The Drums of the Fore and Aft - Part I

"And a little child shall lead them."

In the Army List they still stand as "The Fore and Fit Princess
Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen-Auspach's Merther-Tydfilshire Own Royal Loyal
Light Infantry, Regimental District 329A," but the Army through all its
barracks and canteens knows them now as the "Fore and Aft." They may in
time do something that shall make their new title honorable, but at
present they are bitterly ashamed, and the man who calls them "Fore and
Aft" does so at the risk of the head which is on his shoulders.

Two words breathed into the stables of a certain Cavalry Regiment will
bring the men out into the streets with belts and mops and bad language;
but a whisper of "Fore and Aft" will bring out this regiment with rifles.

Their one excuse is that they came again and did their best to finish the
job in style. But for a time all their world knows that they were openly
beaten, whipped, dumb-cowed, shaking and afraid. The men know it; their
officers know it; the Horse Guards know it, and when the next war comes
the enemy will know it also. There are two or three regiments of the Line
that have a black mark against their names which they will then wipe out,
and it will be excessively inconvenient for the troops upon whom they do
their wiping.

The courage of the British soldier is officially supposed to be above
proof, and, as a general rule, it is so. The exceptions are decently
shoveled out of sight, only to be referred to in the freshet of unguarded
talk that occasionally swamps a Mess-table at midnight. Then one hears
strange and horrible stories of men not following their officers, of
orders being given by those who had no right to give them, and of disgrace
that, but for the standing luck of the British Army, might have ended in
brilliant disaster. These are unpleasant stories to listen to, and the
Messes tell them under their breath, sitting by the big wood fires, and
the young officer bows his head and thinks to himself, please God, his men
shall never behave unhandily,

The British soldier is not altogether to be blamed for occasional lapses;
but this verdict he should not know. A moderately intelligent General will
waste six months in mastering the craft of the particular war that he may
be waging; a Colonel may utterly misunderstand the capacity of his
regiment for three months after it has taken the field; and even a Company
Commander may err and be deceived as to the temper and temperament of his
own handful: wherefore the soldier, and the soldier of to-day more
particularly, should not be blamed for falling back. He should be shot or
hanged afterward--_pour encourager les autres_; but he should not be
vilified in newspapers, for that is want of tact and waste of space.

He has, let us say, been in the service of the Empress for, perhaps, four
years. He will leave in another two years. He has no inherited morals, and
four years are not sufficient to drive toughness into his fibre, or to
teach him how holy a thing is his Regiment. He wants to drink, he wants to
enjoy himself--in India he wants to save money--and he does not in the
least like getting hurt. He has received just sufficient education to make
him understand half the purport of the orders he receives, and to
speculate on the nature of clean, incised, and shattering wounds. Thus, if
he is told to deploy under fire preparatory to an attack, he knows that he
runs a very great risk of being killed while he is deploying, and suspects
that he is being thrown away to gain ten minutes' time. He may either
deploy with desperate swiftness, or he may shuffle, or bunch, or break,
according to the discipline under which he has lain for four years.

Armed with imperfect knowledge, cursed with the rudiments of an
imagination, hampered by the intense selfishness of the lower classes, and
unsupported, by any regimental associations, this young man is suddenly
introduced to an enemy who in eastern lands is always ugly, generally tall
and hairy, and frequently noisy. If he looks to the right and the left and
sees old soldiers--men of twelve years' service, who, he knows, know what
they are about--taking a charge, rush, or demonstration without
embarrassment, he is consoled and applies his shoulder to the butt of his
rifle with a stout heart. His peace is the greater if he hears a senior,
who has taught him his soldiering and broken his head on occasion,
whispering:--"They'll shout and carry on like this for five minutes. Then
they'll rush in, and then we've got 'em by the short hairs!"

But, on the other hand, if he sees only men of his own term of service,
turning white and playing with their triggers and saying:--"What the
Hell's up now?" while the Company Commanders are sweating into their
sword-hilts and shouting:--"Front-rank, fix bayonets. Steady
there--steady! Sight for three hundred--no, for five! Lie down, all!
Steady! Front-rank, kneel!" and so forth, he becomes unhappy; and grows
acutely miserable when he hears a comrade turn over with the rattle of
fire-irons falling into the fender, and the grunt of a pole-axed ox. If he
can be moved about a little and allowed to watch the effect of his own
fire on the enemy he feels merrier, and may be then worked up to the blind
passion of fighting, which is, contrary to general belief, controlled by a
chilly Devil and shakes men like ague. If he is not moved about, and
begins to feel cold at the pit of the stomach, and in that crisis is badly
mauled and hears orders that were never given, he will break, and he will
break badly; and of all things under the sight of the Sun there is nothing
more terrible than a broken British regiment. When the worst comes to the
worst and the panic is really epidemic, the men must be e'en let go, and
the Company Commanders had better escape to the enemy and stay there for
safety's sake. If they can be made to come again they are not pleasant men
to meet, because they will not break twice.

