"Wounded and in hospital!"
That might have meant anything. And for a whole week that was all we knew. To hope for word more definite until—and unless—John himself could send us a message, appeared to be hopeless. Every effort we made ended in failure. And, indeed, at such a time, private inquiries could not well be made. The messages that had to do with the war and with the business of the armies had to be dealt with first.
But at last, after a week in which his mother and I almost went mad with anxiety, there came a note from our laddie himself. He told us not to fret—that all that ailed him was that his nose was split and his wrist bashed up a bit! His mother looked at me and I at her. It seemed bad enough to us! But he made light of his wounds—aye, and he was right! When I thought of men I'd seen in hospitals—men with wounds so frightful that they may not be told of—I rejoiced that John had fared so well.
And I hoped, too, that his wounds would bring him home to us—to Blighty, as the Tommies were beginning to call Britain. But his wounds were not serious enough for that and so soon as they were healed, he went back to the trenches.
"Don't worry about me," he wrote to us. "Lots of fellows out here have been wounded five and six times, and don't think anything of it. I'll be all right so long as I don't get knocked out."
He didn't tell us then that it was the bursting of a shell that gave him his first wounded stripe. But he wrote to us regularly again, and there were scarcely any days in which a letter did not come either to me or to his mother. When one of those breaks did come it was doubly hard to bear now.
For now we knew what it was to dread the sight of a telegraph messenger. Few homes in Britain there are that do not share that knowledge now. It is by telegraph, from the war office, that bad news comes first. And so, with the memory of that first telegram that we had had, matters were even worse, somehow, than they had been before. For me the days and nights dragged by as if they would never pass.
There was more news in John's letters now. We took some comfort from that. I remember one in which he told his mother how good a bed he had finally made for himself the night before. For some reason he was without quarters—either a billet or a dug-out. He had to skirmish around, for he did not care to sleep simply in Flanders mud. But at last he found two handfuls of straw, and with them made his couch.
"I got a good two hours' sleep," he wrote to his mother. "And I was perfectly comfortable. I can tell you one thing, too, Mother. If I ever get home after this experience, there'll be one in the house who'll never grumble! This business puts the grumbling out of your head. This is where the men are. This is where every man ought to be."
In another letter he told us that nine of his men had been killed.
"We buried them last night," he wrote, "just as the sun went down. It was the first funeral I have ever attended. It was most impressive. We carried the boys to one huge grave. The padre said a prayer, and we lowered the boys into the ground, and we all sang a little hymn: 'Peace, Perfect Peace!' Then I called my men to attention again, and we marched straight back into the trenches, each of us, I dare say, wondering who would be the next."
John was promoted for the second time in Flanders. He was a captain, having got his step on the field of battle. Promotion came swiftly in those days to those who proved themselves worthy. And all of the few reports that came to us of John showed us that he was a good officer. His men liked him, and trusted him, and would follow him anywhere. And little more than that can be said of any officer.
While Captain John Lauder was playing his part across the Channel, I was still trying to do what I could at home. My band still travelled up and down, the length and width of the United Kingdom, skirling and drumming and drawing men by the score to the recruiting office.
There was no more talk now of a short war. We knew what we were in for now.
But there was no thought or talk of anything save victory. Let the war go on as long as it must—it could end only in one way. We had been forced into the fight—but we were in, and we were in to stay. John, writing from France, was no more determined than those at home.
It was not very long before there came again a break in John's letters. We were used to the days—far apart—that brought no word. Not until the second day and the third day passed without a word, did Mrs. Lauder and I confess our terrors and our anxiety to ourselves and one another. This time our suspense was comparatively short-lived. Word came that John was in hospital again—at the Duke of Westminster's hospital at Le Toquet, in France. This time he was not wounded; he was suffering from dysentery, fever and—a nervous breakdown. That was what staggered his mother and me. A nervous breakdown! We could not reconcile the John we knew with the idea that the words conveyed to us. He had been high strung, to be sure, and sensitive. But never had he been the sort of boy of whom to expect a breakdown so severe as this must be if they had sent him to the hospital.
We could only wait to hear from him, however. And it was several weeks before he was strong enough to be able to write to us. There was no hint of discouragement in what he wrote then. On the contrary, he kept on trying to reassure us, and if he ever grew downhearted, he made it his business to see that we did not suspect it. Here is one of his letters—like most of them it was not about himself.
"I had a sad experience yesterday," he wrote to me. "It was the first day I was able to be out of bed, and I went over to a piano in a corner against the wall, sat down, and began playing very softly, more to myself than anything else.
"One of the nurses came to me, and said a Captain Webster, of the Gordon Highlanders, who lay on a bed in the same ward, wanted to speak to me. She said he had asked who was playing, and she had told him Captain Lauder—Harry Lauder's son. 'Oh,' he said, 'I know Harry Lauder very well. Ask Captain Lauder to come here?'
"This man had gone through ten operations in less than a week. I thought perhaps my playing had disturbed him, but when I went to his bedside, he grasped my hand, pressed it with what little strength he had left, and thanked me. He asked me if I could play a hymn. He said he would like to hear 'Lead, Kindly Light.'
"So I went back to the piano and played it as softly and as gently as I could. It was his last request. He died an hour later. I was very glad I was able to soothe his last moments a little. I am very glad now I learned the hymn at Sunday School as a boy."
[ILLUSTRATION: "'Carry On!' were the last words of my boy, CaptainJohn Lauder, to his men, but he would mean them for me, too." (SeeLauder03.jpg)]
Soon after we received that letter there came what we could not but think great news. John was ordered home! He was invalided, to be sure, and I warned his mother that she must be prepared for a shock when she saw him. But no matter how ill he was, we would have our lad with us for a space. And for that much British fathers and mothers had learned to be grateful.
I had warned John's mother, but it was I who was shocked when I saw him first on the day he came back to our wee hoose at Dunoon. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes very bright, as a man's are who has a fever. He was weak and thin, and there was no blood in his cheeks. It was a sight to wring one's heart to see the laddie so brought down— him who had looked so braw and strong the last time we had seen him.
That had been when he was setting out for the wars, you ken! And now he was back, sae thin and weak and pitiful as I had not seen him since he had been a bairn in his mother's arms.
Aweel, it was for us, his mother and I, and all the folks at home, to mend him, and make him strong again. So he told us, for he had but one thing on his mind—to get back to his men.
"They'll be needing me, out there," he said. "They're needing men. I must go back so soon as I can. Every man is needed there."
"You'll be needing your strength back before you can be going back, son," I told him. "If you fash and fret it will take you but so much the longer to get back."
He knew that. But he knew things I could not know, because I had not seen them. He had seen things that he saw over and over again when he tried to sleep. His nerves were shattered utterly. It grieved me sore not to spend all my time with him but he would not hear of it. He drove me back to my work.
