THE SOUTH AFRICAN SCOTTISH
The pipers proved quite invaluable on the long marches in the operations against the Senussi, in keeping the men going, under the most trying climatic conditions.
The pipers were sometimes employed as bearers, or as carriers of stores, ammunition, etc., and as runners.
In the Cambrai advance by the Germans they had to serve in the ranks. At Houdincourt, having piled their pipes and taken up rifles, nearly all their instruments were destroyed by a shell.
| REG. NO. RANK. | NAME. | RECORD. | |
| Pipe Major | D. Cameron, D.C.M. | Became C. Sergt.-Major; wounded. | |
| " | Alexander Grieve | Gassed, March 1918. | |
| Lance-Cpl. | R. Hay | ||
| Piper | T. Scott | Killed, Arras, 9/4/17. | |
| " | A. Gray, M.M. | Military Medal. | |
| " | J. Waterhouse, M.M. | Military Medal. | |
| " | J. Matheson | ||
| " | D. A. Cummings | ||
| " | F. Fraser | ||
| " | C. Gordon | Invalided. | |
| " | R. Lindsay | ||
| " | M. M'Neil | ||
| " | J. M'Calman | ||
| " | J. Munro | Wounded, Oct. 1916; invalided. | |
| " | M. Strang | ||
| " | G. Collier | ||
| " | W. Irons | ||
| " | M'Gregor | ||
| " | M'Coll | ||
| " | W. Strang | ||
Roll of Honour
1914-1918
Cha till, cha till, cha till Mac Criomain,
An cogadh no sith cha till e tuille;
Le airgiod no ni cha till Mac Criomain,
Cha till e gu bràth gu là na cruinne.
Son épée au Roi,
Son cœur à sa dame,
Ses honneurs à soi,
—À dieu son âme.
[ROLL OF HONOUR. 1914-1918]
"So he passed over. And all the trumpets sounded
for him on the other side."
[CANNTAIREACHD]
By Major J. P. Grant, M.C., Yr. of Rothiemurchus
It is related[14] by Sir John Graham Dalyell how in 1818, one John Campbell from Nether Lorn, brought "a folio in MS., said to contain numerous compositions," for the inspection of the judges at the annual piping competition held in Edinburgh under the auspices of the Highland Society: the story goes on, "but the contents merely resembling a written narrative in an unknown language, nor bearing any resemblance to Gaelic, they proved utterly unintelligible. Amidst many conjectures relative both to the subject and the language, nobody adventured so far as to guess at either airs or pibrochs." It is believed that this is the earliest authentic reference to the pipers notation known as Canntaireachd, and it is of interest to note that even as early as 1818,[15] among the class of Highland gentlemen who acted as judges at the biggest competition in the country, the very existence of the notation was unknown. Sir John mentions also that he made later attempts to acquire this MS. volume and to trace two others in the possession of John Campbell's father: his attempts were unsuccessful.
In 1828 Captain Macleod of Gesto published some pipe tunes in Canntaireachd as taught by the MacCrimmons in Skye. The merits of this publication have been made the subject of controversy among pipers and others; this controversy has no place in this paper. The late John Campbell (Iain Ileach) of Tales of the West Highlands, wrote a monograph on Canntaireachd in 1880, in which he reviewed Gesto's book: the monograph, interesting as it is and written in Iain Ileach's easy flowing style is extraordinarily disappointing. In spite of his comprehensive knowledge of folk-lore—more particularly of Gaelic folk-lore—he fails to indicate any probable source of this notation—probably no one in Europe was, or is better fitted to make conjectures on the point. However, he made two statements of interest in the late history of the notation, (1) that he had "often seen my nurse John Piper reading and practising music from an old paper manuscript, and silently fingering tunes. I have tried to recover this writing, but hitherto in vain," and (2) that there were three local varieties of the notation (a) MacCrimmon (b) MacArthur, and (c) Campbell of Nether Lorn. Now "John Piper" was this same John Campbell of the family of Nether Lorn, which possessed three MS. volumes of Canntaireachd.
Among the older-fashioned pipers in Scotland, even just before the war, one constantly heard syllables (hodroho, hiodro, etc., etc.) being used, generally at haphazard, seldom in their correct place. The astounding thing is that even fragments of a notation, the system of which had been out of use for so long, should have survived to this day.
About 1912 two of the Nether Lorn MS. books were rediscovered, and from them it has not been hard to reconstruct the system of notation. Those tunes with recognisably the same names as we know them by to-day, furnished the first step in the problem: after that it became easy to identify other tunes with different names, and finally to rediscover a number of tunes which have been lost for an undetermined period.
One word of caution will be necessary to certain pipers before going further into this subject. This notation, invented for and suitable only to piobaireachd, is not going to teach pipers how to play piobaireachd. There is and always has been, one way and only one way to do that—to get instruction from a master; once that is accomplished, a pupil may be fit to learn more tunes by himself from books written in any intelligible notation. This I take to be true of any musicians and any music.
The piobaireachd pupil might well get his instruction through the medium of canntaireachd, for it has been made solely for this music, and is in point of fact very suitable for the purpose. To begin with, if the few master-instructors of piobaireachd will take the trouble (and assuredly it will not be great to them) to become familiar with canntaireachd, and to use it as a medium of instruction, it is a matter of certainty that they will realise its use for this end—for instead of a perplexing maze of notes and grace-notes in staff notation to correspond to any movement which they are trying to teach their pupil, they will have pronounceable vocables which will act as memoria technica to the pupil: the pupil will, at first, learn these parrot style, until he gets to a certain length, when, unaided, he will begin to see that these vocables he has learnt convey a definite meaning—a definite combination of note and grace note, in a form which can be crooned to the air. I have found that for the purposes of learning new tunes, staff notation compared with canntaireachd is cumbrous and misleading: and even when written in an abbreviated form (as in General Thomason's great book, Ceol Mor) it appeals mainly to the eye, while canntaireachd appeals to the ear.
For some years now I have found it invaluable as a kind of musical shorthand, and with a certain amount of practice it becomes possible to write down a tune in canntaireachd while it is being played, and then to learn it at leisure. I had the triumph of converting a brother piper a few years ago. He was inclined to be sceptical about the whole system, so to test me and it he played me a tune which I had never heard and I wrote it down as he played it. After he had finished he said, "Now we shall see what is in it, for I made two mistakes: play what you have got and we shall see." I played on the practice chanter just what I had written, with the mistakes, of course, included.
Again, when one is judging piobaireachd competitions, it is valuable as shorthand to jot down notes of mistakes, etc.
Before coming to the notation itself, it should be explained that it is not maintained for a moment that this variety (the Nether Lorn) is superior in any way to the MacCrimmon or MacArthur varieties. It is merely given and suggested for use, because it is this variety which has become once more available to pipers at large. There are people who undoubtedly can do the same for the MacCrimmon variety also, and it is sincerely hoped that they will do so. That all three varieties are first cousins to each other is beyond doubt to any one who compares them; perhaps at a later date, when more knowledge of canntaireachd becomes available, it may be possible to point to one as the original, or to find a common ancestor to all.
Coming now to the actual notation, the following paragraphs should be read, subject to this note that the pronunciation of the vocables must be largely a matter of conjecture, but it is reasonable to suppose that, as they were written in the manuscript and used by Gaelic-speaking pipers,[16] the pronunciation should have at least some reference to Gaelic pronunciation—thus the vowels, when occurring as the last letter of the syllable, would be pronounced
| 'a' | as in English | hard |
| 'e' | " | hay |
| 'i' | " | heed |
| 'o' | " | home |
and probably the consonants should be given their Gaelic equivalents also (all which can best be obtained verbally from a Gaelic speaker).
In addition to the simple vowels, combinations occur which require to be sounded as diphthongs:
| 'io' } | as in English | yoke, e.g. hioeo |
| 'eo' } | ||
| 'ea' | " | yard, e.g. haea. |
KEY TO NETHER LORN CANNTAIREACHD.
Key to columns:
A = Scale with high G grace note.
B = Scale with D grace note.
C = Scale with E grace note.
D = Scale with no grace notes.
E = Siubhal.
F = Siubhal Sleamhuinn.
G = Leumluath to E.
H = Taorluath to low A.
I = Tripling or Taorluath Breabach.
J = Crunluath.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | |
| low G | him | dam or bam | em | em | himen | himem | himbare | himdarid | himbabem | himbandre |
| low A | hin | dan | en | en | hinen | hinen | hinbare | hindarid | hindaen | hinbandre |
| B | hio | to | eo | o | hioen | hioeo | hiobare | hiodarid | hiotoeo | hiobandre |
| C | ho | do | eo | o | hoen | hoeo | hobare | hodarid | hodoeo | hobandre |
| D | ha | — | ea | a or da | haen | haea | habare or harrode | hadarid | — | habandre or haroddre |
| E | che | — | — | e or de | chehin | cheche | chebare | chedarid | — | chebandre |
| F | he | — | — | ve or dhe | hehin | hehe | hebare | hedarid | — | hebandre |
| G | hi or chi (high Ag-n.) | — | — | di | hihin | hihi | hibare | hidarid | — | hibandre |
| A | — | — | — | I | Ien | no example | Ibare | Idarid | — | Ibandre |
The nomenclature of most of the different movements has for convenience been taken from the Piobaireachd exercises in Logan's Tutor, price 1s., and the examples here given refer to the staff notation examples given there and should be compared with them.
PIOBAIREACHD EXERCISES
(Cf. Logan's Tutor.)
1st Scale of Instructions, pp. 34 and 35. On the Urlar.
Chedari, hiriri, herere, cherede, hiharara, hihodro, hihorodo, hiharin. (See Cadences, [p. 185].)
2nd Scale of Instructions.
Enbari (should be embari, i.e. from low G), end
, endre (note: if this shake on F or E is approached from a higher note the vocables become ved
and edre respectively; thus one gets Ived
, but hiod
, heedre but hiodre) tradarodo (tra being the usual throw on D, e.g. hiotra), p. 36, hihor
in, hodr
in, hiotrodin.
3rd Scale of Instructions. On Crunluath.
Hinban or hinbain, dre—together hinbandre, Ibandre.
4th Scale, p. 37. On Crunluath Breabach.
Hinbandreendi.
IbandreenI hibandreendi, hibandreendhe chebandreende, habandreenda hobandreendo, hiobandreemto hinbandreendan.
5th Scale. On Crunluath Fosgailte.
Hindodre.
No examples of open: closed, himdandre hintodre, hindodre hindadre, twice over.
6th Scale. On Crunluath Mach.
Hiotradre hodrodre, hiotrodre himbamdre, twice over.
7th Scale. The Exercise on Accidentals.
IbarI dibari (no example known), vebarhe edre, adeda odro, otro enban or enbain, twice over.
CHA TILL MACCRUIMEIN
1st. Dreve hiove, cheve cheento, dreve hiove, cheve cheemto, dreve hioe, trae haento,
2nd. Dreve hiove, cheve cheemto, dreve hioe, trae haemto, dreve hioe, trae haento,
3rd. Dreve hiove, cheve cheemto, dreve hioe, trae haento.
Var. 1st.
1st. DreI ove, cheI deento, dreI ove, cheI deemto, dreI oe, traI aento, etc.
Var. 2nd.
1st. Cheve hiove, cheve cheento, cheve hiove, cheve cheemto, cheve hioe, trae haento, etc.
Doubling of Var. 2nd.
1st. Chea cheo, cheve cheento, chea cheo, cheve cheemto, chea cheo, trae haento, etc.
Various Vocables not previously included.
| Throw on high A | dili. |
| Taorluath to low G | hiodarem, chedarem, etc. |
| Low A with low G grace-note before | -din (e.g. hiodin). |
| D or C followed by B grace-note on low G grace-note followed by A with low G grace-note before | harin or horin. |
| Taorluath mach | hiotroeo, hodroeo, hiotraea. |
| Crunluath to low G. | hiobamdre, or hiobaemdre or (on D) haromdre. |
Cadences
By cadences I mean those notes often printed as grace-notes, GED, followed by C, B, low A, or low G melody notes, and GE followed by D, low A, or low G melody notes. The prefix 'hi' is in general terms used for this, e.g. hiharin, hihorodin. Taking them in above order, examples of the vocables used are, of the former, hihodin, hihioem, hihinbain, and hihambam, and of the latter hiaen, hienem, hiemto. It is one of the remarkable points in the MS. that these cadences are indicated to a far less extent than is played by traditional players of modern times, and I am as yet unable to make any deductions from the manner in which they appear as to the style in which the MS. intends them to be played. To avoid confusion between 'hi' as cadence and high G with A grace-note, it would be better to use the alternative 'chi' for the latter.
General
A study of the key will reveal various noticeable points, some of which I will touch on here. It will be seen that some of the composite vocables can be pulled to pieces into their component parts, e.g., hiotroeo, hinbandre, etc., while others can only be dissected to a lesser extent, e.g., hindaen in the Tripling or Taorluath Breabach; in this latter case the vocable must be read in its context, for hindaento might be Glow A, D, low A, DB, while standing by itself, but in conjunction with a string of others it is undoubtedly meant to be the Taorluath Breabach. Again there is liable to be confusion between 'en' low A without any and with an E grace-note, and in some few cases it is impossible to say definitely which is meant: on the other hand it is used in the siubhal variation, and there can be no doubt in such a context: hinen by itself is unambiguous, and in various combinations, e.g., hiaendre, it is highly probable that no E grace-note is intended. The question of the eo and o, B or C, is a little more difficult in theory, but in practice it will be found to narrow down to one or two instances; the most common instance of this ambiguity is odro, which may be either B grip C, or C grip C. It seems likely that this confusion is the origin of this difference in existing settings of various tunes, e.g., An Daorach Mhor (The Big Spree) Var. 1st and doubling, The Battle of Auldearn, The Carles of Sligachin and many others. Campbell often writes 'ho' for 'o,' obviously not intending a G grace-note, but to avoid this ambiguity.
Time signature and rhythm are, I think, sufficiently shown to enable a trained player to find no difficulty in playing; bar divisions are indicated by commas, and each part of each tune is divided into lines numbered 1st, 2nd, etc.: and a repeat is written at the end of the line to be repeated, thus: Two times or twice over. '3 times,' etc., is often used in the MS. to refer back only to the last comma, not to the beginning of the line. The smaller details of time, which I will call "pointing," is a matter of greater doubt. I have said above why I think Gaelic standards should be applied to the pronunciation of the vocables, and my opinion is that the same applies to this question in general terms: it can be said that as a rule the vocables are separated into distinct words, the accent or stress (and in this case the longer note) being represented as the first syllable of the word (an almost invariable rule in Gaelic). Thus one gets hodarid hiodarid—not daridho daridhio darid. Many exceptions can be pointed out no doubt, but the above will serve as a broad rule.
It should be made clear to any reader of this paper that it has been written in haste. Most of it is written from memory after four and three-quarter years separation from MSS., books and notes, and I have no doubt that mistakes will be discovered later. Further, it does not profess to be complete, for there are some vocables not included, the meaning of which is not yet clear to me.
The two volumes of the MS. contain 169 tunes of which I can trace in no other collection, printed or MS., 65 tunes: moreover, many tunes which exist already in printed collections are written in entirely different settings, and under different names from those known by present day players. To illustrate this I have included at the end of this paper the MS. style of An Ceapadh Eucorach (translated as the "Unjust Incarceration"). This setting, apart from smaller differences, contains one line in each part which, so far as my knowledge goes, is unknown to-day, and which in my opinion is an essential part of the theme, leading the 3rd line up to the musical climax of the ordinarily accepted 4th line.[17] The names of the tunes as written in the Index or as headings in the MS. present a very difficult problem. Some are in English; some are in recognisable Gaelic; some are in unrecognisable Gaelic, some give the first few notes of the tune, and some are ludicrous mistranslations of Gaelic into English. Only approximately 42 out of the total have anything like the names by which the tunes are known to-day.
It is to be hoped that some day soon the whole MS. will be printed, so that enthusiasts who have the time may really get to work and unravel some of the conundrums which still remain so. I have a feeling that the vocables used in so many Gaelic songs are distantly related to canntaireachd, and research into this might conceivably throw light on the larger question of the origin of canntaireachd. It would also be interesting to know of any examples of similar notations in foreign countries. But the main thing to be done by all pipers at the present day is to make real attempts to discover other canntaireachd manuscripts: and the ideal should be that all MSS. now known to exist or discovered at a later date should be made available for comparison and information of other players; this is best done by publication in as near the original form as possible, and failing that by loan or gift to some responsible piping society, such as the Scottish Pipers Society, The Piobaireachd Society, the Caledonian Pipers Society, London, The Inverness Pipers Society, The Highland Pipers Society, Edinburgh, or any other well-known society. This would ensure that the information would get into the hands of those who can most easily disseminate it.
AN CEAPADH EUCORACH
(From the Campbell MS. vol. i. p. 1.)
1st called Kepper Eggarich.
Hiharin hioen[18], hodrooen, himen hoen, hiotroenem, hihodrooen, hiotroenem hihodroen hioem hiharinen
2nd Hiharin hioen hodrooen, himotrao hoen, hiotroenem, hihodrooen hiotroenem, hihodroen, hioem hiharinen
3rd Hihodrotra, cheredea hoen, hadrea hoen, hihorodoenem, hihodrotra, cherededea[19] hihodroen hioem, hiharinen
4th Hihararache, hived
ve[20] cheho, haem, barivecheho, hiharara[21]hohic, hihodrotraem, barived
vechea,[20] hihodroen, hioem, hiharinen
5th Chedari Ie, hiririeha diliedrehia, cheredeaho himbarihia, cheho, hadre himbaria, chedaria, hioem hiharinen.
The First Motion
1st Hinen hinen hioen, hoen, hoen, hinen, himen, hinen, hoen, hioen, hioen, himen, hoen hoen hinen hioen, hioen, himen hoen hoen hioem, hinen hinen hinen.
2nd Hinen hinen hioen hihoen[22] hoen hinen himen haen hoen, hioen hioen, himen hoen hoen hinen hioen hioen himen hoen hoen hioem, hinen three times.
3rd Hoen hoen haem, chehin chehin, hoen haem, chehin hoen hioen hioen, himen hoen hoen haem, chehin chehin chehin hoen hoen hioem, hinen three times.
4th Haen haem, chehin hien hien chehin haem hien chehin haen haen hioem, hoen hoen haem hien hien chehin hoen hoen hioem, hinen three times.
5th Chehin hien, dilien hien hien, haen dilien, chehin hien, chehin chehin, hoen hien hien, chehin haem, chehin hien, chehin hien, hioem, hinen three times.
The 2nd Motion, called Tolive
1st Hindarid hindarid hiodarid hodarid hodarid hindarid himdarid hindarid hodarid hiodarid hiodarid himdarid hodarid hodarid hindarid hiodarid hiodarid himdarid hodarid hodarid hiodarem, hindarid three times.
2nd Hindarid hindarid hiodarid hodarid hodarid hindarid himdarid hadarid hodarid hiodarid hiodarid himdarid hodarid hodarid hindarid hiodarid hiodarid himdarid hodarid hodarid hiodarem hindarid three times.
3rd Hodarid hodarid hadarem, chedarid chedarid, hodarid hadarem, chedarid hodarid, hiodarid hiodarid, himdarid hodarid hodarid, hadarem, chedarid three times, hodarid hodarid, hiodarem hindarid three times.
4th Hadarid hadarem, chedarid hidarid hidarid chedarid hadarem hidarid, chedarid hadarid hadarid hiodarem, hodarid hodarid hadarem hidarid hidarid chedarid hodarid hodarid hiodarem, hindarid three times.
5th Chedarid hidarid Idarid hidarid hidarid hadarid Idarid chedarid hidarid chedarid chedarid hodarid hidarid hidarid chedarid hadrem,[23] chedarid hidarid chedarid hidarid hiodarem, hindarid three times.
Part 3rd, Crolive
1st Hinbandre hinbandre, hiobandre hobandre hobandre hinbandre himbandre hinbandre hobandre hiobandre hiobandre himbandre hobandre hobandre hinbandre hiobandre hiobandre himbandre hobandre hobandre hiobaemdre hinbandre hinbandre hinbandre hinbandre.
2nd Hinbandre hinbandre hiobandre hobandre hobandre hinbandre himbandre habandre hobandre hiobandre hiobandre himbandre hobandre hobandre hinbandre hiobandre hiobandre himbandre hobandre hobandre hiobaemdre, hinbandre hinbandre hinbandre.
3rd Hobandre hobandre habamdre chebandre chebandre hobandre habamdre chebandre hobandre hiobandre hiobandre himbandre hobandre hobandre habaemdre, chebandre three times, hobandre hobandre hiobamdre hinbandre hinbandre hinbandre.
4th Habandre habaemdre chebandre hibandre hibandre chebandre habaemdre hibandre chebandre habandre habandre hiobaemdre hobandre hobandre habaemdre hibandre hibandre chebandre hobandre hobandre hiobaemdre, hinbandre three times.
5th Chebandre hibandre Ibandre hibandre hibandre habandre Ibandre chebandre hibandre chebandre chebandre hobandre hibandre hibandre chebandre habaemdre chebandre hibandre chebandre hibandre hiobaemdre hinbandre three times.
[THE IRISH PIPES:]
THEIR HISTORY, DEVELOPMENT, AND DIVERGENCE FROM THE SIMPLE HIGHLAND TYPE
By W. H. Grattan Flood, Mus.D., K.S.G.
There is ample evidence that the bagpipe was used in pre-Christian Ireland, whence it was brought to Scotland. It is referred to in the Brehon Laws of the fifth century. Irish writers allude to it as Cuisle and as Piob mor—and this is the warlike instrument which was adopted by our Scottish brethren and became the national instrument of Scotland.
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Irish pipers accompanied the Irish troops that fought in Gascony and Flanders under King Edward I. Strange, too, that Irish pipers were heard, in opposition to the Scots, at the battle of Falkirk (July 22, 1298), and it is surmised that the strident tones of the Irish piob mor suggested to the Scotch the employment of this warlike instrument in battle. At Creçy (August 26, 1346) the Irish pipes were also in evidence, and again at Harfleur (1418) and at Rouen (1419). Incidentally, it may be stated that there is no sound historical evidence for the Scotch bagpipes in battle at Harlaw (1411), but it would appear that they were employed at the battle of Inverlochy (1431). Irish pipers were heard to advantage in Henry VIII.'s Tournay campaign (1513) and also at the siege of Boulogne (1544). This association of Irish pipers leading the charge is strikingly pourtrayed in the Mask of Irishmen played before Queen Mary at the English Court, on April 25, 1557, in which there were six Irish Kerne and two Bagpipers.
Here is Stanihurst's description of the Irish piob mor, in 1575: "The Irish, likewise, instead of the trumpet, make use of a wooden pipe of the most ingenious structure, to which is joined a leather bag, very closely bound with bands. A pipe is inserted in the side of this skin, through which the piper, with his swollen neck and puffed-up cheeks, blows in the same manner as we do through a tube. The skin, being thus filled with air, begins to swell, and the player presses against it with his arm; thus a loud and shrill sound is produced through two wooden pipes of different lengths. In addition to these, there is yet a fourth pipe (the chanter), perforated in different places (having five or six holes), which the player so regulates by the dexterity of his fingers in the shutting and opening of the holes, that he can cause the upper pipes to send forth either a loud or a low sound at pleasure."
A few years after Stanihurst presented this description of the Irish piob mor, a new development of this instrument came into vogue, that is, about the year 1580, and almost immediately came into favour. This development was the Irish Uilleann (elbow) pipes, or domestic pipes, in which the wind was supplied by a bag blown by the elbow. Shakespearian commentators have been puzzled over the term "woollen" pipes in the Merchant of Venice (Act iv. Sc. 1); but the great bard of Avon, who derived much information regarding Ireland from Stanihurst and Dowland (if he did not actually visit Ireland at the close of the sixteenth century), used the Irish term Uilleann, equating it with "woollen"—a corruption which subsequently blossomed forth as "Union pipes." All during the seventeenth century the Uilleann pipes became immensely popular, and were used as an accompaniment for dancing, especially the Rinnce Fada (The Long Dance), the qualifying word Fada becoming Anglicised as "the Fading," also alluded to by Shakespeare (Winter's Tale, Act iv. Sc. 3). Subsequently keys or regulators were added, a feature that we also find in the Surdelina, or Neapolitan bagpipe, in 1625, as described by Père Mersenne. It is of interest to note that the great English composer, William Byrd, circâ 1590, wrote a piece of programme music called "Mr. Byrd's Battle," in which there are three movements; the Irish March, the Bagpipe, and the Drone. Thus the Irish bagpipe furnished the musical form known as "pedal point" or "drone bass."
When the Regiment of Irish Guards was formed in 1662, provision was made for a drum major, twenty-four drummers, and a piper to the King's Company. At the siege of Derry in 1689, the Jacobite regiments had each fourteen pipers and eighty-six drums.
Further improvements in the Uilleann pipes were effected between the years 1700 and 1720, and, in consequence, they were taken up by musical amateurs or "gentlemen pipers," of whom Larry Grogan, Parson Sterling, and Walter Jackson were famous.
The Irish piob mor was heard at the battle of Fontenoy (May 11, 1745), on which occasion the pipers played "St. Patrick's Day in the Morning," and "The White Cockade"—two characteristic Irish airs. Irish pipers were also heard during the American War of Independence, and, in 1778, Barney Thompson, from Hillsborough, Co. Down, was pipe major of Lord Rawdon's "Volunteers of Ireland," which corps merged into the 100th Regiment in 1780.
The revival of the Irish bagpipes in Irish regiments is due to Major Doyle, in September, 1793. A few months previously, on May 23, his brother, Colonel Doyle, in command of the 14th Regiment, found the fortunes of the day at the siege of Famara going against the British troops, when, by a happy inspiration, he ordered his band to play up the French revolutionary march of "Ça Ira," and shouted to his troops: "Come on, boys, and we'll beat 'em to their own damned tune." As a result, Doyle's regiment successfully routed the French, to the strains of "Ça Ira," which has ever since been the quick-step of the West Yorkshire Regiment (the old 14th). The Colonel wrote to his brother the Major, who was M.P. for Mullingar, telling him of the advantage of a good band, and, as at that very time (August) Major Doyle had been commissioned by King George III. to form a new Irish regiment, originally called "Major Doyle's Legion," the Major recruited a gallant body of his countrymen, known as "The Prince of Wales' Royal Irish Regiment"—with a band of Irish pipers.
Not long afterwards, in October 1793, Colonel de Burgh (brother of the Marquis of Clanrickarde) formed the "Royal Connaught Rangers," with a fine band of pipers and drummers. The Wexford Regiment (the 38th), commanded by Lord Loftus, had also a pipe band ere the close of the year 1794 or early in 1795. Several years later there were pipers attached to the Tyrones (4th Inniskilling Fusiliers).
However, after the year 1815, the vogue of a pipe band in Irish regiments waned, and it was not till 1903 that the Queen's County Militia—the 4th Battalion of the P.O.W. Leinster Regiment—again took up the war pipes, thanks to the enthusiasm and generosity of their commander, Lieut.-Col. Lord Castletown, K.P.
To the Tyrone Fusiliers, a link battalion of the 27th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, is due the revival of the Irish Piob mor in 1859. Some years later, Colonel Cox, commanding the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers, supplied eight sets of war pipes, as well as two drums, to eight Irish pipers in his regiment. More recently, the 4th Battalion of the Leinster Regiment (late Queen's County Militia) formed a pipe band under the direction of their gallant Colonel, my dear friend, Lord Castletown of Upper Ossory, K.P., who presented the pipes, in 1903. Since then all five battalions of this regiment have pipe bands, mainly through the enthusiastic zeal of Captain Orpen Palmer who published an excellent little book for the war pipes in 1913. Other Irish regiments having pipe bands are the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Fusiliers and the 3rd Battalion of the 18th Royal Irish.
In conclusion it may be briefly said that the Irish war pipe of to-day is the same as the Scottish or Highland war pipe. On the other hand, the Irish Uilleann pipes may be regarded as a miniature organ. The old war pipe is only capable of eight notes with certain limitations, whereas the Uilleann pipes are of two full octaves, including chromatic intervals, and are thus capable of performing most classes of music, added to which the four keys of the regulator on the chanter make for a wonderful effect.
[THE TUITION OF YOUNG REGIMENTAL PIPERS]
By John Grant, Pipe Major
There is an establishment for the training of bandsmen at Kneller Hall, Twickenham, known as "The Royal Military School of Music," where regular soldiers are trained in a very efficient manner both in theory and practice, for brass bands. Each pupil remains for a considerable period, extending from one to three years, and not only do they become good performers on the various instruments, but they qualify for the rank of bandmaster in any regiment. A bandmaster holds the rank of a warrant officer, and, in some cases, a commissioned officer.
Some months ago a colonial soldier asked the question in a Highland newspaper why the pipe major in a Highland regiment did not also hold the rank of a warrant officer. In fact pipe major is only an honorary rank. In reality he is only "sergeant piper." It would be very interesting to know the difference between the person in charge of the one band and the other. When the regiment is on the march the one band leads the men as well as the other. In fact many prefer a pipe band to a brass band on a long route march. In a pipe band the pipe major has to train his pipers efficiently in the performance of their music just the same as the bandmaster of a brass band, and why should a pipe major not be raised to the rank of a warrant officer along with his brother bandmaster? True it is that in a brass band there are many instruments for the bandmaster to teach and bring in in their proper places, in order to have a perfect band. But then the pipe major has the same task in front of him in training a perfect pipe band. In fact—if I may be allowed the analogy—in the case of a brass band a bandmaster might have many glaring errors and flaws in instrumentation and harmony in his band, and this is passed over by the average listener but detected by the expert conductor. The brass band, from its construction, has more scope for covering errors than the pipe band.
The regimental pipe band is so constructed that each performer must play in perfect unison, with pipes all timed in unison, and every finger should be lifted and laid down together, a thing which is much more difficult to do than is the case with a brass band. The errors in a badly trained pipe band are much more easily detected where every performer has to play in perfect unison, than the errors in a brass band, where different instruments take different parts.
The next important point is the bandmaster has been properly trained in his profession at the "Royal Military School of Music," Kneller Hall, but the pipe major in a pipe band has not had this coveted opportunity. There is no school where pipe music is taught in theory and practice, and that may be one of the chief reasons why the pipe major falls short of the trained bandmaster. If a military school of piping were instituted by the War Office, such an institution would supply a long felt want. The piper could then be educated in piping, to understand music in theory, and be instructed in practice on a sound basis and fixed system.
Few pipers in pipe bands, if any, are trained at the proper age, i.e., 12-14-16 years, except in industrial schools, where they are in many cases improperly taught. When the boy is young his fingers will do anything because they are very supple, but at the age of twenty they become stiff and set against perfect manipulation. At this age theory is picked up in a masterly fashion, and the pupil is unconscious of difficulties in fingering, which simplifies everything in the process of his training.
At no period in the history of our nation was there greater need for a military school of piping than at the present moment. There are hundreds of young pipers required to fill the places of those who have fallen in action. As can be seen from the record contained in this volume many pipe bands have suffered most heavily. In fact some have been entirely wiped out.
From experience of class-work in piping it has been proved that the training of young pipers at the age of fourteen to sixteen years under a fixed system is an ideal method of creating good performers. Boys who have never had a finger on the chanter before, are started in classes of from eight to ten in number. This prevents them from making an improper use of the chanter or creating bad fingering which, if allowed to go too far, can never be got out of. Each pupil should be provided with a properly made chanter, and all the chanters in the class should be of the same make and correctly tuned, so that, while at practice in class-work, they are all in perfect unison. If one or two improperly made and badly tuned chanters are used in a class, this is the cause of two great evils. The performer's ear becomes less sensitive to the notes in proper pitch; and it discourages the training of a pupil to detect improper sounds and slovenly fingering. If there are two or three chanters out of tune in a class of ten they prevent the instructor from detecting errors in fingering.
The use of a properly tuned chanter tends to cultivate a good ear, whereas if the ear is used to improper sounds it loses its power of detecting the difference between what is real and that which is false.
In class-work it is hardly possible to get ten pupils with equal powers of picking up tunes and correct fingering. The ear may be compared to a machine which records musical compositions and sounds. In this respect the perfect machine has already been found. The phonograph will record and reproduce a tune in perfect form, but then it is only a reproduction, whereas the musician has life and power to create new and original tunes.
Take the human ear. Where it is perfect it will record a tune with the same accuracy as the machine; but, where the ear is defective, it will only take in what it is capable of. In cases where there is only a slight defect in ear, and where a pupil is somewhat slow at fingering, care must be taken that the slow pupil is brought up in line with the smart pupil. This makes the results in class-work equal. Many instructors of piping fail because they overlook slovenly fingering. Each pupil must be made to finger exactly. The slovenly player spoils the class and every band into which he may go, so that, if a class is to be properly taught, each pupil must come to know his class mate as a musician as well as a companion. Each performer in a pipe band must form part of a machine, as it were, which acts systematically as a clock, in order to give good results and render a tune like one man. A properly trained class with a sufficiently long period of training will, in time, finger together in a manner which is most surprising as regards regularity.
As an example of irregularity in fingering, take for instance—one pupil is playing in perfect time, one graces his note a little too soon and another a little too late. This gives three different renderings as regards time, and how could they become pleasing to the ear or ever attain regularity in time or fingering?
"Patience is a virtue," and an instructor of piping must be imbued with that qualification. Without patience there can be no climax, no perfection, and no goal to aim at. One may compel a person to do work even by punishment, but to compel a pupil to play the pipes would be hopeless. If a pupil has to be forced to play an instrument against his will, the music will be anything but pleasing to the listener's ear. Then it will lack expression, the most important and wonderful thing in all musical performances. To be successful as an instructor of piping one must first win the hearts of his pupils, so that they will like and respect him; speak firmly but kindly to them; enforce strict discipline and good behaviour; and conduct his school just the same as all well-governed establishments of education. One hour's instruction should be given at a time, and this should be given by the instructor of the school himself. Although boys are boys, they are sensitive to insult and degradation, and they will not accept tuition from another boy, even although he is a good performer. It has been found to be the case that intelligent pupils must have instruction from the proper source, and, when one boy teaches another, their time is wasted and they drift into slovenly and careless fingering. This constitutes a reason for strict supervision on the part of an instructor himself in a school of piping, so that the best results may be attained and good order and obedience maintained.
In bagpipe music, theory is entirely neglected. The average piper is able to read the names of the notes: G A B C D E F G and A, and he plays from them and pays little attention to their value. They may be all crotchets, quavers or semi-quavers, for all he cares. In almost every case the piper has already heard the tune played on the chanter, and the relative value of the notes mean nothing to him. Then, one hears illegal syncopation, e.g., the taking of the value from the lengthened note and giving it to the next one, which should be the shortest note in the beat, especially in six-eight time. Then, in writing down an original tune without a knowledge of the theory of music, the average piper is of no use.
Boys should be started on the chanter at fourteen to sixteen years of age, and given a period of chanter practice of from six to nine months; at the same time it is necessary to see that, from the very start, they are able to read music at sight. Then, towards the end of nine months tuition in practice, theory should be taught; then they make more progress than they would at the very beginning of their training. Theory enables the piper to put expression into his playing, and, in his turn, he can in time take his place as a qualified instructor of piping.
One thing of great importance in piping and the training of young pipers is the rate of speed at which they play. The regimental regulation pace is 120 paces to the minute. This may be all very well with a brass band, where the performer with his 120 paces to the minute has a curtailed, nipped, or broken step, but in pipe music it is far different. Any one who has a knowledge of the Highland bagpipe and its music knows that piping at the rate of 120 paces to the minute is not pipe music at all. The great majority of marches for the pipes are written in two-four and six-eight time. Two-four time has a crotchet beat and six-eight has a dotted crotchet beat. The beat in six-eight being a dotted crotchet is of longer duration than the two-four or crochet beat. When both are played at 120 paces to the minute they are more or less equalized and spoiled. Time must be given to the beat note in six-eight to distinguish it from the two-four beat; hence, 100 to 105 paces to the minute in two-four time is good marching, and 90 to 95 paces to the minute in six-eight time gives the proper swinging pace which the men in a Highland regiment like. To adopt such a suggestion would give time and expression to pipe music, differentiate the pace in one time signature from another, and, above all, would tend to give more time for correct fingering and clear, distinct playing. A young piper who has only been playing the bagpipes for about six months is very often spoiled for life as a performer when he begins, at that stage, to play at 120 paces to the minute. He is unable to get the fingering in in time. What he cannot find time to finger is left out altogether, and then, worst of all, he becomes a slovenly and incorrect performer.
The teaching of piping has always been placed on an unequal footing as compared with brass bands in His Majesty's forces, and one wonders how long it is to be allowed to remain so. It is absolutely certain that a Military School of Piping would be a blessing to regimental pipe bands, and the standard of performance could be raised to the highest point of perfection. In times of peace many people single out the brass band as the apple of their eye in the garden of music, so to speak, but let us Highlanders mark time and see what the great Highland bagpipe has done in war.
Many pipers have gone over the parapet playing the bagpipes and have won laurels which can never be forgotten. Hundreds of pipers have fallen in the great war to sleep their last sleep in the graves of heroes, after sounding the triumphant charge. The bagpipe has lived in war in its majestic power and splendour, and in peace it should not be allowed to die.
In war there is, to our Highland regiments, no music like that of the great Highland bagpipe. Its notes inspire the men to victory, and the glory of the results of the music of the Piob Mhor with its fluttering pennons has left a landmark in the history of the world's war.
The great Highland bagpipe is the hallmark of a race whose achievements are second to none in the world. It has been played in every great battlefield in the history of our nation, and the heroic deeds done by Highland regiments inspired by its music deserve to be perpetuated in a lasting memorial.
[THE SPIRIT OF THE MACCRIMMONS]
By Fred T. Macleod, F.S.A. (Scot.)
It was the year 1626, a memorable year in the history of the Western Isles of Scotland, and singularly eventful in the history of Skye and of the Dunvegan family. Sir Rory Mor MacLeod, warrior and statesman, patron of Art, of Music and of Letters, and dispenser of lavish hospitality to rich and poor alike, had died in the Chanonry of Ross an event "greatly deplored among the Gael at that time." The ancient sea-gate of Dunvegan Castle was opened, and into a waiting boat stepped Patrick Mor MacCrimmon, the dead chief's hereditary piper, the representative of a line of pipers almost as long as the line of MacLeod chiefs. Swiftly, yet silently, the piper was rowed across Loch Dunvegan to Boreraig. MacCrimmon stepped ashore and took from his servant the instrument which had on many occasions cheered his beloved master. His heart could no longer contain its pent-up emotion, and his frame shook with a violent outburst of grief. Then, with head erect and firm step, he walked the remaining distance to the renowned College of Pipers, the home of his family for many generations. The fingers of a master player lingered for a moment lovingly on the chanter. In swift succession there fell upon the ears of his pupils, themselves no mean players of ancient piobaireachd, the arresting, appealing, plaintive notes of "Cumha Ruaridh Mhoir," "Lament to Rory Mor."
To-day, cattle browse upon the site of the MacCrimmon College, within whose walls instruction on the Piob mhor had been given by members of the MacCrimmon family to countless students from all parts. Thither too had come the best pipers of Scotland to receive the finishing touches to a piping education well-nigh perfect in itself, including representatives of the three well-known piping families, MacArthur, Mackay and Campbell. The music of the pipes is now seldom, if ever, heard on the plateau upon which in former days many pipers were wont to assemble. Sassenach inhibitory legislation followed by the unsympathetic action of the Highland clergy combined in an attempt to stifle for ever the majestic notes of ancient piobaireachd, and the free, independent, social temperament of the Children of the Island. But, while the grass grows green on the spot where the college stood, the memory of these master musicians is enshrined in the ancient traditions of the island, in the MacCrimmon compositions preserved and played to-day, and in the names of places in the vicinity of the MacCrimmon homeland. The ancient castle, dating from the ninth century, is occupied to-day by Norman Magnus MacLeod, the 23rd chief of his line, as it has been continuously occupied by his forefathers, and among the relics carefully preserved is an ancient set of MacCrimmon pipes. One can still enjoy the shelter of "Slochd nam Piobairean"[24] and he who desires to do so can honour the dust of several members of the MacCrimmon family in the little burying-ground at Kilmuir, overlooking Dunvegan Loch. Nay more, one may converse with living descendants of the family within a stone's throw of the home of their forefathers. The fame of the MacCrimmons will never die so long as these features or the memory of them remains, and, when these are no longer remembered, the honour due to these Kings of Pipers will be enshrined in the music they have left behind them.
It is impossible in this article to do more than touch the fringe of an almost illimitable subject. There are many controversial points into which it is not desirable to enter, e.g., the origin of the family name, the exact period during which the MacCrimmons held their hereditary office, and the "Cainntaireachd" invented and used by them. The old papers in the castle are singularly silent in regard to the history of men so closely allied with the fortunes of the Dunvegan family. The only two documents among these papers, so far as I am aware, which bear upon the subject, are a lease of the lands of Galtrigal in Skye to the MacCrimmons in virtue of their hereditary office, and a rent-roll of the latter years of the eighteenth century, which contains entries of payments made by MacLeod tenants, in the form of a tax to assist a member of the MacCrimmon family in his declining years. But while contemporary documentary evidence is practically unavailable, tradition has preserved a great deal of interesting information. While it may not be advisable to accept as accurate many oral traditions of a country, we are entitled to rely to a considerable extent upon, and to accept as generally trustworthy, Highland oral tradition, which every student of Highland history knows was the common mode of preserving what otherwise would have been long ago irretrievably lost. The office of "Seanachaidh"[25] was recognized and honoured in leading Highland families and, subject to the legitimate criticism that a Seanachaidh was apt unduly to extol the virtues of those whose praises he sang and to decry the virtues of rival families, we are entitled to draw upon this source of information.
The first published account of the family known to me is Angus MacKay's collection of Ancient Piobaireachd, or Highland Pipe Music, published in 1838, which forms the basis of most, if not all, the subsequent published references to the family. Dr. Norman MacLeod's account (in Gaelic) of the MacCrimmons must also be mentioned, and of more modern date Dr. Fraser's interesting book on the Highland Bagpipe. The Rev. Archibald Clerk contributed an article worthy of notice in the New Statistical Account of Scotland, and Fionn's Martial Music of the Gael contains some interesting notes.
I regard, however, as the most authoritative contribution a series of Gaelic articles contributed to the Celtic Monthly by the Rev. Neil Ross of Buccleuch Parish Church, Edinburgh. Mr. Ross is one of our ablest Gaelic scholars, and, having been born and brought up in the heart of the MacCrimmon country, he has had the peculiar advantage of obtaining the local traditions of the family at first hand, from old people practically all of whom have passed away.
I am inclined to place the commencement of the MacCrimmon era so far as their relationship with the Macleods of Dunvegan is concerned, approximately as 1500, and the termination thereof as 1822. My reasons for doing so are first that we find that in 1651 one of the family was publicly acknowledged as the King of Pipers. In the old chronicle detailing this incident the name of the piper upon whom this honour was bestowed is given as John Macgurmen (MacCrimmon) which I believe to be a mistake for Patrick MacCrimmon, he who composed the well-known port, "I gave a kiss to the hand of the King." If the old adage is true that it took seven years of a man's life and seven generations of pipers before him to make a perfect piper, the date 1500 is by no means too remote. Further, the traditional list of MacCrimmon pipers who held their hereditary office is sufficiently long to bridge that period. Dr. MacLeod enumerates seven successive members of the family, whereas Mr. Ross furnishes us with twelve names inclusive of those mentioned by Dr. MacLeod. The following is Mr. Ross' list:
Finlay of the Breacan.
Iain Odhar.
Patrick Caogach.
Patrick Donn.
Donald Mór.
Patrick Mór.
Patrick Òg.
Donald Bàn
Angus Òg.
Malcolm.
Iain Dubh.
Patrick Mór.
It is outwith the scope of this article to deal with the MacCrimmon genealogy, or to discuss in detail the different members of the family. Interesting notes might be furnished concerning most of the men whose names are enumerated above, and it might not be difficult for a skilled player of pibroch, by a careful analysis of the MacCrimmon compositions, to assign many of the extant compositions to the appropriate composers. I prefer to gather together from the available sources known to me a few incidents in the lives of three outstanding members of the family, Donald Mór, Patrick Mór and Donald Bàn.
DONALD MÓR MACCRIMMON
We shall probably not be very far wrong if we regard the period during which this piper lived as that embracing the concluding years of the sixteenth century and the early years of the seventeenth. I realise that, in so placing him, I lay myself open to the criticism that I post-date the period of Patrick Mór's activities. Patrick Mór is regarded as the son of Donald Mór, and it is probable that both father and son were in the service of Sir Rory Mór. It is stated that, being a special favourite of his chief, Donald was sent to Ireland to complete his musical education. There can be little doubt that as Ireland was the early home of Celtic letters so she was the early home of musical culture, and that the high degree of efficiency attained by the MacCrimmons was, at least in part, due to the finishing touches obtained by them in the sister island. We learn that Donald Mór played before many of the nobility and gentry of the country and greatly distinguished himself. Mr. Ross has an interesting note that Donald accompanied his chief to Ireland in the reign of James VI., on the occasions when MacLeod led his clan in battle, and that about that time Donald composed "The Lament to the Earl of Antrim." Among the compositions attributed to him are "The Macdonald Salute," "Welcome to Rory Mór," and "The Salute of the Earl of Ross." Mr. Ross, whose knowledge of pibroch entitles him to speak with authority, states that close analysis of Donald Mór's compositions reveals the fact that he frequently used the lower notes of the chanter, and that there is internal evidence that he possessed great skill in changing from the low to the high notes.
