always follow one another. 'Tis my belief if I stood his words on end
and could follow them backwards they would be good Gaelic of Erin.
The better half of our speech was with our hands; he had not even got
the English; and most of the time we talked pipe-music, as any man
can do that's fit to pucker his lips and whistle. The Breton people
_canntarach_ tunes too, like ourselves--soft-warbling them to fix
them in the memory, and blyth that morning was our warbling; he could
charm, my man, the very thrush from trees! But Herself--the _piob
mhor_--was an instrument beyond his fingering; the pipes he used at
home he called _biornieu_, fashioned differently from ours. Yet the
same wind blows through reeds in France or Scotland, and everywhere
they sing of old and simple things; you are deaf indeed if you cannot
understand.
"He was from the seashore--John his name--a mariner to his
trade--with a wife and seven children; himself the son of a cooper.
"I am a good hand at the talking myself, as little Margaret here
will tell you, but his talk was like a stream in spate, and the arms
of him went flourishing like drum-sticks. Keep mind of this--that
the two of us, by now, were all alone in the kirk-yard, on a little
hillock with the great big cliff of a kirk above us, and the town
below all humming with the soldiers, like a byke of bees.
"He bade me play on the pipes at last and I put them in my oxter
and gave him 'Lochiel's awa' to France.' A fine tune! but someway I
felt I never reached him. I tried him then with bits of 'The Bugle
Horn,' 'Take your gun to the Hill,' 'Bonnie Ann' and 'The Persevering
Lover;' he beat time with a foot to them, and clapped my shoulder,
but for all that they said to him I might as well be playing on a
fiddle.
"It was only when I tried an old _port-mor_--"The Spoil of the
Lowlands now graze in the Glen" that his whiskers bristled, and at
that said I to myself 'I have you Uncle Sandy!'
"Before the light that flickered was gone from him I blew it up to a
height again with 'Come to me Kinsman!'
"He was like a fellow that would be under spells!
"'The Good Being be about me!' cried he, and his eyes like flambeaux,
'what tune is that?'
"You never, never, never saw a man so much uplifted!
"'They call it,' said I, 'Come to me Kinsman,' (_Thigibh a so a
charaid!_), and it has the name, in the small Isles of the West, of
the Oldest Air of the World. The very ravens know it; what is it but
the cry of men in trouble? It's older than the cairns of Icolmkill,
and cried the clans from out of the Isles to Harlaw. Listen you
well!' and I played it to him again--not all the MacCrimmons that
ever came from Skye could play it better! For grand was the day and
white with sun, and to-morrow we were marching. And many a lad of
ours was dead behind us.
"When I was done, he did a droll thing then, the red fellow--put his
arms about my shoulders and kissed me on the face! And the beard of
him like a flaming whin!
"What must he do but learn it? Over and over again I had to whistle
it to him till he had it to the very finish, and all the time the
guns were going in the east.
"'If ever you were in trouble,' I said to him--though of course he
could not understand me, 'and you whistled but one blast of that air,
it is Col Maclean would be at your side though the world were staving
in below your feet like one of your father's barrels!'"
II
The day was done in Trosdale. Beyond the rim of the sea the sun had
slid to make a Sabbath morning further round the world, and all the
sky in the west was streaming fire. Over the flats of Heisker the
light began to wink on the Monach islets. Ebbed tide left bare sand
round Kirkibost, and the sea-birds settled on them, rising at times
in flocks and eddying in the air as if they were leaves and a wind
had blow them. Curlews were piping bitterly.
Behind the creek where the folk were gathered on the sea-pinks,
talking, Trosdale clachan sent up the reek of evening fires, and the
bairns were being cried in from the fields.
The Catechist, sombre fellow, already into his Sabbath, though 'twas
only Saturday nine o' the clock, came through the whins and cast
about him a glance for bagpipes. He had seen Maclean's arrival with
misgiving. A worthy man, and a face on him like the underside of a
two-year skate-fish.
Col Maclean turned on him a visage tanned as if it had been in the
cauldron with the catechu of the barking nets.
"Take you a firken too, and rest you, Catechist," said he. "You see I
have not my pipes to-night, but I'm at _sgeulachd_."
But the Catechist sat not; and leaning against a net-pole sighed.
