A Minstrel in France

by Sir Harry Lauder

I was to give a concert for this battery, and I felt that it was time, now, for it to begin. I could see, too, that the men were growing a bit impatient. And so I said that I was ready.

"Then come along to our theater," said the major, and grinned at my look of astonishment.

"Oh, we've got a real amphitheater for you, such as the Greeks used for the tragedies of Sophocles!" he said. "There it is!"

He had not stretched the truth. It was a superb theater—a great, crater-like hole in the ground. Certainly it was as well ventilated a show house as you could hope for, and I found, when the time came, that the acoustics were splendid. I went down into the middle of the hole, with Hogge and Adam, who had become part of my company, and the soldiers grouped themselves about its rim.

Before we left Boulogne a definite programme had been laid out for the Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour. We had decided that we would get better results by adopting a programme and sticking to it at all our meetings or concerts. So, at all the assemblies that we gathered, Hogge opened proceedings by talking to the men about pensions, the subject in which he was so vitally interested, and in which he had done and was doing such magnificent work. Adam would follow him with a talk about the war and its progress.

He was a splendid speaker, was Adam. He had all the eloquence of the fine preacher that he was, but he did not preach to the lads in the trenches—not he! He told them about the war, and about the way the folks at hame in Britain were backing them up. He talked about war loans and food conservation, and made them understand that it was not they alone who were doing the fighting. It was a cheering and an inspiring talk he gave them, and he got good round applause wherever he spoke.

They saved me up for the last, and when Adam had finished speaking either he or Hogge would introduce me, and my singing would begin. That was the programme we had arranged for the Hole-in-the-Ground Theater, as the Canadians called their amphitheater. For this performance, of course, I had no piano. Johnson and the wee instrument were back where we had left the motor cars, and so I just had to sing without an accompaniment—except that which the great booming of the guns was to furnish me.

I was afraid at first that the guns would bother me. But as I listened to Hogge and Adam I ceased, gradually, to notice them at all, and I soon felt that they would annoy me no more, when it was my turn to go on, than the chatter of a bunch of stage hands in the wings of a theater had so often done.

When it was my turn I began with "Roamin' In the Gloamin'." The verse went well, and I swung into the chorus. I had picked the song to open with because I knew the soldiers were pretty sure to know it, and so would join me in the chorus—which is something I always want them to do. And these were no exceptions to the general rule. But, just as I got into the chorus, the tune of the guns changed. They had been coughing and spitting intermittently, but now, suddenly, it seemed to me that it was as if someone had kicked the lid off the fireworks factory and dropped a lighted torch inside.

Every gun in the battery around the hole began whanging away at once. I was jumpy and nervous, I'll admit, and it was all I could do to hold to the pitch and not break the time. I thought all of Von Hindenburg's army must be attacking us, and, from the row and din, I judged he must have brought up some of the German navy to help, instead of letting it lie in the Kiel canal where the British fleet could not get at it. I never heard such a terrific racket in all my days.