"Mademoiselle From Armentieres"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 343, 18 January 1946, Page 19

"Mademoiselle From Armentieres"

C. H, ROWLAND, the man who * wrote the words of "Mademoiselle from Armentieres" (though he was emphatic that he wrote only four verses and took no responsibility for the many others that soldiers of the last war added), told the story of how it came about in a recent BBC "In Town Tonight" programme. After war broke out in 1914, Rowland was one of the first actors in Franceon August 14, And he put on the first troop shows at Ballieul, in September, with bus-drivers as stars. The following March he was at Armentieres, racking his brains to find a new number for a show. And he says it was "in the Cafe de la Paix where I found a good-looking girl who served drinks but wouldn’t stand any nonsense from anyone" that he got the idea for the new number, In half-an-hour he wrote the lyric, four verses, and a friend of his, Lieutenant Gitz-Rice, of Montreal, wrote the music. But, Rowland told listeners, the song didn’t take on and "was dead in a week." Months afterwards, when he was sitting with a pal in a field near Ballieul, a battalion marched up the line. And they were singing Ais song. From then on all the troops took up the song and by the end of the war "Mademoiselle from Armentieres" had some 150 verses. But it didn’t bring the composers a bean, In 1940 Rowland was invited to go to the United States and broadcast the story of how the song was born, but he couldn’t get there. So BBC listeners were the first to hear it.