"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