A Minstrel in France

by Sir Harry Lauder

They were hard at work. Their work, it seemed, never came to an end or even to a pause. The orders rang out, in a sort of sing-song voice. After each shot a man who sat with a telephone strapped about his head called out corrections of the range, in figures that were just a meaningless jumble to me, although they made sense to the men who listened and changed the pointing of the guns at each order.

[ILLUSTRATION: Capt. John Lauder and Comrades Before The Trenches In
France (See Lauder07.jpg)]

Their faces, that, like their bare backs and chests, looked like tanned leather, were all grimy from their work among the smoke and the gases. And through the grime the sweat had run down like little rivers making courses for themselves in the soft dirt of a hillside. They looked grotesque enough, but there was nothing about them to make me feel like laughing, I can tell you! And they all grinned amiably when the amazed and disconcerted Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour came tumbling in among them. We all felt right at hame at once— and I the more so when a chap I had met and come to know well in Toronto during one of my American tours came over and gripped my hand.

"Aye, but it's good to see your face, Harry!" he said, as he made me welcome.

This battery had done great work ever since it had come out. No battery in the whole army had a finer record, I was told. And no one needed to tell me the tale of its losses. Not far away there was a little cemetery, filled with doleful little crosses, set up over mounds that told their grim story all too plainly and too eloquently.

The battery had gone through the Battle of Vimy Ridge and made a great name for itself. And now it was set down upon a spot that had seen some of the very bloodiest of the fighting on that day. I saw here, for the first time, some of the most horrible things that the war holds. There was a little stream, as I said, that ran through the hollow in which the battery was placed, and that stream had been filled with blood, not water, on the day of the battle.

Everywhere, here, were whitened bones of men. In the wild swirling of the battle, and the confusion of digging in and meeting German counter attacks that had followed it, it had not been possible to bury all the dead. And so the whitened bones remained, though the elements had long since stripped them bare. The elements—and the hungry rats. These are not pretty things to tell, but they are true, and the world should know what war is to-day.

I almost trod upon one skeleton that remained complete. It was that of a huge German soldier—a veritable giant of a man, he must have been. The bones of his feet were still encased in his great boots, their soles heavily studded with nails. Even a few shreds of his uniform remained. But the flesh was all gone. The sun and the rats and the birds had accounted for the last morsel of it.

Hundreds of years from now, I suppose, the bones that were strewn along that ground will still be being turned up by plows. The generations to come who live there will never lack relics of the battle, and of the fighting that preceded and followed it. They will find bones, and shell cases, and bits of metal of all sorts. Rusty bayonets will be turned up by their plowshares; strange coins, as puzzling as some of those of Roman times that we in Britain have found, will puzzle them. Who can tell how long it will be before the soil about Vimy Ridge will cease to give up its relics?

That ground had been searched carefully for everything that might conceivably be put to use again, or be made fit for further service. The British army searches every battlefield so in these days. And yet, when I was there, many weeks after the storm of fighting had passed on, and when the scavengers had done their work, the ground was still rather thickly strewn with odds and ends that interested me vastly. I might have picked up much more than I did. But I could not carry so very much, and, too, so many of the things brought grisly thoughts to my mind! God knows I needed no reminders of the war! I had a reminder in my heart, that never left me. Still, I took some few things, more for the sake of the hame folks, who might not see, and would, surely, be interested. I gathered some bayonets for my collection—somehow they seemed the things I was most willing to take along. One was British, one German—two were French.