A Minstrel In France
by
Harry Lauder
Part 5 out of 5
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.
Their faces, their deportments, may not have shown the change. But it
was in their hearts. They would not show it. Not they! But I have
talked with hundreds of men along the front. And it is my conviction
that they believe, one and all, that if they fall in battle they only
pass on to another. And what a comforting belief that is!
"It is that belief that makes us indifferent to danger and to death,"
a soldier said to me. "We fight in a righteous cause and a holy war.
God is not going to let everything end for us just because the mortal
life quits the shell we call the body. You may be sure of that."
And I am sure of it, indeed!
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