About thirty years from this date, when we have succeeded in
half-educating everything that wears trousers, our Army will be a
beautifully unreliable machine. It will know too much and it will do too
little. Later still, when all men are at the mental level of the officer
of to-day it will sweep the earth. Speaking roughly, you must employ
either blackguards or gentlemen, or, best of all, blackguards commanded by
gentlemen, to do butcher's work with efficiency and despatch. The ideal
soldier should, of course, think for himself--the _Pocketbook_ says so.
Unfortunately, to attain this virtue, he has to pass through the phase of
thinking of himself, and that is misdirected genius. A blackguard may be
slow to think for himself, but he is genuinely anxious to kill, and a
little punishment teaches him how to guard his own skin and perforate
another's. A powerfully prayerful Highland Regiment, officered by rank
Presbyterians, is, perhaps, one degree more terrible in action than a
hard-bitten thousand of irresponsible Irish ruffians led by most improper
young unbelievers. But these things prove the rule--which is that the
midway men are not to be trusted alone. They have ideas about the value of
life and an upbringing that has not taught them to go on and take the
chances. They are carefully unprovided with a backing of comrades who have
been shot over, and until that backing is re-introduced, as a great many
Regimental Commanders intend it shall be, they are more liable to disgrace
themselves than the size of the Empire or the dignity of the Army allows.
Their officers are as good as good can be, because their training begins
early, and God has arranged that a clean-run youth of the British middle
classes shall, in the matter of backbone, brains, and bowels, surpass all
other youths. For this reason a child of eighteen will stand up, doing
nothing, with a tin sword in his hand and joy in his heart until he is
dropped. If he dies, he dies like a gentleman. If he lives, he writes Home
that he has been "potted," "sniped," "chipped" or "cut over," and sits
down to besiege Government for a wound-gratuity until the next little war
breaks out, when he perjures himself before a Medical Board, blarneys his
Colonel, burns incense round his Adjutant, and is allowed to go to the
Front once more.

Which homily brings me directly to a brace of the most finished little
fiends that ever banged drum or tootled fife in the Band of a British
Regiment. They ended their sinful career by open and flagrant mutiny and
were shot for it. Their names were Jakin and Lew--Piggy Lew--and they were
bold, bad drummer-boys, both of them frequently birched by the Drum-Major
of the Fore and Aft.

Jakin was a stunted child of fourteen, and Lew was about the same age.
When not looked after, they smoked and drank. They swore habitually after
the manner of the Barrack-room, which is cold-swearing and comes from
between clinched teeth; and they fought religiously once a week. Jakin had
sprung from some London gutter and may or may not have passed through Dr.
Barnado's hands ere he arrived at the dignity of drummer-boy. Lew could
remember nothing except the regiment and the delight of listening to the
Band from his earliest years. He hid somewhere in his grimy little soul a
genuine love for music, and was most mistakenly furnished with the head of
a cherub: insomuch that beautiful ladies who watched the Regiment in
church were wont to speak of him as a "darling." They never heard his
vitriolic comments on their manners and morals, as he walked back to
barracks with the Band and matured fresh causes of offence against Jakin.

The other drummer-boys hated both lads on account of their illogical
conduct. Jakin might be pounding Lew, or Lew might be rubbing Jakin's head
in the dirt, but any attempt at aggression on the part of an outsider was
met by the combined forces of Lew and Jakin; and the consequences were
painful. The boys were the Ishmaels of the corps, but wealthy Ishmaels,
for they sold battles in alternate weeks for the sport of the barracks
when they were not pitted against other boys; and thus amassed money.

On this particular day there was dissension in the camp. They had just
been convicted afresh of smoking, which is bad for little boys who use
plug-tobacco, and Lew's contention was that Jakin had "stunk so 'orrid bad
from keepin' the pipe in pocket," that he and he alone was responsible for
the birching they were both tingling under.

"I tell you I 'id the pipe back o' barricks," said Jakin, pacifically.

"You're a bloomin' liar," said Lew, without heat.

"You're a bloomin' little barstard," said Jakin, strong in the knowledge
that his own ancestry was unknown.

Now there is one word in the extended vocabulary of barrack-room abuse
that cannot pass without comment. You may call a man a thief and risk
nothing. You may even call him a coward without finding more than a boot
whiz past your ear, but you must not call a man a bastard unless you are
prepared to prove it on his front teeth.