PATRICK MÓR MACCRIMMON
It is generally agreed that Patrick succeeded Donald as hereditary piper to the MacLeods of Dunvegan. He is generally admitted to have been the most distinguished member of his race. His life was spent in the service of Sir Rory Mór MacLeod, who succeeded to the chiefship in 1596, and who died as stated in 1626. Under the protection of this powerful chief the practice of Piobaireachd received an impetus which is bearing fruit to-day. The Scottish Privy Council, at a comparatively early date, struck a severe blow at what was regarded as the despotic power of the chiefs by limiting the number of the retinue each chief was entitled to gather round him. An important member of that retinue was the person who held the office of hereditary piper. In addition to the honour such an office carried, there were certain material advantages e.g., the freeholding of land and the right to certain dues and liberties which were not lightly esteemed. As indicating the dignified nature of the office, it may be mentioned that, included in the chief's retinue, was the piper's man, whose duty it was to act as servant to the piper and to carry his instrument for him when not in use.
To Patrick Mór MacCrimmon is assigned the honour of having composed the largest number of pipe tunes. In the plaintive lament "Cumha na Cloinne" (Lament to the Children) he gives expression to his deep grief caused by the visitation of one of the most poignant afflictions known to man—the deaths of his children. According to Dr. MacLeod he was the father of eight stalwart sons. Proudly one Sabbath morning he and they marched to the church in their native glen. Before the close of that year he mourned the loss of all his sons who died in an epidemic of fever. Two other well-known laments, the composition of which is assigned to him, are, "The Lament to the only Son" and "The Lament to John Garbh MacGhille Chalum of Raasay," who was drowned in 1646 while crossing the Minch.
In 1651 Patrick Mór MacCrimmon was in all probability an old man, but not too old to accompany the clan in support of Charles II. At this time MacLeod of MacLeod was a minor, and the command of the clan devolved upon his uncles, Norman MacLeod of Bernera and Roderick MacLeod of Talisker. According to Angus Mackay's account, both these men were knighted by Charles II. before the battle of Worcester in 1651 and on that occasion, Patrick Mór having had the honour of playing before the King, and his performance having greatly pleased His Majesty, Patrick received the further honour of being allowed to kiss the King's hand. Mackay states that the well-known port, "Fhuaireas pog o spog an Righ," was composed by MacCrimmon in honour of the distinction then conferred upon him. Various accounts of this outstanding MacCrimmon honour have been published, no two of which entirely agree. Dr. William Mackay of Inverness has frequently rendered signal service in the department of Highland history, and I am indebted to his labours and scholarly research for what I regard as a complete elucidation of the circumstances surrounding the composition of this tune. Dr. Mackay edited The Chronicles of the Frasers, an old MS. of events embracing the period 1616-1674. There are many MS. histories bearing upon Highland matters, some of which have been fabricated, but no suggestion of falsification besmirches the reputation of this MS., which has been published under the auspices of The Scottish History Publication Society. Referring to the year 1651, the date of the battle of Worcester, the MS. states that at Stirling, in the month of May, "there was great competition betwixt the trumpets in the army; one Axell, the Earle of Hoome's trumpeter, carried it by the King's own decision. The next was anent the pipers; but the Earle of Sutherland's domestick carried it of all the camp, for non contended with him. All the pipers in the army gave John Macgurmen (MacCrimmon) the van, and acknowledged him for their patron in chief. It was pretty in a morning (the King) in parad viewing the regiments and bragads. He saw no less than eighty pipers in a crould, bare-headed, and John Macgurmen in the middle covered. He asked what society that was? It was told his Majesty—'Sir, yow are our King, and yonder old man in the middle is the Prince of Pipers.' He cald him by name and comeing to the king, kneeling, His Majesty reacht him his hand to kiss; and instantly played an extemporanean port, 'Fuoris Pooge i spoge i Rhi'—I got a kiss of the King's hand—of which he and they were all vain." The writer of the manuscript has made an attempt to render the Gaelic phonetically, and Mr. Mackay in a footnote gives the correct Gaelic spelling "Fhuaireas pog o spog an Righ."
DONALD BAN MACCRIMMON
MacLeod of Dunvegan, when Prince Charles Edward made his romantic if impossible attempt to seize the crown of his forefathers, declined to lend his services to the Prince, and consequently incurred the deep displeasure of many of his clansmen. Had he remained simply neutral, the resentment which his refusal to follow the Prince aroused would have been less bitter, but he openly supported the reigning house. Opinions differ as to which of two men, Malcolm MacCrimmon and Donald Ban MacCrimmon, held the office of hereditary piper, but most authorities agree that Donald Ban performed the duties of the office when MacLeod led out his men against the Prince. Many of the MacLeod men refused to follow their chief, and preferred to follow the standard of the Prince, under the leadership of the heads of cadet families sprung from the Dunvegan line. MacLeod's position was a difficult one. Had the Prince landed in Moidart with sufficient money, equipment and arms, MacLeod would probably have given him all the support within his power. It is persistently stated that his was one of the signatures to the document inviting the Prince to raise his standard in Scotland. In these circumstances it was necessary for MacLeod, by some overt act, to give practical evidence to the Government of his non-adherence to the Stuart cause. He was in close correspondence with, and being actively advised by, President Forbes, who realised the importance of securing the services of MacLeod, thereby lessening the likelihood of the Macdonalds of Skye joining the Prince's forces. MacLeod gathered around him a substantial body of men who held the lands in the vicinity of the castle, and led them from the castle to the shore, where boats waited to convey them to the mainland, and thence to the east of Scotland.
THE PIBROCH
From the Painting by Lockhart Bogle
We are constantly reminded of the romance of the Forty-Five. We too often forget the dark tragedies of those days. The spectre of looming disaster entered the home of the MacCrimmons. Donald Ban MacCrimmon had heard the note of the Banshee presaging a journey from which for him there would be no returning. He was told to inspirit the men by the rousing strains of "MacLeod's March," but true to his hereditary instincts he could only play a port in harmony with the mood of the moment. In place of the "March" his pipes attuned themselves to that most touching of all laments, "Cumha Mhic Cruimein." The pages of the Brahan Seer do not contain any instance of second sight more circumstantially fulfilled than that concerning Donald Ban MacCrimmon. Contemporary history supplies us with the information. The scene is changed from Dunvegan Castle to Moy Hall, the residence of The Mackintosh, a few miles east of Inverness. In the absence of her husband, the wife of The Mackintosh, better known as "Lady Anne," kept a watchful eye, in the interests of the Prince, on the movements of his enemies. The Prince had accepted the hospitality of Moy Hall for the night. News reached "Lady Anne" that a body of men, under Lord Loudon, including MacLeod and his men, were to attempt to capture the Prince under the cover of night. "Donald Fraser, a blacksmith, and other four with loaded muskets in their hands were keeping watch upon a muir out some distance from Moy towards Inverness. As they were walking up and down they happened to spy a body of men marching towards them, upon which the blacksmith fired his piece and the other four followed his example. The laird of MacLeod's piper (reputed the best at his business in all Scotland) was shot dead on the spot. Then the blacksmith (Fraser) and his trusty companions raised a cry (calling some particular regiments by their names) to the Prince's army to advance, as if they had been at hand, which so far imposed upon Lord Loudon and his command (a pretty considerable one) and struck them with such a panic, that instantly they beat a retreat and made their way back to Inverness in great disorder, imagining the Prince's whole army to be at their heels."
Tradition states that Donald Ban's body was buried not far from the spot where he received his fatal wound, and I am informed that a large stone on the moor marks the place of interment.
THE HOMELAND OF THE MACCRIMMONS
Pipers throughout the world will probably welcome a short description of that part of Skye which will for all time be associated with the MacCrimmon family. We may safely assume that the lands of Galtrigal and Boreraig have undergone little physical change during the last 300 years. Standing on a lofty plateau, the MacCrimmon practice ground, we find ourselves in the centre of a district possessing great natural charm and an unparalled sea view. Dunvegan's ancient towers are a prominent landmark reminiscent of bloody feuds, when Macdonald and MacLeod, though connected by marriage, were continually at one anothers throats. Johnson, Boswell, Pennant and Sir Walter Scott all testify to the hospitality they received within its walls. Dun Boreraig, to the east, one of many interesting brochs on the island—silent witnesses to the strength and ingenuity of a past race—still keeps its sentinel watch. To the west stand out in strong relief the rocky cliffs of Dunvegan Head, and in the south are the marvellous Coolins with their ever-changing aspects. At the time when Angus Mackay's publication appeared in 1838, the ruins of the "college" remained in situ, disclosing thick walls, massive cabers or rafters, and other characteristics of old Highland habitations. Mackay says that the building was divided into two parts, one forming the class-room and the other the sleeping apartments.
It was the practice of the MacCrimmons to enter into formal indentures of apprenticeship with their pupils, one of which has been published in the Inverness Gaelic Society's Transactions. So many years of study were prescribed, regular lessons were given out, and certain periods for receiving the instructions of the master were fixed. The Rev. Archibald Clerk, son-in-law of Dr. Norman MacLeod (Caraid nan Gaidheal), writing in 1845 states, that the whole tuition "was carried on systematically as in any of our modern academies; and the names of some of the caves and knolls in the vicinity still point out the spots where the scholars used to practice respectively the Piob Mhor or large bagpipe, before exhibiting in presence of the master. MacLeod endowed this school by granting the farm of Borreraig to it, and it is no longer than seventy years since the endowment was withdrawn. The farm had originally been given only during the pleasure of the proprietor. For many ages the grant was undisturbed, but when the value of land had risen to six or seven times what it was when the school was founded, MacLeod very reasonably proposed to resume one half of the farm, offering at the same time to MacCrimmon a free lease of the other half in perpetuam: but MacCrimmon, indignant that his emoluments should be curtailed, resigned the whole farm and broke up his establishment, which has never been restored."
Any description of the home of the MacCrimmons would be incomplete without referring to Clach MacCrimmon, a stone which is almost as well-known as the MacCrimmons themselves. Although the account of this matter savours of exaggeration, there can be little doubt that the incident is believed in firmly by the people of the district. The incident as narrated to me was as follows: One of the MacCrimmons was in the habit of tethering his horse, in accordance with the custom of the country, by a rope attached to a cipean driven into the ground. Some maliciously disposed persons removed the cipean from its place on more than one occasion, thus causing MacCrimmon's horse to roam and to do damage to the surrounding crops. In exasperation, MacCrimmon vowed that he would so fix the cipean that no mortal man would ever remove it again. He thereupon looked about for a stone sufficiently large to suit his purpose, and, observing one about 200 yards distant, he immediately proceeded, unaided, to lift it, carried it that distance and placed it upon the top of the cipean. The spot from which MacCrimmon removed the stone, and the spot upon which he placed it, were both pointed out to me. The stone is about 3 feet long by 2½ feet broad, and 2 feet high. I endeavoured to lift the stone an inch or two from the ground and failed to do so. To satisfy certain south-country sceptics, not very long ago, several men, including Murdoch MacLeod (who accompanied me upon the occasion to which I have been referring), succeeded in removing the stone from the bed in which it had lain so long, and by using a wall as a lever, rolled it down a gradient of several yards to the spot where it at present lies. A most remarkable sequel followed. It was stated to me, in all seriousness, that underneath the stone when it was removed, was found an ancient rusty cipean much worn away. Murdoch Macleod stated to me that he not only saw it, but handled it.
MACCRIMMON PUPILS
If the genius of a master can be measured by the success of his pupils, then, apart from other considerations, the MacCrimmons of Boreraig must truly be regarded as kings among pipers. The fame of their college, long recognised throughout the Isles, spread to the mainland, and pupils from all parts of Scotland eagerly travelled long distances to avail themselves of the tuition the college afforded. No piper's education was regarded as complete until he had passed through the hands of the masters at Boreraig. Rival chiefs buried for a time their jealousies, and sent their pipers to the college on MacLeod's lands. The method usually adopted was to apprentice the young pipers to the MacCrimmons for a period of years, and, in the case of those men who had already otherwise been trained, to send them to Skye for a short period. In a series of articles upon the History of the Parish of Kiltarlity, written by the Rev. Archibald Macdonald, I find the following: "There is an indenture drawn up at Beaufort on 9th March, 1743, in which William Fraser, tacksman, Beauly, is described as his Lordship's (Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat) musician. The brother of this William—David Fraser—had been educated by David Macgregor, his Lordship's piper. His Lordship, however, was now to send David to the Isle of Skye to have him perfected as a Highland piper by the famous Malcolm MacCrimmon, whom his Lordship was to reward for educating the said David for a year."
It in no sense belittles the importance of the MacArthurs, who, as a family of pipers, were second only in excellence to the MacCrimmons of Boreraig, to state that the musical education of a member of this family, Charles, was perfected by Patrick Og MacCrimmon. The MacArthurs were hereditary pipers to the MacDonalds of the Isles and, like the MacCrimmons, had a school for instruction in pipe music. Pennant, who visited the Hebrides in 1774, was hospitably entertained in this building and listened to the playing of many pibrochs. He describes the building as consisting of four apartments, one of which formed the hall set apart for students. Of Charles MacArthur the following interesting incident is told. Sir Alexander Macdonald, being at Dunvegan on a visit to the laird of MacLeod, heard the performance of Patrick Og MacCrimmon with great delight, and desirous if possible to have a piper of equal merit, he said to MacCrimmon one day that there was a young man whom he was anxious to place under his tuition, on condition that he should not be allowed to return until such time as he could play equal to his master. "When this is the case," said MacDonald, "you will bring him home and I will give you ample satisfaction for your trouble." "Sir Alexander," said Patrick, "if you will be pleased to send him to me I will do all that I am able to do for him." Charles was accordingly sent to Boreraig where he remained for eleven years, when MacCrimmon, considering him as perfect as he could be made, proceeded to Mugstad to deliver his charge to Sir Alexander, who was then residing there, and, where Iain Dall Mackay, Gairloch's blind piper, happened also to be. Macdonald hearing of their arrival, thought it a good opportunity to determine the merit of his own piper by the judgment of the blind man, whose knowledge of pipe music was unexceptionable. He therefore enjoined Patrick Og and MacArthur not to speak a word to betray who they were, and, addressing Mackay, he told him he had a young man learning the pipes for some years and was glad that he was present to say whether he thought him worth the money which his instruction had cost. Mackay said if he heard him play he would give his opinion freely, and he requested to be informed previously with whom the piper had been studying. Sir Alexander told him he had been with Patrick Og MacCrimmon. Then Mackay exclaimed, "He could never have been with a better master!" The young man was ordered to play, and when he was finished Sir Alexander asked the other for his opinion. "I think a great deal of him," replied Iain. "He is a good piper; he gives the notes correctly, and if he takes care he will excel in his profession." Sir Alexander was pleased with so flattering an opinion, and observed that he had been at the trouble of sending two persons to the college that he might retain the best, and that now the second man would play, so that an opinion on his merits might also be given. Mackay observed that he must be a very excellent performer to surpass the first, or even to compare with him. When Patrick Og (who acted as the second pupil) had finished playing, Sir Alexander asked the umpire what he thought of his performance. "Indeed, Sir, no one need try me in that manner," returned the blind man. "Although I have lost the eyes of my human body, I have not lost the eyes of my understanding; and if all the pipers in Scotland were present I would not find it a difficult task to distinguish the last player from them all." "You surprise me, Mackay, who is he?" "Who but Patrick Og MacCrimmon," promptly rejoined Mackay, and, turning to where Patrick was sitting, he observed, "It was quite needless, my good sir, to think you would deceive me in that way, for you could not but know that I should have recognised your performance among a thousand." Sir Alexander then asked Mackay himself to play, and afterwards he called for a bottle of whisky, drank to their healths, and remarked that he had that night under his roof the three best pipers in Britain. So much admired was Charles MacArthur for his musical taste, that a gentleman in MacLeod's country prevailed on Malcolm MacCrimmon to send his son Donald for six months to reside with MacArthur, not with the idea of adding to his musical knowledge, but in order that he might be improved by studying MacArthur's particular graces.
About the same time one of the MacCrimmons, better known as Padruig Caogach (obviously not the Patrick Caogach No. 3 on Mr. Ross' list, if Mr. Ross' order is correct), because of his habit of frequently winking, was endeavouring to compose a tune. Two years had passed since the first two measures of it had become known, and still the tune remained half finished. Poor Patrick utterly failed in his frequent attempts to finish what he had begun so well. Mackay succeeded where Patrick failed, finished the tune and called it "Lasan Phadruig Chaogaich."[26] Annoyed because of Mackay's success, or perhaps because of the perpetuation of his physical weakness, Patrick bribed the other apprentices to hurl the blind Iain from a height of twenty-four feet. Iain, however, landed on his feet without injury. The place in question was thereafter known as "Leum an Doill."[27] It is said that the completion by Iain Dall of Patrick's unfinished tune resulted in great praise being bestowed upon the former, and gave rise to the saying, "Chaidh an fhoghluim osceann Mhic Cruimein," i.e., "the apprentice outstrips the master."
MACCRIMMON LEGENDS
The legends associated with the MacCrimmons are numerous and interesting, but I can only refer to one or two of them. The "Cave" legend is well-known, and I make no further reference to it except to say that variations of it are to be met with wherever piping has been practised.
Neil Munro, whose stories of the Hebrides are redolent of peat reek and quaint Gaelic idioms, has used the following Breadalbane legend to excellent purpose in his story of the Red Hand: Ross, an old Breadalbane piper, in a fit of jealous rage, forced the right hand of his brother into the fire until it became a charred lump, to prevent him becoming a better piper than himself. Somewhat akin to this old tale is one concerning the MacCrimmons. Although proud of the state of perfection to which they had brought the art of piping, and while encouraging the dissemination of their art by returning young men to their homes from the college at Boreraig trained to a high degree of efficiency, they nevertheless retained among the members of their own family certain movements known only to themselves. They were rightly proud of the position they occupied, and were jealous lest they lost it, even though the honour were to descend upon a pupil of their own training. The story goes that a girl, friendly with the MacCrimmons, acquired the knowledge of how a certain hitherto secret combination of notes was accomplished and imparted the information to her sweetheart, who was not of the MacCrimmon family. Upon this fact reaching the ears of her family the drastic step was adopted of instantly cutting off her fingers so as to prevent possible leakage of information in the future.
In the beautiful Gaelic song, said to have been composed by Donald Ban MacCrimmon's sweetheart at Dunvegan, one of the lines refers to the wailing of the fairies when they heard that their friend was leaving to return no more. These little people play no small part in Highland legends generally, and we are therefore not surprised to learn of the existence of the following MacCrimmon fairy legend. On one occasion, when Dunvegan's chief was entertaining within his hospitable walls a goodly company, including many representatives of the leading clans, accompanied by their pipers, it was agreed that the pipers should compete for the post of honour. MacLeod, as a good host, naturally left his piper to come last. The competition went on, piper succeeding piper, until there remained two, including MacLeod's piper, MacCrimmon, to compete. MacLeod glanced in the direction where he expected to see MacCrimmon preparing to acquit himself bravely, but to his annoyance there was no sign of him. Calling a boy, a young MacCrimmon, to him, he bade him search for and bring back MacCrimmon. In a short time the boy returned with the tidings that MacCrimmon was hopelessly drunk. The chief was plunged into the depths of despair with the certainty staring him in the face of being disgraced in front of his guests in his own castle. Seizing the boy by the hand, he whispered in his ear as the eleventh piper stepped forward, "You are the twelfth piper from your chief." Realizing the impossibility of the task imposed upon him the poor lad fled from the hall and threw himself down upon the hillside bitterly bewailing the helplessness of his condition. Suddenly there arose out of an adjacent hillock a beautiful little fairy, who, doubtless realizing the importance of time, handed to the lad a silver chanter and bade him play upon it. He did so, and through the silent glen there floated music the like of which had never before been heard by human ears. With a radiant countenance the lad immediately returned to the hall and, as he entered, the last notes of the eleventh piper were dying away. Proudly the little fellow lifted his master's pipes, and to the surprise and merriment of the great gathering, took the place just vacated by the previous piper. The virtues of the silver chanter stood him in good stead and the looks of amusement quickly turned into admiration, as there came from the pipes the notes of a master player.
In my own youthful days I heard the following MacCrimmon story. On the occasion of a great competition among the pipers held at Dunvegan Castle, the leading MacCrimmon of the day and his nephew, to whom MacCrimmon had imparted his whole store of knowledge, save one particular tune, resolved to compete. The old master had specially refrained from communicating this particular composition to his pupil in order that, while priding himself upon the accomplishments of his own pupil, he might yet retain one item, the knowledge and playing of which would secure for him the coveted honour at the coming competition. On the night before the great event master and pupil slept together at a certain inn. Believing his companion to be sleeping, the old man conned over to himself the air by which he hoped to distinguish himself on the morrow. The arm of the apparently sleeping lad was lying stretched across the bed, and the old piper's hands, mechanically searching for something upon which to "finger" the tune, seized upon his pupil's arm. Time and again the old man practised the notes, at the same time quietly humming the notes, ignorant of the fact that his pupil, though feigning sleep, was very wide awake, and gradually becoming the possessor of the coveted port. On the morrow the pupil entered the lists before his master, and to the mortification of the latter, carried off the leading honour by reason of his manner of playing the tune of which MacCrimmon believed himself at that time to be the sole possessor.
Once again, I find myself in "Eilean a' cheó." Six weeks of almost constant rain, disappointing to others who are not accustomed to the vagaries of the weather, have not chilled the affectionate ardour which contact with the island and its people invariably inspires in me. The mists have ever hung heavy on the hills in times of deep, heart-breaking sorrow, and the present tempestuous weather is but in keeping with the sad aftermath of War.
To-day, there came from a distant part of the Island one who served his country well in the late war and who was sorely wounded in that service. To the home of Pibroch he brought his pipes, and in the seclusion of the Pipers Cave in Galtrigal he played two well-known MacCrimmon ports; "Cumha Ruari Mhor," and "Tog orm mo phiob." An ardent student of MacCrimmon Pibroch, and a cultured exponent of their art, he came to do honour at their shrine. It was fitting that one of those who heard the haunting notes as they welled forth across the loch was Sir Rory's lineal descendant Macleod of Macleod.
There are many pipers who look hopefully for the day when the memory of the MacCrimmons and of their immortal genius shall be enshrined in a College of Piping, where pupils from far and near may receive instruction in all that is noblest and best in the art of bag-pipe playing.
