and over, the one terrible word: "Dead!"

I felt that for me everything had come to an end with the reading of
that dire message. It seemed to me that for me the board of life was
black and blank. For me there was no past and there could be no
future. Everything had been swept away, erased, by one sweep of the
hand of a cruel fate. Oh, there was a past, though! And it was in
that past that I began to delve. It was made up of every memory I had
of my boy. I fell at once to remembering him. I clutched at every
memory, as if I must grasp them and make sure of them, lest they be
taken from me as well as the hope of seeing him again that the
telegram had forever snatched away.

I would have been destitute indeed then. It was as if I must fix in
my mind the way he had been wont to look, and recall to my ears every
tone of his voice, every trick of his speech. There was something
left of him that I must keep, I knew, even then, at all costs, if I
was to be able to bear his loss at all.

There was a vision of him before my eyes. My bonnie Highland laddie,
brave and strong in his kilt and the uniform of his country, going
out to his death with a smile on his face. And there was another
vision that came up now, unbidden. It was a vision of him lying stark
and cold upon the battlefield, the mud on his uniform. And when I saw
that vision I was like a man gone mad and possessed of devils who had
stolen away his faculties. I cursed war as I saw that vision, and the
men who caused war. And when I thought of the Germans who had killed
my boy a terrible and savage hatred swept me, and I longed to go out
there and kill with my bare hands until I had avenged him or they had
killed me too.

But then I was a little softened. I thought of his mother back in our
wee hoose at Dunoon. And the thought of her, bereft even as I was,
sorrowing, even as I was, and lost in her frightful loneliness, was
pitiful, so that I had but the one desire and wish--to go to her, and
join my tears with hers, that we who were left alone to bear our
grief might bear it together and give one to the other such comfort
as there might be in life for us. And so I fell upon my knees and
prayed, there in my lonely room in the hotel. I prayed to God that he
might give us both, John's mother and myself, strength to bear the
blow that had been dealt us and to endure the sacrifice that He and
our country had demanded of us.

My friends came to me. They came rushing to me. Never did man have
better friends, and kindlier friends than mine proved themselves to
me on that day of sorrow. They did all that good men and women could
do. But there was no help for me in the ministration of friends. I
was beyond the power of human words to comfort or solace. I was glad
of their kindness, and the memory of it now is a precious one, and
one I would not be without. But at such a time I could not gain from
them what they were eager to give me. I could only bow my head and
pray for strength.

That night, that New Year's night that I shall never forget, no
matter how long God may let me live, I went north. I took train from
London to Glasgow, and the next day I came to our wee hoose--a sad,
lonely wee hoose it had become now!--on the Clyde at Dunoon, and was
with John's mother. It was the place for me. It was there that I
wanted to be, and it was with her, who must hereafter be all the
world to me. And I was eager to be with her, too, who had given John
to me. Sore as my grief was, stricken as I was, I could comfort her
as no one else could hope to do, and she could do as much for me. We
belonged together.

I can scarce remember, even for myself, what happened there at
Dunoon. I cannot tell you what I said or what I did, or what words
and what thoughts passed between John's mother and myself. But there
are some things that I do know and that I will tell you.

Almighty God, to whom we prayed, was kind, and He was pitiful and
merciful. For presently He brought us both a sort of sad composure.
Presently He assuaged our grief a little, and gave us the strength
that we must have to meet the needs of life and the thought of going
on in a world that was darkened by the loss of the boy in whom all
our thoughts and all our hopes had been centred. I thanked God then,
and I thank God now, that I have never denied Him nor taken His name
in vain.

For God gave me great thoughts about my boy and about his death.
Slowly, gradually, He made me to see things in their true light, and
He took away the sharp agony of my first grief and sorrow, and gave
me a sort of peace.

John died in the most glorious cause, and he died the most glorious
death, it may be given to a man to die. He died for humanity. He died
for liberty, and that this world in which life must go on, no matter
how many die, may be a better world to live in. He died in a struggle
against the blackest force and the direst threat that has appeared
against liberty and humanity within the memory of man. And were he
alive now, and were he called again to-day to go out for the same
cause, knowing that he must meet death--as he did meet it--he would
go as smilingly and as willingly as he went then. He would go as a
British soldier and a British gentleman, to fight and die for his
King and his country. And I would bid him go.

I have lived through much since his death. They have not let me take
a rifle or a sword and go into the trenches to avenge him. . . . But
of that I shall tell you later.

Ah, it was not at once that I felt so! In my heart, in those early
days of grief and sorrow, there was rebellion, often and often. There
were moments when in my anguish I cried out, aloud: "Why? Why? Why
did they have to take John, my boy--my only child?"

But God came to me, and slowly His peace entered my soul. And He made
me see, as in a vision, that some things that I had said and that I
had believed, were not so. He made me know, and I learned, straight
from Him, that our boy had not been taken from us forever as I had
said to myself so often since that telegram had come.