"You must work on, Dad, like every other Briton," he said. "Think of the part you're playing. Why you're more use than any of us out there—you're worth a brigade!"
So I left him on the Clyde, and went on about my work. But I went back to Dunoon as often as I could, as I got a day or a night to make the journey. At first there was small change of progress. John would come downstairs about the middle of the day, moving slowly and painfully. And he was listless; there was no life in him; no resiliency or spring.
"How did you rest, son?" I would ask him. He always smiled when he answered.
"Oh, fairly well," he'd tell me. "I fought three or four battles though, before I dropped off to sleep."
He had come to the right place to be cured, though, and his mother was the nurse he needed. It was quiet in the hills of the Clyde, and there was rest and healing in the heather about Dunoon. Soon his sleep became better and less troubled by dreams. He could eat more, too, and they saw to it, at home, that he ate all they could stuff into him.
So it was a surprisingly short time, considering how bad he had looked when he first came back to Dunoon, before he was in good health and spirits again. There was a bonnie, wee lassie who was to become Mrs. John Lauder ere so long—she helped our boy, too, to get back his strength.
Soon he was ordered from home. For a time he had only light duties with the Home Reserve. Then he went to school. I laughed when he told me he had been ordered to school, but he didna crack a smile.
"You needn't be laughing," he said. "It's a bombing school I'm going to now-a-days. If you're away from the front for a few weeks, you find everything changed when you get back. Bombing is going to be important."
John did so well in the bombing school that he was made an instructor and assigned, for a while, to teach others. But he was impatient to be back with his own men, and they were clamoring for him. And so, on September 16, 1916, his mother and I bade him good-by again, and he went back to France and the men his heart was wrapped up in.
"Yon's where the men are, Dad!" he said to me, just before he started.
John's mother, his sweetheart and I all saw him off at Glasgow. The fear was in all our hearts, and I think it must have been in all our eyes, as well—the fear that every father and mother and sweetheart in Britain shared with us in these days whenever they saw a boy off for France and the trenches. Was it for the last time? Were we seeing him now so strong and hale and hearty, only to have to go the rest of our lives with no more than a memory of him to keep?
Aweel, we could not be telling that! We could only hope and pray! And we had learned again to pray, long since. I have wondered, often, and Mrs. Lauder has wondered with me, what the fathers and mothers of Britain would do in these black days without prayer to guide them and sustain them. So we could but stand there, keeping back our tears and our fears, and hoping for the best. One thing was sure; we might not let the laddie see how close we were to greeting. It was for us to be so brave as God would let us be. It was hard for him. He was no boy, you ken, going blindly and gayly to a great adventure; he had need of the finest courage and devotion a man could muster that day.
For he knew fully now what it was that he was going back to. He knew the hell the Huns had made of war, which had been bad enough, in all conscience, before they did their part to make it worse. And he was high strung. He could live over, and I make no doubt he did, in those days after he had his orders to go back, every grim and dreadful thing that was waiting for him out there. He had been through it all, and he was going back. He had come out of the valley of the shadow, and now he was to ride down into it again.
And it was with a smile he left us! I shall never forget that. His thought was all for us whom he was leaving behind. His care was for us, lest we should worry too greatly and think too much of him.
"I'll be all right," he told us. "You're not to fret about me, any of you. A man does take his chances out there—but they're the chances every man must take these days, if he's a man at all. I'd rather be taking them than be safe at home."
We did our best to match the laddie's spirit and be worthy of him. But it was cruelly hard. We had lost him and found him again, and now he was being taken from us for the second time. It was harder, much harder, to see him go this second time than it had been at first, and it had been hard enough then, and bad enough. But there was nothing else for it. So much we knew. It was a thing ordered and inevitable.
And it was not many days before we had slipped back into the way things had been before John was invalided home. It is a strange thing about life, the way that one can become used to things. So it was with us. Strange things, terrible things, outrageous things, that, in time of peace, we would never have dared so much as to think possible, came to be the matters of every day for us. It was so with John. We came to think of it as natural that he should be away from us, and in peril of his life every minute of every hour. It was not easier for us. Indeed, it was harder than it had been before, just as it had been harder for us to say good-by the second time. But we thought less often of the strangeness of it. We were really growing used to the war, and it was less the monstrous, strange thing than it had been in our daily lives. War had become our daily life and portion in Britain. All who were not slackers were doing their part— every one. Man and woman and child were in it, making sacrifices. Those happy days of peace lay far behind us, and we had lost our touch with them and our memory of them was growing dim. We were all in it. We had all to suffer alike, we were all in the same boat, we mothers and fathers and sweethearts of Britain. And so it was easier for us not to think too much and too often of our own griefs and cares and anxieties.
John's letters began to come again in a steady stream. He was as careful as ever about writing. There was scarcely a day that did not bring its letter to one of the three of us. And what bonnie, brave letters they were! They were as cheerful and as bright as his first letters had been. If John had bad hours and bad days out there he would not let us know it. He told us what news there was, and he was always cheerful and bright when he wrote. He let no hint of discouragement creep into anything he wrote to us. He thought of others first, always and all the time; of his men, and of us at home. He was quite cured and well, he told us, and going back had done him good instead of harm. He wrote to us that he felt as if he had come home. He felt, you ken, that it was there, in France and in the trenches, that men should feel at home in those days, and not safe in Britain by their ain firesides.
It was not easy for me to be cheerful and comfortable about him, though. I had my work to do. I tried to do it as well as I could, for I knew that that would please him. My band still went up and down the country, getting recruits, and I was speaking, too, and urging men myself to go out and join the lads who were fighting and dying for them in France. They told me I was doing good work; that I was a great force in the war. And I did, indeed, get many a word and many a handshake from men who told me I had induced them to enlist.
"I'm glad I heard you, Harry," man after man said to me. "You showed me what I should be doing and I've been easier in my mind ever since I put on the khaki!"
I knew they'd never regret it, no matter what came to them. No man will, that's done his duty. It's the slackers who couldn't or wouldn't see their duty men should feel sorry for! It's not the lads who gave everything and made the final sacrifice.
It was hard for me to go on with my work of making folks laugh. It had been growing harder steadily ever since I had come home from America and that long voyage of mine to Australia and had seen what war was and what it was doing to Britain. But I carried on, and did the best I could.
That winter I was in the big revue at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in London, that was called "Three Cheers." It was one of the gay shows that London liked because it gave some relief from the war and made the Zeppelin raids that the Huns were beginning to make so often now a little easier to bear. And it was a great place for the men who were back from France. It was partly because of them that I could go on as I did. We owed them all we could give them. And when they came back from the mud and the grime and the dreariness of the trenches, they needed something to cheer them up—needed the sort of production we gave them. A man who has two days' leave in London does not want to see a serious play or a problem drama, as a rule. He wants something light, with lots of pretty girls and jolly tunes and people to make him laugh. And we gave him that. The house was full of officers and men, night after night.