[A GOSSIP ABOUT THE GORDON HIGHLANDERS]
By J. M. Bulloch
If the Great War has reversed some preconceptions and ruthlessly rationalised many traditions, it has confirmed, and actually enhanced, the fine fighting reputation of the ten Regiments of the Line—half of them kilted—which Scotland contributes to the British Army. We now know of a certainty that this reputation is well founded as we did not know it before. True, there has long been a legend to that effect, but of recent years there has been a disposition to question its validity. Scotland, or rather the articulate part of it, has borrowed the deadly doctrine of self-depreciation, from which the dominant partner has suffered severely, and the suggestion has not been wanting that the praise of Scots troops, which received such an impetus from the enthusiastic pen of the author of The Romance of War, was somewhat overdone. We were reminded that our Army had not had to face troops on the Continent of Europe since the days of the Crimea; one Scots Regiment had not done so since 1799, while the Gordons had nothing to show for it since Waterloo.
If that was true of the old "Contemptibles" generally, it was still truer of the auxiliary forces, which had seen no fighting at all, except in South Africa; but to-day all of them have stood the acid test of the greatest war in history. The old "Contemptibles" were never finer, and we have lived to see one of the best Divisions in the Army composed entirely of kilted Territorials. Indeed, a cloud of witnesses has arisen to prove that all the 126 Battalions, into which the 69 composing the Scots Regiments expanded themselves for the purposes of war, have rendered magnificent service. If we relied merely on the word of the Commander-in-Chief we might suspect bias, for Earl Haig and more than one of his Generals are Scots by birth; but we have the appreciation of the special newspaper war-correspondents, and not one of them hailed from north of the Border.
We have, moreover, the testimony of the enemy, who very quickly recognised the valour and skill of all the Scots Regiments, particularly those of the 51st Division. Indeed, the Scots soldier, although he represented only eleven per cent. of the British Army against eighty-one per cent. of England itself, took hold of the imagination of the Germans to such an extent that their caricaturists turned John Bull into a Highlander, converting his traditional tall hat into a diced "cockit" bonnet, his white riding breeches into a kilt or tartan trews, and his top-boots into gaiters. The pages of Simplicissmus, Kladderadatsch, and Jugend, to name only a few, have throughout the war pictured a long procession of the "wife-men" as representing the British Army, at first in a spirit of incredulous burlesque, and latterly with something of the wholesome fear, which was popularly supposed to have overtaken George the Second when he started in his sleep in terror as he dreamed that the "Great Glenbogged" (Glenbucket) was swooping down upon him.
It was to the advent of the father of that monarch that we owe the raising of the kilted Scots—nearly all the trewsed Regiments arose in the previous century—though the connection was indirect, not to say inverted, and was touched with an irony (especially in the light of the greatest of wars), which has been largely lost on a certain type of popularly accepted English history. According to this reasoning, the Highlanders, on seeing the country in danger owing to the expansion adventures of the dominant partner at the expense of France, flocked to the colours at the call of the English Government, and thus not only helped to save the Empire, but gratified their own passion for arms, which had been severely suppressed after the Forty-Five.
The facts, however, are very different from this facile theory. To begin with, if the country as a whole had little consciousness of expansion, as Seeley argued, the Highlander had infinitely less, for one of the main troubles of dealing with him, even in our own day, has been his homing instinct, his intense love of his native soil, no matter how poor it may be. In the second place, the ambitions of the House of Hanover touched no responsive chord in the Highlander's heart, for the Clans had felt the full scourge of Teutonism in the ruthless work of Cumberland at Culloden.
Again, if France was the hereditary arch-enemy of the dominant partner, Scotland in general and the Highlands in particular, had no such quarrel with her. On the contrary, France and Scotland, linked together by racial, psychological, and historical similarities and identities of interest, had long been the best of friends, and it must have puzzled the average Highlander why he should be asked to fight against her. So strong is this community of spirit that it might very well be argued that the Highland Regiments have never fought better in their long history than they have done in the Great War, because they were fighting for France, as well as for their native country.
No doubt the Union had placed Scotland in the same category as England so far as France was concerned, but the kilted regiments arose, not so much out of a political necessity as from a revival of the spirit which had made the Scot in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a soldier of fortune wherever he was wanted, fighting now for Rome, and now in the ranks of Gustavus Adolphus against her; fighting to a large extent without passion, but as an artist in arms; and it was this absence of bias as much as anything else that made these venturers clean fighters, and raised their reputation as masters of their art wherever they took service.
From first to last the spirit which animated the soldier of fortune—out to gratify his instinct for adventure, his desire to make a living, and his passion for individuality—has always inspired the Highland regiments to a remarkable extent. It is true that the war with France involved the most momentous issues for the State, but the methods adopted for warding off the danger were far more personal and local than national. It might be argued that the real cause of the war with France was due to the imperialistic ambitions of individual adventurers, and therefore raised little national animus, but precisely the same methods of meeting a crisis coloured the early stages of Armageddon, when every one felt involved, the influence of one man, Lord Kitchener, being far more potent in rousing resistance than any abstract doctrine of State necessity.
The raising of troops to fight France was at no time the complete State undertaking that conscription has involved in our own day. At first the duty was taken up by individual landowners, who raised in turn Regiments of the Line and Fencible Corps; and when their pockets were exhausted, the task was assigned to local authorities like the Lords Lieutenant, who were commissioned to raise in turn Militia, Volunteers (1794-1808), and the very curious force known as Local Militia (1808-1816).
Scotland afforded a splendid ground for the exercise of personal influence because, although the Clan system with its chieftainship had broken down, the influence of the great landowners was still powerful enough to attract attention, although the devotion of the people had to be reinforced by bounties on a scale unknown in our day, and by all sorts of practical recognition, such as the adjustment of rents and the enlargement of holdings; for, although the armies thus raised had strong affinities with the levies organised under the feudal system, the Clan system was infinitely more democratic, and gave scope for greater individuality. This is so true that it often happened that the men raised in one glen declined to march to the rendezvous with the men of another glen who happened to be their hereditary enemies, and trouble arose over the demands of particular groups to be led by their local officers, some of them even believing that they should go forth to battle by Clans, as in the old days.
Of all the personal potentates interested in recruiting in Scotland, none was more powerful than the fourth Duke of Gordon who, although long in possession of vast tracts of Highland territory, was in no sense a Highlander, his family having migrated from Berwickshire to the north, and the trouble which existed for centuries between him and his Highland tenants, like the Macphersons, was due to the inability of his ancestors, or their representatives, to understand the true nature of the Celt. More motives than one urged His Grace forward as recruiter. In the first place, his immediate ancestors had played a very dubious part in the Jacobite risings, and the fourth Duke was anxious to remove the last doubts as to the loyalty of his house. Later on he married an extremely clever and ambitious woman, the famous Jane Maxwell, who had a great desire to play a big part in the State, and do something for her sons.
Whatever the motives, the recruiting achievements of His Grace were splendid, for from first to last he raised no fewer than four complete regiments, besides contributing two companies to corps raised by others, and he also played a very active part as Lord Lieutenant of his county. The forces organised by the Duke were as follows:
| 1759-65 | 89th Regiment. |
| 1775-83 | Company for the Fraser Highlanders. |
| 1778-83 | Northern Fencibles. |
| 1790-1 | Company for the Black Watch. |
| 1793-9 | Northern Fencibles. |
| 1794 | Gordon Highlanders. |
The sole remnant of this mighty effort, which must have cost the Duke a fortune, is the regiment of Gordon Highlanders, which we have seen blossom out into eleven battalions, to say nothing of certain reserves; and although the regiment has not continued to be recruited on the ducal estates, its connection with the House of Gordon has all along been maintained, and has actually been strengthened in recent times. That connection of course has always been symbolised by the wearing of the clan tartan, but the links with the north were strengthened by the rearrangement of 1872, when infantry regiments were allotted to definite Territorial areas for the purpose of recruiting. About the same time the Gordon family motto, "Bydand," and the familiar crest were placed upon the bonnet in lieu of the hard-won Sphinx.
What is of much more importance is the fact that the genius of the family, admirably described in the alliterative phrase the "Gay Gordons," which inspired the original regiment, has passed into all its subsequent accretions, so that the 75th Regiment added to it in 1881, although actually of earlier origin, has been completely absorbed. The same can be said of the old Aberdeenshire Militia, which became the 3rd Battalion, and also of the various Volunteer Corps which were gradually absorbed, while the Service Battalions raised by Lord Kitchener displayed exactly the same spirit as the cradle corps. This continuity and identity of tradition are also emphasised, not only in the Gordons, but in all the Scots regiments, and especially in the kilted units, by the fact that they alone maintained during the War at least, part of their Peace equipment in the shape of the kilt—even if it was camouflaged with khaki aprons—and the trewsed regiments had their glengarries replaced by Kilmarnock and other braid bonnets.
Who can doubt that such a continuity of outward traditions is but the symbol of a spiritual identity which links up the Scots regiments of the present day with the Corps who did such splendid work of old from Fontenoy to Waterloo, from the Crimea to South Africa. True, when you come to define it, it is difficult to say what it precisely consists in. Nearly every Regiment of the Line has its own peculiarities, but the Scots regiments have them in even greater abundance, for with them they are reinforced by marked racial characteristics. It is perfectly true that the Highland regiments are no longer confined to Highlanders, or even to Scotsmen, although the idea industriously propagated some years ago that they were originally composed largely of Irishmen, is a fallacy, completely disproved by War Office Records. Even if it were otherwise, the fact remains that the esprit de corps which all these idiosyncracies help to form has a remarkably proselytising influence, very subtle and difficult to define, but very potent in actual practice.
The early history of the Gordons is full of curious little incidents which sometimes run counter to popular notions. For example, it used to be commonly supposed, especially in support of the now exploded theory that we have become "degenerate," that the first recruits of the Highland regiments were gigantic men. This is far from being the case. From the Description Book of the Gordons, one of the very few regiments which possess such data in an early form, it is proved that the average height of 914 men composing the greater part (940) of the original regiment, was only 5' 5½", only six of them being 6' or upwards—the tallest, a Morayshire man, scaling 6' 4". Similar facts can be cited about the heights of other groups of men at the same period.
There were only 16 men actually named Gordon, against 39 Macdonalds, 35 Macphersons, and 34 Camerons. As to the occupations of the men, it is interesting to note that 442 were described as "labourers," and as most of them came from the Highlands, they were presumably farm servants. Of skilled artisans, 186 were weavers. Inverness-shire, where the Duke had vast estates, supplied 240 men, Aberdeenshire 124, Banffshire 82, Lanark 62, Ireland 51, England 9, and Wales 2.
There was a solitary German in the regiment, a musician named C. Augustus Sochling, hailing from Hesse Cassel. There was another German in the regiment later on, also a musician, named Friederich Zeigher (or Zugner) who fell at Quatre Bras. The appearance of these Germans was in its way a sort of return for the fact that the House of Gordon had given many good soldiers of its name to what we now call Germany, although most of them really took post in Poland. The descendants of at least four of these soldiers still exist in Germany, and have risen to the dignity of a von, including the founder of the von Gordon-Coldwells, of Laskowitz, in West Prussia, the von Gordons of Frankfort, and the family of Dr. Adolf von Gordon, the well-known Berlin lawyer, whose motto is "Byid Dand." Although at the beginning of 1914 he told a Berlin newspaper that he knew nothing more about it than that it was an "altschottischer Spruch," it is, of course, nothing more or less than the historic word "Bydand."
With regard to the pipe history of the regiment not very much is known. I fancy this is due to the fact that so much that has to do with the art of piping generally rests on oral and not written tradition. In the second place it must be remembered that pipers were not originally recognised by the State. They were purely a regimental, and not an Army, institution, and had no separate rank as the drummers had. Indeed, it was not till about 1853 that they got the same rank and pay as drummers. Thus, in May 1805, a piper named Alexander Cameron was taken on the strength of the Grenadiers as drummer, probably to get him drummer's pay, to which, as a piper, he was not entitled.
The rivalry of the two is brought out in a story told in Carr's Caledonian Sketches, of a dispute as to precedence between a piper and a drummer of a Highland regiment. When the Captain decided in favour of the latter, the piper expostulated with the remark, "Oh, sir, shall a little rascal that beats a sheepskin take the right hand of me that am a musician?" The differentiation of the two is still reflected in the fact that a piper is always a piper, whereas a "musician" returns to the ranks in time of war.
The first direct mention of pipers in the Gordons occurs in a regimental order of October 27, 1796, when the regiment was at Gibraltar, and when it was ordained that pipers were to attend all fatigue parties. An interesting sidelight on the use of the pipes occurs in a regimental order of November 12, 1812, when the regiment was at Alba de Tormes in Spain:
"The pibroch will never sound except when it is for the whole regiment to get under arms; when any portion of the regiment is ordered for duty and a pipe to sound, the first pipe will be the warning, and the second pipe for them to fall in. The pibroch only will, and is to be considered, as invariably when sounded, for every persons off duty to turn out without a moment's delay."
A pathetic little story about this function of the pipers is told by James Hope in his forgotten little book, Letters from Portugal, Spain and France, printed in 1819:
"At ten o'clock (on the evening of the day of Quatre Bras) the piper of the 92nd took post under the garden hedge in front of the village, and, tuning his bagpipes, attempted to collect the sad remains of his regiment. Long and loud blew Cameron, and, although the hills and vallies (sic) re-echoed the hoarse murmurs of his favourite instrument, his utmost efforts could not produce more than half of those whom his music had cheered in the morning on their march to the field of battle."
At the battle of St. Pierre in the Peninsular, December 13, 1813, two out of the three pipers of the Gordons were killed while playing the pibroch "Cogadh na sith" (with which they were to charm the ears of the Czar of Russia in the great Review at Paris in July, 1815). As one fell, another took up the tune, and it was suggested to Sir John Sinclair, as President of the Highland Society, that this "should be made known all over the Highlands." It may be noted that the Colonel, the gallant, if martinet, Cameron of Fassiefern, who fell at Quatre Bras, gave great encouragement to his pipers, especially as regards the specially Highland airs and the high-class music (Ceol Mor). Colonel Greenhill Gardyne attributes to this the fact that "all pipers in the Gordons are still taught to play Piobaireachd," and that the ancient and characteristically Highland class of pipe music is still played every day under the windows of the officers quarters before dinner.
The Gordons have enjoyed the services of one particular family of hereditary ear-pipers, the Stewarts. They came from Perthshire, where one of them was a piper to the Duke of Atholl, while his brother, known as "Piper Jamie," crossed the hills into the Parish of Kirkmichael, Banffshire—the cradle of a remarkable military family, the Gordons of Croughly—where seven sons were born to him. All of these strapping fellows entered the Aberdeenshire Militia, now the 3rd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders, six of them becoming pipers. The best known of these was the eldest, Donald (1849-1913), who migrated to New Deer, Aberdeenshire, and was known all over Scotland as a champion piper. The family has been supplying pipers to the Gordons for more than half a century.
No doubt modern battles are not won by deeds of individual daring such as these pipers have achieved, but they are won in terms of the spirit which makes such conduct possible, for it is just the little things, the train of tradition, the idiosyncracies of uniform, and the rest of it, which go to form that esprit de corps which has made the kilted regiments famous the world over.
[TO THE LION RAMPANT]
By Alice C. Macdonell of Keppoch
Did ye hear the light feet marching,
Marching down the birchclad glen?
Did ye see the pipers' streamers,
Floating free behind the men?
Did ye hear the brave tunes ringing,
As they swung the drones on high?
Did ye watch the rythm of the kilt,
Did ye hear the war march die?
Behind the sharp bend of the road,
Beyond the wild Ben Nevis range:
The strains of Donald Dubh again,
Bore out the clans to battles strange.
But, it's O! our tears ran sorely,
As they left the Scottish shore;
For who'd come back, and who would see
Lochaber's wooded braes no more?
Only the Lord of Hosts could tell,
And the wae heart's own prophetic knell.
Did ye see the brave lads smiling,
As they drew their bonnets' down,
With the shortened breath indrawn and tight,
The flashing eyes, the steadfast frown?
Did ye hear the whistling shot and shell,
That swept the kilted foremost ranks
Like the snow wind's call before its fall,
As clouds lie piled in fleecy banks?
Ah! no, t'was not the keen gust bite,
That reddens cheeks with healthful glow,
Nor the hissing as the shrapnel fell
The sound of melting driving snow.
Did ye hear the war pipes calling,
Like the mavis, in the van,
'Mid the thunder of the battle storm,
To the valour of each Scottish man?
The blood call of the march they knew,
With bayonet charge was answered true.
O! Piper lads! O! Piper lads!
What magic woven spell
Amergin breathed within your reeds,
Is not for mortal voice to tell.
The wizard winds thro' reed and drone,
The soul draws on to follow after
To splendid heights of hero fame,
Or, spellbound, led to grim disaster.
Great Fingal heard beyond the hills
Your quivering grace notes heavenward soar;
Old Ossian followed in a dream
The "Broom of Peril"[28] Oscar bore.
Blow softly, then, O! Piobaireachd's wail,
Or loud and bold, to stir the heart;
No music stirs as yours can stir,
Wild glamour of the fairies Art.
Did ye hear the war pipes shrilling,
Out beyond the German lines,
Where the gallant soldiers pressing on,
Drove home their charge, despite the mines?
Did ye see yon brave lad casting
His broken pipes aside,
As he plunged among the German lines
To do his part what'er betide?
Did ye watch the tartans pouring down
From hill, and trench, and sweep
The cruel Teuton from the field,
Like herds of driven sheep?
Did ye hear the shot that echoed,
Till it reached a woodland lone?
Did ye see the mother's auld grey plaid,
Wrapped round her mourning head?—Ochone!
Did ye see the tears that dropped like rain,
For the lads we ne'er may see again?
O! Piper lads! O! Piper lads!
What magic woven spell
Amergin breathed within your reeds,
Is not for mortal voice to tell.
The wizard winds thro' reed and drone,
The soul draws on to follow after,
To splendid heights of hero fame,
Or, spellbound, led to grim disaster.
Great Fingal heard beyond the hills,
Your quivering grace notes heavenward soar;
Old Ossian followed in a dream
The "Broom of Peril" Oscar bore.
Blow softly, then, O! Piobaireachd's wail,
Or loud and bold, to stir the heart;
No music stirs as yours can stir,
Wild glamour of the fairies Art.
True hearts, as ever ready, to guard their native land,
O! Scotland's sons are bonnie, and Scotland's sons are grand.
True hearts that never failed her yet, to-day as yester year,
O! Scotia rouse thine echoes, with one resounding cheer.
Let the Lion Rampant proudly raise his head on cloth of gold,
For the deeds of valour done to-day, in pages yet untold.
Gay Gordon lads, brave Seaforths, Black Watch and Camerons tell,
What steeled your dauntless hearts to face that living screen of hell!
The pipes of Loos, of Mons, of far and distant Dardanelles,
That spake in Gaelic tones to each who dared those deadly shells.
The old time slogan of the race, the spell that cannot fail,
"À chlanna nan gaidheal! À chlanna nan, Gaidheal!
Guillain ri Guillain a chèile!"[29]
[THE MUSIC OF BATTLE]
By Philip Gibbs
Through all the days and the years in which I served as a war-correspondent on the Western Front, it was seldom that I did not hear, from near by or from afar, the music of the pipes. It was a sound which belonged to the great orchestra of life in the war zone, rising above the deep rumble of distant guns, travelling ahead of marching columns up the long roads to Arras or Bapaume, wailing across the shell craters of that desert which stretched for miles over the battlefields of Flanders, and coming to one's ears like elfin music through the dead woods above the Somme. Before every big battle the skirl of the pipes went with the traffic of war and guns surging forward to the fighting-lines. For in every big battle there were Scottish troops and their pipers played them on to the fields of honour, and played them out again when their ranks had been thinned by heroic sacrifice. This music had an inspiring influence not only on the Scottish troops themselves, whose spirits rose to the sound of it when, after long marching, their feet were leaden on the hard roads and their shoulders ached to the burden of their packs, but also on English troops who were in their neighbourhood, and on their way to the same battlegrounds. For though an Englishman cannot, as a rule, distinguish one tune from another—does not indeed believe that the pipes play any tune—there is something in the rhythm, in the long drawn notes, in the soul singing out of those "wind-bags," so he calls them, which in some queer magic way, stirs the blood of a man, whoever he may be, and stiffens the slackening fibre of his heart, and takes him out of the rut of his earth to some higher plane of thought, and gives him courage. It is an Englishman who writes this, but I am sure of it, for many times in dark days of war I have been taken up by the sadness and the gladness of the pipes, borne by the breeze across the fields of war.
The 15th (Scottish) Division were special friends of mine, and I remember, years ago now, how I saw them marching through Bethune on their way to the battle of Loos, where they fought their first big fight in September of '15. Through the Grand-Place of Bethune, not yet wrecked by shell-fire, they came marching with their guns. Snow was falling on the steel helmets of the men and clinging to the long hair of their goat-skin coats. It was a grim scene, and away beyond the city of Bethune there was the ceaseless thunder of bombardment over the enemy lines. But above this noise, like a heavy sea breaking against rocks, rose the music of the Scottish pipers playing their men forward. One pipe band stood in the Square, and its waves of stirring sound clashed against the gabled houses, and I remember how all our English gunners, riding with their heads bent against the storm, turned in their saddles to look at the pipers as they passed and seemed warmed a little by the spirit of that Scottish march.
The 15th Division went into battle with their pipers, while the Londoners of the 47th had to be content with mouth-organs and sing "Who's your lady friend?" on the way to Loos through storms of shell-fire. The 10th Gordons were the first into the village of Loos, and some of them went away to the Cité St. Auguste—and never came back. It was an unlucky battle and cost us dearly, but it proved the immense valour of our men, who were wonderful. The pipers played under fire and some of them were badly wounded, but there were enough left to play again when the Scots were relieved and came out, all muddy and bloody, with bandaged heads and arms, to small villages like Mazingarbe and Heuchin, where I saw Sir John French, then Commander-in-Chief, riding about on a white horse, and bending over his saddle to speak to small groups of Jocks, thanking them for their gallant deeds.