"'Twas two years after that," said Col, again into the rapture of
his story, "when my regiment went to the land of wine, where we
battled beside the French. I assure you we did nobly! nobly! Nor, on
the soul of me! were the Frenchmen slack!"
"The French," ventured Patrick Macneill, "are renowned in story for
all manly parts. Oh King! 'tis they have suffered!"
"'Tis myself, just man, that is not denying it! We were yonder in
a land like Keppoch desolate after the red cock's crowing. The
stars themselves, that are acquaint with grief, and have seen great
tribulation in the dark of Time would sicken at the sight of it!
Nothing left of the towns but _larochs_--heaps of lime and rubble
where the rat made habitation, and not one chimney reeking in a
hundred miles. Little we ken of trees here in the Islands, but they
were yonder planted thick as bracken and cut down to the stump the
way you would be cutting winter kail. And the fields that the country
folk had laboured!--were the Minch drained dry, the floor of it would
seem no likelier place for cropping barley or for pasturing goats.
"There was a day of days, out yonder, that we mixed up with the
French and cleared the breadth of a parish of _am boche_, who was
ill to shift. But the mouth of the night brought him back on us most
desperate altogether, and half we had gained by noon was lost by
gloaming.
"Five score and ten of our men were missing at the roll-call.
"The Cornal grunted. 'Every man of them out of Lewis!' says he;
'they're either dead or wandered. Go you out Col Maclean with your
beautiful, lovely, splendid pipes, and gather at least the living.'
"Not one morsel of meat had I eaten for twenty hours, and the inside
of me just one hole full of hunger, but out went Col and his pipes to
herding!
"Oh King of the Elements! but that was the night most foul, with
the kingdom of France a rag for wetness, and mire to the hose-tops.
Rain lashed; a scourging wind whipped over the country, and it was
stinking like a brock from tatters that had been men. The German
guns were pelting it, the sound of them a bellow no more broken than
the roar on skerries at Martinmas, the flash of them in the sky like
Merry Dancers.
"I got in a while to the length of a steading with a gable standing;
tuned up _piob mhor_ and played the gathering. They heard me, the
lads--the living of them; two-over-twenty of them came up to me by
the gable, with no more kenning of what airt they were in than if a
fog had found them midway on the Long Ford of Uist. I led them back
to King George's furrows where our folk were, and then, _mo chreach!_
when we counted them, one was missing!
"'It is not a good herd you are, Maclean,' said the Cornal, 'you will
just go back and find Duncan Ban; he's the only man in the regiment I
can trust to clean my boots.'
"So back went Col in search of Duncan."
"Oh lad! weren't you the gallant fellow!" cried Margaret's mother,
adoring.
"I was that, I assure you! If it were not the pipes were in my
arm-pit like a girl, my feet would not keep up on me the way I would
be pelting any other road than the way I had to go. But my grief! I
never got my man, nor no man after ever found him. I went to the very
ditches where _am boche_ was lying, and 't was there that a light
went up that made the country round about as white-bright as the day,
and I in the midst of it with my pipes in hand. They threw at me grey
lead as if it had been gravel, and I fell."
"_Och, a mheudail bhochd!_--Oh treasure!" said the women of Trosdale
all together.
"I got to my knees in a bit and crawled, as it might be for a
lifetime, one ache from head to heel, till I came to a hole as deep's
a quarry where had been the crossing of roads, and there my soul went
out of me. When I came to myself I was playing pipes and the day was
on the land. The Good Being knows what I played, but who should come
out across the plain to me but a Frenchman!
"He moved as spindrift from spindrift,
As a furious winter wind--
So swiftly, sprucely, cheerily,
Oh! proudly,
Through glens and high-tops,
And no stop made he
Until he came
To the city and court of Maclean,
Maclean of the torments,
Playing his pipes."
The Catechist writhed; the people of Trosdale shivered; Patrick
Macneill wept softly, for Col Maclean, the cunning one, by the
rhyming trick of the ancient sennachies, had flung them, unexpected,
into the giddiness of his own swound, and all of them, wounded,
dazed, saw the Frenchman come like a shadow into the world of shades.
"He flung himself in the hole beside me, did the Frenchman, gave me a
sup of spirits and put soft linen to my sores, and all the time grey
lead was snarling over us.
"'Make use of thy good hale feet, lad,' said I to him, 'and get out
of this dirty weather! Heed not the remnants of Col Maclean. What
fetched thee hither?'