Soon word came from John that he was to have leave, just after Christmas, that would bring him home for the New Year's holidays. His mother went home to make things ready, for John was to be married when he got his leave. I had my plans all made. I meant to build a wee hoose for the two of them, near our own hoose at Dunoon, so that we might be all together, even though my laddie was in a home of his own. And I counted the hours and the days against the time when John would be home again.
While we were playing at the Shaftesbury I lived at an hotel in Southampton Row called the Bonnington. But it was lonely for me there. On New Year's Eve—it fell on a Sunday—Tom Vallance, my brother-in-law, asked me to tea with him and his family in Clapham, where he lived. That is a pleasant place, a suburb of London on the southwest, and I was glad to go. And so I drove out with a friend of mine, in a taxicab, and was glad to get out of the crowded part of the city for a time.
I did not feel right that day. Holiday times were bad, hard times for me then. We had always made so much of Christmas, and here was the third Christmas that our boy had been away. And so I was depressed. And then, there had been no word for me from John for a day or two. I was not worried, for I thought it likely that his mother or his sweetheart had heard, and had not time yet to let me know. But, whatever the reason, I was depressed and blue, and I could not enter into the festive spirit that folk were trying to keep alive despite the war.
I must have been poor company during that ride to Clapham in the taxicab. We scarcely exchanged a word, my friend and I. I did not feel like talking, and he respected my mood, and kept quiet himself. I felt, at last, that I ought to apologize to him.
"I don't know what's the matter with me," I told him. "I simply don't want to talk. I feel sad and lonely. I wonder if my boy is all right?"
"Of course he is!" my friend told me. "Cheer up, Harry. This is a time when no news is good news. If anything were wrong with him they'd let you know."
Well, I knew that, too. And I tried to cheer up, and feel better, so that I would not spoil the pleasure of the others at Tom Vallance's house. I tried to picture John as I thought he must be—well, and happy, and smiling the old, familiar boyish smile I knew so well. I had sent him a box of cigars only a few days before, and he would be handing it around among his fellow officers. I knew that! But it was no use. I could think of John, but it was only with sorrow and longing. And I wondered if this same time in a year would see him still out there, in the trenches. Would this war ever end? And so the shadows still hung about me when we reached Tom's house.
They made me very welcome, did Tom and all his family. They tried to cheer me, and Tom did all he could to make me feel better, and to reassure me. But I was still depressed when we left the house and began the drive back to London.
"It's the holiday—I'm out of gear with that, I'm thinking," I told my friend.
He was going to join two other friends, and, with them, to see theNew Year in in an old fashioned way, and he wanted me to join them.But I did not feel up to it; I was not in the mood for anything ofthe sort.
"No, no, I'll go home and turn in," I told him. "I'm too dull tonight to be good company."
He hoped, as we all did, that this New Year that was coming would bring victory and peace. Peace could not come without victory; we were all agreed on that. But we all hoped that the New Year would bring both—the new year of 1917. And so I left him at the corner of Southhampton Row, and went back to my hotel alone. It was about midnight, a little before, I think, when I got in, and one of the porters had a message for me.
"Sir Thomas Lipton rang you up," he said, "and wants you to speak with him when you come in."
I rang him up at home directly.
"Happy New Year, when it comes, Harry!" he said. He spoke in the same bluff, hearty way he always did. He fairly shouted in my ear. "When did you hear from the boy? Are you and Mrs. Lauder well?"
"Aye, fine," I told him. And I told him my last news of John.
"Splendid!" he said. "Well, it was just to talk to you a minute thatI rang you up, Harry. Good-night—Happy New Year again."
I went to bed then. But I did not go to sleep for a long time. It was New Year's, and I lay thinking of my boy, and wondering what this year would bring him. It was early in the morning before I slept. And it seemed to me that I had scarce been asleep at all when there came a pounding at the door, loud enough to rouse the heaviest sleeper there ever was.
My heart almost stopped. There must be something serious indeed for them to be rousing me so early. I rushed to the door, and there was a porter, holding out a telegram. I took it and tore it open. And I knew why I had felt as I had the day before. I shall never forget what I read:
"Captain John Lauder killed in action, December 28. Official.War Office."
It had gone to Mrs. Lauder at Dunoon first, and she had sent it on to me. That was all it said. I knew nothing of how my boy had died, or where—save that it was for his country.
But later I learned that when Sir Thomas Lipton had rung me up he had intended to condole with me. He had heard on Saturday of my boy's death. But when he spoke to me, and understood at once, from the tone of my voice, that I did not know, he had not been able to go on. His heart was too tender to make it possible for him to be the one to give me that blow—the heaviest that ever befell me.
It was on Monday morning, January the first, 1917, that I learned of my boy's death. And he had been killed the Thursday before! He had been dead four days before I knew it! And yet—I had known. Let no one ever tell me again that there is nothing in presentiment. Why else had I been so sad and uneasy in my mind? Why else, all through that Sunday, had it been so impossible for me to take comfort in what was said to cheer me? Some warning had come to me, some sense that all was not well.
Realization came to me slowly. I sat and stared at that slip of paper, that had come to me like the breath of doom. Dead! Dead these four days! I was never to see the light of his eyes again. I was never to hear that laugh of his. I had looked on my boy for the last time. Could it be true? Ah, I knew it was! And it was for this moment that I had been waiting, that we had all been waiting, ever since we had sent John away to fight for his country and do his part. I think we had all felt that it must come. We had all known that it was too much to hope that he should be one of those to be spared.
The black despair that had been hovering over me for hours closed down now and enveloped all my senses. Everything was unreal. For a time I was quite numb. But then, as I began to realize and to visualize what it was to mean in my life that my boy was dead there came a great pain. The iron of realization slowly seared every word of that curt telegram upon my heart. I said it to myself, over and over again. And I whispered to myself, as my thoughts took form, over and over, the one terrible word: "Dead!"
I felt that for me everything had come to an end with the reading of that dire message. It seemed to me that for me the board of life was black and blank. For me there was no past and there could be no future. Everything had been swept away, erased, by one sweep of the hand of a cruel fate. Oh, there was a past, though! And it was in that past that I began to delve. It was made up of every memory I had of my boy. I fell at once to remembering him. I clutched at every memory, as if I must grasp them and make sure of them, lest they be taken from me as well as the hope of seeing him again that the telegram had forever snatched away.
I would have been destitute indeed then. It was as if I must fix in my mind the way he had been wont to look, and recall to my ears every tone of his voice, every trick of his speech. There was something left of him that I must keep, I knew, even then, at all costs, if I was to be able to bear his loss at all.
