A Minstrel in France

by Sir Harry Lauder

So I was thinking as I set out to talk to my American friends and beg them to prepare—prepare! I did not want to see this country share the experience of Britain. If she needs must be drawn into the war— and so I believed, profoundly, from the time when I first learned the true measure of the Hun—I hoped that she might be ready when she drew her mighty sword.

They thought I was mad, at first, many of those to whom I talked. They were so far away from the war. And already the propaganda of the Germans was at work. Aye, they thought I was raving when I told them I'd stake my word on it. America would never be able to stay out until the end. They listened to me. They were willing to do that. But they listened, doubtingly. I think I convinced few of ought save that I believed myself what I was saying.

I could tell them, do you ken, that I'd thought, at first, as they did! Why, over yon, in Australia, when I'd first heard that the Germans were attacking France, I was sorry, for France is a bonnie land. But the idea that Britain might go in I, even then, had laughed at. And then Britain had gone in! My own boy had gone to the war. For all I knew I might be reading of him, any day, when I read of a charge or a fight over there in France! Anything was possible—aye, probable!

I have never called myself a prophet. But then, I think, I had something of a prophet's vision. And all the time I was struggling with my growing belief that this was to be a long war, and a merciless war. I did not want to believe some of the things I knew I must believe. But every day came news that made conviction sink in deeper and yet deeper.

It was not a happy trip, that one across the United States. Our friends did all they could to make it so, but we were consumed by too many anxieties and cares. How different was it from my journey westward—only nine months earlier! The world had changed forever in those nine months.

Everywhere I spoke for preparedness. I addressed the Rotary Clubs, and great audiences turned out to listen to me. I am a Rotarian myself, and I am proud indeed that I may so proclaim myself. It is a great organization. Those who came to hear me were cordial, nearly always. But once or twice I met hostility, veiled but not to be mistaken. And it was easy to trace it to its source. Germans, who loved the country they had left behind them to come to a New World that offered them a better home and a richer life than they could ever have aspired to at home, were often at the bottom of the opposition to what I had to say.

They did not want America to prepare, lest her weight be flung into the scale against Germany. And there were those who hated Britain. Some of these remembered old wars and grudges that sensible folk had forgotten long since; others, it may be, had other motives. But there was little real opposition to what I had to say. It was more a good natured scoffing, and a feeling that I was cracked a wee bit, perhaps, about the war.

I was not sorry to see New York again. We stayed there but one day, and then sailed for home on the Cunarder Orduna—which has since been sunk, like many another good ship, by the Hun submarines.

But those were the days just before the Hun began his career of real frightfulness upon the sea—and under it. Even the Hun came gradually to the height of his powers in this war. It was not until some weeks later that he startled the world by proclaiming that every ship that dared to cross a certain zone of the sea would be sunk without warning.

When we sailed upon the old Orduna we had anxieties, to be sure.
The danger of striking a mine was never absent, once we neared the
British coasts. There was always the chance, we knew, that some
German raider might have slipped through the cordon in the North Sea.
But the terrors that were to follow the crime of the Lusitania still
lay in the future. They were among the things no man could foresee.