They had played for high stakes there in the old days before the war.  Thousands of dollars had changed hands in an hour there.  But they were playing for higher stakes now!  They were playing for the lives and the health of men, and the hearts of the women at home in Britain who were bound up with them.  In the old days men had staked their money against the turn of a card or the roll of the wheel.  But now it was with Death they staked—­and it was a mightier game than those old walls had ever seen before.

The largest ward of the hospital was in what had been the Baccarat room, and it was there I held my first concert of the trench engagement.  When I appeared it was packed full.  There were men on cots, lying still and helpless, bandaged to their very eyes.  Some came limping in on their crutches; some were rolled in in chairs.  It was a sad scene and an impressive one, and it went to my heart when I thought that my own poor laddie must have lain in just such a room—­ in this very one, perhaps.  He had suffered as these men were suffering, and he had died—­as some of these men for whom I was to sing would die.  For there were men here who would be patched up, presently, and would go back.  And for them there might be a next time—­a next time when they would need no hospital.

There was one thing about the place I liked.  It was so clean and white and spotless.  All the garish display, the paint and tawdry finery, of the old gambling days, had gone.  It was restful, now, and though there was the hospital smell, it was a clean smell.  And the men looked as though they had wonderful care.  Indeed, I knew they had that; I knew that everything that could be done to ease their state was being done.  And every face I saw was brave and cheerful, though the skin of many and many a lad was stretched tight over his bones with the pain he had known, and there was a look in their eyes, a look with no repining in it, or complaint, but with the evidences of a terrible pain, bravely suffered, that sent the tears starting to my eyes more than once.

It was much as it had been in the many hospitals I had visited in Britain, and yet it was different, too.  I felt that I was really at the front.  Later I came to realize how far from the real front I actually was at Boulogne, but then I knew no better.

I had chosen my programme carefully.  It was made up of songs altogether.  I had had enough experience in hospitals and camps by now to have learned what soldiers liked best, and I had no doubt at all that it was just songs.  And best of all they liked the old love songs, and the old songs of Scotland—­tender, crooning melodies, that would help to carry them back, in memory, to their hames and, if they had them, to the lassies of their dreams.  It was no sad, lugubrious songs they wanted.  But a note of wistful tenderness they liked.  That was true of sick and wounded, and of the hale and hearty too—­and it showed that, though they were soldiers, they were just humans like the rest of us, for all the great and super-human things they ha’ done out there in France.