"You might ha' kep' that till I wasn't so sore," said Lew, sorrowfully,
dodging round Jakin's guard.

"I'll make you sorer," said Jakin, genially, and got home on Lew's
alabaster forehead. All would have gone well and this story, as the books
say, would never have been written, had not his evil fate prompted the
Bazar-Sergeant's son, a long, employless man of five and twenty, to put in
an appearance after the first round. He was eternally in need of money,
and knew that the boys had silver.

"Fighting again," said he. "I'll report you to my father, and he'll report
you to the Color-Sergeant."

"What's that to you?" said Jakin, with an unpleasant dilation of the
nostrils.

"Oh! nothing to _me_. You'll get into trouble, and you've been up too
often to afford that."

"What the Hell do you know about what we've done?" asked Lew the Seraph.
"_You_ aren't in the Army, you lousy, cadging civilian."

He closed in on the man's left flank.

"Jes' 'cause you find two gentlemen settlin' their differences with their
fistes you stick in your ugly nose where you aren't wanted. Run 'ome to
your 'arf-caste slut of a Ma--or we'll give you what-for," said Jakin.

The man attempted reprisals by knocking the boys' heads together. The
scheme would have succeeded had not Jakin punched him vehemently in the
stomach, or had Lew refrained from kicking his shins. They fought
together, bleeding and breathless, for half an hour, and after heavy
punishment, triumphantly pulled down their opponent as terriers pull down
a jackal.

"Now," gasped Jakin, "I'll give you what-for." He proceeded to pound the
man's features while Lew stamped on the outlying portions of his anatomy.
Chivalry is not a strong point in the composition of the average
drummer-boy. He fights, as do his betters, to make his mark.

Ghastly was the ruin that escaped, and awful was the wrath of the
Bazar-Sergeant. Awful too was the scene in Orderly-room when the two
reprobates appeared to answer the charge of half-murdering a "civilian."
The Bazar-Sergeant thirsted for a criminal action, and his son lied. The
boys stood to attention while the black clouds of evidence accumulated.

"You little devils are more trouble than the rest of the Regiment put
together," said the Colonel, angrily. "One might as well admonish
thistledown, and I can't well put you in cells or under stoppages. You
must be flogged again."

"Beg y' pardon, Sir. Can't we say nothin' in our own defence, Sir?"
shrilled Jakin.

"Hey! What? Are you going to argue with me?" said the Colonel.

"No, Sir," said Lew. "But if a man come to you, Sir, and said he was going
to report you, Sir, for 'aving a bit of a turn-up with a friend, Sir, an'
wanted to get money out o' _you_, Sir"--

The Orderly-room exploded in a roar of laughter. "Well?" said the Colonel.

"That was what that measly _jarnwar_ there did, Sir, and 'e'd 'a' _done_
it, Sir, if we 'adn't prevented 'im. We didn't 'it 'im much, Sir. 'E
'adn't no manner o' right to interfere with us, Sir. I don't mind bein'
flogged by the Drum-Major, Sir, nor yet reported by _any_ Corp'ral, but
I'm--but I don't think it's fair, Sir, for a civilian to come an' talk
over a man in the Army."

A second shout of laughter shook the Orderly-room, but the Colonel was
grave.

"What sort of characters have these boys?" he asked of the Regimental
Sergeant-Major.

"Accordin' to the Bandmaster, Sir," returned that revered official--the
only soul in the regiment whom the boys feared--"they do everything _but_
lie, Sir."

"Is it like we'd go for that man for fun, Sir?" said Lew, pointing to the
plaintiff.

"Oh, admonished,--admonished!" said the Colonel, testily, and when the
boys had gone he read the Bazar-Sergeant's son a lecture on the sin of
unprofitable meddling, and gave orders that the Bandmaster should keep the
Drums in better discipline.

"If either of you come to practice again with so much as a scratch on your
two ugly little faces," thundered the Bandmaster, "I'll tell the
Drum-Major to take the skin off your backs. Understand that, you young
devils."

Then he repented of his speech for just the length of time that Lew,
looking like a Seraph in red worsted embellishments, took the place of one
of the trumpets--in hospital--and rendered the echo of a battle-piece. Lew
certainly was a musician, and had often in his more exalted moments
expressed a yearning to master every instrument of the Band.

"There's nothing to prevent your becoming a Bandmaster, Lew," said the
Bandmaster, who had composed waltzes of his own, and worked day and night
in the interests of the Band.

"What did he say?" demanded Jakin, after practice.

"'Said I might be a bloomin' Bandmaster, an' be asked in to 'ave a glass
o' sherry-wine on Mess-nights."

