I was not content, though, even when I seemed to agree with them.  I did try to argue, but it was no use.  And still I felt that it was no time for a man to be playing and to be giving so much of his time to making others gay.  It was well for folk to laugh, and to get their minds off the horror of war for a little time.  Well I knew!  Aye, and I believed that I was doing good, some good at least, and giving cheer to some puir laddies who needed it sorely.  But—­weel, it was no what I wanted to be doing when my country was fighting for her life!  I made up my mind, slowly, what it was that I wanted to do that would fit in with the ideas and wishes of those whose word I was bound to heed and that would still come closer than what I was doing to meet my own desires.

Every day, nearly, then, I was getting letters from the front.  They came from laddies whom I’d helped to make up their minds that they belonged over yon, where the men were.  Some were from boys who came from aboot Dunoon.  I’d known those laddies since they were bits o’ bairns, most of them.  And then there were letters—­and they touched me as much and came as close home as any of them—­from boys who were utter strangers to me, but who told me they felt they knew me because they’d seen me on the stage, or because their phonograph, maybe, played some of my records, and because they’d read that my boy had shared their dangers and given his life, as they were ready, one and all, to do.

And those letters, nearly all, had the same refrain.  They wanted me.  They wanted me to come to them, since they couldn’t be coming to me.

“Come on out here and see us and sing for us, Harry,” they’d write to me.  “It’d be a fair treat to see your mug and hear you singing about the wee hoose amang the heather or the bonnie, bonnie lassie!”

How could a man get such a plea as that and not want to do what those laddies asked?  How could he think of the great deal they were doing and not want to do the little bit they asked of him?  But it was no a simple matter, ye’ll ken!  I could not pack a bag and start for France from Charing Cross or Victoria as I might have done—­and often did—­ before the war.  No one might go to France unless he had passports and leave from the war office, and many another sort of arrangement there was to make.  But I set wheels in motion.

Just to go to France to sing for the boys would have been easy enough.  They told me that at once.

“What?  Harry Lauder wants to go to France to sing for the soldiers?  He shall—­whenever he pleases!  Tell him we’ll be glad to send him!”

So said the war office.  But I knew what they meant.  They meant for me to go to one or more of the British bases and give concerts.  There were troops moving in and out of the bases all the time; men who’d been in the trenches or in action in an offensive and were back in rest billets, or even further back, were there in their thousands.  But it was the real front I was eager to reach.  I wanted to be where my boy had been, and to see his grave.  I wanted to sing for the laddies who were bearing the brunt of the big job over there—­while they were bearing it.