“There, within the hour, he sang again the sweet old songs of love and home and country, bringing all very near and helping the men to realize the deeper what victory for the enemy would mean. Grim and determined men they were that went back to their dugouts and trenches, heartened for the task of war for human freedom by Harry Lauder. Harry’s little kilted figure came and went from the war zone, but his influence remains, the influence of a heroic heart.” CAUSE FOR GRIEVANCE A wounded soldier explained his grievance to his nurse: “You see, old Smith was next to me in the trenches. Now, the bullet that took me in the shoulder and laid me out went into ’im and made a bit of a flesh-wound in his arm. Of course I’m glad he wasn’t ’urt bad. But he’s stuck to my bullet and given it his girl. Now, I don’t think that’s fair. I’d a right to it. I’d never give a girl ’o mine a second-’and bullet.” DOUBLY ANNOYING A German spy caught redhanded was on his way to be shot. “I think you English are brutes,” he growled, “to march me through this rain and slush.” “Well,” said the “Tommy” who was escorting him, “what about me? I have to go back in it.” KING GEORGE UNDER FIRE KING GEORGE and Queen Mary have been seeing war at close range. Together they made an eleven days’ visit to the British troops in France, and while there the King experienced the sensation of being under fire. While the Queen devoted herself to the hospitals and the sick and wounded, the King was shown all the latest devices for killing and maiming the enemy. It was soon after seeing what would happen to the Teutons that he decided to drop his Teutonic name and become Mr. Windsor. Says a dispatch from the British headquarters in the New York _Sun_: On the first morning after his arrival in France, King George visited the Messines Ridge sector of the front, climbing the ridge while the Germans were shelling the woods just to his left. He inspected the ground over which the Irish troops, men from the north and the south, fought so gallantly side by side during the taking of the Messines Ridge, and where Major William Redmond fell. While the King was doing this the Germans began shelling places on the ridge which he had left but half an hour before. The King visited also Vimy Ridge, from which he could see the German lines about Lens, with British shells breaking on them. For the benefit of the King a special show was staged that he might witness “that black art of frightfulness which has steadily increased the horrors of war since the day when the enemy let loose clouds of poisoned gas upon the soldiers and civilians in Ypres,” says Philip Gibbs in the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_: