“I’ll be good,” I promised, with a grin, as we drove on.  “We shall go straight on to Arras now!”

But we did not.  We met a bunch of engineers on the road, after a space, and they looked so wistful when we told them we maun be getting right along, without stopping to sing for them, that I had not the heart to disappoint them.  So we got out the wee piano and I sang them a few songs.  It seemed to mean so much to those boys along the roads!  I think they enjoyed the concerts even more than did the great gatherings that were assembled for me at the rest camps.  A concert was more of a surprise for them, more of a treat.  The other laddies liked them, too—­aye, they liked them fine.  But they would have been prepared, sometimes; they would have been looking forward to the fun.  And the laddies along the roads took them as a man takes a grand bit of scenery, coming before his eyes, suddenly, as he turns a bend in a road he does not ken.

As for myself, I felt that I was becoming quite a proficient open-air performer by now.  My voice was standing the strain of singing under such novel and difficult conditions much better than I had thought it could.  And I saw that I must be at heart and by nature a minstrel!  I know I got more pleasure from those concerts I gave as a minstrel wandering in France than did the soldiers or any of those who heard me!

I have been before the public for many years.  Applause has always been sweet to me.  It is to any artist, and when one tells you it is not you may set it down in your hearts that he or she is telling less than the truth.  It is the breath of life to us to know that folks are pleased by what we do for them.  Why else would we go on about our tasks?  I have had much applause.  I have had many honors.  I have told you about that great and overwhelming reception that greeted me when I sailed into Sydney Harbor.  In Britain, in America, I have had greetings that have brought tears into my eye and such a lump into my throat that until it had gone down I could not sing or say a word of thanks.

But never has applause sounded so sweet to me as it did along those dusty roads in France, with the poppies gleaming red and the cornflowers blue through the yellow fields of grain beside the roads!  They cheered me, do you ken—­those tired and dusty heroes of Britain along the French roads!  They cheered as they squatted down in a circle about us, me in my kilt, and Johnson tinkling away as if his very life depended upon it, at his wee piano!  Ah, those wonderful, wonderful soldiers!  The tears come into my eyes, and my heart is sore and heavy within me when I think that mine was the last voice many of them ever heard lifted in song!  They were on their way to the trenches, so many of those laddies who stopped for a song along the road.  And when men are going into the trenches they know, and all who see them passing know, that some there are who will never come out.