And so it comes to this: the method of employment of the regimental piper during this war has depended largely on opportunity—and still more on the individuality of commanding officers. Men vary within very wide limits in the price they are prepared to pay for attaining their object; and where one man will deliberately sacrifice a certain number of men to get a position, another will as deliberately avoid the sacrifice, even if it costs him his objective.
As far as pipers are concerned, the decision arrived at by commanding officers of the two schools is equally indicative of the esteem in which they hold them.
[A HISTORY OF THE PIPES]
At what stages of his development primitive man discovered he could obtain musical sounds by blowing on a hollow reed we cannot now ascertain; if we could do so we could at once determine when the pipe came into existence. It is unprofitable to speculate on this point.
What we do know, however, is that men playing the pipe are portrayed in sculptures the date of which is fixed by the best authorities as about 4000 B.C., and we conclude that in Chaldaea, Egypt, Assyria and Persia at least, the pipe—but not necessarily the bagpipe—had become a recognised musical instrument.
Actual specimens of the Egyptian pipe dating back to at least 1500 B.C. are in existence, and we know that they had a reed giving a scale almost identical with the chromatic scale; they also had a drone. Such a pipe had, clearly, advanced some way on the upward development to "piob mhor."
Every stage in its evolution still persists in some country in the world, and by comparing these it is possible to trace the actual process. Thus, besides the single pipe, which is world-wide in its distribution, we have the Egyptian "arghool," which consists of a pipe "chanter" and drone lying side by side; and the later development, the "zummarah," has a bag. In India the twentieth century snake charmer has an instrument in which chanter and single drone lie side by side fixed into a small gourd with a lump of wax. The chanter has a small reed very similar to our own chanter reeds, and, although the scale differs, the sound produced is remarkably similar. This instrument is essentially a single drone bagpipe, and is to be found all over India, in Yunnan and other parts of China.
Note.—The author takes this opportunity of acknowledging his indebtedness for much of the early history of the instrument to Manson's The Highland Bagpipe and Dr. Grattan Flood's The Story of the Bagpipe, both monuments of research.