in the twentieth century drowsed on until the late forenoon.
And while I stood mentally picturing this happy state of affairs, and sponging the icy water off the table-top with the flat of my hand, the sadistic brute would sneak into the ablutions and turn the cold hose on us, screaming:
“Two minnits to gerron rifle parade, you ’orrible shower! Har-har! Mooo-ve or I’ll blitz yer!”
I wonder that we survived that recruit training, I really do.
You may suppose that that orderly sergeant’s method of intimating reveille was as refined a piece of mental cruelty as even a military mind could devise, and I daresay if I hadn’t later been commissioned into a Highland regiment I would agree. But in fact, there I discovered something worse, and it used to happen once a week, regularly on Friday mornings. In nightmares I can hear it still.
On the other six days of the week reveille was sounded in the conventional way at six, by a bugler on the distant square playing the famous “Charlie, Charlie, get out of bed”. If you were a pampered brute of an officer, you used to turn over, mumbling happily, and at six-thirty your orderly would come in with a mug of tea, open the shutters, lay out your kit, and give you the news of the day while you drank, smoked, and coughed contentedly.
But on Fridays it was very different. Then the duty of sounding reveille devolved on the battalion’s pipes and drums, who were bound to march round the entire barrack area, playing full blast. The trouble was, in a spirit of schadenfreud comparable with that of the Durham orderly sergeant’s, they used to assemble in dead silence immediately outside the junior subalterns’ quarters, inflate their beastly bags without so much as a warning sigh, poise their drum-sticks without the suspicion of a click, and then, at a signal from that godforsaken demented little kelpie of a pipe-sergeant, burst thunderously into the squealing cacophony and ear-splitting drum rolls of “Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye waukin’ yet?”
Now, “Johnnie Cope” is one of the most magnificent sounds ever to issue from musical instruments. It is the Highlanders’ war clarion, the tune that is played before battle, the wild music that is supposed to quicken the blood of the mountain man and freeze the foe in his tracks. It commemorates the day two and a quarter centuries ago when the broadswords came whirling out of the mist at Prestonpans to fall on Major-General John Cope’s redcoats and cut them to ribbons in something under five minutes. I once watched the Seaforths go in behind it against a Japanese-held village, and saw for the first time that phenomenon which you can’t really appreciate until you have seen it—the unbelievable speed with which Highland troops can accelerate a slow, almost leisurely advance into an all-out charge. And I’ve heard it at military funerals, after “Lovat’s Lament” or “Flowers of the Forest”, and never failed to be moved by it. Well played, it is a savage, wonderful sound, unlike any other pipe march—this, probably, because it doesn’t truly belong to the Army, but to the fighting tails of the old clansmen before the government had the sense to get them into uniforms.
But whatever it does, for the Jocks or to the enemy, at the proper time and occasion, its effect at 6 a.m. on a refined and highly-strung subaltern who is dreaming of Rita Hayworth is devastating. The first time I got it, full blast at a range of six feet or so, through a thin shutter, with twenty pipers tearing their lungs out and a dozen side-drums crashing into the thunderous rhythm, I came out of bed like a galvanised ferret, blankets and all, under the impression that the Jocks had Risen, or that the MacLeods were coming to settle things with me and my kinsfolk at long last. My room-mate, a cultured youth of nervous disposition, shot bolt upright from his pillow with a wordless scream, and sat gibbering that the Yanks had dropped the Bomb, and, as usual, in the wrong place. For a few deafening moments we just absorbed it, with the furniture shuddering and the whole room in apparent danger of collapse, and then I flung open the shutters and rebuked the musicians, who were counter-marching outside.
Well, you try arguing with a pipe-band some time, and see what it gets you. And you cannot, if you are a young officer with any notions of dignity, hie yourself out in pyjamas and bandy words with a towering drum-major, and him resplendent in leopard skin and white spats, at that hour in the morning. So we had to endure it, while they regaled us with “The White Cockade” and the “Braes of Mar”, before marching off to the strains of “Highland Laddie”, and my room-mate said it had done something to his inner ear, and he doubted if he would ever be able to stand on one leg or ride a bicycle again.
“They can’t do that to us!” he bleated, holding his nose and blowing out his cheeks in an effort to restore his shattered ear-drums. “We’re officers, dammit!”
That, as I explained to him, was the point. Plainly what we had just suffered was a piece of insubordinate torture devised to remind us that we were pathetic little one-pippers and less than the dust beneath the pipe-band’s wheels, but I knew that if we were wise we would just grin and bear it. A newly-joined second-lieutenant is, to some extent, fair game. Properly speaking, he has power and dominion over all warrant officers, N.C.O.s and private men, including pipe- and drum-majors, but he had better go cannily in exercising it. He certainly shouldn’t start by locking horns with such a venerable and privileged institution as a Highland regimental pipe band.
“You mean we’ll have to put up with that … that infernal caterwauling every Friday morning?” he cried, massaging his head. “I can’t take it! Heavens, man, I play the piano; I can’t afford to be rendered tone-deaf. Look what happened to Beethoven. Anyway, it’s … it’s insubordination, calculated and deliberate. I’m going to complain.”
“You’re not,” I said. “You’ll get no sympathy, and it’ll only make things worse. Did complaining do Beethoven any good? Just stick your head under the pillow next time, and pretend it’s all in the mind.”
I soothed him eventually, saw that he got lots of hot, sweet tea (this being the Army’s panacea for everything except a stomach wound) and convinced him that we shouldn’t say anything about it. This, we discovered, was the attitude of the other subalterns who shared our long bungalow block—which was situated at some distance from the older officers’ quarters. Complain, they said, and our superiors would just laugh callously and say it did us good; anyway, for newcomers to a Highland unit to start beefing about the pipe band would probably be some kind of mortal insult. So every Friday morning, with our alarms set at five to six, we just gritted our teeth and waited with towels round our heads, and grimly endured that sudden, appalling blast of sound. Indeed, I developed my own form of retaliation, which was to rise before six, take my ground-sheet and a book out on to the patch of close-cropped weed which passed in North Africa for a lawn, and lie there apparently immersed while the pipe band rendered “Johnnie Cope” with all the stops out a few yards away. When they marched off to wake the rest of the battalion I noticed the pipe-sergeant break ranks, and come over towards me with his pipes under his arm. He was a small, bright-eyed, elfin man whose agility as a Highland dancer was legendary; indeed, my only previous contacts with him had been at twice-weekly morning dancing parades, at which he taught us younger officers the mysteries of the Highland Fling and foursome reel, skipping among us like a new-roused fawn, crying “one-two-three” and comparing our lumbering efforts to the soaring of golden eagles over Grampian peaks. If that was how he saw us, good luck to him.
“Good morning to you, sir,” he said, with his head cocked on one side. “Did you enjoy our wee reveille this morning?”
“Fairly well, thanks, pipey,” I said, and closed my book. “A bit patchy here and there, I thought. Some hesitation in the warblers—” I didn’t know what a warbler was, except that it was some kind of noise you made on the pipes “—and a bum note every now and then. Otherwise, not bad.”
“Not—bad?” He went pale, and then pink, and finally said, with Highland archness: “Would you be a piper yoursel’, sir, perhaps?”
“Not