In the early battles of the Somme there were many Scottish battalions of the 3rd and 9th and 15th Divisions, fighting up by Longueval and Bazentin and Delville Wood, where they suffered heavy losses under the frightful fire of German guns. The South African Scottish were but a thin heroic remnant when they staggered out of the infernal fire of "Devil's Wood," and the men of the 15th Division who captured Longueval left many of their comrades behind. That was one of the finest exploits of the war, and they were led forward by their pipers, who went with them into the thick of the battle. It was to the tune of "The Campbells are Coming" that the Argyll and Sutherlands went forward, and that music which I had once heard up the slopes of Stirling Castle when the King was there, was heard now with terror by the German soldiers. The pipers screamed out the Charge, the most awful music to be heard by men who have the Highlanders against them, and with fixed bayonets and hand grenades they stormed the German trenches, where there were many machine-gun emplacements, and dug-outs so strong that no shell could smash them. There was long and bloody fighting, and in Longueval village, across which the Highlanders dug a trench, the enemy put down a barrage, yard by yard, so that it was churned up by heavy shells. On that day of July 20, 1916, I met the Scots marching out of that place. They came across broken fields where old wire lay tangled and old trenches cut up the ground, and there was the roar of gun-fire about us. Some of our batteries were firing with terrific shocks of sound which made mule teams plunge and tremble, and struck sharply across the thunder of masses of guns firing along the whole line of battle. At the time there was a thick summer haze about, and on the ridges were the black vapours of shell bursts, and all the air was heavy with smoke. It was out of this that the Highlanders came marching. They brought their music with them, and the pipes of war were playing a Scottish love-song:
I lo'e nae laddie but ane,
An' he lo'es nae lassie but me.
Their kilts were caked with mud, and stained with mud and filth, but the men were splendid, marching briskly with a fine pride in their eyes. Officers and men of other regiments watched them pass, as men who had fought grandly, so that the dirtiest of them there and the humblest of these Jocks was a fine gentlemen and worthy of Knighthood.
Many of them wore German helmets and grinned beneath them. One brawny young Scot had the cap of a German staff officer cocked over his ear. One machine-gun section brought down two German machine-guns besides their own. They were dog-tired, but they held their heads up, and the pipers who had been with them blew out their bags bravely, though hard-up for wind, and the Scottish love-song rang out across the fields—whatever its words, it was, I think, a love-song for the dear dead they had left behind them.
During the battle of Arras in April of 1917 there was always a wonderful pageant of men in that old city which had been under fire since October in the first year of war and was badly wounded, with many of its ancient houses utterly destroyed, but still a city with streets through which men could march, and buildings in which they could find comfortable, but unsafe billets. It was the headquarters of the battle which lasted in the fields outside by Monchy Hill and by Fampoux and Roeux, Wancourt and Havinel until the end of May. Arras is a city built above deep tunnels and vaults made in the Middle Ages when the stone was quarried out of them to build the houses, and lengthened and strengthened by our own engineers and tunnellers, so that our men could live in them under the heaviest shell-fire, and march through them to the German lines. Above, in the old squares and streets, in houses still standing between gulfs of ruin, several of our Divisional generals and some of our battalion commanders established their headquarters, and when the first fierce shelling eased off—though it never ceased until the last German retreat in the autumn of 1918—the streets were always filled with a surging traffic of men and mules and guns and motor lorries. Many Scottish battalions of the 15th and 51st Divisions among others were quartered here, and on one historic day there were assembled no less than five pipe bands in full strength, who played up and down one of the Squares amidst crowds of fighting men of English and Scottish regiments. I remember one such day when the pipers of the 8/10th Gordons, commanded then by Colonel Thom, were playing in the square. The Colonel had a proud light in his eyes as the tune, "Highland Laddie," swelled up to the gables and filled the open frontages of the gutted houses. Snowflakes fell lightly on the steel hats of the Scots standing in a hollow square, and mud was splashed to the khaki aprons over their kilts as they smiled at the fine swagger of the pipe-major and the thump of the drum-sticks; an old woman danced a jig to the pipes, holding her skirt above her skinny legs. She tripped up to a group of Scottish officers and spoke quick shrill words to them. "What does the old witch say?" asked a laughing Gordon. She had something particular to say. In 1870 she had heard the pipes in Arras. They were played by prisoners from South Germany, and as a young girl she had danced to them. It seemed to me a link between two strange chapters of history in the city of Arras which had been crowded with the ghosts of history since those days when Julius Caesar had his camp outside its walls on the very ground—at Etrun—where our Scottish troops had their huts.
The pipes of Scotland sounded in many villages of France and Flanders, where for all time the wail of them will come down the wind to the ears of men who hear with the spirit. They were played not only in the roads and fields, but often at night in farmhouses where Highland officers had their messes, or in cottages where some battalion headquarters were established or in old houses within city walls where there was a feast or a guest night. It was my privilege to spend some of those evenings, when down the long table in a narrow room the pipers marched, solemnly standing behind the guest's chair and playing old dances and marches of Bonnie Scotland. Then the colonel would offer the pipe-major a glass of whisky, which he would raise high, toasting the health of the officers in Gaelic. After that, on many a good evening in a bad war, the tables would be cleared, and the young officers would dance an eightsome reel, with laughter and simulated passion, and shrill cries of challenge and triumph which stirred a stranger's soul. Or the pipers themselves would be asked to give a dance, and in stocking feet on bare boards, dance as lightly as gossamer and as nimbly as Nijinsky the Russian, though big, brawny men. In small rooms the music of the pipes was loud—too loud for any but Scottish ears—and it was hard on a French "padre" who was trying to sleep upstairs in one small cottage, with thin walls and cracks between old timbers of the ceiling, while downstairs late into the night the pipers played merrily for those who would fight in the next battle, near at hand. The effect of such pipe-music within four walls was prodigious on a French officer whom I took one night to the mess of the 8/10th Gordons. The full pipe-band marched in as usual, and I saw my friend open his eyes wide and stare with amazement at this apparition. When they stood behind his chair playing lustily, so that the very glasses quaked on the table, he became very pale, and after the second "strathspey" I saw him collapse in his chair in a dead swoon. The Gordons thought this a fine tribute to their pipers. They enjoyed the incident justly though full of consideration for the French officer. He explained to me after the symptoms that overcame him. "I felt," he said, "enormous waves rolling up to me and passing over me; my heart beat wildly, and vivid colours rushed past my eyes. Then I knew no more!" Nothing would induce him to suffer such musical agony again.
I shall always remember one piper I saw in the ruins of the Château of Caulaincourt. How he came there, or why he stayed there, I do not know, because few of our troops were in the neighbourhood, and the place was a desert. The château had been a vast place, with high walls and terraces and out-houses, but the whole place had been hurled into ruin by the Germans on their first retreat in the spring of 1917. They had opened the family vaults and pillaged the coffins, and I remember being struck by the pathos of a little marble tablet I saw on a refuse heap, to which it had been flung. On it were the words in French, "The heart of Madame la Marquise de Caulaincourt." Poor dead heart of Madame la Marquise! In life it would have broken at the sight of all this ruin. But there, quite alone, on the central avalanche of stones, stood a Scottish piper playing a lament.... I heard from other officers that he was seen there later, still alone, and still playing his pipes, but why we could not tell.
The last time I heard the pipes was at the end of the war. They were playing Scottish troops over a bridge across the Rhine, at Cologne, and at the journeys' end of all that long and tragic way through which our men had fought with heroism, through frightful fire, with dreadful losses, until victory was theirs, final and complete. Along those roads the pipes of war went playing, month after month, year after year, from one battle to another, and in their music for ever, as long as remembrance of this war lasts, there will be the tears and the tragedy and the triumph, reminding the world of all that gallant youth of Scotland which fought in France.
[THE PIPES IN THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF THE WAR]
By Arthur Fetterless
I do not think any one can write with greater pleasure than I for the Pipers' Record. My only regret is that, personally, I never chanced to see the pipes go into direct action. I know that, in the earlier stages of the war, and in a few celebrated cases later, the pipes went into the charge, but I had not the good fortune to be present on one of these occasions. Others, however, will have written of these things, and I do not think I can do better than speak of events actually known to myself relating to the pipes and the pipers in the general life of the war.
The pipes! Ah! No memories of the great war will ever be complete to any member of a Highland regiment without the recollection of the pipes, for they are unquestionably the finest battle instrument ever created. They mourned with us in hours of sorrow. They cheered us in hours of weariness. They played gaily in hours of rest and merriment.
Back in billets, in ruined villages, half the battalion would turn out to hear "Retreat" played by the pipe-band. It was one of the events of the day, in the summer in the sweltering heat of the dust-laden huts behind the front-line, in the winter in the dank cold mid the seas of mud, in the midst of which the pipers played upon an island that was sometimes almost a floating raft.
At these times the rumble of the guns was overwhelmed, and the horrors of war and the atmosphere were for a little time forgotten. And the fact that the pipes were the pride of the battalion was evident from the remarks of the men, if several Highland battalions were billeted together.
"Your pipes are no' a patch on ours!"
"Aw, away wi' ye, look at yer big drum; he canna twirl his sticks above his heid."
"Umph! We've got a pipe-major, onyhoo."
"Aye." A grudging admission.
Such remarks were of the everyday talk of the men who heard the pipes.
Again, at the periodical meetings and games of Highland brigades, the massed bands of the battalions were always there playing a mighty skirl. There were, of course, piping competitions in conjunction with competitions in Highland dancing and sport.
All these occasions did much to rob modern war of its dismal character, and bring back something of the glamour of arms, and the glory of strong men.
But enough of general remarks. I wish to write of five typical scenes from the life of the war relating to pipes and the pipers.
In the first I am standing at the entrance to one of the low dug-outs, covered over with turf, which used to lie, and perhaps still exist, a few hundred yards from the Café Belge up the road to Ypres. Most people who fought in that sector found a billet in them at some time, or knew them—filthy they were.
Overhead a couple of aeroplanes are hovering, very high up. An occasional shell can be heard, coming from a long distance away, with a rolling noise. The shells are probably 9-inch or perhaps larger, and they are bursting with crash and splash in the fields around or near the road.
From the direction of the Café Belge I see a company of men in kilts advancing, men heavily laden with all the usual impedimenta of packs, rifles, etc. They look, in the distance, tired and grim, and in formation they are straggling, owing to the appallingly muddy state of the road.
A shell bursts in the field to the left of the road along which they are coming. There is a heavy cloud of smoke, and streams of mud and slime are spued upwards and around. For a moment the leader seems to hesitate, and the party halts. Then they move on again.
Suddenly there is a sound as of tuning up, and two pipers commence to play. The advancing men steady in formation and come slogging through the mud, with step almost rhythmic to the music.
"Crash!" Another shell bursts nearer them, splashing some of the platoon with mud. The pipes play on.
"Crash!" A third shell bursts short of them.
The pipes play on, and the men march steadily past to the music of the pipes. They cover another hundred yards, and a shell bursts in the road where the platoon were marching a few seconds before. I say to myself, "Thank God, they got through in time."
As I look back it seems to me that that was not too bad an example of steadiness of pipers and men under dangerous fire. But of course it was all just an everyday sort of thing—a few men relieving trenches with a couple of pipers to cheer them on the way up—part of the everyday life of war.
The pipes only began to play after the shelling broke out.
My second scene is an incident taken from life in France. I think the pipes did their share in fostering the entente, and the arrival of Highland battalions with their pipe-bands marching in front did much to engrave in the hearts of the French people memories which will be carried on from generation to generation.
In this second scene I stood at the entrance to a French town when a very famous battalion entered the main street marching to attention, with pipe-band playing. It was the first Scottish battalion to enter that town.
Near me stood a little girl in a white dress. Her face, on seeing the band, first expressed astonishment. The expression changed to pleased interest, and finally she burst into gleeful smiles.
As the band came near her she danced along beside the pipers, a beautiful golden-haired child, supremely happy.
The people standing around cheered and waved with French enthusiasm. To them undoubtedly, in one of the darkest hours of the war—those magnificent men and the music of the pipes bore a message of hope and determination, with the promise of ultimate victory.
To any people who are inclined to be supercilious about pipe-music, the recollection of the unfeigned pleasure of a beautiful child on hearing the pipes for the first time has often seemed to me to supply an answer. Those who cannot understand pipe-music might be able to do so if they were ready to receive it in the same simple spirit.
About the end of October 1915 the trenches on Hill 60 in front of Ypres, were in a particularly sodden state. The rotting sandbags which formed the parapets were a mass of oozing earth, continually being scattered by shell-fire and rebuilt again by the toilsome labours of mud-covered "Jocks."
The Hun sniper, too, was exceptionally vigilant in these parts, and, as he had the advantage of ground and of enfilade fire from several points, to put a head above the parapet in daylight meant almost certain death. Men also were being continually wounded and killed while passing along the trenches at points where the parapet had become too low, and it had not been possible to build it up quickly enough.
As the combined result of shell-fire, sniping, and the bad state of the trenches, the amount of work which could be done in daylight was small. Repairs were done at night. There were also, on account of these difficulties and others, very few loop-holes available, so that, excepting through periscopes, the average man saw very little of the enemy. He scarcely ever got a shot at him by day. I suppose it was the result of all these things put together which created the scene.
On a very dull morning a party of Seaforths were gathered in a bay of one of the trenches. I was round the traverse in the next bay. One of the party of men was on sentry duty with a periscope; the rest were cleaning rifles.
Owing to the dullness of the day, mud and filth, the ensemble was dismal. Suddenly there sounded from the direction of Sanctuary Wood the music of pipes playing. Why they were playing then, or where exactly they were playing, I have never known, but there certainly floated across to the dismal trenches the music of "Horo, My Nut Brown Maiden."
To us in the trenches the distant music sounded perfectly glorious, and the burdens of the hour were for a time lifted away. That the men found it so was evident from their action.
Everybody knows the soldier's version which runs to the same air, and it apparently struck the fancy of the men as applicable to the occasion, for there burst forth from the adjoining bay a cheerful chorus:
"Aa canna see the tairget,
Aa canna see the tairget,
Oh, aa canna see the tairget,
It's owre far awa."
The last line was converted by one of the chorus party into the line:
"For Jerry he's owre fly."
On looking round the corner of the traverse I saw the concert-party incredibly cheerful, and entirely oblivious of war, mud or danger, for the pipes had asserted their sway.
There are many marches which the pipers made, including marches to battle, of which I might write, but I think my second last reminiscence had best be taken from the journey of the conquering Second Army which tramped from Ypres to the Rhine on the last great triumphal march.
Of the 250 miles odd which the Army covered, I am certain that the pipers of my battalion piped at least a good half, perhaps more.
What could we have done without them on that march? As we tramped through village after village and town after town, neath welcome banners and cheering crowds, men wearied with marching, not always too amply rationed, yet swung forward with assured tread to the lilt of the pipes through every village and town.
Welcoming bands played the Marseillaise, the Brabançonne, and the British Anthem, and the crowds shouted their "Vive les Alliês," etc. The pipes played their regimental and national marches in return, and if intercommunication through language was not perfect, yet there was complete accord through music.
Undoubtedly, on that never-to-be-forgotten march, the pipes were indispensable.
The last scene is taken from Germany. Perhaps I should speak of massed bands parading in the main squares and streets of the great towns of the Rhine, bringing home to the Hun as forcibly as in any way the destruction of his ill-judged schemes; or perhaps I should speak of the pipers on some of the great occasions—presentations of medals, presentations of colours, etc.
I prefer to write of a very simple event. Happening where it did, it seemed so homely.
I was riding through a forest not far from Cologne when I heard the music of pipes. I turned off the road and proceeded along a pathway which led to a green sward in the forest.
There I saw a solitary piper marching slowly up and down playing a lament. His loneliness seemed to me to symbolise two things—the completeness of victory, and the detachment of the conquerors. The music sounded very beautiful among the trees.
I did not interrupt the piper, but if I know anything at all of piping, I am sure that that piper in the forest felt for a little while almost as if he were treading his native heath again, and dreamt of the Highland hills and forests from which he had come.
After all, in Germany, we were strangers in a strange land and not wishing to stay there. Having done our work, we said in our hearts, "let us away!" for the Huns will always be Hunnish. But we are Highland, and the pipes are calling us home.
Beat on drums; let the pipes play and the banners be unfurled for every triumphal march that shall be. But when the marches are played let us never forget that every march has grown more glorious by the war and the blood of the men who fell; that every march has woven around it a thousand memories of life and death, of hardship, of danger, and of victory.
In days to come we will remember—to battle we went by that march; to Longueval we went by that march; and from Loos we came by that one. And for every battle march that the pipers play, we know that a million feet and more have marched to its song.
That record of great work—that, with death and other things they did not count—that is the Pipers' Record.
[THE OLDEST AIR IN THE WORLD]
By Neil Munro
Col Maclean, on two sticks, and with tartan trousers on, came down between the whins to the poles where the nets were drying, and joined the Trosdale folk in the nets' shade. 'Twas the Saturday afternoon; they were frankly idling, the township people—except that the women knitted, which is a way of being indolent in the Islands—and had been listening for an hour to an heroic tale of the old sea-robber days from Patrick Macneill, the most gifted liar in the parish. A little fire of green wood burned to keep the midges off, and it was hissing like a gander.
"Take your share of the smoke and let down your weariness, darling," said one of the elder women, pushing towards the piper a herring firken. Nobody looked at his sticks nor his dragging limb—not even the children; had he not been a Gael himself Maclean might have fancied his lameness was unperceived. He bitterly knew better, but pushed his sticks behind the nets as he seated himself, and seated, with his crutches absent, he was a fellow to charm the eye of maid or sergeant-major.
"Your pipes might be a widow, she's so seldom seen or heard since you came home," said one of the fishermen.
"And that's the true word," answered Col Maclean. "A widow indeed, without her man! Never in all my life played I piob mhor but on my feet and they jaunty! I'll never put a breath again in sheep-skin. If they had only blinded me!"
There was in the company, Margaret, daughter of the bailie; she had been a toddling white-haired child when Col went to France, and had to be lifted to his knees; now she got up on them herself at a jump, and put her arms round his neck, tickling him with her fingers till he laughed.
"Oh bold one! Let Col be!" her mother commanded; "thou wilt spoil his beautiful tartan trews."
"It is Col must tell a story now," said the little one, thinking of the many he used to tell her before he became a soldier.
"It is not the time for wee folks stories," said the mother; "but maybe he will tell us something not too bloody for Sunday's eve about the Wars."
Col Maclean, for the first time, there and then, gave his tale of The Oldest Air in the World.
"I was thinking to myself," said he, "as I was coming through the whins there, that even now, in creeks of the sea like this, beside their nets adrying, there must be crofter folk in France, and they at ceilidh like yourselves, telling of tales and putting to each other riddles."
"Ubh! ubh! It is certain there are no crofters in France, whatever," said William-the-Elder. "It is wine they drink in France, as I heard tell from the time I was the height of a Lorne shoe, and who ever heard of crofters drinking wine?"
"Wherever are country people and the sea beside them to snatch a meal from, you will find the croft," insisted Col the piper. "They have the croft in France, though they have a different name for it from ours, and I'll wager the bulk of the land they labour is as bare as a bore's snout, for that is what sheep and deer have left in Europe for the small spade-farmer."
"Did'st see the crofting lands out yonder?" asked Margaret's mother.
"No," said the piper; "but plenty I saw of the men they breed there; I ate with them, and marched with them, and battled at their side, for we were not always playing the pipes, we music-fellows.
"And that puts me in mind of a thing—there is a people yonder, over in France, that play the bagpipe—they call them Brettanach—the Bretons. They are the same folk as ourselves though kind of Frenchmen too, wine-drinking, dark and Papist. Race, as the old-word says, goes down to the rock, and you could tell at the first glance of a Brettanach that he was kin to us though a kilt was never on his loins, and not one word in his head of the Gaelic language. 'Tis history! Someway—some time—far back—they were sundered from us, the Brettanach, and now have their habitation far enough from Albyn of the mountains, glens and heroes. Followers of the sea, fishermen or farmers; God-fearing, good hard drinkers, in their fashion—many a time I looked at one and said to myself, 'There goes a man of Skye or Lewis!'"
"And the girls of them?" said Ranald Gorm, with a twinkle of the eyes.
"You have me there!" said Col. "I never saw woman-kind of the Brettanach; the war never went into their country, and the Bretons I saw were in regiments of the army, far enough from home like myself, in the champagne shires where they make the wine.
"We came on them first in a town called Corbie, with a church so grand and spacious a priest might bellow his head off and never be heard by the poor in the seats behind. 'Twas on a week-day, a Mass was making; that was the first and last time ever I played pipes in the House of God, and faith! that not by my own desiring. 'Twas some fancy of the priests, connived between them and the Cornal. Fifteen of us marched the flag-stones of yon kirk of Corbie playing 'Fingal's Weeping.'"
"A good brave tune!" remarked the bailie.
"A brave tune, and a bonny! I'll warrant yon one made the rafters shiver! The kirk was filled with a corps of the tribe I mention—the Brettanach—and they at their Papist worshipping; like ourselves, just country folk that would sooner be at the fishing or the croft than making warfare.
"My eye fell, in particular, on a fellow that was a sergeant, most desperate like my uncle Sandy—so like I could have cried across the kirk to him 'Oh uncle! what do ye do so far from Salen?' The French, for ordinary, are black as sloes, but he was red, red, a noble head on him like a bullock, an eagle nose, and a beard cut square and gallant.
"When the kirk spilled out its folk, they hung awhile about the burial-yard as we do ourselves in Trosdale, spelling the names on the head-stones, gossiping, and by-and-bye slipped out, I doubt not, to a change-house for a dram, and all the pipers with them except myself."
DUNIQUAICH, LOCH FYNE
From the Water-colour Drawing by George Houston, A.R.S.A.
"God bless me!" cried Ronald Gorm.
"Believe it or not, but I hung back and sought my friend the red one. He was sitting all his lone on a slab in the strangers' portion of the graveyard, under yews, eating bread and onion and sipping wine from his flask of war. Now the droll thing is that though I knew he had not one word of Christian Gaelic in his cheek, 'twas the Gaelic I must speak to him.
"'Just man,' says I to him. 'Health to you and a hunter's hunger! I was looking at you yonder in the kirk, and a gentleman more like my clansman Sandy Ruadh of Salen is surely not within the four brown borders of the world nor on the deeps of ocean. Your father must have come from the Western Isles, or the mother of you been wandering.'
"Of all I said to him he knew but the one word that means the same thing, as they tell me, in all Celtdom—eaglais. To his feet got the Frenchman, stretched out to me his bread and wine, with a half-laugh on him most desperate like Uncle Sandy, and said eaglais too, with a flourish of the heel of his loaf at the kirk behind him to show he understood that, anyway. We sat on the slab, the pair of us, my pipes stretched out between us, and there I assure, folk, was the hour of conversation!"
"But if you could not speak each other's tongue?" said a girl.
"Tach! two men of the breed with a set of pipes between them can always follow one another. 'Tis my belief if I stood his words on end and could follow them backwards they would be good Gaelic of Erin. The better half of our speech was with our hands; he had not even got the English; and most of the time we talked pipe-music, as any man can do that's fit to pucker his lips and whistle. The Breton people canntarach tunes too, like ourselves—soft-warbling them to fix them in the memory, and blyth that morning was our warbling; he could charm, my man, the very thrush from trees! But Herself—the piob mhor—was an instrument beyond his fingering; the pipes he used at home he called biornieu, fashioned differently from ours. Yet the same wind blows through reeds in France or Scotland, and everywhere they sing of old and simple things; you are deaf indeed if you cannot understand.