There was a vision of him before my eyes. My bonnie Highland laddie, brave and strong in his kilt and the uniform of his country, going out to his death with a smile on his face. And there was another vision that came up now, unbidden. It was a vision of him lying stark and cold upon the battlefield, the mud on his uniform. And when I saw that vision I was like a man gone mad and possessed of devils who had stolen away his faculties. I cursed war as I saw that vision, and the men who caused war. And when I thought of the Germans who had killed my boy a terrible and savage hatred swept me, and I longed to go out there and kill with my bare hands until I had avenged him or they had killed me too.
But then I was a little softened. I thought of his mother back in our wee hoose at Dunoon. And the thought of her, bereft even as I was, sorrowing, even as I was, and lost in her frightful loneliness, was pitiful, so that I had but the one desire and wish—to go to her, and join my tears with hers, that we who were left alone to bear our grief might bear it together and give one to the other such comfort as there might be in life for us. And so I fell upon my knees and prayed, there in my lonely room in the hotel. I prayed to God that he might give us both, John's mother and myself, strength to bear the blow that had been dealt us and to endure the sacrifice that He and our country had demanded of us.
My friends came to me. They came rushing to me. Never did man have better friends, and kindlier friends than mine proved themselves to me on that day of sorrow. They did all that good men and women could do. But there was no help for me in the ministration of friends. I was beyond the power of human words to comfort or solace. I was glad of their kindness, and the memory of it now is a precious one, and one I would not be without. But at such a time I could not gain from them what they were eager to give me. I could only bow my head and pray for strength.
That night, that New Year's night that I shall never forget, no matter how long God may let me live, I went north. I took train from London to Glasgow, and the next day I came to our wee hoose—a sad, lonely wee hoose it had become now!—on the Clyde at Dunoon, and was with John's mother. It was the place for me. It was there that I wanted to be, and it was with her, who must hereafter be all the world to me. And I was eager to be with her, too, who had given John to me. Sore as my grief was, stricken as I was, I could comfort her as no one else could hope to do, and she could do as much for me. We belonged together.
I can scarce remember, even for myself, what happened there at Dunoon. I cannot tell you what I said or what I did, or what words and what thoughts passed between John's mother and myself. But there are some things that I do know and that I will tell you.
Almighty God, to whom we prayed, was kind, and He was pitiful and merciful. For presently He brought us both a sort of sad composure. Presently He assuaged our grief a little, and gave us the strength that we must have to meet the needs of life and the thought of going on in a world that was darkened by the loss of the boy in whom all our thoughts and all our hopes had been centred. I thanked God then, and I thank God now, that I have never denied Him nor taken His name in vain.
For God gave me great thoughts about my boy and about his death.Slowly, gradually, He made me to see things in their true light, andHe took away the sharp agony of my first grief and sorrow, and gaveme a sort of peace.
John died in the most glorious cause, and he died the most glorious death, it may be given to a man to die. He died for humanity. He died for liberty, and that this world in which life must go on, no matter how many die, may be a better world to live in. He died in a struggle against the blackest force and the direst threat that has appeared against liberty and humanity within the memory of man. And were he alive now, and were he called again to-day to go out for the same cause, knowing that he must meet death—as he did meet it—he would go as smilingly and as willingly as he went then. He would go as a British soldier and a British gentleman, to fight and die for his King and his country. And I would bid him go.
I have lived through much since his death. They have not let me take a rifle or a sword and go into the trenches to avenge him. . . . But of that I shall tell you later.
Ah, it was not at once that I felt so! In my heart, in those early days of grief and sorrow, there was rebellion, often and often. There were moments when in my anguish I cried out, aloud: "Why? Why? Why did they have to take John, my boy—my only child?"
But God came to me, and slowly His peace entered my soul. And He made me see, as in a vision, that some things that I had said and that I had believed, were not so. He made me know, and I learned, straight from Him, that our boy had not been taken from us forever as I had said to myself so often since that telegram had come.
He is gone from this life, but he is waiting for us beyond this life. He is waiting beyond this life and this world of wicked war and wanton cruelty and slaughter. And we shall come, some day, his mother and I, to the place where he is waiting for us, and we shall all be as happy there as we were on this earth in the happy days before the war.
My eyes will rest again upon his face. I will hear his fresh young voice again as he sees me and cries out his greeting. I know what he will say. He will spy me, and his voice will ring out as it used to do. "Hello, Dad!" he will call, as he sees me. And I will feel the grip of his young, strong arms about me, just as in the happy days before that day that is of all the days of my life the most terrible and the most hateful in my memory—the day when they told me that he had been killed.
That is my belief. That is the comfort that God has given me in my grief and my sorrow. There is a God. Ah, yes, there is a God! Times there are, I know, when some of those who look upon the horrid slaughter of this war, that is going on, hour by hour, feel that their faith is being shaken by doubts. They think of the sacrifices, of the blood that is being poured out, of the sufferings of women and children. And they see the cause that is wrong and foul prospering, for a little time, and they cannot understand.
"If there is a God," they whisper to themselves, "why does he permit a thing so wicked to go on?"
But there is a God—there is! I have seen the stark horror of war. I know, as none can know until he has seen it at close quarters, what a thing war is as it is fought to-day. And I believe as I do believe, and as I shall believe until the end, because I know God's comfort and His grace. I know that my boy is surely waiting for me. In America, now, there are mothers and fathers by the scores of thousands who have bidden their sons good-by; who water their letters from France with their tears—who turn white at the sight of a telegram and tremble at the sudden clamor of a telephone. Ah, I know—I know! I suffered as they are suffering! And I have this to tell them and to beg them. They must believe as I believe—then shall they find the peace and the comfort that I have found.
So it was that there, on the Clyde, John's mother and I came out of the blackness of our first grief. We began to be able to talk to one another. And every day we talked of John. We have never ceased to do that, his mother and I. We never shall. We may not have him with us bodily, but his spirit is never absent. And each day we remember some new thing about him that one of us can call to the other's mind. And it is as if, when we do that, we bring back some part of him out of the void.
Little, trifling memories of when he was a baby, and when he was a boy, growing up! And other memories, of later days. Often and often it was the days that were furthest away that we remembered best of all, and things connected with those days.
But I had small wish to see others. John's mother was enough for me. She and the peace that was coming to me on the Clyde. I could not bear to think of London. I had no plans to make. All that was over. All that part of my life, I thought, had ended with the news of my boy's death. I wanted no more than to stay at home on the Clyde and think of him. My wife and I did not even talk about the future. And no thing was further from all my thoughts than that I should ever step upon a stage again.
What! Go out before an audience and seek to make it laugh? Sing my songs when my heart was broken? I did not decide not to do it. I did not so much as think of it as a thing I had to decide about.