He is gone from this life, but he is waiting for us beyond this life.
He is waiting beyond this life and this world of wicked war and
wanton cruelty and slaughter. And we shall come, some day, his mother
and I, to the place where he is waiting for us, and we shall all be
as happy there as we were on this earth in the happy days before the
war.

My eyes will rest again upon his face. I will hear his fresh young
voice again as he sees me and cries out his greeting. I know what he
will say. He will spy me, and his voice will ring out as it used to
do. "Hello, Dad!" he will call, as he sees me. And I will feel the
grip of his young, strong arms about me, just as in the happy days
before that day that is of all the days of my life the most terrible
and the most hateful in my memory--the day when they told me that he
had been killed.

That is my belief. That is the comfort that God has given me in my
grief and my sorrow. There is a God. Ah, yes, there is a God! Times
there are, I know, when some of those who look upon the horrid
slaughter of this war, that is going on, hour by hour, feel that
their faith is being shaken by doubts. They think of the sacrifices,
of the blood that is being poured out, of the sufferings of women and
children. And they see the cause that is wrong and foul prospering,
for a little time, and they cannot understand.

"If there is a God," they whisper to themselves, "why does he permit
a thing so wicked to go on?"

But there is a God--there is! I have seen the stark horror of war. I
know, as none can know until he has seen it at close quarters, what a
thing war is as it is fought to-day. And I believe as I do believe,
and as I shall believe until the end, because I know God's comfort
and His grace. I know that my boy is surely waiting for me. In
America, now, there are mothers and fathers by the scores of
thousands who have bidden their sons good-by; who water their letters
from France with their tears--who turn white at the sight of a telegram
and tremble at the sudden clamor of a telephone. Ah, I know--I know!
I suffered as they are suffering! And I have this to tell them and to
beg them. They must believe as I believe--then shall they find the
peace and the comfort that I have found.

So it was that there, on the Clyde, John's mother and I came out of
the blackness of our first grief. We began to be able to talk to one
another. And every day we talked of John. We have never ceased to do
that, his mother and I. We never shall. We may not have him with us
bodily, but his spirit is never absent. And each day we remember some
new thing about him that one of us can call to the other's mind. And
it is as if, when we do that, we bring back some part of him out of
the void.

Little, trifling memories of when he was a baby, and when he was a
boy, growing up! And other memories, of later days. Often and often
it was the days that were furthest away that we remembered best of
all, and things connected with those days.

But I had small wish to see others. John's mother was enough for me.
She and the peace that was coming to me on the Clyde. I could not
bear to think of London. I had no plans to make. All that was over.
All that part of my life, I thought, had ended with the news of my
boy's death. I wanted no more than to stay at home on the Clyde and
think of him. My wife and I did not even talk about the future. And
no thing was further from all my thoughts than that I should ever
step upon a stage again.

What! Go out before an audience and seek to make it laugh? Sing my
songs when my heart was broken? I did not decide not to do it. I did
not so much as think of it as a thing I had to decide about.

CHAPTER IX

And then one thing and another brought the thought into my mind, so
that I had to face it and tell people how I felt about it. There were
neighbors, wanting to know when I would be about my work again. That
it was that first made me understand that others did not feel as I
was feeling.

"They're thinking I'll be going back to work again," I told John's
mother. "I canna'!"

She felt as I did. We could not see, either one of us, in our grief,
how anyone could think that I could begin again where I had left off.

"I canna'! I will not try!" I told her, again and again. "How can I
tak up again with that old mummery? How can I laugh when my heart is
breaking, and make others smile when the tears are in my eyes?"

And she thought as I did, that I could not, and that no one should be
asking me. The war had taken much of what I had earned, in one way or
another. I was not so rich as I had been, but there was enough. There
was no need for me to go back to work, so far as our living was
concerned. And so it seemed to be settled between us. Planning we
left for the future. It was no time for us to be making plans. It
mattered little enough to us what might be in store for us. We could
take things as they might come.

So we bided quiet in our home, and talked of John. And from every
part of the earth and from people in all walks and conditions of life
there began to pour in upon us letters and telegrams of sympathy and
sorrow. I think there were four thousand kindly folk who remembered
us in our sorrow, and let us know that they could think of us in
spite of all the other care and trouble that filled the world in
those days. Many celebrated names were signed to those letters and
telegrams, and there were many, too, from simple folk whose very
names I did not know, who told me that I had given them cheer and
courage from the stage, and so they felt that they were friends of
mine, and must let me know that they were sorry for the blow that had
befallen me.

Then it came out that I meant to leave the stage. They sent word from
London, at last, to ask when they might look for me to be back at the
Shaftesbury Theatre. And when they found what it was in my mind to do
all my friends began to plead with me and argue with me. They said it
was my duty to myself to go back.

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