"He was from the seashore—John his name—a mariner to his trade—with a wife and seven children; himself the son of a cooper.
"I am a good hand at the talking myself, as little Margaret here will tell you, but his talk was like a stream in spate, and the arms of him went flourishing like drum-sticks. Keep mind of this—that the two of us, by now, were all alone in the kirk-yard, on a little hillock with the great big cliff of a kirk above us, and the town below all humming with the soldiers, like a byke of bees.
"He bade me play on the pipes at last and I put them in my oxter and gave him 'Lochiel's awa' to France.' A fine tune! but someway I felt I never reached him. I tried him then with bits of 'The Bugle Horn,' 'Take your gun to the Hill,' 'Bonnie Ann' and 'The Persevering Lover;' he beat time with a foot to them, and clapped my shoulder, but for all that they said to him I might as well be playing on a fiddle.
"It was only when I tried an old port-mor—"The Spoil of the Lowlands now graze in the Glen" that his whiskers bristled, and at that said I to myself 'I have you Uncle Sandy!'
"Before the light that flickered was gone from him I blew it up to a height again with 'Come to me Kinsman!'
"He was like a fellow that would be under spells!
"'The Good Being be about me!' cried he, and his eyes like flambeaux, 'what tune is that?'
"You never, never, never saw a man so much uplifted!
"'They call it,' said I, 'Come to me Kinsman,' (Thigibh a so a charaid!), and it has the name, in the small Isles of the West, of the Oldest Air of the World. The very ravens know it; what is it but the cry of men in trouble? It's older than the cairns of Icolmkill, and cried the clans from out of the Isles to Harlaw. Listen you well!' and I played it to him again—not all the MacCrimmons that ever came from Skye could play it better! For grand was the day and white with sun, and to-morrow we were marching. And many a lad of ours was dead behind us.
"When I was done, he did a droll thing then, the red fellow—put his arms about my shoulders and kissed me on the face! And the beard of him like a flaming whin!
"What must he do but learn it? Over and over again I had to whistle it to him till he had it to the very finish, and all the time the guns were going in the east.
"'If ever you were in trouble,' I said to him—though of course he could not understand me, 'and you whistled but one blast of that air, it is Col Maclean would be at your side though the world were staving in below your feet like one of your father's barrels!'"
II
The day was done in Trosdale. Beyond the rim of the sea the sun had slid to make a Sabbath morning further round the world, and all the sky in the west was streaming fire. Over the flats of Heisker the light began to wink on the Monach islets. Ebbed tide left bare sand round Kirkibost, and the sea-birds settled on them, rising at times in flocks and eddying in the air as if they were leaves and a wind had blow them. Curlews were piping bitterly.
Behind the creek where the folk were gathered on the sea-pinks, talking, Trosdale clachan sent up the reek of evening fires, and the bairns were being cried in from the fields.
The Catechist, sombre fellow, already into his Sabbath, though 'twas only Saturday nine o' the clock, came through the whins and cast about him a glance for bagpipes. He had seen Maclean's arrival with misgiving. A worthy man, and a face on him like the underside of a two-year skate-fish.
Col Maclean turned on him a visage tanned as if it had been in the cauldron with the catechu of the barking nets.
"Take you a firken too, and rest you, Catechist," said he. "You see I have not my pipes to-night, but I'm at sgeulachd."
But the Catechist sat not; and leaning against a net-pole sighed.
"'Twas two years after that," said Col, again into the rapture of his story, "when my regiment went to the land of wine, where we battled beside the French. I assure you we did nobly! nobly! Nor, on the soul of me! were the Frenchmen slack!"
"The French," ventured Patrick Macneill, "are renowned in story for all manly parts. Oh King! 'tis they have suffered!"
"'Tis myself, just man, that is not denying it! We were yonder in a land like Keppoch desolate after the red cock's crowing. The stars themselves, that are acquaint with grief, and have seen great tribulation in the dark of Time would sicken at the sight of it! Nothing left of the towns but larochs—heaps of lime and rubble where the rat made habitation, and not one chimney reeking in a hundred miles. Little we ken of trees here in the Islands, but they were yonder planted thick as bracken and cut down to the stump the way you would be cutting winter kail. And the fields that the country folk had laboured!—were the Minch drained dry, the floor of it would seem no likelier place for cropping barley or for pasturing goats.
"There was a day of days, out yonder, that we mixed up with the French and cleared the breadth of a parish of am boche, who was ill to shift. But the mouth of the night brought him back on us most desperate altogether, and half we had gained by noon was lost by gloaming.
"Five score and ten of our men were missing at the roll-call.
"The Cornal grunted. 'Every man of them out of Lewis!' says he; 'they're either dead or wandered. Go you out Col Maclean with your beautiful, lovely, splendid pipes, and gather at least the living.'
"Not one morsel of meat had I eaten for twenty hours, and the inside of me just one hole full of hunger, but out went Col and his pipes to herding!
"Oh King of the Elements! but that was the night most foul, with the kingdom of France a rag for wetness, and mire to the hose-tops. Rain lashed; a scourging wind whipped over the country, and it was stinking like a brock from tatters that had been men. The German guns were pelting it, the sound of them a bellow no more broken than the roar on skerries at Martinmas, the flash of them in the sky like Merry Dancers.
"I got in a while to the length of a steading with a gable standing; tuned up piob mhor and played the gathering. They heard me, the lads—the living of them; two-over-twenty of them came up to me by the gable, with no more kenning of what airt they were in than if a fog had found them midway on the Long Ford of Uist. I led them back to King George's furrows where our folk were, and then, mo chreach! when we counted them, one was missing!
"'It is not a good herd you are, Maclean,' said the Cornal, 'you will just go back and find Duncan Ban; he's the only man in the regiment I can trust to clean my boots.'
"So back went Col in search of Duncan."
"Oh lad! weren't you the gallant fellow!" cried Margaret's mother, adoring.
"I was that, I assure you! If it were not the pipes were in my arm-pit like a girl, my feet would not keep up on me the way I would be pelting any other road than the way I had to go. But my grief! I never got my man, nor no man after ever found him. I went to the very ditches where am boche was lying, and 't was there that a light went up that made the country round about as white-bright as the day, and I in the midst of it with my pipes in hand. They threw at me grey lead as if it had been gravel, and I fell."
"Och, a mheudail bhochd!—Oh treasure!" said the women of Trosdale all together.
"I got to my knees in a bit and crawled, as it might be for a lifetime, one ache from head to heel, till I came to a hole as deep's a quarry where had been the crossing of roads, and there my soul went out of me. When I came to myself I was playing pipes and the day was on the land. The Good Being knows what I played, but who should come out across the plain to me but a Frenchman!
"He moved as spindrift from spindrift,
As a furious winter wind—
So swiftly, sprucely, cheerily,
Oh! proudly,
Through glens and high-tops,
And no stop made he
Until he came
To the city and court of Maclean,
Maclean of the torments,
Playing his pipes."
The Catechist writhed; the people of Trosdale shivered; Patrick Macneill wept softly, for Col Maclean, the cunning one, by the rhyming trick of the ancient sennachies, had flung them, unexpected, into the giddiness of his own swound, and all of them, wounded, dazed, saw the Frenchman come like a shadow into the world of shades.
"He flung himself in the hole beside me, did the Frenchman, gave me a sup of spirits and put soft linen to my sores, and all the time grey lead was snarling over us.
"'Make use of thy good hale feet, lad,' said I to him, 'and get out of this dirty weather! Heed not the remnants of Col Maclean. What fetched thee hither?'
"He put his hand on my pipes and whistled a stave of the old tune.
"'How learned ye that?' I asked him.
"Although he was Brettanach he had a little of the English. 'Red John our sergeant, peace be with him! heard you playing it all last night,' said he, 'took a craze at the tune of you and went out to find you, but never came back. Then another man, peace be with him! a cousin of John, heard your playing and went seeking you, but he came back not either. I heard you first, myself, no more than an hour ago, and had no sooner got your tune into my head than it quickened me like drink, and here am I, kinsman!'
"'Good lad!' I cried, 'all the waters in the world will not wash out kinship, nor the Gael be forsaken while there is love and song.'"
"Vain tales! Vain tales!" groaned the Catechist, and his face like a skate.
[THE PIPES: ONSET]
(Somme, September, 1916)
By Joseph Lee, Lieut.
Dedicated to Major Angus MacGillivray.
The cry is in my ear,
The sight is in my eye,
This is the dawning of the day
That shall see me die:
What is the piper playing
That battles in my blood?—
Winds in it,
Waves in it,
Waters at the flood;
Sadness in it,
Madness in it,
Weeping mists and rain—
What is the piper playing
That beats within my brain?
Sobbing and throbbing
Like a soul's unrest;
I drink his madd'ning music in
As milk at my mother's breast:
Flame in it,
Fame in it,
Love and all desire;
The clean hills,
The clear rills,
The smouldering peat fire;
Glances sweet,
Dancing feet,
Beating on the floor;
Maidens fair,
Comrades rare
I shall meet no more.
The cry is in my ear,
The sight is in my eye,
This is the morning of the day
That shall see me die:
What is the piper playing
That surges in my blood?
The soft breeze
In pine trees,
The hawthorn i' the bud;
The lone tarn,
The golden barn,
Fields of waving grain—
What is the piper playing
That beats within my brain?
Red war screams from his reeds
And in the thrumming drones
There lurks the lapping of men's blood,
And sobs, and dying groans:
Night in it,
Fight in it,
Wraiths of stricken men,
Ghosts of ancient clansmen
Sweeping down the glen;
Life in it,
Strife in it,
Whisp'rings—it is well,
If you bear a foeman down
Right to reddest hell!
What is the piper playing?
For now I may not hear ...
The glamour comes across my soul,
And the cry is in my ear.
[FLESH TO THE EAGLES]
By Boyd Cable
It was during the retreat of 1914 that a Highland regiment was quartered for a night in one of the French villages, and billetted in houses, barns, anywhere the hospitable villagers could give them room. The officers established their Mess and quarters in "The Chateau," a big house on the outskirts of the village. Many of the villagers had already cleared out, but in the Chateau the officers found the mistress of the house, her daughter, and her servants, standing staunchly to their place; the master of the house being, as they were told, in the French Army.
Madame spoke English fairly well, the daughter very well—when she did speak, which was seldom. She was a young and pretty girl of perhaps fifteen to sixteen years of age, fresh come from a convent school, reserved, timid and shy, in the presence of the officers almost to a point of shrinking when they spoke to her. Yet, although they could see her shiver and blanch at the sound of the distant grumble of the guns, she supported her mother bravely and asserted stoutly that she was not afraid to stay, when the C.O. and some of the other officers questioned the wisdom of the household waiting for the Germans to advance.
"Perhaps, monsieur," said Madame, "your soldiers will possible arrest the advance before the Allemands arrive at us here. And if it is not so, it is, after all, soldiers of the Allemands that will come, and they will not harm women and old men and boys who make no provocation or resistance."
Unfortunately the practices of German soldiers were not then sufficiently known to the officers to make them press their argument beyond reasonable limits, and they gave in reluctantly to Madame's reasoning. "We cannot the children and the very old to march away," she said, "and one could not go and leave them here. Me, I stay to speak with the enemy officers and see my people do nothing foolish. I cannot run away and leave them."
So they left it at that.
Madame gave them dinner that night in the dining-room, and it was after dinner that one of the regimental pipers was heard parading round and playing tune after tune. Madame and Mademoiselle were greatly interested and asked many questions.
"But there," cried Madame at one tune, "there is the music most fierce. It sound—"
"It is battle music, Madame," explained the C.O. "Music of a war song of the Highlands—of the Écossais. Ask Monsieur l'Adjutant for the words of the song."
So the Adjutant recited "The Macgregors' Gathering," with all the fire and ardour of a fiery Scot, and a Macgregor at that. Madame sat with brows knit, plainly struggling to follow the English words; her daughter, as plainly understanding them clearly, held her breath and listened spellbound and wondering to the words. Her head lifted and her eye lit to some of the lines:
While there's leaves in the forest and foam on the river,
Macgregor, despite them, shall flourish for ever.
But at others, delivered with fierce emphasis and dramatic fervour, she shrank back with quivering lip and pain on her face:
If they rob us of name and pursue us with beagles,
Give their roofs to the flames, their flesh to the eagles.
When the Adjutant had finished and had sat down, looking a little shame-faced at having allowed his feelings to so carry him away, Madame and the girl spoke rapidly in French for a minute.
Then Madame shook her head. "But no," she said, "I do not like it, this song. It is cru-el, cru-el. How says it—'The roof to the burning, and the bodies, the dead, the flesh, to the birds of prey.' But no, that is the war of savage."
The C.O. tried to explain to her, while the Adjutant did so even more eagerly to the girl, that it was war of the most savage and relentless kind that ran in those far back days in the Highlands of Scotland; but again Madame protested. "It is too cru-el. I do not like it that you make such song and such music now. War, it is no more so. What is it your song says of the burning of la maison?" She made the Adjutant repeat the lines and repeated after him, "Ah, m'sieu, 'Give their roof to the flames, their flesh to the eagles.' That is, burn the shelter of the women and children, and leave the dead unbury. You would not do that; even the Boche that we despise would not do this thing. It is cru-el, cru-el."
Mademoiselle said nothing, but they could all see the shrinking in her eyes as she looked at them, the wonder if, even now, the Écossais could be so savage as to make such war. The Adjutant set himself to remove such an idea of their barbarity from her mind, and with some success apparently, since there was little shrinking and no more than a faint blush of timid friendship when they said good-night and retired.
Next morning the orders came, sharp, urgent and imperative, to move at once, and there was little time for farewells. But Madame and the girl were both out to see them off and watch the battalion tramp by. The pipes at their head were screaming their vengeful music, "Give their roof to the flames, their flesh to the eagles," until the Adjutant, seeing the protesting motion of Madame's hands to her ears, hurried to the pipers and asked them to change the tune.
After the ebb of our retreat and the period of the Marne, came the full flood-tide of our advance, and the sweeping forward of the French and British over the ground the Germans had taken and held a space. As the luck had it, the same Highland battalion came back through the same village where they had billetted that night—or rather to the shell, the wreckage, the remains of the same village. The men by now were coming to know what sort of treatment had been served out to the conquered country by the Germans, and were angry enough at some of the sights they had seen, the tales they had heard. But the anger had been cold and impersonal until now, when they came swinging in to this friendly spot, through the shattered houses and streets littered with broken bottles and household goods, saw the gaping windows to the houses, the smoke-blackened shells here and there, the signs of pillage and wanton destruction everywhere. The cavalry and an advance guard regiment had been through before them, but it was plain that no fighting had taken place here, that no shell-fire had wrought this damage, that cold-blooded "frightfulness" alone had to answer for it. They were roused to fresh wrath by what they saw, but to a still greater pitch of fury by the tales they heard from the quaking villagers who were left, or who came creeping in from the fields and ditches to which they had fled on word of approaching soldiers. The sights were no more than the men had been seeing in any of a dozen villages passed, the tales no more than they had heard a score of times in the past few days; but in this village they had been made welcome, had been treated to the best, had made quick but happy friendships; and they felt a personal injury and pity for the brutally treated villagers.
The battalion halted there for an hour or so and ate their midday meal—or rather gave it to the hungry women and children and watched them eat—and heard fresh and more horrible tales and half-tales that were too bestial to be told in full.
The moment the battalion had fallen out and he was free, the Adjutant had asked the Colonel if he might go to the Chateau and make enquiries....
But when he and another officer came there they found none to make enquiries of. The house still stood, intact so far as the building itself went, but otherwise no more than a litter of rubbish and wreckage. Every stick of furniture that would break was broken, every crock and dish and bottle was scattered in splinters over the floors, every curtain, blanket and sheet, every item of bed and table linen, every piece of clothing was torn, dirtied, and defiled as completely as men and beasts could do it; every shelf and door and balustrade and fitting was hacked and broken and wrenched out of place; every room on the ground floor had been used as horses' stables and left as foul as a stable could be; every upper room was so befouled that, by comparison, the places of the animals below was the cleaner.
The two officers hunted through the house, outside and round the out-buildings, and found no one; and, nauseated by what they had seen and heart-sick at thought of the women who had been there, returned to the village. As they entered it again they heard pipe music softly played, and seeing down a bye-street a cluster of their men, and hearing the sound of a woman's voice raised loud above the pipe music, they turned off and pushed in to see what was afoot.
They found a woman in the centre of a close-pressing ring of their men, a woman wild-eyed, with grey hair in disorder, with black and blue bruises on her face, with her clothing torn and grimed with dirt.
"Good God!" exclaimed the Adjutant. "Madame!"
He thrust a way through the men to her, but when he spoke to her and asked her to come with him, she clutched and held his wrist, and stood there and made him—short of using force to her—stand and listen with the men. A dozen times he tried to interrupt, but she would not be interrupted, so at last he left her to go on with her tale and asked the other officer to go and bring the C.O.
But before the C.O. came, he, like the men, was under the spell of the woman and of her tale, was listening, like them, with his heart turning cold and a deadly bitter anger rising in his heart. She spoke to them in English, breaking off at times into voluble torrents of French, checking herself and going back and repeating as best she could in English again. But although French words and phrases and sentences were mixed through her English, the tale was horribly plain and clear, the stories detailed and circumstantial enough to make it evident they were desperately true.
She told of women, girls, girl-children, outraged, and afterwards, in some cases, mutilated and bayoneted; she told of old men and boys hauled out and stood against a wall and shot while their women were made to stand and look on; of one woman who refused to make coffee for the Germans until they dipped the head of her infant in a pan of boiling water; of another woman who was crucified, pinned to the door with bayonets while the arm of her child was broken and its body was flung down on the ground before her and left there writhing ... all this and more she told, and helped her story out with rapid gesticulations and imitative motions and sounds of the child squirming and whining and the helpless mother wrenching at the pinning bayonets, while the men pressed in, glowering and cursing under breath, and behind them the pipe music skirled and wailed "roofs to the flames, and their flesh to the eagles."
And then, lastly, she told them of herself and her daughter, the girl of fifteen, fresh from a convent school, timid as a child and shrinking from the look, much less the touch of a man ... and of what they had done to her, while they held her daughter and made her watch; and then had done to the daughter, while she in turn was held to see and not allowed to look away or even close her ears to the cries. She told it all, sparing herself and her child no word and no item of their shame; and then—this was just before the Colonel arrived—she paused and looked round at the ring of savage faces about her, and lifted her two hands and shook them above her head.
"I am French, and you are Anglais," she cried, "but I am woman and you are men. I have told you, so that you may know the animals you fight. I have asked your music-man will he play this song you have, that with the music I say it to you 'Give their roofs to the flames, their flesh to the eagles.' And if ever you have Germans soldat at your mercy, and they cry for pity, remember this village, and its women and my daughter, and me. Give us revanche ... their flesh to the eagles...."
The Colonel broke in here, and, finding she was not to be stopped, turned and ordered the men away, and when they had gone, handed Madame over to some of the village women who watched timidly from their doors. Madame had told nothing but truth they assured him. Mademoiselle? Ah, ma'm'zelle could not be seen; she hid in a cellar and screamed like one mad if any entered or spoke—like mad did one say, but truly she was mad; and Madame scarcely less mad.[30]
They had one more glimpse of Madame as they marched out, a glimpse of her standing in a door and waving and calling something to the pipers as they came past. They knew or guessed what she wanted and the tune they were playing swung abruptly into "The Gathering," and the battalion tramped past the woman to the vengeful skirl of " ... flesh to the eagles."
Affairs had not gone well with the battalion, or what was left of it, through the battle. They had been ordered to advance and take a certain position in what was supposed to be the flank, had forced their way forward over the open under a scourging shell-fire, had suffered heavy losses, and at last gained the point from which they were to make the final attacking rush. But now that they were here it seemed impossible for men to go further and live. A stretch of open still lay before them, and this was swept with a tornado of rifle and machine-gun fire. What was supposed to be a flank of the enemy had become a frontal position, strongly held and evidently meant to be bitterly defended. It was vital to the success of the day that it should be taken, for various tactical reasons we need not touch here. The Colonel had passed the word through his officers and N.C.O.'s of what they were needed to do, and, briefly, why and how much depended on them.
The moment came.
A battalion on their left surged out and went plunging across the open, the high-explosive shells bursting and flinging fountains of spouting black earth and smoke amongst them, the ground puffing and dust-spurting under the hailing bullets. The Highlanders were supposed to wait until this other battalion had gained a certain line before they, the Highlanders, attacked; so they lay in their ditch, watching the line struggle forward and the men falling in swathes under the pouring fire, watched it stop at last and drop flat and then begin to break back to cover. It was no time to wait longer, and the Colonel, making up his mind swiftly, launched his attack. It was met by a devastating storm of fire, even heavier and more deadly than the one they had watched. The battalion, barely clear of their cover, wilted under the storm, hesitated, stopped, and began to fire back at the enemy they could not see. Those of the men who stood firing were cut down quickly, the others dropped prone or jumped into shell-holes or such cover as they could find. The officers did their best, jumping up and running forward and calling on their men to follow. But few of them ran more than a score of paces before bullet or shell fragment found them, and they fell; such men as rose and tried to follow only followed them into the next world. The air was alive and trembling to the whistle and whine and hiss of bullets, their snap and smack and crack, and to the quick following crash on crash of the earth shaking shell-bursts.
Again some of the officers tried to rally and start the line forward; but, by now, so great was the noise, so dense the air with smoke and dust, so chaotic and confused the whole business, that the officers' attempts resulted in no more than spasmodic and isolated movements of little groups, movements that were worse than useless, because each could be dealt with in detail, and, one after another, the sweeping machine-guns sluicing bullets on each and cutting them to pieces in turn. Those that made these separate attempts were mostly cut down; those that watched their failure were more convinced than ever that the whole was useless.
The Colonel, too, saw that it was useless and vain slaughter unless by some desperate chance the line should move together ... and even now it was perhaps too late, because the battalion on the left, lying in the open and scourged with fire, was giving way solidly and struggling back to cover.
It was a crisis in the battle, and where in the crisis many brave men had failed, one brave man tried and won. From somewhere down the line high over the roar of the battle there rose a wailing skirl of the pipes. There was no note of the music that was not familiar to every man there, that they did not know each word to fit to it. The pipes might have been crying the very words aloud to them instead of the music:
"Thro' the depths of Loch Katrine the steed shall career,
O'er the peaks o' Ben Lomond the galley shall steer,
And the rocks of Craig Royston like icicles melt
Ere our wrongs be forgot, ere our vengeance unfelt."
