mmission, you'd be but one man out there. Here you're worth
many men--a brigade, or a division, maybe. You are more use to us
than many men who go out there to fight. You do great things toward
winning the war every day. No, Harry, there is work for every man in
Britain to do, and you have found yours and are doing it."

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