Regimental Lore
By BERNARD FERGUSSON HE other day, in the Depot of a certain illustrious Low- land regiment, I encountered an old friend. He was dressed as a corporal; I have seen him in different regi- ments not only in that rank, but as a private soldier and a pipe-serjeant. He is in fact a bit of a rolling stone; but he can't keep away from the Army. He joined my own regiment a good many years before I did, and left after completing twelve years; I knew him next as a piper in the Camerons; now he is where he is. The young officer in whose company I was described him as a major nuisance,'which did not surprise me; but his real function is telling the young idea long stories about the old Army, which he does superlatively well. He did it to me, that evening, for three-quarters of an hour.
Regimental lore is of the first importance; and in an age when we tend to allow everything, even soldiering, to be shorn of its natural romance, it is more important than ever. The official function of the Quartermaster in an infantry battalion is to look after the storing and issue of clothing and equip- ment, and to make sure that the rations arrive; but it is also the Quartermaster who has the longest memory, and is the deepest repository of the old tales; it is the Quartermaster who is the referee on matters of regimental history and custom, the Gameliel at whose feet the young—and even the not-so- young—officers willingly sit. It is they who provide the true continuity; and when I was commanding a battalion of my regiment a few years ago, I was happy to have the son of the first Quartermaster whom I knew serving under me as Trans- port Officer, and the nephew of the second as my RQMS; the latter is now a Quartermaster in his own right. And I was gloriously lucky in my own Quartermaster, who had been a corporal when I joined.
My friend of the other evening was saying, for instance, how the procedure in my own regiment for falling in the Battalion was the most elegant '—his word—in the Army. I had never realised that it was anything special, or how elaborate it was, until I heard him going through it, phase by phase, with all the nostalgia of one who had not seen it for twenty years. And then the pipes move along the flank of the Battalion playing " Cam ye by Athole " for the Advance. . . .' And in our 2nd Battalion the pipes have always .played After the Battle' just before turning in by the guardroom after a route march, before changing to the regimental march—a custom dating from Mesopotamia in the first war; and at the funeral of Field-Marshal Lord Wavell, who like his father and his son was a 2nd Battalion man, we played After the Battle' for him in Westminster Abbey. In the same tradition, a tuna called The Black Bear' is always played towards the end of a long march. There is a moment in it when the drums stop, and everybody gives a cheer, just when they are feeling at their weariest. That tune was played in the break-out from Tobruk, on November 21, 1941, and the Jocks, falling in dozens before the fire of a German machine-gun battalion, cheered in mid- charge at the appropriate bar. And then there is another tune, a lovely tune, called Magersfontein: written by one of the Armour family, who provided pipers for the Regiment for several generations; but unhappily it got the reputation of being an unlucky tune, and not many pipers will play it. Most people know. 1 think, that The Flowers of the Forest' is never practised for superstitious reasons on the full set, but only on the chanter.
The life of a soldier with his regiment is not a long one— thirty years at the very most; and it is therefore the more astonishing how long regimental lore persists. Very little of it is enshrined in the printed histories; it is carried on purely by oral tradition. Its survival owes much to the fact that in the infantry of the line the profession of arms is still largely hereditary. It is the exception, though far from rare, for the service of fathers and sons to overlap; but the tales go on. would say that, on the whole, the memory of the Serteants' Mess is more tenacious than that of the Officers'; perhaps it is because in the present age the average officer spends a good deal of his service away on the staff, and there is a wider variety of garments hanging in the wardrobe of his mind than in that of the average serjeant.
There is one very old legend in my regiment which might fittingly be paraded as a sample of the stories which have been handed down. It has found its way into print more than once, and. Robert Louis Stevenson made it the subject of a poem, though he rather unkindly transferred its setting from the Campbell country to the Mamore, and from The Black Watch to the Camerons. The house of Inverawe stands, .as its name indicates, near where the River Awe tumbles its waters into Loch Etive; and to that house there came one evening in the 1740s a fugitive seeking shelter from his pursuers. Campbell of Inverawe duly hid him, and later sent him on his way; but that night he dreamed that his brother appeared to him, re- vealed that he himself had been the victim of the fugitive, and finished by saying that the two of them would meet again at Ticonderoga. Inverawe in due course joined The Black Watch, like so many of his kin (no fewer than eighty-five Campbells have held Regular commissions in the Regiment); and he had made no secret of his experience, nor of the curious name which his dead brother had given him as their rendezvous.
One evening in North America the Indian scouts came in and reported that they had located the French in a stockade at Ticonderoga; and Inverawe was killed in the assault upon the stockade. There are now no Campbells of Inverawe but the family is represented by Angus Campbell, the 20th Hereditary Captain of Dunstaffnage, whose cousin is commanding the 1st Battalion today.
The Jocks of today tell another story. younger by close on two hundred years, of an officer in the Battle of the Reichswald, in March, 1945, who sent his runner on a message. The runner set off, calling back : 1'11 see you in twenty minutes, sir 1 and was immediately killed by a shell. The officer was killed twenty minutes later.
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