It was the voice of their own Highlands, their own clansmen, their own regiment, that was calling to those crouching men in the ditch. They stirred, lifting their heads and looking for the piper. They could not see him, but the pipes shrilled on:
"Then gather, gather, gather ..."
The men knew what was coming. "Gather" sang the pipes, and, when they were ready gathered, the word or the sign would surely come. The music was rousing them to other memories beyond their Scotland and their name and fame in the Highlands. "Landless, landless, landless," cried the pipes, and the men remembered those women back in the village, houseless and homeless, tortured and shamed past telling, remembered too a woman's final word, "But we are women and you are men."
Along the line the wild and useless fire was steadying and dying away; they could see now that this was no time for shooting, but for the cold steel. The Colonel saw and felt that the moment had come, rose crouching to his knees, made ready to leap out and forward. He, too, had been looking for the piper without seeing sign of him. But now, just as he rose,—"Hulloo, Hulloo ... Gregorlach!" skirled the pipes, and down the line a figure leaped from cover into full view, halted, marked time for a few steps to the beat of the music, moved steadily forward, the kilt swaying, shoulders and pipe drones swinging, streamers fluttering, and the pipes screaming their hardest.
All along the line men were scrambling to their feet and into the open. " ... Gregorlach!"
The Colonel was out and running forward, the line was up and away—"Hulloo, Gregorlach!" and the pipe streamers still fluttering and dancing ahead of the solid rushing wave of kilt and khaki and glinting steel. "Give their roofs to the flames...."
In that rush many fell and died; but at the end of it so did many Germans. For this time no bullet storm could stay the charge, the position was reached and taken, and the cold steel came to its own again—came to its own and drove home the meaning of the music that alone had brought it there—"Their flesh ... to the eagles."
[THE BLACK CHANTER]
By Charles Laing Warr
It was April above Lucerne, in the year of grace nineteen hundred and fourteen, and everything was young. A witchery of sunlight and scent and blossom etherealised the earth and the heavens; and fields, green as the green diamond at the heart of the world, rioted wantonly to kiss the white dazzling peaks that glittered in the sapphire sky.
On a fallen tree, its bark all frosted with lichen, two young people sat at the edge of a pine copse. They were both in the springtide of life, and they sat in enchanted silence inhaling the perfume of the trees and listening to the birth song of an awakening universe. She was not much over twenty, perhaps, and she was enhaloed with the soul of France. It lurked in the dark glistening coils of her hair, in the gestures of her shoulders and white, nervous hands, her lips. Her eyes, half mystic, half tigerish, wells of lightly slumbering passion, told the eternal story of that indomitable race whose destiny it seems to have been to demonstrate to the world that the life of a nation's soul may be unquenchable, though drowned in every century with blood.
He was obviously from across the Channel; clean built, healthy and handsome. One versed in the characteristic physiognomy of the denizens of our islands would have told you after a moment's observation that he was a Celt. And indeed, the Honourable Gordon Niall, son and heir of the fifteenth Baron Niall of the Western Isles, could play the piob mor and speak the Gaelic as his mother tongue. Twelve years of public school and university life had left him still dreaming foolish dreams and seeing great visions. Which is a proof that he was born into this world a trifle late.
They were happy, these two, in their nest in the hills. They looked out on the world as the good God made it. Among the flower-smothered fields stretched at their feet a placid-minded peasantry lived and moved and had their being. Content with their tree-bowered, log-built chalets and their daily bread, they follow the slow-footed oxen and their wooden ploughs, just as their fathers did a thousand years ago. From day to day their stainless, uneventful life unfolds to them the secret of the untroubled heart, and they believe in the beauty of the world they see and the goodness of the Creator they one day hope to see. They are simple folk, of course.
Helene von Behr loved it as she looked. It made her remember so vividly an old-age worn chateau in the peace of southern France. She felt again in her inmost soul those scents of childhood which outlive all human forgetfulness. She sat and dreamed of it all, and as she dreamed her thoughts became words, and she told them to her companion, who listened with his blue eyes full of a boyish unconcealed adoration for the lovely girl beside him. Her eyes sometimes puzzled him; they puzzled him now. A sad, lambent light was in them; like sunset glints on the shadowing hills of vanished years.
She talked on: about the moat round the grey creeper-covered house, the moat into which she had fallen one day when only six years old. And the forest—so deep and dark and wonderful—with the great oak, into whose branches Napoleon III. had climbed to smoke his everlasting cigarette in peace when he had been the unwelcome guest of her great-uncle, a grand seigneur who had despised the new régime. Old Jean Barbé, the coachman, was remembered too—old Jean, who was always cross but didn't mean to be; and what a funny scar it was over his left eye where her white cat had scratched him!
Then there was the village curé. She said, with simple innocence, that her nurse had told her as a secret that it was whispered he was her uncle, and would have reigned in the chateau had he only travelled into this life down the broad road which leadeth from the altar. But, what a dear he was! She remembered when she made her first confession to him, and how she had wondered if he was smiling, or angry, behind the grating when she told that she had stolen a cigarette from the big silver box on the writing-table of M. le Vicomte de Fontaigne, her father, and had smoked it surreptitiously in the stable beside her pet horse. He used to dine with them every Wednesday evening; and in the calm summer night the table was laid beneath the pear tree at the end of the terrace near the river, which glowed so red in the light of the westering sun. How shabby his soutane always was, and all brown with the stains of snuff!
So she rambled on and spoke of her father, that proud aristocrat, bearing a name to be found in the most abbreviated histories. She laughed when she said that he lived there in magnificent isolation, too proud to serve the Republic!
Then she sighed, and did not tell that nevertheless he had married her against her will to that dull old German diplomatist sitting down there in the Schweizerhof immersed in the voluminous correspondence which was the breath of his life: that correspondence which she secretly blessed in her heart for the free, careless hours it had given her these last ten days with this fresh-faced boy, the only occupant of the scantily filled hotel with whom her lord and master would allow her to associate.
She sat silent, and gazed dreamily at the undulating countryside, radiant in bloom and light and colour, with old Pilatus in the distance, sentinel of ages. The shimmering sunshine quivered all over it, and the scattered chalets, and orchards pink and white with foam, seemed lulled to sleep in the security of God. Once a priest passed, trudging down the white dusty road beneath; once a peasant, the smoke of his long black cigar hanging in a blue filmy wreath about his round felt hat. Far down in the valley tinkled the music of cow bells. A little stream, crystal clear, trickled at her feet ... flies danced in clouds above the edging rushes. The warm smell of the earth was intoxicating like incense....
She was dimly conscious that her companion was whistling softly. He had a habit of doing this when deep in thought, and she recognised the odd little refrain. She had heard him whistle it a dozen times—queer, uncanny, elusive as the mountain mist, with the mystery of the hills in it, and sorrow, and the spirit of brave men. She glanced at him. She knew that this boy had begun to exercise a strange fascination over her, stronger and more dangerous than she dared to confess even to herself. It was not unnatural, for her life these last three years in that grim, dull old schloss in Hanover had been very lonely. The bud will not mate with the yellow leaf, but spring must call to spring; albeit the mongers of the matrimonial market prattle as they please.
"What is it you whistle, my Gordon?" she asked suddenly. "There are strange things in the air. Has it a story from your Scottish hills?"
He sat back and laughed his gay laugh.
"Yes, it has," he answered. "I'll tell it you, if it won't bore you."
"But no: tell me," she said, and prepared to listen, her chin in her hand.
It was a tune they played on the pipes, he said: and it was a wild, barbaric story of war and the fierce passion of men and the tottering fortunes of his race. Six hundred years ago Castle Niall had been besieged by a neighbouring clan, for the Niall of the day had carried off the daughter of its chief, and held her within his walls. The beleaguered garrison was on the verge of starvation, when to Niall came a dream which told him that deliverance would come from a black chanter which would drop from heaven upon the castle roof. Three times, and three times only, would it play a mysterious tune, which none but the head of the house would be able to awaken from the reed; and in the hour of peril or distress the playing of the chanter would bring salvation. When the morning dawned grey over the castle ramparts, they found, lying on the roof, a black chanter as had been foretold. The chief blew on it with trembling lips, and lo! it played of its own accord. Immediately Niall and his men sallied from the fortress and drove their enemies into the sea.
In the intervening centuries the chanter had again been used and brought deliverance. Its virtue would be efficacious only once more. The strange, haunting air had become the battle charge of his race. It was that which he had been whistling. The last time it had been played, in the sixteenth century, the family piper had caught the air and fixed it indelibly on the scroll of memory. He laughed nervously when he had finished. He was afraid she would treat it lightly. But he had told his tale with an old-world seriousness, and although she had felt inclined to smile when he had ended his recital of it, something in his face restrained her. Instead, she patted his brown curly head.
"Come," she said, "it is late. We must go home."
It was their last evening together, for Helene and her husband were leaving the following day. As they walked along under the chestnut trees on the Schweizerhof Quai, Niall was dull and silent. She had stirred the very depths of his young, impressionable heart, this girl. He didn't attempt to deceive himself: he knew he was passionately in love with her. He felt that he hated old von Behr. But—it was all so hopeless.
That night he dined with them. The dinner was not a great success. They were all pre-occupied—Helene and Gordon with crowding thoughts that were very much akin, the Count with a disquieting dispatch from the Wilhelmstrasse and a severe attack of indigestion. At ten o'clock he excused himself: he had writing to do. He pointedly suggested that his wife should go to bed; and he made his adieux to Niall, remarking that they were leaving early in the morning and would not likely see him. Furious with stifled anger, the boy said a conventional good-bye to the woman he loved. She moved away. Count von Behr lingered for a moment, and then betook himself with shambling gait to his accustomed corner of the writing-room, which, for some reason, he preferred to his own private apartment.
The moment he was out of sight Niall hurriedly left the lounge and hastened upstairs. On the first floor he saw her, obviously lingering, a little way down the corridor. She came back as she saw him approach. The boy blushed deeply as he took her hand, and stammered something about not being able to say good-bye in such a beastly cold fashion. His head seemed to be swimming. He had some confused impressions about the white of her evening gown and a great crimson rose at her breast.
"My Gordon," she said softly, with that fascinating inability to control her r's that thrilled him; "Whistle me your tune once again—quickly, for I must go. I shall remember you by it, boy. Perhaps, some day if we meet again, I may be able to whistle it to you!"
She smiled, but her eyes were moist. And Niall drew his parched lips together and managed to whistle the strange, mysterious air. He finished and stood awkwardly facing her, tall and distinguished in his evening clothes. No word of love had ever passed between them, but as they looked into each other's eyes, each read the secret that nothing could hide.
"Adieu, my Gordon," she whispered hastily. "You have been good to me. I won't forget you ... and you'll help me often ... but be sensible, boy—and forget me!"
A moment later she was running down the corridor and vanished at the end. The boy stood for a minute or two rigid where he was, staring blankly at a red rose in his hands, his head reeling with the delicious joy of the knowledge that for one never-to-be-forgotten moment her arms had been thrown round his neck, and on his mouth her warm lips had pressed a swift, burning kiss.
II
Captain Gordon Niall of the Uist Highlanders lay flat on his face beside a loophole in the wall. With a subaltern, two men, and a stray sergeant of the Yorkshire Rifles, he occupied the remains of a former farmstead, now a jumbled heap of bricks and mortar. The only portion of this mass of refuse that looked like a house was a right angle formed by the ends of two walls which rose like a skeleton from the shattered piles of rafters, rubbish, stones, lime, and dead bodies of mangled men.
It was one of the supreme moments resultant upon the German break through near Armentières, that grim, bloody month of April, 1918. The British line existed only in the imagination of an exhausted and bewildered Staff, their faculties half paralysed with fatigue and over work. No one knew with anything even approaching certainty what the situation was. Only one thing was certain because it was obvious, and that was that the very existence of our Armies was hanging in the balance. The British front was hopelessly, irretrievably broken; and a disorganised rabble of tattered regiments, half crazy with weariness and strain and hunger, were retreating in mixed, irregular bands back from the river Lys, through a withering hail of bullets and a raging tornado of shrapnel and high explosive; valiantly and uncomplainingly to take up new positions and renew the desperate struggle against overwhelming odds.
Gordon Niall had arrived at the stage when all emotion had been frozen to its depths. He looked phlegmatically out upon a dreary, muddy countryside literally alive with the grey advancing hordes of the enemy. The little group huddled in the shelter of the tottering walls manipulated a Lewis gun with the dull ceaseless energy of men in a dream. Dirty, ragged, verminous, with a week's growth on their smoke-grimed emaciated faces, they were unquestioningly carrying out to the last their final act in the mighty drama of that last awful month which clouded their minds like a nightmare from Hell.
They had been all through the sickening horror of the struggle on the Somme, and after three weeks hard fighting had arrived a week ago at Armentières for a rest, to find themselves swirled into the vortex of the new German offensive. Gordon Niall as he stoically waited for death, knew very little about the facts of it all. He had been told that the Portuguese who held the line on the left had broken; and that out of the welter of shattered, scurrying, disordered units, he had been ordered to take up an advanced position, to stem the rush with a handful of men he had managed to gather round him out of the retreating forces. And there he was, with four others—all that were left—with the German masses two hundred yards ahead, and behind him the river Lys, its muddy waters splashing under the bursting barrage, ironically emphasising the fact that for him there was no retreat.
It was only a matter of minutes, and at last the end came. A confused babel of sounds; a smothering avalanche of men, stamping, yelling, pushing; the collapse of the whole universe about him; a deadly pain in his head; a strange, swift, kaleidoscopic vision of home ... his mother's face ... then darkness.
He didn't know how long afterwards it was that he felt himself jerked roughly to his feet. As his senses slowly returned he realised that a German officer was searching him. He watched the man stupidly as he went through the papers in his pocket-book: then something fell from a letter to the ground, something brown like a dead leaf, and Niall lurched forward with a snarl.
"Give it me!" he said hoarsely.
The officer looked up, surprised, and then down at his feet. He stooped and picked the little fragment from the ground, glanced at it casually, and handed it to Niall with a look of half amused wonder in his eyes. Then he went on reading. Niall thrust the recovered treasure into his tunic pocket—only a faded rose given to him four years ago by a girl at Lucerne, whose memory the passion of war had not succeeded in effacing.
The officer soon finished, and Niall was marched off with a small escort. It all seemed like a bad dream, that scurry over the fire-swept zone, the arrival at the battered hamlet where more prisoners were waiting. Then the long weary march, hour after hour, their numbers constantly swelling, on through the fading twilight and a dark drizzling night. Like drunken men the straggling column reeled along, half delirious with hunger and fatigue, past stores and camps and dumps and villages, while ever past them the reserve masses of horse, foot and artillery incessantly pressed on the heels of the advancing German forces. At last, long after midnight, they reached a smallish town; and, packed into an empty building, they fell on the cold concrete floor and slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.
Early in the morning they were marched to the station, and Niall found himself in a third class compartment with eleven other officers. Some time before the train started a bowl of some sticky, soupy substance was handed in, with a loaf of bread; and on this they subsisted during the twenty-six hours which elapsed before they were detrained at their destination, a dreary, drab little town; and, cramped and weak as children, they marched two miles out into the country to the wire-encircled encampment which awaited their coming.
III
Those unfortunates who endured the lonely monotonous horror of prison life in Germany will tell you what "barbed-wire madness" was. They will tell you of men who got the disease; and of that furtive, piteous look that haunted the tragic sunken eyes of weary creatures who became frenzied with the longing for freedom. It is perhaps difficult to appreciate from the depths of an arm-chair the terrible gnawing pain of this consuming passion to which some natures were so very susceptible. But strong men who have lived, if only just lived, for three long ghastly months, without letters or parcels, on a diet of turnip-soup and small lumps of black bread, till the skin was stretched tight over their protruding cheek-bones like yellow parchment, their filthy, ragged clothes hanging like mildewed sacks on their emaciated bodies, and their hollow eyes gleaming like the eyes of famished beasts—they understand how easy it was to fall a prey to "barbed-wire madness."
Gordon Niall got it, and got it badly. It was inevitable. The restless Celtic spirit was the first to fall a victim to the mania for escape. Five times he eluded his watchful guard, and five times was recaptured, sullen and still determined, taking his punishment of solitary confinement as a matter of course, with a purpose dogged and unbroken. For solitary confinement in cells was no cure for the disease: it was like malaria, once in the system it was ineradicable. The weeks dragged on. Parcels and letters arrived from home and conditions gradually improved, but Niall remained obsessed with his yearning for liberty. Other men who had escaped and been recaptured began to realise the futility of it, and the news which filtered through the German newspapers of the turn of the tide and the progress of the Allied forces tended to encourage them to settle down to await developments. And one night the camp was electrified with the announcement of the defection of Bulgaria. It was the beginning of the end, and the star of hope shone clear in the firmament. Yet it had no effect on Gordon Niall, for the following night he made yet another attempt to escape.
He had thought it out carefully; and at midnight, three friends, strenuously protesting at his foolishness, hoisted him up to the little window of their hut which overlooked the prison yard. It was not more than twelve yards from the wire enclosure, and within four feet of it rose a telegraph pole. The window had been very carefully prepared, and it did not take Niall many minutes to remove the glass, drop the panes into the keeping of his friends below, and wriggle on to the narrow ledge. He listened carefully, and looked up and down the yard, white in the searching glare of the great electric lamps which turned night into day. A high wind and a driving sleet favoured him, for the sentry who passed shortly afterwards on his beat by the barbed wire was walking quickly with his chin sunk in the collar of his coat. Niall waited till he had gone, then, crouching for a moment on the window ledge, he sprang forward, clutched at the telegraph pole, clung to it for a few seconds, then laboriously hauled himself up to the cross-bars. Here he rested for a while and allowed the sentry once more to pass. Then, judging that he would just have time to reach the further pole, which was a few feet on the far side of the wire, before the man returned, he commenced his perilous journey. Painfully and cautiously he straddled across the wires and began to work himself along. The swirling blasts of the strong wind more than once almost swept him from his precarious hold, and the icy rain numbed his cut and bleeding hands. Beneath his weight the wires swayed and sagged ... yet he struggled on his desperate way. It was more difficult than he had supposed, and sick, with nervous strain and physical exhaustion, he determined to risk discovery and hang where he was, halfway across, until the sentry passed again. The minutes dragged, and then round the corner of the next hut the man appeared, his shoulders hunched in the driving rain, his eyes on the ground. Above him, clinging frantically to the wire, Niall waited, his heart in his mouth. The man walked almost beneath him, seeing nothing; and in a few seconds the prisoner again began to toil along the wires. At length, almost fainting with fatigue and strain, he clutched his goal and drew himself across the cross-bars, and waited, panting, his heart throbbing as if it would burst, until the sentry should repass him. He soon approached. Nearer and nearer he came. He tramped beneath the crouching figure on the top of the telegraph pole. Niall muttered a prayer of thankfulness for the fierce wind and the torrential rain.
The blood suddenly roared in his ears with excitement ... the man had stopped ... was he going to look up?... he stamped his feet for a minute or two, then resumed his monotonous beat.
Niall quickly clutched the pole with his arms and knees and slithered to the ground. Bending low he ran swiftly across the area illumined by the glare from the prison yard, and found himself in the enveloping darkness of the night.
The fugitive had a roughly accurate knowledge of the immediate countryside, gained by constant observation during the occasional walks which had been permitted the prisoners, under escort. He purposed making for a thick wood which lay about two miles to the westward, and there concealing himself during the following day when the hue and cry would be in full swing. When night again came round he would push ahead; if possible, keeping a general course to the north-west, which, he anticipated, would in time bring him to some point on the Dutch frontier. He had saved up a quantity of food, which, with strict economy, he hoped might last him at a pinch for a fortnight. If, by that time, he had not reached the frontier, things might become awkward; but this was an eventuality too distant to be considered at the moment.
He found himself at the outskirts of the forest an hour later, and forged ahead through the crowding trees and thick undergrowth until dawn broke, when he searched about for a secure hiding-place. He resolved not to climb a tree as he felt that sleep was a necessity. Fortune favoured him by the discovery of a large fox-hole in a dense thicket; and down this he forced his way feet first, carefully wound up his wrist watch, and in five minutes was fast asleep.
It was one o'clock in the afternoon when he awoke. Scarcely a sound broke the tense silence of the wood. The rain had passed and the sun shone clear above the trees. He ate some biscuits and a meagre slice of tinned meat, washed his face and hands in a neighbouring stream, made some rough calculations on a sheet of paper as to direction, and settled down to wait for nightfall. With the advent of dusk he again set off through the forest.
For twelve long weary days and nights he successfully eluded capture and kept up the same monotonous round—hiding by day and pushing ahead by night. He had been forced on many occasions to retrace his steps or make circuitous rounds owing to coming suddenly on villages or towns, and he had not made the progress he had resolved to make. His food, too, he had miscalculated; and at the close of the twelfth day he found himself with his rations at an end, and hopelessly befogged as to his whereabouts. For another day and night he held out bravely, and then narrowly avoided detection in a fruitless attempt to steal a chicken from a farmyard. At the expiry of a fortnight he was starving and in the throes of a fever.
He came to a final decision. He would start again at dusk and press on. If by daylight there was no sign of the frontier he would give himself up. There was nothing else for it. He was in desperate straits: his clothes were torn to rags and he was almost overcome by the fierce grip of the fever that was rapidly consuming his little remaining strength. He had given up all hope of winning to the haven of neutral territory; it might not be far away, perhaps, but his power of endurance was at an end. However, he would forge ahead that night, whatever happened.
As soon as darkness rendered it safe he emerged from his concealment and struck westward along the edge of a rough country road. For hours he toiled along meeting with nobody, but making poor progress. He was becoming light-headed, and he lurched heavily as he walked. At intervals he burned and shivered and sweated fiercely. Time and again he fell on his face, but on each occasion he staggered to his feet and struggled ahead.
The night wore on, and through the clouds on the eastern skyline a palish light began to filter. The skies grew dull grey and then softer like the wing of a dove. Over the fields and hedgerows the luminous glow grew clearer as the wheels of the Dawn rolled on, touching the bare branches of the trees and silvering the green stagnant water in the ditch, by whose edge reeled and pitched an exhausted atom of humanity.
Niall raised his bloodshot eyes to the heavens.
"Well, this is the end of it," he muttered, "and probably the end of me too. I don't mind ... it's been a good effort, and I'm so tired ... my God, how tired I am!"
A hundred yards ahead a high wall began, evidently the bound of some large country residence, and not much further on was a small iron gate. Inside, a footpath led winding among the trees of a wide parkland. With shaking hands Niall unlatched the gate and followed the path. He could not see now where he was going: a red mist hung like a veil before his eyes. Once he ran against a tree, striking his head violently against the trunk. Dazedly he raised his hand to his forehead and felt it wet.... Shortly afterwards he reached the end of the parkland. Things grew clearer again, and he saw before him, not three hundred yards away, the grey battlemented towers of a stately castle. For a few moments he stared at it in a fuddled manner, then he collapsed into a ditch full of rotting leaves.
