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.