And then one thing and another brought the thought into my mind, so that I had to face it and tell people how I felt about it. There were neighbors, wanting to know when I would be about my work again. That it was that first made me understand that others did not feel as I was feeling.
"They're thinking I'll be going back to work again," I told John's mother. "I canna'!"
She felt as I did. We could not see, either one of us, in our grief, how anyone could think that I could begin again where I had left off.
"I canna'! I will not try!" I told her, again and again. "How can I tak up again with that old mummery? How can I laugh when my heart is breaking, and make others smile when the tears are in my eyes?"
And she thought as I did, that I could not, and that no one should be asking me. The war had taken much of what I had earned, in one way or another. I was not so rich as I had been, but there was enough. There was no need for me to go back to work, so far as our living was concerned. And so it seemed to be settled between us. Planning we left for the future. It was no time for us to be making plans. It mattered little enough to us what might be in store for us. We could take things as they might come.
So we bided quiet in our home, and talked of John. And from every part of the earth and from people in all walks and conditions of life there began to pour in upon us letters and telegrams of sympathy and sorrow. I think there were four thousand kindly folk who remembered us in our sorrow, and let us know that they could think of us in spite of all the other care and trouble that filled the world in those days. Many celebrated names were signed to those letters and telegrams, and there were many, too, from simple folk whose very names I did not know, who told me that I had given them cheer and courage from the stage, and so they felt that they were friends of mine, and must let me know that they were sorry for the blow that had befallen me.
Then it came out that I meant to leave the stage. They sent word from London, at last, to ask when they might look for me to be back at the Shaftesbury Theatre. And when they found what it was in my mind to do all my friends began to plead with me and argue with me. They said it was my duty to myself to go back.
"You're too young a man to retire, Harry," they said. "What would you do? How could you pass away your time if you had no work to do? Men who retire at your age are always sorry: They wither away and die of dry rot."
"There'll be plenty for me to be doing," I told them. "I'll not be idle."
But still they argued. I was not greatly moved. They were thinking of me, and their arguments appealed to my selfish interests and needs, and just then I was not thinking very much about myself.
And then another sort of argument came to me. People wrote to me, men and women, who, like me, had lost their sons. Their letters brought the tears to my eyes anew. They were tender letters, and beautiful letters, most of them, and letters to make proud and glad, as well as sad, the heart of the man to whom they were written. I will not copy those letters down here, for they were written for my eyes, and for no others. But I can tell you the message that they all bore.
"Don't desert us now, Harry!" It was so that they put it, one after another, in those letters. "Ah, Harry—there is so much woe and grief and pain in the world that you, who can, must do all that is in your power to make them easier to bear! There are few forces enough in the world to-day to make us happy, even for a little space. Come back to us, Harry—make us laugh again!"
It was when those letters came that, for the first time, I saw that I had others to consider beside myself, and that it was not only my own wishes that I might take into account. I talked to my wife, and I told her of those letters, and there were tears in both our eyes as we thought about those folks who knew the sorrow that was in our hearts.
"You must think about them, Harry," she said.
And so I did think about them. And then I began to find that there were others still about whom I must think. There were three hundred people in the cast of "Three Cheers," at the Shaftesbury Theatre, in London. And I began to hear now that unless I went back the show would be closed, and all of them would be out of work. At that season of the year, in the theatrical world, it would be hard for them to find other engagements, and they were not, most of them, like me, able to live without the salaries from the show. They wrote to me, many of them, and begged me to come back. And I knew that it was a desperate time for anyone to be without employment. I had to think about those poor souls. And I could not bear the thought that I might be the means, however innocent, of bringing hardship and suffering upon others. It might not be my fault, and yet it would lie always upon my conscience.
Yet, even with all such thoughts and prayers to move me, I did not see how I could yield to them and go back. Even after I had come to the point of being willing to go back if I could, I did not think I could go through with it. I was afraid I would break down if I tried to play my part. I talked to Tom Valiance, my brother-in-law.
"It's very well to talk, Tom," I said. "But they'd ring the curtain down on me! I can never do it!"
"You must!" he said. "Harry, you must go back! It's your duty! What would the boy be saying and having you do? Don't you remember, Harry? John's last words to his men were—'Carry On!' That's what it is they're asking you to do, too, Harry, and it's what John would have wanted. It would be his wish."
And I knew that he was right. Tom had found the one argument that could really move me and make me see my duty as the others did. So I gave in. I wired to the management that I would rejoin the cast of "Three Cheers," and I took the train to London. And as I rode in the train it seemed to me that the roar of the wheels made a refrain, and I could hear them pounding out those two words, in my boy's voice: "Carry On!"
But how hard it was to face the thought of going before an audience again! And especially in such circumstances. There were to be gayety and life and light and sparkle all about me. There were to be lassies, in their gay dresses, and the merriest music in London. And my part was to be merry, too, and to make the great audience laugh that I would see beyond the footlights. And I thought of the Merryman in The Yeomen of the Guard, and that I must be a little like him, though my cause for grief was different.
But I had given my word, and though I longed, again and again, as I rode toward London, and as the time drew near for my performance, to back out, there was no way that I could do so. And Tom Valiance did his best to cheer me and hearten me, and relieve my nervousness. I have never been so nervous before. Not since I made my first appearance before an audience have I been so near to stage fright.
I would not see anyone that night, when I reached the theatre. I stayed in my dressing-room, and Tom Valiance stayed with me, and kept everyone who tried to speak with me away. There were good folk, and kindly folk, friends of mine in the company, who wanted to shake my hand and tell me how they felt for me, but he knew that it was better for them not to see me yet, and he was my bodyguard.
"It's no use, Tom," I said to him, again and again, after I was dressed and in my make up. I was cold first, and then hot. And I trembled in every limb. "They'll have to ring the curtain down on me."
"You'll be all right, Harry," he said. "So soon as you're out there!Remember, they're all your friends!"
But he could not comfort me. I felt sure that it was a foolish thing for me to try to do; that I could not go through with it. And I was sorry, for the thousandth time, that I had let them persuade me to make the effort.
A call boy came at last to warn me that it was nearly time for my first entrance. I went with Tom into the wings, and stood there, waiting. I was pale under my make up, and I was shaking and trembling like a baby. And even then I wanted to cry off. But I remembered my boy, and those last words of his—"Carry On!" I must not fail him without at least trying to do what he would have wanted me to do!
My entrance was with a lilting little song called "I Love My Jean." And I knew that in a moment my cue would be given, and I would hear the music of that song beginning. I was as cold as if I had been in an icy street, although it was hot. I thought of the two thousand people who were waiting for me beyond the footlights—the house was a big one, and it was packed full that night.
"I can't, Tom—I can't!" I cried.
But he only smiled, and gave me a little push as my cue came and the music began. I could scarcely hear it; it was like music a great distance off, coming very faintly to my ears. And I said a prayer, inside. I asked God to be good to me once more, and to give me strength, and to bear me through this ordeal that I was facing, as he had borne me through before. And then I had to step into the full glare of the great lights.