When he regained consciousness it was night. He must have lain there all day. Slowly past events came back to him, and he raised himself with difficulty on his elbow and looked at the winking lights in the castle windows. The fever did not trouble him now: all he was conscious of was a fierce, overpowering craving for food and warmth and rest. The twinkle of the lights called to him. It was a German house, certainly, but he would get something to eat there, and they would let him rest—how he wanted rest! His thoughts flew back to his home in the distant western isles. Would they be thinking of him? he wondered. Thank God, they couldn't see him now. His mother, and Eileen his sister ... they would be in the old library where they always sat at night, that vast stone-walled room above the cliff where the moaning of the sea rose eternally. And his father would be asleep in the red leather chair by the gun-room fire. He smiled as the vision rose before him. Would he ever see it again? Great God, why did men want to kill one another?...
His rambling thoughts switched off in another direction ... if they could see him now, perhaps his old father would go to the glass case on the library wall, take from its resting place the black chanter, and blow on it for the last time! He laughed hoarsely—a good joke that! Delirious and cracked, his voice suddenly croaked forth the weird notes of the black chanter's tune. Horrible and broken it rose on the still night air.
In a few moments the delirium passed, and with a mighty effort he got on his hands and knees. Painfully and slowly he began to crawl across the damp grass of the park towards the shadowy mass of the silent castle.
"They'll give me food," he gasped ... "and let me rest."
IV
The Countess von Behr sat in a deep chair by the open fireplace of her boudoir in the Schloss Bersenburg. On the white marble mantelshelf a painted china clock pointed to a quarter past eleven. The luxuriously furnished room was in deep shadow, the only light coming from two massive silver candelabra upon the grand piano in a recess by the window. The flickering glow from the red embers lit up fitfully the face of the woman who gazed abstractedly into the fire.
Four years of mental strain and suffering had left their mark on Helene von Behr, for there were lines about her eyes and her mouth had grown harder. These years had fallen with tragic weight upon the shoulders of the exiled girl, doomed by the exigencies of the times to live alone in this vast gloomy house, her heart in bleeding France, her body in a country which by hereditary instinct she had always disliked, but now hated with all the intensity of her passionate southern heart. So she had dragged out her solitary days in the seclusion of the Schloss, one of that vast multitude, young in years but old in suffering, whose souls have been ruthlessly crushed beneath the iron wheels of the chariots of war.
The Count had been keenly alive to the delicacy of his domestic situation, and from the outbreak of hostilities, though he had been almost constantly resident in Berlin owing to his important connection with the Foreign Office, he had deemed it the prudent course to leave his French wife in the solitariness of his country home; a policy which saved both himself and her from inevitable embarrassments which might at once prove detrimental to the interests of the one, and intolerable to the other.
The unutterable agony of the weary months in a position which was both false and horrible to her, conscious as she could not fail to be of the veiled contempt and cleverly concealed hostility of her servants, and the less disguised dislike of her few neighbours, had told heavily upon the lonely woman. Two months ago things had become almost insufferable when the news came that the Vicomte de Fontaigne had been laid in a soldier's grave. To fight for the Republic was one thing, but to fight for France was quite another: and so, at the hour of crisis, like the rest of his order, the haughty nobleman had put his politics in his pocket and offered his services to the Govermnent. The grief of her father's death, borne alone, friendless and exiled, had almost crushed Helene. Yet it seemed as if her perplexities were never to end: for that very afternoon a telegram had come intimating in crude staring words, that the Count von Behr had been shot dead in the Wilhelmstrasse while endeavouring from a window to appease a revolutionary mob.
She had tried to analyse her feelings when the news was conveyed to her. She had never loved him, but in his own blunt way he had been kind and considerate to her; and the sudden tears which she shed were from the heart, for she sincerely regretted his death. Yet despite this fact she could not stifle the insistent thought that she was free—free to go back to France and to the Chateau Fontaigne, that pearl of her soul, when this holocaust of death was past and over; a thought rendered doubly moving by the knowledge that the dawn was already breaking! She had often wondered what it would be like in the future for a child of France to be wedded for ever to a German.
As she sat before the fire she felt restless and ill at ease. Her jumbled thoughts refused to be focussed on any one aspect of her affairs. She felt something strange in the atmosphere, something that oppressed her. It seemed in the air, it was all around, real yet indefinable. Time and again she looked round half nervously as if expecting to find someone in the room with her....
She settled deeper into her chair and listlessly watched a morsel that fell red from the fire ... it grew pink and then grey. It still smoked a little, then died. As the lonely woman stared into the embers there suddenly rose before her a boyish face, so clear and vivid that she was startled by it. There was pain in the eyes that looked at her, pain and dull weariness, and the dumb suffering of a yearning spirit. Helene shivered.... How often during these last years had that face risen before her, and the sunlight and happiness of ten brief days in a deserted Lucerne had fallen on her tired heart like the dew of heaven. She had never forgotten him—how could she? She had wondered so often where he was. She knew he was not dead: for he was first in that list of names which she had given to a friend in Berne, desiring him to keep her acquainted with their fortunes. She often thought, had she done wrong that night when she kissed his young mouth? But it didn't really matter, after all: she had done him no harm, and long ago he would have forgotten her. Men forgot so quickly. For his own sake she hoped he had: yet—in spite of herself she prayed that he hadn't. And as she looked ahead, to-night, to her coming liberty, she wondered.... But the face in the fire made her uneasy. A queer tune throbbed in her head—his tune! She had heard it in her thoughts all night; wild, unrhythmical, it seemed to have vibrated in the stillness of the shadowy room—mysterious, passionate, compelling. Once it had been so realistic that she had been convinced that she actually heard it—out in the night; and she had pulled aside the curtains and peered out into the darkness.
She stretched her arms above her head. She felt stifled: surely the room was very hot. Rising, she moved restlessly to the window and looked out. It was a clear, starry night; with a silver moon peeping from behind some scudding clouds. She lingered, gazing up at the beauty of the heavens. Then, just as she was about to let the thick curtain drop, suddenly, muffled yet distinct, she heard a man's voice rise on the night air. It cried one English word—"Help!"
For a minute she stood startled and irresolute, then she flung open the window. Below, on the white of the wide gravel sweep, she could dimly see a dark form lying stretched before the massive steps of the doorway. She leaned over the edge and called. No answer came. She drew back into the room and touched the electric bell. A few seconds later, an old sleepy-eyed footman appeared, their last remaining manservant.
"Quick," she cried, "there is a man lying outside on the gravel. I think he is dead. Get some help and bring him into the hall. I'll come down myself immediately."
The man bowed solemnly and withdrew; and when five minutes later she descended the broad oak staircase, Helene saw an excited knot of servants depositing a human burden on the great fur rug before the cavernous hall fireplace. She approached and looked down upon the form of a man, little more than a skeleton, his clothes ragged and smeared with filth, his thin sunken face bearded and dirty. The cluster of servants stared at him open-mouthed.
The sick man moved an arm. He drowsily muttered a few words; feebly, but Helene and the domestics heard them:
"Must be near the frontier now.... Thank God!"
"English," said the old footman resentfully, but a quick look from his mistress silenced any further remark. She despatched the man for the local doctor and sent the women for blankets, hot water, brandy, pillows; and she herself knelt by the miserable creature and gently loosened his ragged collar. The emaciated face recalled nothing to her as she looked—but, a few seconds later, Gordon Niall opened his eyes, and, trembling like an aspen leaf, and white to the lips, Helene von Behr recognised him.
"Mother of God!" she gasped.
The floodgates of memory opened and the great waters poured over her soul. She felt the walls and the floor of the vast gloomy hall reeling about her; but, with an almost superhuman effort of will, she regained her composure, and met the eyes that looked into her ashen face with a look of wonder and amazement. The fever seemed to have left him, and for the moment Niall was perfectly conscious. She bent down and pillowed his head on her arm.
"Helene," he whispered, "is it you?... where am I?"
"It's all right, dear," she said soothingly. "You're quite safe. Don't speak—you must rest."
The servants returned and Niall was made as comfortable as possible. Helene thought rapidly. At all costs she must be alone with him for a time. She dismissed the whispering women upon various errands. Yes, she said to their enquiries, she would stay with him till they returned.
When they were alone Niall looked up.
"I escaped, you know," he said weakly. "I've had an awful time—but I'm safe now, Helene, am I not?... across the frontier, eh?"
"Yes, yes, my Gordon," she answered, smoothing back his matted hair, "you're across the frontier, and you'll soon be well." She almost choked as she remembered that the frontier was only five miles away.
He sighed contentedly and closed his eyes. For a while he lay very still; then he spoke, with difficulty.
"My left tunic pocket," he gasped, "feel in it, Helene ... that's right ... now, open that flap."
From the tattered leather pocket-book she pulled out a dried withered flower. His eyes gleamed as he saw it. He turned his face to her.
"Your rose," he whispered—"at Lucerne, you know."
A severe fit of shivering seized him. His eyes closed. From the corners of his mouth two thin rivulets of blood began to trickle ... he opened his eyes.
"Helene," he muttered spasmodically, "Helene—the frontier ... I must get across the frontier ... before the morning."
The end was near and she knew it. With her left hand she extracted from her bosom a little gold crucifix and held it before the dying eyes. In a voice, choked with emotion, she said in his ear,
"Say after me, my Gordon ... 'Jesu, have mercy!'"
"Jesu—have—mercy!"
"Now, and in the hour of death"—
"Now, and—in—the hour of—death"—
"Have mercy on me, a sinner!"
"Have mercy—on—me—a sinner!"—
He shivered as in a blast of icy wind, then smiled like a tired child and nestled his head against her breast. And very quietly he crossed the silent frontier of that shadowy country, whence no traveller returns.
The servants were clustered about her, and the stout village doctor was bending over the thin body stretched on the fur rug; but Helene, her head bowed, neither looked up nor spoke....
[THE PIPES]
By Edmund Candler
On Christmas night the pipers came into the mess. They had piped the regiment across many a hot place in France and escorted bombing parties down many a German trench. In one action four out of the eight were hit and two killed. They touch a chord deep down somewhere which no doubt has its proper scientific name. The eye of the piper which conceals his gladness, denying all rapture, is a key to the undemonstrative temper of the men who would rather die than throw up their bonnets and shout.
A subaltern of nineteen years put the case for the pipes to me in his own eloquent slang.
"Of course I get cold feet sometimes" he said, "like everyone else. But the pipes soon warm one. MacFarlane, the Company Piper, piped us across on the 25th, the regimental slogan, you know. By Jove, it was top-hole."
We called him the Chicken. Being bigger in the beam than in the shoulders and having a slightly forward stoop he looked in his kilt like a preternaturally large nestling just emerged from the egg. To see him walking reminded one of a determined young chicken. He had an assurance unnatural in the new-born which set off his callowness and puzzled one. It was not side. To hear him talk made one smile. You would think he had plumbed experience and was already convinced about the main issues of life, celibacy or marriage, the rights and wrongs of Demos, peace and war, and the like. One smiled in sympathy, not in derision, accepting the indisputable explanation that the Chicken had had special privileges in the egg. And one thanked the war for an ingenuousness of speech, the bloom of which would have been rubbed off in a week of peace-time conditions in a mess.
"MacFarlane was killed with a bombing party," the subaltern went on. "They let hell loose,—all their machine guns, rifle grenades, trench mortars, and every rifle thirty rounds at least. Our fellows came in half an hour afterwards, having been snug in a shell-hole through the whole show. Only two of our men were hit—by a trench mortar. One was MacFarlane. It was a horrid sight—made me feel a bit green. Nothing was left of them, and you couldn't tell who they were save by their identity discs. I put a sentry by the traverse on both sides and gave orders that no one was to pass. It wouldn't have done for these young recruits to see the mess," this pink-faced subaltern of nineteen explained with paternal solicitude.
His tenderness for the recruits amused me, for the absence of down on his chin made the Chicken look younger than his years. But I marvelled more at the complacency with which he found himself in command. He spoke of his blooded veterans—Perthshires, if you please, the salt of the British Army, as if he were a huntsman holding them in the leash; yet it was only in spirit that he had attained to man's estate. One phrase struck me. He was describing the capture of Hun murderers, or if not actual murderers the comrades and accomplices of murderers, men whom his Highlanders wanted to kill.
"They were all holding up their hands," the boy told me, "and trembling with funk and holding out pictures of their Fraus and kids, and calling out 'Don't shoot, Kamarade! Don't shoot!' and my men wanted to shoot them. The Perthshires had been out for blood since the 9th of May when the Huns had burnt their wounded comrades, shooting them with petrol bullets so that their clothes burst into flame and they died in agony, and men who couldn't stick the sight of it any longer crept out of their trenches, in spite of orders, to drag them in and were burnt alive too. That day my company swore that they would take no more Prussian prisoners, and now word had been passed round by the Brigade, 'The 15th Prussians are in front of you, who burnt the men of your regiment. You will know how to behave.' My men wanted to shoot them all down, make the place a shambles; but, of course, I wouldn't have it. I told them they had to take the men prisoners."
"Did they obey you?" I asked.
The Nestling looked at me in surprise as if I were a very ignorant person.
"Obey! They knew very well that the first man who fired I'd blow out his brains with my revolver."
After all, the Chicken's assurance was a compliment to the regiment, where discipline is an elemental fact. And it spoke well for the boy too, that he realized what admission into that Kingdom, or corporation, meant,—all self and chickenhood being merged in the subaltern of the Perthshires, whose powers were as natural and inalienable as the properties of carbon or oxygen.
Yet this callow youth on whom authority sat so lightly spurned his profession. It appeared that he had ambitions. He scoffed at the idea of sticking in the army after the war. He wanted "to do something," he said. I could not understand how he could resist the glamour of it all. His Colonel thought well of him and he knew it. The O.C., a reserved man, and sparing of praise, had been talking to me about the Chicken before dinner; he told me that the boy had the right spirit and no fear in him. "I sent him on a patrol," he said, "a day or two after he arrived at the front, to a building between the lines which was supposed to be occupied by Germans. My orders were, 'Find out if the house is held. Find out for yourself, remember, and don't take your men's word for it. They'll always see Germans, especially on a wet night when they want to be snug in the trenches.'"
The Subaltern had the sight of an owl, but he was determined not to come back until he had seen Germans. So far he had seen none, having arrived at the trenches straight from Winchester, where he held a commission in the O.T.C. and had just won a scholarship for New College. He swore he would see Germans that night or promenade the empty house between the lines.
A slip of a moon showed above the clouds and the rain ceased when they were within fifty yards of the building. The Corporal touched the Subaltern's sleeve and said, "They're there, Sir. I can see about a dozen of them."
"Where? I don't see."
"Straight ahead, Sir, by the wall."
The Chicken approached nearer. Within forty—thirty yards. The Corporal warned him again in a throaty whisper:—"There's 'arf a company, Sir, lining the side of the house. We're almost agin them."
Still the Chicken could not see. He gave the order to move forward.
At fifteen yards the Germans opened fire. A quick volley. The patrol threw themselves flat. Luckily they were concealed in a slight depression, and in a few seconds the moon went under a dark cloud.
The Subaltern whispered the order to return the enemy's fire, and his four men blazed away into the shadow under the house. The Germans replied vigorously; by a miracle none of the little party were hit. Then the Huns turned the machine gun on to them from somewhere farther back. The Subaltern heard the spray of bullets coming nearer, spattering the earth, searching every inch of soil, passing with a thirsty sucking noise overhead. He was the most exposed of his party, but he felt for the body of the dead man he had stumbled against, and drew it into a close embrace. The current of lead passed an inch over them where they lay interlaced, the live man clinging for life to the dead. The fire dropped. The body received a bullet and shook as if it were wrestling with him. Its head butted his own. A faint smell of cigar fume clung to its moustache. The boy had let the situation go for a moment, and was wondering, with a detachment at which he was surprised, whether all Germans smoked Havanas in the trenches, when a new kind of explosion added to the din. It was "A" Company's patrol bombing the house. The little scouting party received their first casualty from them. The man behind the Chicken uttered a cry of pain. A splinter from a bomb had taken away part of his right ear.
This extended attack was too much for the Huns, who thought the whole line was advancing and decamped. The moon peeped out again as they were going off, and the Subaltern, Corporal and the two men accounted for at least half a dozen of them. These dark figures which rolled up like rabbits were the first Germans the Chicken had seen.
The Subaltern entered the house with the two privates and sent the Corporal back to tell the Colonel that we were in possession. He had taken a rather important Observation Post marked 2.22 on the map.
I had some of the story from the boy and some from the Colonel, but I will let the boy finish it.
"The next day we had some burying," he said. "From the new post we could send out patrols to bring in our fellows who had been knocked out on the 12th. You won't mind me talking about things which make you feel a bit squeamish, will you, Sir?"—the boy called everybody above the age of forty "Sir"—"Tell me to shut up if it is too beastly; but, you see, most of these bodies had been out for six weeks and were more or less decomposed. We dug a shallow trench towards them, threw out a hook on a bit of rope and drew them in. We had to find their identification discs. It was not a pleasant business taking off a man's shirt and not always easy, and my Corporal being sick every minute didn't help things either. I generally went for their pockets for letters; that was easier, but ..." I omit here some details which are too unpleasant to print. "The Corporal with his weak stomach was a bit of a nuisance, especially at night, for if the Germans heard him they would send up a flare."
Then he told me about a frontal attack at Loos. The Chicken had seen and suffered more and lived more in six months in France, and done more for England than I had in two score odd years. He was clearly a born soldier. He was happy in the regiment and quite one of them—one of the new incarnation at least who approximate in some ways to the old. I could not see what more he desired.
"You really think of throwing up the army after the war?" I asked. The Chicken turned on me the wistful smile that talk of "after the war" evoked among the sanguine at the time. "In war time of course everybody has got to be a soldier," he said, "but in peace time—no thank you!"
"But what are you going to do?"
"Anything, but inspect meat and tunic buttons. Something that counts. I suppose I shall go into the Bar or Parliament."
I would have asked him if he really thought these talking shops counted more than the Perthshires; but the pipes were coming in again and they were playing the regimental slogan. It gave one the most extraordinary feeling in the pit of one's stomach and all down one's back.
"I'm not sure, though," the boy said ingenuously when they had gone out, "I may stick to the regiment on the chance of another show."
I understood, I had passed through the two moods myself in a long route march when the pipes took over charge from the brass band.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
[FOOTNOTES:]
[1] The Bagpipe. Grattan Flood.
[2] Probably the first pipers to play on French soil were those of the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders on their landing at Boulogne.
[3] Echoes of Flanders. C. L. Warr.
[4] Philip Gibbs.
[5] "We will take the high road."
[6] The Adventures of a Despatch Rider. Major W. H. Watson.
[7] More Adventures in Kilt and Khaki. Thomas Lyon.
[8] Stephen Graham.—The Times, 16th January, 1919.
[9] Philip Gibbs.
[10] "The battle beyond Baghdad—'A Highland Officer.'"—Blackwood's Magazine.
[11] Stephen Graham.—"A Private in the Guards."
[12] With the Gordons at Ypres.—Rev. A. M. Maclean, C.M.G.
[13] Lieut.-Col. Cyrus Peck, V.C., D.S.O.
[14] Musical Memoirs of Scotland, 1849, p. 9.
[15] Sir John was wrong in his date: this incident happened in 1816.
[16] The names of the tunes are largely written in rather badly spelt Gaelic, including in some cases the letter 'v,' e.g., Vuirlin instead of A Bhirlinn, and h is the commonest consonant in the vocables—neither 'v' nor 'h' alone being used in correct Gaelic.
[17] Since this was written I have discovered this line in staff notation in an old MS. by Donald Macdonald, son of the man who published the Collection of Piobaireachd in the early nineteenth century.
[18] The commas are thrown about haphazard in this tune.
[19] Something is omitted here—probably 'a.'
[20] It is not easy to see what 'ved
' means here: comparing it with same point in First, Second and Third Motions, it should probably be 'dari' instead of ved
or 'vedari' perhaps. As written in D. Macdonald, Jr's. MS. it would be 'dari.'
[21] 'h' is probably inserted here to show that C and not B is meant.
[22] Perhaps this cadence is a clerical error.
[23] Probably a clerical error for hadarem.
[24] "The pipers' hollow."
[25] Keeper of family records, genealogist.
[26] "The anger of winking Patrick."
[27] "The blind man's leap."
[28] "The Broom of Peril," the banner borne by Oscar in battle.
[29] "Sons of the Gael shoulder to shoulder."
[30] All the atrocities mentioned above are not fiction but fact. Day and date, names and places can be given for all of them.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.
The one hundred and twenty table headers in the 'REGIMENTAL RECORDS' section have been made identical; a small number in the original text omitted the column header 'REG. NO.'
Footnote [20] is correctly referenced twice from [pg 189].
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained. For example, unrhythmical; outwith; bagpipe, bag-pipe; dugout, dug-out.
[Pg ix], 'The Cameron Highlanders' replaced by 'The Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders'.
[Pg 5], 'invididuals' replaced by 'individuals'.
[Pg 7], 'Ch till mi' replaced by 'Cha till me'.
[Pg 11], 'sons of Erc' replaced by 'sons of Ere'.
[Pg 19], 'unfavourably' replaced by 'unfavourable'.
[Pg 52], 'dipersed' replaced by 'dispersed'.
[Pg 65], 'sporans' replaced by 'sporrans'.
[Pg 73], 'REG. NO. NAME. RANK.' replaced by 'REG. NO. RANK. NAME.'.
[Pg 102], '23/121/7' replaced by '23/12/17'.
[Pg 124], '24/10/141' replaced by '24/10/14'.
[Pg 130], 'Piper Major' replaced by 'Pipe Major'.
[Pg 166], 'June, 1615' replaced by 'June, 1915'.
[Pg 183], 'himbandrc' replaced by 'himbandre'.
[Pg 183], 'hobandrc' replaced by 'hobandre'.
[Pg 200], 'Higlanders' replaced by 'Highlanders'.
[Pg 202], 'The musi' replaced by 'The music'.
[Pg 222], 'Higland' replaced by 'Highland'.
[Pg 229], 'shapnel' replaced by 'shrapnel'.
[Pg 236], 'Nifinsky' replaced by 'Nijinsky'.
[Pg 248], 'Bretannach' replaced by 'Brettanach'.
[Pg 262], 'boys haled' replaced by 'boys hauled'.
[Pg 282], 'unrythmical' replaced by 'unrhythmical'.
[Pg 287], 'shell-hope' replaced by 'shell-hole'.