A final quotation—one of a very great number received—reflects the opinion of all ranks:
"I have often seen a company just out of the trenches straggling along the road too weary to think of keeping in formation, let alone in step. On the first sound of the pipes these same men would double up to their place and march along with the best of them."
The ubiquity of the pipes on the Western front has been remarked by all observers. "The music of the pipes is now as much a part of the great orchestra of this war as the incessant rumbling of distant guns, as the swirl of traffic along the transport lines, as the singing of birds above No Man's Land.... And where there are pipes there are Scotsmen—Scots everywhere from the sea to St. Quentin, in old French market towns, and in Flemish villages ... and in camps behind the fighting line not beyond the reach of long range shells, and up in the trenches where death is very near to them.... As long as history lasts the spirit of France will salute the memory of these kilted boys and of all the Lowland Scots who have gone into the furnace fires of this war to the music of the pipes, and have fallen in heaps upon her fields. A thousand years hence, when the wind blows softly across the ground where they fought, old Scottish tunes will sound faintly in the ears of men who remember the past, and all this country will be haunted with the ghosts of Scotland's gallant sons."[9]
Nor has it been on the Western front alone that the value of the pipes has made itself appreciated. In every other theatre of war as well has "the tune with the tartan of the clan in it" been heard at the head of columns toiling through the dust and heat, or through pitiless rain. In Egypt and Gallipoli and the Holy Land, in Mesopotamia and the Balkans, the pipes have been the prelude to great happenings. "Bundle and Go" in the early dawn of an Eastern day, "Soldier lie down" at night—these have been the preliminaries which led up naturally to "Cabar Feidh" in a hail of machine gun fire, or "Horo mo nighean donn bhoidheach" in the streets of captured Bagdad.
"Many a soldier sadly misses his pipe, which of course may not be lit on a night march; but to me a greater loss is the silence of those other pipes, for the sound of the bagpipes will stir up a thousand memories in a Highland regiment, and nothing helps a column of weary foot soldiers so well as pipe music, backed by the beat of a drum."[10]
When the British army advanced into German territory the pipers had an opportunity to play with an abandon that had never been felt before.
"Next day, with the skies still streaming, we made the longest continuous march, some 36 kilometres, and by that effort got well into Germany. The roads improved as we got farther on, but the tramp through the forest of Zitter was long, marshy, and melancholy. Our company was first after the pipers, and had the full benefit of the music all the way. And we wandered inward; inward, with our seeking and haunting Gaelic melodies, into the depths of the hanging, silent wood. It was strange how aloof nature seemed to these melodies. In Scotland, or even in France, all the hills and the woods would have helped the music. But in this German land all were cold toward us, and those endless pine trees seemed to be holding hands with fingers spread before the eyes to show their shame and humiliation. There was a curious sense that the road on which we trod was not our road, and that earth and her fruits on either hand were hostile.
"And how tired the men became, with half of them through the soles of their boots and with racking damp in their shoulders and backs from their rain-sodden packs. But we listened still whilst voluminous waves of melody wandered homeless over German wastes and returned to us,
I heard the pibroch sounding, sounding,
O'er the wide meadows and lands from afar.