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.

Not every actor and artist who has tried to help in the hospitals has
fully understood the men he or she wanted to please. They meant well,
every one, but some were a wee bit unfortunate in the way they went
to work. There is a story that is told of one of our really great
serious actors. He is serious minded, always, on the stage and off,
and very, very dignified. But some folk went to him and asked him
would he no do his bit to cheer up the puir laddies in a hospital?

He never thought of refusing--and I would no have you think I am
sneering at the man! His intentions were of the best.

"Of course, I do not sing or dance," he said, drawing down his lip.
And the look in his eyes showed what he thought of such of us as had
descended to such low ways of pleasing the public that paid to see us
and to hear us: "But I shall very gladly do something to bring a
little diversion into the sad lives of the poor boys in the
hospitals."

It was a stretcher audience that he had. That means a lot of boys who
had to lie in bed to hear him. They needed cheering. And that great
actor, with all his good intentions could think of nothing more
fitting than to stand up before them and begin to recite, in a sad,
elocutionary tone, Longfellow's "The Wreck of the Hesperus!"

He went on, and his voice gained power. He had come to the third
stanza, or the fourth, maybe, when a command rang out through the
ward. It was one that had been heard many and many a time in France,
along the trenches. It came from one of the beds.

"To cover, men!" came the order.

It rang out through the ward, in a hoarse voice. And on the word
every man's head popped under the bedclothes! And the great actor,
a