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The rôle of the drum is anything but hum-drum. The ear-drum recognizes the sound of a drum whether the instrument is side, snare, brass or kettle. In travel I have seen and heard drums big and little, round, cylindrical, high and low, loud and soft, wild and weird; played by head, hand and foot—played fast and slow in life and death, peace and war—played by savage and by civilized man in the desert or orchestra hall.
Savages, whose natural argument was a blow on the head to beat out their enemies’ brains, naturally fell into a percussion style of music and invented the drum, often the sole as well as the chief musical instrument.
The drum figures in this world from religion to ragtime—from the Salvation Army to the jazz band.
Deborah’s timbrel was a sort of drum. The old tom-tom at an Indian snake-charming doubtless had its counterpart in Egypt in 1600 B. C., and one listens to that same noise in modern Cairo. The dull sound that waked my dreams in the Alhambra was from a drum the Moor had brought from the East after a crusade.
Music is a universal language, and the despised, unmusical drum has a polyglot tongue. All other musical instruments have their speech of sentiment, love and emotion, but the voice of the drum knows the eloquent language of liberty and can get more volunteers for God, home and native land than all the orators. The roll of the drum, like that of the sea, fills the soul’s shore-line and its every bay and gulf. Heine says that the history of the storming of the Bastile cannot be correctly understood until we know how the drumming was done.
The reveille of the drum means that it is time to get up, and there is a fable of its resurrection meaning in the old legend of soldiers, fallen in battle, who by night rose from the grave in the battlefield, and with drummer at their head, marched back to their native home.
There is a pathetic story in French history of Napoleon’s nameless drummer-boy being swept from the ranks, by the sudden dash of an avalanche, into an Alpine valley. He was uninjured and the drum still hung suspended from his neck. He waved his hands to the soldiers 200 feet above him and began to drum, playing the tattoo, the reveille, the advance and the charge. But there was no time to rescue him, the soldiers passed on, and the last thing they heard in the clear, cold air was the beat of a funeral march. Then the little drummer boy lay on the snow bank to die with the snow for his shroud and the falling night for his pall. For years the veterans of the Italian campaign hushed their voices at the campfire, as they told the story of Napoleon’s drummer-boy, whose slender body lay frozen beside his drum in the silent solitudes of the snowy Alps.
In patriotic art we have the spirit of ’76. Germany has used the drum as a favorite means to raise recruits—we have done it against her, and by God’s grace will give her a drum-head court martial before long, though the world is waiting for the time Tennyson speaks of, “When the war-drum throbs no longer.”
The drum is the heart-beat of a liberty-loving humanity. The Fourth of July drum recalls the spirit of 1917, when Uncle Sam started to make the world habitable and we prayed that the American eagle might beat out the brains of Germany’s two-headed vulture; recalls the spirit of the Spanish War to give Cuba and the Philippines human rights; recalls the War of the Rebellion for the union of all creeds, colors and conditions; recalls the war of Mexico for a square deal for Americans; recalls the war of 1812 for free commerce of our ships upon the high seas; recalls the war of 1776 for liberty by the noble colonists.