"He put his hand on my pipes and whistled a stave of the old tune.
"'How learned ye that?' I asked him.
"Although he was Brettanach he had a little of the English. 'Red
John our sergeant, peace be with him! heard you playing it all last
night,' said he, 'took a craze at the tune of you and went out to
find you, but never came back. Then another man, peace be with him! a
cousin of John, heard your playing and went seeking you, but he came
back not either. I heard you first, myself, no more than an hour ago,
and had no sooner got your tune into my head than it quickened me
like drink, and here am I, kinsman!'
"'Good lad!' I cried, 'all the waters in the world will not wash out
kinship, nor the Gael be forsaken while there is love and song.'"
"Vain tales! Vain tales!" groaned the Catechist, and his face like a
skate.
THE PIPES: ONSET
(Somme, September, 1916)
By JOSEPH LEE, Lieut.
_Dedicated to Major Angus MacGillivray._
_The cry is in my ear,
The sight is in my eye,
This is the dawning of the day
That shall see me die:_
What is the piper playing
That battles in my blood?--
Winds in it,
Waves in it,
Waters at the flood;
Sadness in it,
Madness in it,
Weeping mists and rain--
What is the piper playing
That beats within my brain?
Sobbing and throbbing
Like a soul's unrest;
I drink his madd'ning music in
As milk at my mother's breast:
Flame in it,
Fame in it,
Love and all desire;
The clean hills,
The clear rills,
The smouldering peat fire;
Glances sweet,
Dancing feet,
Beating on the floor;
Maidens fair,
Comrades rare
I shall meet no more.
_The cry is in my ear,
The sight is in my eye,
This is the morning of the day
That shall see me die:_
What is the piper playing
That surges in my blood?
The soft breeze
In pine trees,
The hawthorn i' the bud;
The lone tarn,
The golden barn,
Fields of waving grain--
What is the piper playing
That beats within my brain?
Red war screams from his reeds
And in the thrumming drones
There lurks the lapping of men's blood,
And sobs, and dying groans:
Night in it,
Fight in it,
Wraiths of stricken men,
Ghosts of ancient clansmen
Sweeping down the glen;
Life in it,
Strife in it,
Whisp'rings--it is well,
If you bear a foeman down
Right to reddest hell!
* * * * *
_What is the piper playing?
For now I may not hear ...
The glamour comes across my soul,
And the cry is in my ear._
FLESH TO THE EAGLES
By BOYD CABLE
It was during the retreat of 1914 that a Highland regiment was
quartered for a night in one of the French villages, and billetted
in houses, barns, anywhere the hospitable villagers could give them
room. The officers established their Mess and quarters in "The
Chateau," a big house on the outskirts of the village. Many of the
villagers had already cleared out, but in the Chateau the officers
found the mistress of the house, her daughter, and her servants,
standing staunchly to their place; the master of the house being, as
they were told, in the French Army.
Madame spoke English fairly well, the daughter very well--when she
did speak, which was seldom. She was a young and pretty girl of
perhaps fifteen to sixteen years of age, fresh come from a convent
school, reserved, timid and shy, in the presence of the officers
almost to a point of shrinking when they spoke to her. Yet, although
they could see her shiver and blanch at the sound of the distant
grumble of the guns, she supported her mother bravely and asserted
stoutly that she was not afraid to stay, when the C.O. and some of
the other officers questioned the wisdom of the household waiting for
the Germans to advance.
"Perhaps, monsieur," said Madame, "your soldiers will possible arrest
the advance before the Allemands arrive at us here. And if it is not
so, it is, after all, soldiers of the Allemands that will come, and
they will not harm women and old men and boys who make no provocation
or resistance."
Unfortunately the practices of German soldiers were not then
sufficiently known to the officers to make them press their argument
beyond reasonable limits, and they gave in reluctantly to Madame's
reasoning. "We cannot the children and the very old to march away,"
she said, "and one could not go and leave them here. Me, I stay to
speak with the enemy officers and see my people do nothing foolish. I
cannot run away and leave them."
So they left it at that.
Madame gave them dinner that night in the dining-room, and it was
after dinner that one of the regimental pipers was heard parading
round and playing tune after tune. Madame and Mademoiselle were
greatly interested and asked many questions.
