Long Trail

Tommies who ploughed through Flanders' mud to Ypres, doughboys who marched through the black night into the Argonne. soldiers who were herded aboard transports and troop trains, recruits who dug straddle ditches and loaded ammunition until their backs were fairly broken, had one song which helped more than any other to see them through the War. In leaky barracks, smoky cafes and on endless marches ''There's a Long. Long Trail'' was sung rowdily, nostalgically. Last week, in Spokane, Wash., after five months of sleeping sickness, Death took Stoddard King, the man who wrote the words of the War's No. 1 song.

When Stod King (class of 1914) was an undergraduate at Yale he and his friend Alonzo ("Zo") Elliott wanted desperately one spring to be sent as delegates to a Zeta Psi smoker in Boston. Delegates to the smoker had their expenses paid, were excused from classes. But to he elected they had to prove themselves entertainers, prepare an act to regale their fraternity brothers. Stod King and Zo Elliott wrote a song and when they did their act in Boston, the other Zets stopped pounding with their beer mugs, stopped moulding spongy biscuit-insides to pelt about the room. With King and Elliott they sang:

There's a long, long trail awinding

Into the land of my dreams

Where the nightingales are singing

And a white moon beams:

There's a long, long night of waiting

Until my dreams all come true

Till the day when I'll be going

Down that long, long trail with you.

But New York's music publishers failed to share Zeta Psi's enthusiasm for the King-Elliott song. A British concern accepted it first. It was the rage in every London music-hall before a New York house would gamble on it. Even then few copies were sold here until the U. S. entered the War. Then regimental band-masters seized on it. In Oklahoma's Fort Sill thousands of raw recruits began to swelter to it. In Massachusetts' Devens thousands more shivered to it. Camp Gordon's men shaved to it, groomed horses to it, built roads to it. They sang it whether they wanted to or not. The Government's morale-boosters made it compulsory for soldiers to sing.

During the War Stod King served in the Washington National Guard. When he was discharged he went back to the Spokane Spokesman-Review, the newspaper on which he worked before he went East to Yale. The Spokesman mourned deeply last week the passing of its best colyumist, a man who, News Editor Malcolm Glendenning said, had never once turned in a poor piece of copy, who knew as much about sport as he did about turning out neat comic rhymes for his daily "Facetious Fragments." Yalemen who were in college just before the War remembered Stod King's brilliant undergraduate record, how he impressed people at first as a swart plain-spoken Westerner careless about clothes, how he joined Zeta Psi (next to worst of the five fraternities then in existence*), went on working his way to become managing editor of the News.

In Mory's, the New Haven biers tube where Yale romantics like to think ''The Long, Long Trail" was written, Stod King's initials are carved on one of the big round table tops strung up around the wall. But his song is carved still deeper in the history of the War. Contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink and Tenor Enrico Caruso sang it in Liberty Loan drives. Elsie Janis sang it in France from the back of a truck. The first U. S. troops to land in England marched in review to it before Ambassador Page and Admiral Sims. British soldiers sang it when they were lined up on deck waiting to be taken off the torpedoed troop ship Tyndarius. They sang it after the Armistice when they marched across the bridge into Cologne. In London the massed bands of the Guards play it even now when Britain's notables gather on the Mall to do honor to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

* Beta Theta Pi was worse until 1916 when college authorities commissioned Charles Phelps Taft II, son of William Howard Taft, to assemble a group of desirables, join Bet, raise its social status.

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