I felt as if I were in a dream. The people were unreal—stretching away from me in long, sloping rows, their white faces staring at me from the darkness beyond the great lights. And there was a little ripple that ran through them as I went out, as if a great many people, all at the same moment, had caught their breath.
I stood and faced them, and the music sounded in my ears. For just a moment they were still. And then they were shaken by a mighty roar. They cheered and cheered and cheered. They stood up and waved to me. I could hear their voices rising, and cries coming to me, with my own name among them.
"Bravo, Harry!" I heard them call. And then there were more cheers, and a great clapping of hands. And I have been told that everywhere in that great audience men and women were crying, and that the tears were rolling down their cheeks without ever an attempt by any of them to hide them or to check them. It was the most wonderful and the most beautiful demonstration I have ever seen, in all the years that I have been upon the stage. Many and many a time audiences have been good to me. They have clapped me and they have cheered me, but never has an audience treated me as that one did. I had to use every bit of strength and courage that I had to keep from breaking down.
To this day I do not know how I got through with that first song that night. I do not even know whether I really sang it. But I think that, somehow, blindly, without knowing what I was doing, I did get through; I did sing it to the end. Habit, the way that I was used to it, I suppose, helped me to carry on. And when I left the stage the whole company, it seemed to me, was waiting for me. They were crying and laughing, hysterically, and they crowded around me, and kissed me, and hugged me, and wrung my hand.
It seemed that the worst of my ordeal was over. But in the last act I had to face another test.
There was a song for me in that last act that was the great song in London that season. I have sung it all over America since then "The Laddies Who Fought and Won." It has been successful everywhere—that song has been one of the most popular I have ever sung. But it was a cruel song for me to sing that night!
It was the climax of the last act and of the whole piece. In "Three Cheers" soldiers were brought on each night to be on the stage behind me when I sang that song. They were from the battalion of the Scots Guards in London, and they were real soldiers, in uniform. Different men were used each night, and the money that was paid to the Tommies for their work went into the company fund of the men who appeared, and helped to provide them with comforts and luxuries. And the war office was glad of the arrangement, too, for it was a great song to stimulate recruiting.
There were two lines in the refrain that I shall never forget. And it was when I came to those two lines that night that I did, indeed, break down. Here they are:
"When we all gather round the old firesideAnd the fond mother kisses her son—"
Were they not cruel words for me to have to sing, who knew that his mother could never kiss my son again? They brought it all back to me! My son was gone—he would never come back with the laddies who had fought and won!
For a moment I could not go on. I was choking. The tears were in my Eyes, and my throat was choked with sobs. But the music went on, and the chorus took up the song, and between the singers and the orchestra they covered the break my emotion had made. And in a little space I was able to go on with the next verse, and to carry on until my part in the show was done for the night. But I still wondered how it was that they had not had to ring down the curtain upon me, and that Tom Valiance and the others had been right and I the one that was wrong!
Ah, weel, I learned that night what many and many another Briton had learned, both at home and in France—that you can never know what you can do until you have to find it out! Yon was the hardest task ever I had to undertake, but for my boy's sake, and because they had made me understand that it was what he would have wanted me to do, I got through with it.
They rose to me again, and cheered and cheered, after I had finished singing "The Laddies Who Fought and Won." And there were those who called to me for a speech, but so much I had to deny them, good though they had been to me, and much as I loved them for the way they had received me. I had no words that night to thank them, and I could not have spoken from that stage had my life depended upon it. I could only get through, after my poor fashion, with my part in the show.
But the next night I did pull myself together, and I was able to say a few words to the audience—thanks that were simply and badly put, it may be, but that came from the bottom of my overflowing heart.
I had not believed it possible. But there I was, not only back at work, back upon the stage to which I thought I had said good-by forever, but successful as I had thought I could never be again. And so I decided that I would remain until the engagement of "Three Cheers" closed. But my mind was made up to retire after that engagement. I felt that I had done all I could, and that it was time for me to retire, and to cease trying to make others laugh. There was no laughter in my heart, and often and often, that season, as I cracked my merriest jokes, my heart was sore and heavy and the tears were in my eyes.
But slowly a new sort of courage came to me. I was able to meet my friends again, and to talk to them, of myself and of my boy. I met brother officers of his, and I heard tales of him that gave me a new and even greater pride in him than I had known before. And my friends begged me to carry on in every way.
"You were doing a great work and a good work, Harry," they said. "The boy would want you to carry on. Do not drop all the good you were doing."
I knew that they were right. To sit alone and give way to my grief was a selfish thing to do at such a time. If there was work for me to do, still, it was my duty to try to do it, no matter how greatly I would have preferred to rest quiet. At this time there was great need of making the people of Britain understand the need of food conservation, and so I began to go about London, making speeches on that subject wherever people could be gathered together to listen to me. They told me I did some good. And at least, I tried.
And before long I was glad, indeed, that I had listened to the counsel of my friends and had not given way to my selfish desire to nurse my grief in solitude and silence. For I realized that there was a real work for me to do. Those folk who had begged me to do my part in lightening the gloom of Britain had been right. There was so much sorrow and grief in the land that it was the duty of all who could dispel it, if even for a little space, to do what they could. I remembered that poem of Ella Wheeler Wilcox—"Laugh and the World Laughs With You!" And so I tried to laugh, and to make the part of the world that I chanced to be in laugh with me. For I knew there was weeping and sorrowing enough.
And all the time I felt that the spirit of my boy was with me, and that he knew what I was doing, and why, and was glad, and that he understood that if I laughed it was not because I thought less often of him, or missed him less keenly and bitterly than I had done from the very beginning.
There was much praise for my work from high officials, and it made me proud and glad to know that the men who were at the head of Britain's effort in the war thought I was being of use. One time I spoke with Mr. Balfour, the former Prime Minister, at Drury Lane Theatre to one of the greatest war gatherings that was ever held in London.
And always and everywhere there were the hospitals, full of the laddies who had been brought home from France. Ah, but they were pitiful, those laddies who had fought, and won, and been brought back to be nursed back to the life they had been so bravely willing to lay down for their country! But it was hard to look at them, and know how they were suffering, and to go through with the task I had set myself of cheering them and comforting them in my own way! There were times when it was all I could do to get through with my program.
They never complained. They were always bright and cheerful, no matter how terrible their wounds might be; no matter what sacrifices they had made of eyes and limbs. There were men in those hospitals who knew that they were going out no more than half the men they had been. And yet they were as brave and careless of themselves as if their wounds had been but trifles. I think the greatest exhibition of courage and nerve the world has ever seen was to be found in those hospitals in London and, indeed, all over Britain, where those wonderful lads kept up their spirits always, though they knew they could never again be sound in body.