"But there," cried Madame at one tune, "there is the music most
fierce. It sound--"
"It is battle music, Madame," explained the C.O. "Music of a war song
of the Highlands--of the Écossais. Ask Monsieur l'Adjutant for the
words of the song."
So the Adjutant recited "The Macgregors' Gathering," with all the
fire and ardour of a fiery Scot, and a Macgregor at that. Madame sat
with brows knit, plainly struggling to follow the English words; her
daughter, as plainly understanding them clearly, held her breath and
listened spellbound and wondering to the words. Her head lifted and
her eye lit to some of the lines:
_While there's leaves in the forest and foam on the river,
Macgregor, despite them, shall flourish for ever._
But at others, delivered with fierce emphasis and dramatic fervour,
she shrank back with quivering lip and pain on her face:
_If they rob us of name and pursue us with beagles,
Give their roofs to the flames, their flesh to the eagles._
When the Adjutant had finished and had sat down, looking a little
shame-faced at having allowed his feelings to so carry him away,
Madame and the girl spoke rapidly in French for a minute.
Then Madame shook her head. "But no," she said, "I do not like it,
this song. It is cru-el, cru-el. How says it--'The roof to the
burning, and the bodies, the dead, the flesh, to the birds of prey.'
But no, that is the war of savage."
The C.O. tried to explain to her, while the Adjutant did so even
more eagerly to the girl, that it was war of the most savage and
relentless kind that ran in those far back days in the Highlands of
Scotland; but again Madame protested. "It is too cru-el. I do not
like it that you make such song and such music now. War, it is no
more so. What is it your song says of the burning of _la maison_?"
She made the Adjutant repeat the lines and repeated after him, "Ah,
m'sieu, 'Give their roof to the flames, their flesh to the eagles.'
That is, burn the shelter of the women and children, and leave the
dead unbury. You would not do that; even the Boche that we despise
would not do this thing. It is cru-el, cru-el."
Mademoiselle said nothing, but they could all see the shrinking in
her eyes as she looked at them, the wonder if, even now, the Écossais
could be so savage as to make such war. The Adjutant set himself to
remove such an idea of their barbarity from her mind, and with some
success apparently, since there was little shrinking and no more
than a faint blush of timid friendship when they said good-night and
retired.
Next morning the orders came, sharp, urgent and imperative, to move
at once, and there was little time for farewells. But Madame and the
girl were both out to see them off and watch the battalion tramp by.
The pipes at their head were screaming their vengeful music, "Give
their roof to the flames, their flesh to the eagles," until the
Adjutant, seeing the protesting motion of Madame's hands to her ears,
hurried to the pipers and asked them to change the tune.
* * * * *
After the ebb of our retreat and the period of the Marne, came the
full flood-tide of our advance, and the sweeping forward of the
French and British over the ground the Germans had taken and held
a space. As the luck had it, the same Highland battalion came back
through the same village where they had billetted that night--or
rather to the shell, the wreckage, the remains of the same village.
The men by now were coming to know what sort of treatment had been
served out to the conquered country by the Germans, and were angry
enough at some of the sights they had seen, the tales they had heard.
But the anger had been cold and impersonal until now, when they
came swinging in to this friendly spot, through the shattered houses
and streets littered with broken bottles and household goods, saw
the gaping windows to the houses, the smoke-blackened shells here
and there, the signs of pillage and wanton destruction everywhere.
The cavalry and an advance guard regiment had been through before
them, but it was plain that no fighting had taken place here, that no
shell-fire had wrought this damage, that cold-blooded "frightfulness"
alone had to answer for it. They were roused to fresh wrath by what
they saw, but to a still greater pitch of fury by the tales they
heard from the quaking villagers who were left, or who came creeping
in from the fields and ditches to which they had fled on word of
approaching soldiers. The sights were no more than the men had been
seeing in any of a dozen villages passed, the tales no more than they
had heard a score of times in the past few days; but in this village
they had been made welcome, had been treated to the best, had made
quick but happy friendships; and they felt a personal injury and pity
for the brutally treated villagers.
The battalion halted there for an hour or so and ate their midday
meal--or rather gave it to the hungry women and children and watched
them eat--and heard fresh and more horrible tales and half-tales that
were too bestial to be told in full.
The moment the battalion had fallen out and he was free, the Adjutant
had asked the Colonel if he might go to the Chateau and make
enquiries....
