The Soul of a Regiment

The Soul of a Regiment
by Talbot Mundy
First published in Adventure Magazine, February, 1912

I
So long as its colors remain, and there is one man left to carry them, a
regiment can never die; they can recruit it again around that one man,
and the regiment will continue on its road to future glory with the same
old traditions behind it and the same atmosphere surrounding it that
made brave men of it forbears. So although the colors are not exactly
the soul of a regiment, they are the concrete embodiment of it, and are
even more sacred than the person of a reigning sovereign.
The First Egyptian Foot had colors -- and has them still, thanks to Billy
Grogram; so the First Egyptian Foot is still a regiment. It was the very
first of all the regiments raised in Egypt, and the colors were lovely
crimson things on a brand new polished pole, cased in the regulation
jacket of black waterproof and housed with all pomp and ceremony in
the mess-room at the barracks. There were people who said it was bad
policy to present colors to a native regiment; that they were nothing
more than a symbol of a decadent and waning monarchism in any case,
and that the respect which would be due them might lead dangerously
near to fetish-worship. As a matter of cold fact, though, the raw recruits
of the regiment failed utterly to understand them, and it was part of
Billy Grogram's business to instill in them a wholesome respect for the
sacred symbol of regimental honor.
He was Sergeant-Instructor William Stanford Grogram, V. C., D. S. M.,
to give him his full name and title, late a sergeant-major of the True
and Tried, time expired, and retired from service on a pension. His
pension would have been enough for him to live on, for he was

unmarried, his habits were exemplary, and his wants were few; but an
elder brother had been a ne'er-do-well, and Grogram, who was the type
that will die rather than let any one of his depend on charity, left the
army with a sister-in-law and a small tribe of children dependent on
him. Work, of course, was the only thing left for it, and he applied
promptly for the only kind of work that he knew how to do.
The British are always making new regiments out of native material in
some part of the world; they come cheaper than white troops, and, with
a sprinkling of white troops among them, they do wonderfully good
service In time of war -- thanks to the sergeant instructors. The officers
get the credit for It, but it Is the ex-noncommissioned officers of the
Line who do the work, as Grogram was destined to discover. They sent
him out to Instruct the First Egyptian Foot, and it turned out to be the
toughest proposition that any one lonely, determined, homesick
fighting-man ever ran up against.
He was not looking for a life of idleness and ease, so the discomfort of
his new quarters did not trouble him overmuch, though they would
have disgusted another man at the very beginning. They gave him a
little, white-washed, mud-walled hut, with two bare rooms in it, and a
lovely view on three sides of aching desert sand; on the fourth a blind
wall.
It was as hot inside as a baker's oven, but It had the one great advantage
of being easily kept clean, and Grogram, whose fetish was cleanliness,
bore that in mind, and forebore to grumble at the absence of a
sergeant's mess and the various creature comforts that his position had
entitled him to for years.
What did disgust him, though, was the unfairness of saddling the task
that lay in front of him on the shoulders of one lone man; his officers
made it quite clear that they had no intention of helping him in the least;
from the Colonel downward they were ashamed of the regiment, and
they expected Grogram to work it into something like shape before
they even began to take an interest in it. The Colonel went even further
than that; he put in an appearance at Orderly Room every morning and
once a week attended a parade out on the desert where nobody could

see the awful evolutions of his raw command, but he, actually threw
cold water on Grogram's efforts at enthusiasm.
"You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," he told him a few
mornings after Grogram joined, "or well drilled soldiers out of Gyppies.
Heaven only knows what the Home Government means by trying to
raise a regiment out here; at the very best we'll be only be teaching the
enemy to fight us! But you'll find they