Between You and Me

by Sir Harry Lauder

"Harry," I've had them say to me, in wee toons in America, "ca' canny here. There's a muckle o' folk of German blood. Ye'll be hurtin' their feelings if you do not gang easy——"

It was a lee! I ne'er hurt the feelings o' a man o' German blood that was a decent body—and there were many and many o' them. There in America the many had to suffer for the sins of the few. I've had Germans come tae me wi' tears in their een and thank me for the way I talked and the way I was helping to win the war. They were the true Germans, the ones who'd left their native land because they cauldna endure the Hun any more than could the rest of the world when it came to know him.

But I couldna ha gone easy, had I known that I maun lose the support of thousands of folk for what I said. The truth as I'd seen it and knew it I had to tell. I've a muckle to say on that score.

CHAPTER XV

It was as great a surprise tae me as it could ha' been to anyone else when I discovered that I could move men and women by speakin' tae them. In the beginning, in Britain, I made speeches to help the recruiting. My boy John had gone frae the first, and through him I knew much about the army life, and the way of it in those days. Sae I began to mak' a bit speech, sometimes, after the show.

And then I organized my recruiting band—Hieland laddies, wha went up and doon the land, skirling the pipes and beating the drum. The laddies wad flock to hear them, and when they were brocht together so there was easy work for the sergeants who were wi' the band. There's something about the skirling of the pipes that fires a man's blood and sets his feet and his fingers and a' his body to tingling.

Whiles I'd be wi' the band masel'; whiles I'd be off elsewhere. But it got sae that it seemed I was being of use to the country, e'en though they'd no let me tak' a gun and ficht masel'. When I was in America first, after the war began, America was still neutral. I was ne'er one o' those who blamed America and President Wilson for that. It was no ma business to do sae. He was set in authority in that country, and the responsibility and the authority were his. They were foolish Britons, and they risked much, who talked against the President of the United States in yon days.

I keened a' the time that America wad tak' her stand on the side o' the richt when the time came. And when it came at last I was glad o' the chance to help, as I was allowed tae do. I didna speak sae muckle in favor of recruiting; it was no sae needfu' in America as it had been in Britain, for in America there was conscription frae the first. In America they were wise in Washington at the verra beginning. They knew the history of the war in Britain, and they were resolved to profit by oor mistakes.

But what was needed, and sair needed, in America, was to mak' people who were sae far awa' frae the spectacle o' war as the Hun waged it understand what it meant. I'd been in France when I came back to America in the autumn o' 1917. My boy was in France still; I'd knelt beside his grave, hard by the Bapaume road. I'd seen the wilderness of that country in Picardy and Flanders. We'd pushed the Hun back frae a' that country I'd visited—I'd seen Vimy Ridge, and Peronne, and a' the other places.

I told what I'd seen. I told the way the Hun worked. And I spoke for the Liberty Loans and the other drives they were making to raise money in America—the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Salvation Army, the Knights of Columbus, and a score of others. I knew what it was like, over yonder in France, and I could tell American faithers and mithers what their boys maun see and do when the great transports took them oversea.