But when he and another officer came there they found none to make
enquiries of. The house still stood, intact so far as the building
itself went, but otherwise no more than a litter of rubbish and
wreckage. Every stick of furniture that would break was broken, every
crock and dish and bottle was scattered in splinters over the floors,
every curtain, blanket and sheet, every item of bed and table linen,
every piece of clothing was torn, dirtied, and defiled as completely
as men and beasts could do it; every shelf and door and balustrade
and fitting was hacked and broken and wrenched out of place; every
room on the ground floor had been used as horses' stables and left as
foul as a stable could be; every upper room was so befouled that, by
comparison, the places of the animals below was the cleaner.
The two officers hunted through the house, outside and round the
out-buildings, and found no one; and, nauseated by what they had seen
and heart-sick at thought of the women who had been there, returned
to the village. As they entered it again they heard pipe music
softly played, and seeing down a bye-street a cluster of their men,
and hearing the sound of a woman's voice raised loud above the pipe
music, they turned off and pushed in to see what was afoot.
They found a woman in the centre of a close-pressing ring of their
men, a woman wild-eyed, with grey hair in disorder, with black and
blue bruises on her face, with her clothing torn and grimed with dirt.
"Good God!" exclaimed the Adjutant. "Madame!"
He thrust a way through the men to her, but when he spoke to her and
asked her to come with him, she clutched and held his wrist, and
stood there and made him--short of using force to her--stand and
listen with the men. A dozen times he tried to interrupt, but she
would not be interrupted, so at last he left her to go on with her
tale and asked the other officer to go and bring the C.O.
But before the C.O. came, he, like the men, was under the spell of
the woman and of her tale, was listening, like them, with his heart
turning cold and a deadly bitter anger rising in his heart. She spoke
to them in English, breaking off at times into voluble torrents of
French, checking herself and going back and repeating as best she
could in English again. But although French words and phrases and
sentences were mixed through her English, the tale was horribly plain
and clear, the stories detailed and circumstantial enough to make it
evident they were desperately true.
She told of women, girls, girl-children, outraged, and afterwards,
in some cases, mutilated and bayoneted; she told of old men and
boys hauled out and stood against a wall and shot while their women
were made to stand and look on; of one woman who refused to make
coffee for the Germans until they dipped the head of her infant in
a pan of boiling water; of another woman who was crucified, pinned
to the door with bayonets while the arm of her child was broken and
its body was flung down on the ground before her and left there
writhing ... all this and more she told, and helped her story out
with rapid gesticulations and imitative motions and sounds of the
child squirming and whining and the helpless mother wrenching at the
pinning bayonets, while the men pressed in, glowering and cursing
under breath, and behind them the pipe music skirled and wailed
"roofs to the flames, and their flesh to the eagles."
And then, lastly, she told them of herself and her daughter, the
girl of fifteen, fresh from a convent school, timid as a child and
shrinking from the look, much less the touch of a man ... and of
what they had done to her, while they held her daughter and made her
watch; and then had done to the daughter, while she in turn was held
to see and not allowed to look away or even close her ears to the
cries. She told it all, sparing herself and her child no word and
no item of their shame; and then--this was just before the Colonel
arrived--she paused and looked round at the ring of savage faces
about her, and lifted her two hands and shook them above her head.
"I am French, and you are Anglais," she cried, "but I am woman and
you are men. I have told you, so that you may know the animals you
fight. I have asked your music-man will he play this song you have,
that with the music I say it to you 'Give their roofs to the flames,
their flesh to the eagles.' And if ever you have Germans soldat at
your mercy, and they cry for pity, remember this village, and its
women and my daughter, and me. Give us revanche ... their flesh to
the eagles...."
The Colonel broke in here, and, finding she was not to be stopped,
turned and ordered the men away, and when they had gone, handed
Madame over to some of the village women who watched timidly from
their doors. Madame had told nothing but truth they assured him.
Mademoiselle? Ah, ma'm'zelle could not be seen; she hid in a cellar
and screamed like one mad if any entered or spoke--like mad did one
say, but truly she was mad; and Madame scarcely less mad.[30]
They had one more glimpse of Madame as they marched out, a glimpse
of her standing in a door and waving and calling something to the
pipers as they came past. They knew or guessed what she wanted and
the tune they were playing swung abruptly into "The Gathering," and
the battalion tramped past the woman to the vengeful skirl of " ...
flesh to the eagles."
* * * * *