"Ho! 'Said you might be a bloomin' non-combatant, did 'e! That's just
about wot 'e would say. When I've put in my boy's service--it's a bloomin'
shame that doesn't count for pension--I'll take on a privit. Then I'll be
a Lance in a year--knowin' what I know about the ins an' outs o' things.
In three years I'll be a bloomin' Sergeant. I won't marry then, not I!
I'll 'old on and learn the orf'cers' ways an' apply for exchange into a
reg'ment that doesn't know all about me. Then I'll be a bloomin' orf'cer.
Then I'll ask you to 'ave a glass o' sherry-wine, _Mister_ Lew, an' you'll
bloomin' well 'ave to stay in the hanty-room while the Mess-Sergeant
brings it to your dirty 'ands."

"'S'pose _I_'m going to be a Bandmaster? Not I, quite. I'll be a orf'cer
too. There's nothin' like taking to a thing an' stickin' to it, the
Schoolmaster says. The reg'ment don't go 'ome for another seven years.
I'll be a Lance then or near to."

Thus the boys discussed their futures, and conducted themselves with
exemplary piety for a week. That is to say, Lew started a flirtation with
the Color-Sergeant's daughter, aged thirteen,--"not," as he explained to
Jakin, "with any intention o' matrimony, but by way o' keepin' my 'and
in." And the black-haired Cris Delighan enjoyed that flirtation more than
previous ones, and the other drummer-boys raged furiously together, and
Jakin preached sermons on the dangers of "bein' tangled along o'
petticoats."

But neither love nor virtue would have held Lew long in the paths of
propriety had not the rumor gone abroad that the Regiment was to be sent
on active service, to take part in a war which, for the sake of brevity,
we will call "The War of the Lost Tribes."

The barracks had the rumor almost before the Mess-room, and of all the
nine hundred men in barracks not ten had seen a shot fired in anger. The
Colonel had, twenty years ago, assisted at a Frontier expedition; one of
the Majors had seen service at the Cape; a confirmed deserter in E Company
had helped to clear streets in Ireland; but that was all. The Regiment had
been put by for many years. The overwhelming mass of its rank and file had
from three to four years' service; the non-commissioned officers were
under thirty years old; and men and sergeants alike had forgotten to speak
of the stories written in brief upon the Colors--the New Colors that had
been formally blessed by an Archbishop in England ere the Regiment came
away.

They wanted to go to the Front--they were enthusiastically anxious to
go--but they had no knowledge of what war meant, and there was none to
tell them. They were an educated regiment, the percentage of
school-certificates in their ranks was high, and most of the men could do
more than read and write. They had been recruited in loyal observance of
the territorial idea; but they themselves had no notion of that idea. They
were made up of drafts from an over-populated manufacturing district. The
system had put flesh and muscle upon their small bones, but it could not
put heart into the sons of those who for generations had done overmuch
work for overscanty pay, had sweated in drying-rooms, stooped over looms,
coughed among white-lead and shivered on lime-barges. The men had found
food and rest in the Army, and now they were going to fight
"niggers"--people who ran away if you shook a stick at them.

Wherefore they cheered lustily when the rumor ran, and the shrewd, clerkly
non-commissioned officers speculated on the chances of batta and of saving
their pay. At Headquarters, men said:--"The Fore and Fit have never been
under fire within the last generation. Let us, therefore, break them in
easily by setting them to guard lines of communication." And this would
have been done but for the fact that British Regiments were wanted--badly
wanted--at the Front, and there were doubtful Native Regiments that could
fill the minor duties, "Brigade 'em with two strong Regiments," said
Headquarters. "They may be knocked about a bit, but they'll learn their
business before they come through. Nothing like a night-alarm and a little
cutting-up of stragglers to make a Regiment smart in the field. Wait till
they've had half a dozen sentries' throats cut."

The Colonel wrote with delight that the temper of his men was excellent,
that the Regiment was all that could be wished and as sound as a bell. The
Majors smiled with a sober joy, and the subalterns waltzed in pairs down
the Mess-room after dinner and nearly shot themselves at revolver
practice. But there was consternation in the hearts of Jakin and Lew. What
was to be done with the drums? Would the Band go to the Front? How many of
the drums would accompany the Regiment?

They took council together, sitting in a tree and smoking.

"It's more than a bloomin' toss-up they'll leave us be'ind at the Depot
with the women. You'll like that," said Jakin, sarcastically.

"'Cause o' Cris, y' mean? Wot's a woman, or a 'ole bloomin' depot o'
women, 'longside o' the chanst of field-service? You know I'm as keen on
goin' as you," said Lew.

"Wish I was a bloomin' bugler," said Jakin, sadly. "They'll take Tom Kidd
along, that I can plaster a wall with, an' like as not they won't take
us."