Many and many of them there were who knew that they could never walk again the shady lanes of their hameland or the little streets of their hame towns! Many and many more there were who knew that, even after the bandages were taken from about their eyes, they would never gaze again upon the trees and the grass and the flowers growing upon their native hillsides; that never again could they look upon the faces of their loved ones. They knew that everlasting darkness was their portion upon this earth.
But one and all they talked and laughed and sang! And it was there among the hospitals, that I came to find true courage and good cheer. It was not there that I found talk of discouragement, and longing for any early peace, even though the final victory that could alone bring a real peace and a worthy peace had not been won. No—not in the hospitals could I find and hear such talk as that! For that I had to listen to those who had not gone—who had not had the courage and the nerve to offer all they had and all they were and go through that hell of hells that is modern war!
I saw other hospitals besides the ones in London. After a time, when I was very tired, and far from well, I went to Scotland for a space to build myself up and get some rest. And in the far north I went fishing on the River Dee, which runs through the Durrie estate. And while I was there the Laird heard of it. And he sent word to tell me of a tiny hospital hard by where a guid lady named Mrs. Baird was helping to nurse disabled men back to health and strength. He asked me would I no call upon the men and try to give them a little cheer. And I was glad to hear of the chance to help.
I laid down my rod forthwith, for here was better work than fishing— and in my ain country. They told me the way that I should go, and that this Mrs. Baird had turned a little school house into a convalescent home, and was doing a fine and wonderful work for the laddies she had taken in. So I set out to find it, and I walked along a country road to come to it.
Soon I saw a man, strong and hale, as it seemed, pushing a wheel chair along the road toward me. And in the chair sat a man, and I could see at once that he had lost the use of his legs—that he was paralyzed from the waist down. It was the way he called to him who was pushing him that made me tak notice.
"Go to the right, mon!" he would call. Or, a moment later, "To the left now."
And then they came near to the disaster. The one who was pushing was heading straight for the side of the road, and the one in the chair bellowed out to him:
"Whoa there!" he called. "Mon—ye're taking me into the ditch! Where would ye be going with me, anyway?"
And then I understood. The man who was pushing was blind! They had but the one pair of eyes and the one pair of legs between the two of them, and it was so that they contrived to go out together without taking help from anyone else! And they were both as cheerful as wee laddies out for a lark. It was great sport for them. And it was they who gave me my directions to get to Mrs. Baird's.
They disputed a little about the way. The blind man, puir laddie, thought he knew. And he did not—not quite. But he corrected the man who could see but could not walk.
"It's the wrong road you're giving the gentleman," he said. "It's the second turn he should be taking, not the first."
And the other would not argue with him. It was a kindly thing, the way he kept quiet, and did but wink at me, that I might know the truth. He trusted me to understand and to know why he was acting as he was, and I blessed him in my heart for his thoughtfulness. And so I thanked them, and passed on, and reached Mrs. Baird's, and found a royal welcome there, and when they asked me if I would sing for the soldiers, and I said it was for that that I had come, there were tears in Mrs. Baird's eyes. And so I gave a wee concert there, and sang my songs, and did my best to cheer up those boys.
Ah, my puir, brave Scotland—my bonnie little Scotland!
No part of all the United Kingdom, and, for that matter, no part of the world, has played a greater part, in proportion to its size and its ability, than has Scotland in this war for humanity against the black force that has attacked it. Nearly a million men has Scotland sent to the army—out of a total population of five million! One in five of all her people have gone. No country in the world has ever matched that record. Ah, there were no slackers in Scotland! And they are still going—they are still going! As fast as they are old enough, as fast as restrictions are removed, so that men are taken who were turned back at first by the recruiting officers, as fast as men see to it that some provision is made for those they must leave behind them, they are putting on the King's uniform and going out against the Hun. My country, my ain Scotland, is not great in area. It is not a rich country in worldly goods or money. But it is big with a bigness beyond measurement, it is rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, in patriotism, in love of country, and in bravery.
We have few young men left in Scotland. It is rarely indeed that in a Scottish village, in a glen, even in a city, you see a young man in these days. Only the very old are left, and the men of middle age. And you know why the young men you see are there. They cannot go, because, although their spirit is willing their flesh is too weak to let them go, for one reason or another. Factory and field and forge— all have been stripped to fill the Scottish regiments and keep them at their full strength. And in Scotland, as in England, women have stepped in to fill the places their men have left vacant. This war is not to be fought by men alone. Women have their part to play, and they are playing it nobly, day after day. The women of Scotland have seen their duty; they have heard their country's call, and they have answered it.
You will find it hard to discover anyone in domestic service to-day in Scotland. The folk who used to keep servants sent them packing long since, to work where they would be of more use to their country. The women of each household are doing the work about the house, little though they may have been accustomed to such tasks in the days of peace. And they glory and take pride in the knowledge that they are helping to fill a place in the munitions factories or in some other necessary war work.
[ILLUSTRATION: "Bang! went sixpence." HARRY LAUDER BUYING HIS BIT OFWHITE HEATHER (See Lauder04.jpg)]
Do not look along the Scottish roads for folk riding in motor cars for pleasure. Indeed, you will waste your time if you look for pleasure-making of any sort in Scotland to-day. Scotland has gone back to her ancient business of war, and she is carrying it on in the most businesslike way, sternly and relentlessly. But that is true all over the United Kingdom; I do not claim that Scotland takes the war more seriously than the rest of Britain. But I do think that she has set an example by the way she has flung herself, tooth and nail, into the mighty task that confronts us all—all of us allies who are leagued against the Hun and his plan to conquer the world and make it bow its neck in submission under his iron heel.
Let me tell you how Scotland takes this war. Let me show you the homecoming of a Scottish soldier, back from the trenches on leave. Why, he is received with no more ceremony than if he were coming home from his day's work!
Donald—or Jock might be his name, or Andy!—steps from the train at his old hame town. He is fresh from the mud of the Flanders trenches, and all his possessions and his kit are on his back, so that he is more like a beast of burden than the natty creature old tradition taught us to think a soldier must always be. On his boots there are still dried blobs of mud from some hole in France that is like a crater in hell. His uniform will be pretty sure to be dirty, too, and torn, and perhaps, if you looked closely at it, you would see stains upon it that you might not be far wrong in guessing to be blood.
Leave long enough to let him come home to Scotland—a long road it is from France to Scotland these days!—has been a rare thing for Jock. He will have been campaigning a long time to earn it—months certainly, and maybe even years. Perhaps he was one of these who went out first. He may have been mentioned in dispatches: there may be a distinguished conduct medal hidden about him somewhere—worth all the iron crosses the Kaiser ever gave! He has seen many a bloody field, be sure of that. He has heard the sounding of the gas alarm, and maybe got a whiff of the dirty poison gas the Huns turned loose against our boys. He has looked Death in the face so often that he has grown used to him. But now he is back in Scotland, safe and sound, free from battle and the work of the trenches for a space, home to gain new strength for his next bout with Fritz across the water.
