Up to that time I had thought I knew a good deal about the war. I had
had much news from my boy. I had talked, I think, to as many returned
soldiers as any man in Britain. I had seen much of the backwash and
the wretched aftermath of war. Ah, yes, I thought I knew more than
most folk did of what war meant! But until my tour began, as I see
now, easily enough, I knew nothing--literally nothing at all!
There are towns and ports in Britain that are military areas. One may
not enter them except upon business, the urgency of which has been
established to the satisfaction of the military authorities. One must
have a permit to live in them, even if they be one's home town. These
towns are vital to the war and its successful prosecution.
Until one has seen a British port of embarkation in this war one has
no real beginning, even, of a conception of the task the war has
imposed upon Britain. It was so with me, I know, and since then other
men have told me the same thing. There the army begins to pour into
the funnel, so to speak, that leads to France and the front. There
all sorts of lines are brought together, all sorts of scattered
activities come to a focus. There is incessant activity, day and
night.
It was from Folkestone, on the southeast coast, that the Reverend
Harry Lauder, M.P. Tour was to embark. And we reached Folkestone on
June 7, 1917.
Folkestone, in time of peace, was one of the greatest of the Southern
watering places. It is a lovely spot. Great hotels line the Leas, a
glorious promenade, along the top of chalk cliffs, that looks out
over the Channel. In the distance one fancies one may see the coast
of France, beyond the blue water.
There is green grass everywhere behind the beach. Folkestone has a
miniature harbor, that in time of peace gave shelter to the fishing
fleet and to the channel steamers that plied to and from Boulogne, in
France. The harbor is guarded by stone jetties. It has been greatly
enlarged now--so has all Folkestone, for that matter. But I am
remembering the town as it was in peace!
There was no pleasanter and kindlier resort along that coast. The
beach was wonderful, and all summer long it attracted bathers and
children at play. Bathing machines lined the beach, of course, within
the limits of the town; those queer, old, clumsy looking wagons, with
a dressing cabin on wheels, that were drawn up and down according to
the tide, so that bathers might enter the water from them directly.
There, as in most British towns, women bathed at one part of the
beach, men at the other, and all in the most decorous and modest of
costumes.
But at Folkestone, in the old days of peace, about a mile from the
town limits, there was another stretch of beach where all the gay
folk bathed--men and women together. And there the costumes were such
as might be seen at Deauville or Ostend, Etretat or Trouville. Highly
they scandalized the good folk of Folkestone, to be sure--but little
was said, and nothing was done, for, after all those were the folk
who spent the money! They dressed in white tents that gleamed against
the sea, and a pretty splash of color they made on a bright day for
the soberer folk to go and watch, as they sat on the low chalk cliffs
above them!
Gone--gone! Such days have passed for Folkestone! They will no doubt
come again--but when? When?
June the seventh! Folkestone should have been gay for the beginning
of the onset of summer visitors. Sea bathing should just have been
beginning to be attractive, as the sun warmed the sea and the beach.
But when we reached the town war was over all. Men in uniform were
everywhere. Warships lay outside the harbor. Khaki and guns, men
trudging along, bearing the burdens of war, motor trucks, rushing
ponderously along, carrying ammunition and food, messengers on
motorcycles, sounding to all traffic that might be in the way the
clamorous summons to clear the path--those were the sights we saw!
How hopelessly confused it all seemed! I could not believe that there
was order in the chaos that I saw. But that was because the key to
all that bewildering activity was not in my possession.
Every man had his appointed task. He was a cog in the greatest
machine the world has ever seen. He knew just what he was to do, and
how much time had been allowed for the performance of his task. It
was assumed he would not fail. The British army makes that
assumption, and it is warranted.
I hear praise, even from men who hate the Hun as I hate him, for the
superb military organization of the German army. They say the
Kaiser's people may well take pride in that. But I say that I am
prouder of what Britain and the new British army that has come into
being since this war began have done than any German has a right to
be! They spent forty-four years in making ready for a war they knew
they meant, some day, to fight. We had not had, that day that I first
saw our machine really functioning, as many months for preparation as
they had had years. And yet we were doing our part.
We had had to build and prepare while we helped our ally, France, to
hold off that gray horde that had swept down so treacherously through
Belgium from the north and east. It was as if we had organized and
trained and equipped a fire brigade while the fire was burning, and
while our first devoted fighters sought to keep it in check with
water buckets. And they did! They did! The water buckets served while
the hose was made, and the mains were laid, and the hydrants set in
place, and the trained firemen were made ready to take up the task.
