"In These Hard Times."

Levin Daily Chronicle, 15 December 1917, Page 4

"In These Hard Times."

j FUSILIERS' ANSWER TO GERMAN I SHELLS. , An incident which deserves to become historic is that of certain Royal Fusiliers who were out in the line of battered trench and shell-hole along the Broenbcek, and the enemy was shelling them (writes the "Times" correspondent in France). They had practically no shelter, and the Germans knew the range of the positions they had recently lost to a yard. There was nothing for the Fusiliers to do but stick it until such time as our own guns could beat down the enemy batteries. Meanwhile it was about as heavy shelling as troops can be called on to stand. Then someone among the Fusiliers started singing, and what he sang was an Army version of "In These Hard Times." Perhaps you I know the song— You've got to put up with anything In these hard times. ,j 1 Other voices took it up till, from the whole line of shell-holes, where the men crouched with the dead in the bloodstained water and the fragments of trench, where the living and wounded lay together, the chorus welled up mightliy. The earth shook to the shell bursts, and the air was thick with fumes and dirt and debris, and through the crashing and the murk the song rose rollicking on— i. 1 Oh, if you live to bo ninety-four, | And carry on to the end of tlio war, You may get leave, but not before, In these hard times. Our men back in the support lines heard it, and they took it up. The enemy across the way must have heard it, too, and marvelled. The Fusiliers tended to their dead and cared for their wounded, singing while they worked. They bowed in their shellholes, while the great shells shrieked overhead, or, plunging, heaped them with mud, and still they sang — Tmi may get more or you may got less, apple and plum's your best, I guess, For the strawberry jam's for the sergeants' mess, In these hard times. Last night I was at an entertainment given by the formation to which these Royal Fusiliers belong, in a /temporary lath and tarpaulin theatre, which holds 500 men. One of the number on tho programme was this song, sung by a man, now a private, but well known in the London music-halls in peace time.

Some of those same Fusiliers who had lived and sung through all that hell were there, and you ought to havo heard those 500 voices swing into the chorus till it seemed that the whole tarpaulin roof bellied to the sound. Ido not know whose property the song may be, but I do know that all the rights, copyright, and title therein, with all the hereditaments and appurtenances, ought henceforward to bo deeded to and vested in the regiment of the Royal Fusiliers, so that at mess, in billets, and on the march they may sing it as their own and tell in generations to come how in 1917 the Germans heard them sing it on the Broenbcek.