When he gets off the train Jock looks about him, from force of habit. But no one has come to the station to meet him, and he looks as if that gave him neither surprise nor concern. For a minute, perhaps, he will look around him, wondering, I think, that things are so much as they were, fixing in his mind the old familiar scenes that have brought him cheer so often in black, deadly nights in the trenches or in lonely billets out there in France. And then, quietly, and as if he were indeed just home from some short trip, he shifts his pack, so that it lies comfortably across his back, and trudges off. There would be cabs around the station, but it would not come into Jock's mind to hail one of the drivers. He has been used to using Shank's Mare in France when he wanted to go anywhere, and so now he sets off quietly, with his long, swinging soldier's stride.
As he walks along he is among scenes familiar to him since his boyhood. You house, you barn, yon wooded rise against the sky are landmarks for him. And he is pretty sure to meet old friends. They nod to him, pleasantly, and with a smile, but there is no excitement, no strangeness, in their greeting. For all the emotion they show, these folk to whom he has come back, as from the grave, they might have seen him yesterday, and the day before that, and the war never have been at all. And Jock thinks nothing of it that they are not more excited about him. You and I may be thinking of Jock as a hero, but that is not his idea about himself. He is just a Tommy, home on leave from France—one of a hundred thousand, maybe. And if he thought at all about the way his home folk greeted him it would be just so—that he could not expect them to be making a fuss about one soldier out of so many. And, since he, Jock, is not much excited, not much worked up, because he is seeing these good folk again, he does not think it strange that they are not more excited about the sight of him. It would be if they did make a fuss over him, and welcome him loudly, that he would think it strange!
And at last he comes to his own old home. He will stop and look around a bit. Maybe he has seen that old house a thousand times out there, tried to remember every line and corner of it. And maybe, as he looks down the quiet village street, he is thinking of how different France was. And, deep down in his heart, Jock is glad that everything is as it was, and that nothing has been changed. He could not tell you why; he could not put his feeling into words. But it is there, deep down, and the truer and the keener because it is so deep. Ah, Jock may take it quietly, and there may be no way for him to show his heart, but he is glad to be home!
And at his gate will come, as a rule, Jock's first real greeting. A dog, grown old since his departure, will come out, wagging his tail, and licking the soldier's hand. And Jock will lean down, and give his old dog a pat. If the dog had not come he would have been surprised and disappointed. And so, glad with every fibre of his being, Jock goes in, and finds father and mother and sisters within. They look up at his coming, and their happiness shines for a moment in their eyes. But they are not the sort of people to show their emotions or make a fuss. Mother and girls will rise and kiss him, and begin to take his gear, and his father will shake him by the hand.
"Well," the father will ask, "how are you getting along, lad?"
And—"All right," he will answer. That is the British soldier's answer to that question, always and everywhere.
Then he sits down, happy and at rest, and lights his pipe, maybe, and looks about the old room which holds so many memories for him. And supper will be ready, you may be sure. They will not have much to say, these folk of Jock's, but if you look at his face as dish after dish is set before him, you will understand that this is a feast that has been prepared for him. They may have been going without all sorts of good things themselves, but they have contrived, in some fashion, to have them all for Jock. All Scotland has tightened its belt, and done its part, in that fashion, as in every other, toward the winning of the war. But for the soldiers the best is none too good. And Jock's folk would rather make him welcome so, by proof that takes no words, than by demonstrations of delight and of affection.
As he eats, they gather round him at the board, and they tell him all the gossip of the neighborhood. He does not talk about the war, and, if they are curious—probably they are not!—they do not ask him questions. They think that he wants to forget about the war and the trenches and the mud, and they are right. And so, after he has eaten his fill, he lights his pipe again, and sits about. And maybe, as it grows dark, he takes a bit walk into town. He walks slowly, as if he is glad that for once he need not be in a hurry, and he stops to look into shop windows as if he had never seen their stocks before, though you may be sure that, in a Scottish village, he has seen everything they have to offer hundreds of times.
He will meet friends, maybe, and they will stop and nod to him. And perhaps one of six will stop longer.
"How are you getting on, Jock?" will be the question.
"All right!" Jock will say. And he will think the question rather fatuous, maybe. If he were not all right, how should he be there? But if Jock had lost both legs, or an arm, or if he had been blinded, that would still be his answer. Those words have become a sort of slogan for the British army, that typify its spirit.
Jock's walk is soon over, and he goes home, by an old path that is known to him, every foot of it, and goes to bed in his own old bed. He has not broken into the routine of the household, and he sees no reason why he should. And the next day it is much the same for him. He gets up as early as he ever did, and he is likely to do a few odd bits of work that his father has not had time to come to. He talks with his mother and the girls of all sorts of little, commonplace things, and with his father he discusses the affairs of the community. And in the evening he strolls down town again, and exchanges a few words with friends, and learns, perhaps, of boys who haven't been lucky enough to get home on leave—of boys with whom he grew up, who have gone west.
So it goes on for several days, each day the same. Jock is quietly happy. It is no task to entertain him: he does not want to be entertained. The peace and quiet of home are enough for him; they are change enough from the turmoil of the front and the ceaseless grind of the life in the army in France.
And then Jock's leave nears its end, and it is time for him to go back. He tells them, and he makes his few small preparations. They will have cleaned his kit for him, and mended some of his things that needed mending. And when it is time for him to go they help him on with his pack and he kisses his mother and the girls good-by, and shakes hands with his father.
"Well, good-by," Jock says. He might be going to work in a factory a few miles off. "I'll be all right. Good-by, now. Don't you cry, now, mother, and you, Jeannie and Maggie. Don't you fash yourselves about me. I'll be back again. And if I shouldn't come back—why, I'll be all right."
So he goes, and they stand looking after him, and his old dog wonders why he is going, and where, and makes a move to follow him, maybe. But he marches off down the street, alone, never looking back, and is waiting when the train comes. It will be full of other Jocks and Andrews and Tams, on their way back to France, like him, and he will nod to some he knows as he settles down in the carriage.
And in just two days Jock will have traveled the length of England, and crossed the channel, and ridden up to the front. He will have reported himself, and have been ordered, with his company, into the trenches. And on the third night, had you followed him, you might see him peering over the parapet at the lines of the Hun, across No Man's Land, and listening to the whine of bullets and the shriek of shells over his head, with a star shell, maybe, to throw a green light upon him for a moment.
So it is that a warrior comes and that a warrior goes in a land where war is war; in a land where war has become the business of all every day, and has settled down into a matter of routine.