A Minstrel in France

by Sir Harry Lauder

I had chosen my programme carefully. It was made up of songs altogether. I had had enough experience in hospitals and camps by now to have learned what soldiers liked best, and I had no doubt at all that it was just songs. And best of all they liked the old love songs, and the old songs of Scotland—tender, crooning melodies, that would help to carry them back, in memory, to their hames and, if they had them, to the lassies of their dreams. It was no sad, lugubrious songs they wanted. But a note of wistful tenderness they liked. That was true of sick and wounded, and of the hale and hearty too—and it showed that, though they were soldiers, they were just humans like the rest of us, for all the great and super-human things they ha' done out there in France.

Not every actor and artist who has tried to help in the hospitals has fully understood the men he or she wanted to please. They meant well, every one, but some were a wee bit unfortunate in the way they went to work. There is a story that is told of one of our really great serious actors. He is serious minded, always, on the stage and off, and very, very dignified. But some folk went to him and asked him would he no do his bit to cheer up the puir laddies in a hospital?

He never thought of refusing—and I would no have you think I am sneering at the man! His intentions were of the best.

"Of course, I do not sing or dance," he said, drawing down his lip. And the look in his eyes showed what he thought of such of us as had descended to such low ways of pleasing the public that paid to see us and to hear us: "But I shall very gladly do something to bring a little diversion into the sad lives of the poor boys in the hospitals."

It was a stretcher audience that he had. That means a lot of boys who had to lie in bed to hear him. They needed cheering. And that great actor, with all his good intentions could think of nothing more fitting than to stand up before them and begin to recite, in a sad, elocutionary tone, Longfellow's "The Wreck of the Hesperus!"

He went on, and his voice gained power. He had come to the third stanza, or the fourth, maybe, when a command rang out through the ward. It was one that had been heard many and many a time in France, along the trenches. It came from one of the beds.

"To cover, men!" came the order.

It rang out through the ward, in a hoarse voice. And on the word every man's head popped under the bedclothes! And the great actor, astonished beyond measure, was left there, reciting away to shaking mounds of bedclothes that entrenched his hearers from the sound of his voice!

Well, I had heard yon tale. I do no think I should ever have risked a similar fate by making the same sort of mistake, but I profited by hearing it, and I always remembered it. And there was another thing. I never thought, when I was going to sing for soldiers, that I was doing something for them that should make them glad to listen to me, no matter what I chose to sing for them.

I always thought, instead, that here was an audience that had paid to hear me in the dearest coin in all the world—their legs and arms, their health and happiness. Oh, they had paid! They had not come in on free passes! Their tickets had cost them dear—dearer than tickets for the theater had ever cost before. I owed them more than I could ever pay—my own future, and my freedom, and the right and the chance to go on living in my own country free from the threat and the menace of the Hun. It was for me to please those boys when I sang for them, and to make such an effort as no ordinary audience had ever heard from me.