And, now that I had come to Folkestone, now that I was seeing the
results of all the labor that had been performed, the effect of all
the prodigies of organization, I began to know what Lord Kitchener
and those who had worked with him had done. System ruled everything
at Folkestone. Nothing, it seemed to me, as officers explained as
much as they properly could, had been left to chance. Here was order
indeed.
In the air above us airplanes flew to and fro. They circled about
like great, watchful hawks. They looped and whirled around, cutting
this way and that, circling always. And I knew that, as they flew
about outside the harbor the men in them were never off their guard;
that they were peering down, watching every moment for the first
trace of a submarine that might have crept through the more remote
defenses of the Channel. Let a submarine appear--its shrift would be
short indeed!
There, above, waited the airplanes. And on the surface of the sea
sinister destroyers darted about as watchful as the flyers above,
ready for any emergency that might arise. I have no doubt that
submarines of our own lurked below, waiting, too, to do their part.
But those, if any there were, I did not see. And one asks no
questions at a place like Folkestone. I was glad of any information
an officer might voluntarily give me. But it was not for me or any
other loyal Briton to put him in the position of having to refuse to
answer.
Soon a great transport was pointed out to me, lying beside the jetty.
Gangplanks were down, and up them streams of men in khaki moved
endlessly. Up they went, in an endless brown river, to disappear into
the ship. The whole ship was a very hive of activity. Not only men
were going aboard, but supplies of every sort; boxes of ammunition,
stores, food. And I understood, and was presently to see, that beyond
her sides there was the same ordered scene as prevailed on shore.
Every man knew his task; the stowing away of everything that was
being carried aboard was being carried out systematically and with
the utmost possible economy of time and effort.
"That's the ship you will cross the Channel on," I was told. And I
regarded her with a new interest. I do not know what part she had
been wont to play in time of peace; what useful, pleasant journeys it
had been her part to complete, I only knew that she was to carry me
to France, and to the place where my heart was and for a long time
had been. Me--and two thousand men who were to be of real use over
there!
We were nearly the last to go on board. We found the decks swarming
with men. Ah, the braw laddies! They smoked and they laughed as they
settled themselves for the trip. Never a one looked as though he
might be sorry to be there. They were leaving behind them all the
good things, all the pleasant things, of life as, in time of peace,
every one of them had learned to live it and to know it. Long, long
since had the last illusion faded of the old days when war had seemed
a thing of pomp and circumstance and glory.
They knew well, those boys, what it was they faced. Hard, grinding
work they could look forward to doing; such work as few of them had
ever known in the old days. Death and wounds they could reckon upon
as the portion of just about so many of them. There would be bitter
cold, later, in the trenches, and mud, and standing for hours in icy
mud and water. There would be hard fare, and scanty, sometimes, when
things went wrong. There would be gas attacks, and the bursting of
shells about them with all sorts of poisons in them. Always there
would be the deadliest perils of these perilous days.
But they sang as they set out upon the great adventure of their
lives. They smiled and laughed. They cheered me, so that the tears
started from my eyes, when they saw me, and they called the gayest of
gay greetings, though they knew that I was going only for a little
while, and that many of them had set foot on British soil for the
last time. The steady babble of their voices came to our ears, and
they swarmed below us like ants as they disposed themselves about the
decks, and made the most of the scanty space that was allowed for
them. The trip was to be short, of course; there were too few ships,
and the problems of convoy were too great, to make it possible to
make the voyage a comfortable one. It was a case of getting them over
as might best be arranged.
A word of command rang out and was passed around by officers and non
coms.
"Life belts must be put on before the ship sails!"
That simple order brought home the grim facts of war at that moment as
scarcely anything else could have done. Here was a grim warning of the
peril that lurked outside. Everywhere men were scurrying to obey--I
among the rest. The order applied as much to us civilians as it did to
any of the soldiers. And my belt did not fit, and was hard, extremely
hard, for me to don. I could no manage it at all by myself, but Adam
and Hogge had had an easier time with theirs, and they came to my help.
Among us we got mine on, and Hogge stood off, and looked at me,
and smiled.
"An extraordinary effect, Harry!" he said, with a smile. "I declare--
it gives you the most charming embonpoint!"
I had my doubts about his use of the word charming. I know that I
should not have cared to have anyone judge of my looks from a picture
taken as I looked then, had one been taken.
