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!