Charles had yet in reserve his foreign troops, and these, after the mountaineers had been ruined, he hoped, as he looked on from the mound at some distance off, would redeem the day. But though there were instances of bravery among these men, yet, demoralized by the wreck of the clans coming as fugitives among them, and seeing the Duke’s army getting ready to charge with the cold steel, they fled in a body. Thus the rout was complete. Charles, who had made his last cast for a crown, seemed now unable to realize what had happened. Confounded, bewildered, and in tears, he seemed unable to act. His attendants were obliged to turn his horse’s head and compel him to retreat, Sullivan his friend seizing the horse’s bridle and dragging him away.
During the uprising of 1745–46, the local clans wore a red or yellow cross or ribbon, in order to distinguish themselves from the Stuart Highlanders, who were all dressed in about the same way, except as to their bonnets. The Jacobites all wore the white cockade, like that of the Bourbons of France, friends of the Stuarts. One of the liveliest tunes played by the Highland pipers was “The White Cockade.” It was the same air, with different words, which the fifers and drummers of the Continental army played when the flag of the Revolution was raised in the War of Independence. In fact, in looking over the American musicians’ repertoire, from 1775 to 1783, one might almost imagine that the chief music sounded under “the Congress flag” of thirteen stripes and, after 1777, under “Old Glory” of later Revolutionary days, was Scottish. Even the strains of mournful music, over the graves of the slain American patriots, was “Roslyn Castle.”
One fifth of the Highland army was lost at Culloden. Of the five regiments which charged the English, almost all the leaders and front rank men were slain. These numbered nearly a thousand in all. The actual battle lasted about forty minutes, much of it in distant firing; but the charge and the crossing of the cold steel were all over in a quarter of an hour. The number of killed, wounded, and missing of the royal army was three hundred and ten. The victory was mainly attributable to the effect of the artillery and musketry of the royalists; but in Munro’s and Barrel’s regiments, many of the soldiers put to death one, two, or more Highlanders each, with their bayonets, and several of the dragoons, sent in pursuit, were known to have cut down ten or twelve fugitives each in the pursuit.
CHAPTER XVI
THE OLD HIGHLANDS AND THEIR INHABITANTS
The Highlands, geologically speaking, is an island of crystalline rock set in a great sea of younger formations. The great glen which forms the trough of the Caledonian Canal is a mighty earth rift. When once across this line of rock and water, we were in the Highlands. In one summer visit, we spent a part of our vacation at Crieff, which lies at the base of the Grampian Hills and at the entrance to the Highlands. Here the beauty, fashion, and intelligence of the United Kingdom in August gather together. What was once a “hydro,” but is now a fine hotel, was crowded to its utmost capacity. In the evenings, entertainments of music, with dancing and recitations by the young people, were enjoyed. In the mornings, we took horses and carriages and drove through many leagues of the lovely scenery. At another time, in a later year, the automobile served us while glancing at a hundred linear and many more square miles of Scotland’s glory.
Yet every time we were in the Highlands and in whatever shire, the old song, learned in childhood, came to mind—“O where, tell me where, has my Highland laddie gone?” Ross and Cromarty, now united in one and the largest of all the counties in Scotland, is the most thinly populated of all. In fact this great area has been “improved” by its landed proprietors promoting the emigration of its former inhabitants. There is only a fraction left of the Highlanders. The Celtic element is but a survival, a remnant, and the Gaelic tongue is like a flickering flame, almost ready to die out.
What is the reason? Is it, in part at least, because nature is so niggardly? Again, is it not true that “those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword”? Did the traditional Highlands and Highlanders exist, or gain their place in romance and history, chiefly through the human imagination?
Scottish history and poetry show that originally, even as a swordsman and fighter, the Highlander possessed no special superiority over the Lowlander, but in the seventeenth century, as in the modern days, which we of ’61, as well as of 1915, remember, and have seen demonstrated, the best prepared people, to whom arms are habitual, and to whom military training is a personal accomplishment, will, at the first beginning of war, at least, be pretty sure to get the advantage. In a prolonged struggle, it is resources that tell. Wars are not ended by battle, but by manifest reserves, with power to follow up victory.
It was western Scotland, of azoic rock, a far-off corner of Europe, that had the singular fortune of sheltering the last vestiges of the Celts—that early race of people who, once placed upon the centre of the ancient continent, were gradually driven to its western extremities.
A notion, held tenaciously by the Highlanders, was that the Lowlands had originally been their birthright. Many of them practised a regular system of reprisal upon the frontier of that civilized region, with as good a conscience as a Levant pirate crossed himself and vowed to burn candles of gratitude before the Virgin’s picture, if successful in robbery. To maintain this philosophy and practice, the use of arms was habitual and necessary among the Highlanders. While among the Lowlanders cattle-lifting and other methods of rapine were considered as the business of thieves and scoundrels, it was usually reckoned by the Highlanders to be an eminently honorable occupation, partaking of the prestige of a profession. How finely does Sir Walter Scott bring out this sentiment, when Roderick Dhu answers Fitz-James, who charges the Highland chieftain with leading a robber life.