A Minstrel in France

by Sir Harry Lauder

Captain Godfrey, absolute though his power over us was—he could have ordered us all home at a moment's notice—turned out to be a delightful young officer, who did everything in his power to make our way smooth and pleasant, and who was certainly as good a manager as I ever had or ever expect to have. He entered into the spirit of our tour, and it was plain to see that it would be a success from start to finish if it were within his power to make it so. He liked to call himself my manager, and took a great delight, indeed, in the whole experience. Well, it was a change for him, no doubt!

I had brought a piano with me, but no accompanist. That was not an oversight; it was a matter of deliberate choice. I had been told, before I left home, that I would have no difficulty in finding some one among the soldiers to accompany me. And that was true, as I soon found. In fact, as I was to learn later, I could have recruited a full orchestra among the Tommies, and I would have had in my band, too, musicians of fame and great ability, far above the average theater orchestra. Oh, you must go to France to learn how every art and craft in Britain has done its part!

Aye, every sort of artist and artisan, men of every profession and trade, can be found in the British army. It has taken them all, like some great melting pot, and made them soldiers. I think, indeed, there is no calling that you could name that would not yield you a master hand from the ranks of the British army. And I am not talking of the officers alone, but of the great mass of Tommies. And so when I told Captain Godfrey I would be needing a good pianist to play my accompaniments, he just smiled.

"Right you are!" he said. "We'll turn one up for you in no time!"

He had no doubts at all, and he was right. They found a lad called Johnson, a Yorkshireman, in a convalescent ward of one of the big hospitals. He was recovering from an illness he had incurred in the trenches, and was not quite ready to go back to active duty. But he was well enough to play for me, and delighted when he heard he might get the assignment. He was nervous lest he should not please me, and feared I might ask for another man. But when I ran over with him the songs I meant to sing I found he played the piano very well indeed, and had a knack for accompanying, too. There are good pianists, soloists, who are not good accompanists; it takes more than just the ability to play the piano to work with a singer, and especially with a singer like me. It is no straight ahead singing I do always, as you ken, perhaps.

But I saw at once that Johnson and I would get along fine together, so everyone was pleased, and I went on and made my preparations with him for my first concert. That was to be in the Boulogne Casino— center of the gayety of the resort in the old days, but now, for a long time, turned into a base hospital.

They had played for high stakes there in the old days before the war. Thousands of dollars had changed hands in an hour there. But they were playing for higher stakes now! They were playing for the lives and the health of men, and the hearts of the women at home in Britain who were bound up with them. In the old days men had staked their money against the turn of a card or the roll of the wheel. But now it was with Death they staked—and it was a mightier game than those old walls had ever seen before.

The largest ward of the hospital was in what had been the Baccarat room, and it was there I held my first concert of the trench engagement. When I appeared it was packed full. There were men on cots, lying still and helpless, bandaged to their very eyes. Some came limping in on their crutches; some were rolled in in chairs. It was a sad scene and an impressive one, and it went to my heart when I thought that my own poor laddie must have lain in just such a room— in this very one, perhaps. He had suffered as these men were suffering, and he had died—as some of these men for whom I was to sing would die. For there were men here who would be patched up, presently, and would go back. And for them there might be a next time—a next time when they would need no hospital.

There was one thing about the place I liked. It was so clean and white and spotless. All the garish display, the paint and tawdry finery, of the old gambling days, had gone. It was restful, now, and though there was the hospital smell, it was a clean smell. And the men looked as though they had wonderful care. Indeed, I knew they had that; I knew that everything that could be done to ease their state was being done. And every face I saw was brave and cheerful, though the skin of many and many a lad was stretched tight over his bones with the pain he had known, and there was a look in their eyes, a look with no repining in it, or complaint, but with the evidences of a terrible pain, bravely suffered, that sent the tears starting to my eyes more than once.

It was much as it had been in the many hospitals I had visited in Britain, and yet it was different, too. I felt that I was really at the front. Later I came to realize how far from the real front I actually was at Boulogne, but then I knew no better.