But it was not a time for such thoughts. For a civilian, especially,
and one not used to journeys in such times as these, there is a
thrill and a solemnity about the donning of a life preserver. I felt
that I was indeed, it might be, taking a risk in making this journey,
and it was an awesome thought that I, too, might have seen my native
land for the last time, and said a real good-by to those whom I had
left behind me.
Now we cast off, and began to move, and a thrill ran through me such
as I had never known before in all my life. I went to the rail as we
turned our nose toward the open sea. A destroyer was ahead, another
was beside us, others rode steadily along on either side. It was the
most reassuring of sights to see them. They looked so business like,
so capable. I could not imagine a Hun submarine as able to evade
their watchfulness. And moreover, there were the watchful man birds
above us, the circling airplanes, that could make out, so much better
than could any lookout on a ship, the first trace of the presence of
a tin fish. No--I was not afraid! I trusted in the British navy,
which had guarded the sea lane so well that not a man had lost his
life as the result of a Hun attack, although many millions had gone
back and forth to France since the beginning of the war.
I did not stay with my own party. I preferred to move about among the
Soldiers. I was deeply interested in them, as I have always been. And
I wanted to make friends among them, and see how they felt.
"Lor' lumme--its old 'Arry Lauder!" said one cockney. "God bless you,
'Arry--many's the time I've sung with you in the 'alls. It's good to
see you with us!"
And so I was greeted everywhere. Man after man crowded around me to
shake hands. It brought a lump into my throat to be greeted so, and
it made me more than ever glad that the military authorities had been
able to see their way to grant my request. It confirmed my belief
that I was going where I might be really useful to the men who were
ready and willing to make the greatest of all sacrifices in the cause
so close to all our hearts.
When I first went aboard the transport I picked up a little gold
stripe. It was one of those men wear who have been wounded, as a
badge of honor. I hoped I might be able to find the man who had lost
it, and return it to him. But none of them claimed it, and I have
kept it, to this day, as a souvenir of that voyage.
It was easy for them to know me. I wore my kilt and my cap, and my
knife in my stocking, as I have always done, on the stage, and nearly
always off it as well. And so they recognized me without difficulty.
And never a one called me anything but Harry--except when it was
'Arry! I think I would be much affronted if ever a British soldier
called me Mr. Lauder. I don't know--because not one of them ever did,
and I hope none ever will!
They told me that there were men from the Highlands on board, and I
went looking for them, and found them after a time, though going
about that ship, so crowded she was, was no easy matter. They were
Gordon Highlanders, mostly, I found, and they were glad to see me,
and made me welcome, and I had a pipe with them, and a good talk.
Many of them were going back, after having been at home, recuperating
from wounds. And they and the new men too were all eager and anxious
to be put there and at work.
"Gie us a chance at the Huns--it's all we're asking," said one of a
new draft. "They're telling us they don't like the sight of our
kilts, Harry, and that a Hun's got less stomach for the cold steel of
a bayonet than for anything else on earth. Weel--we're carrying a
dose of it for them!"
And the men who had been out before, and were taking back with them
the scars they had earned, were just as anxious as the rest. That was
the spirit of every man on board. They did not like war as war, but
they knew that this was a war that must be fought to the finish, and
never a man of them wanted peace to come until Fritz had learned his
lesson to the bottom of Lie last grim page.
I never heard a word of the danger of meeting a submarine. The idea
that one might send a torpedo after us popped into my mind once or
twice, but when it did I looked out at the destroyers, guarding us,
and the airplanes above, and I felt as safe as if I had been in bed
in my wee hoose at Dunoon. It was a true highway of war that those
whippets of the sea had made the Channel crossing.
Ahm, but I was proud that day of the British navy! It is a great task
that it has performed, and nobly it has done it. And it was proud and
glad I was again when we sighted land, as we soon did, and I knew
that I was gazing, for the first time since war had been declared,
upon the shores of our great ally, France. It was the great day and
the proud day and the happy day for me!
I was near the realizing of an old dream I had often had. I was with
the soldiers who had my love and my devotion, and I was coming to
France--the France that every Scotchman learns to love at his
mother's breast.
A stir ran through the men. Orders began to fly, and I went back to
my place and my party. Soon we would be ashore, and I would be in the
way of beginning the work I had come to do.
[ILLUSTRATION: Harry Lauder preserves the bonnet of his son, brought
to him from where the lad fell. "The memory of his boy, it is almost
his religion." (See Lauder05.jpg)]
[ILLUSTRATION: A tatter of plaid of the Black Watch on a wire of a
German entanglement barely suggests the hell the Scotch troops have
gone through. (See Lauder06.jpg)]