There was a song for me in that last act that was the great song in London that season. I have sung it all over America since then "The Laddies Who Fought and Won." It has been successful everywhere—that song has been one of the most popular I have ever sung. But it was a cruel song for me to sing that night!
It was the climax of the last act and of the whole piece. In "Three Cheers" soldiers were brought on each night to be on the stage behind me when I sang that song. They were from the battalion of the Scots Guards in London, and they were real soldiers, in uniform. Different men were used each night, and the money that was paid to the Tommies for their work went into the company fund of the men who appeared, and helped to provide them with comforts and luxuries. And the war office was glad of the arrangement, too, for it was a great song to stimulate recruiting.
There were two lines in the refrain that I shall never forget. And it was when I came to those two lines that night that I did, indeed, break down. Here they are:
"When we all gather round the old fireside
And the fond mother kisses her son—"
Were they not cruel words for me to have to sing, who knew that his mother could never kiss my son again? They brought it all back to me! My son was gone—he would never come back with the laddies who had fought and won!
For a moment I could not go on. I was choking. The tears were in my Eyes, and my throat was choked with sobs. But the music went on, and the chorus took up the song, and between the singers and the orchestra they covered the break my emotion had made. And in a little space I was able to go on with the next verse, and to carry on until my part in the show was done for the night. But I still wondered how it was that they had not had to ring down the curtain upon me, and that Tom Valiance and the others had been right and I the one that was wrong!
Ah, weel, I learned that night what many and many another Briton had learned, both at home and in France—that you can never know what you can do until you have to find it out! Yon was the hardest task ever I had to undertake, but for my boy's sake, and because they had made me understand that it was what he would have wanted me to do, I got through with it.
They rose to me again, and cheered and cheered, after I had finished singing "The Laddies Who Fought and Won." And there were those who called to me for a speech, but so much I had to deny them, good though they had been to me, and much as I loved them for the way they had received me. I had no words that night to thank them, and I could not have spoken from that stage had my life depended upon it. I could only get through, after my poor fashion, with my part in the show.
But the next night I did pull myself together, and I was able to say a few words to the audience—thanks that were simply and badly put, it may be, but that came from the bottom of my overflowing heart.