"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.