The Soul of a Regiment | Page 2

won't learn. However, until the
Government finds out what a ghastly mistake's being made, there's
nothing for it but to obey orders and drill Gyppies. Go ahead, Grogram;
I give you a free hand. Try anything you like on them, but don't ask me
to believe there'll be any result from it. Candidly I don't."
But Grogram happened to be a different type of man from his new
Colonel. After a conversation such as that, he could have let things go
hang had he chosen to, drawing his pay, doing his six hours' work a day
along the line of least resistance, and blaming the inevitable
consequences on the Colonel. But to him a duty was something to be
done; an impossibility was something to set his clean-shaven, stubborn
jaw at and to overcome; and a regiment was a regiment, to be kneaded
and pummelled and damned and coaxed and drilled, till it began to look
as the True and Tried used to look in the days when he was
sergeant-major. So he twisted his little brown mustache and drew
himself up to the full height of his five feet eight inches, spread his
well-knit shoulders, straightened his ramrod of a back and got busy on
the job, while his Colonel and the other officers did the social rounds in
Cairo and cursed their luck.
The material that Grogram had to work with were fellaheen -- good,
honest coal-black negroes, giants in stature, the embodiment of
good-humored incompetence, children of the soil weaned on raw-hide
whips under the blight of Turkish misrule and Arab cruelty. They had
no idea that they were even men till Grogram taught them; and he had
to learn Arabic first before he could teach them even that.
They began by fearing him, as their ancestors had feared every new
breed of task-master for centuries; gradually they learned to look for
instant and amazing justice at his hands, and from then on they

respected him. He caned them instead of getting them fined by the
Colonel or punished with pack-drill for failing things they did not
understand; they were thoroughly accustomed to the lash, and his light
swagger-cane laid on their huge shoulders was a joke that served
merely to point his arguments and fix his lessons in their memories;
they would not have understood the Colonel's wrath had he known that
the men of his regiment were being beaten by a non-commissioned
officer.
They began to love him when he harked back to the days when he was
a recruit himself, and remembered the steps of a double-shuffle that he
had learned in the barrack-room; when he danced a buck and wing
dance for them they recognized him as a man and a brother, and from
that time on, instead of giving him all the trouble they could and
laughing at his lectures when his back was turned, they genuinely tried
to please him.
So he studied out more steps, and danced his way into their hearts,
growing daily stricter on parade, daily more exacting of pipe-clay and
punctuality, and slowly, but surely as the march of time, molding them
into something like a regiment.
Even he could not teach them to shoot, though he sweated over them on
the dazzling range until the sun dried every drop of sweat out of him.
And for a long time he could not even teach them how to march; they
would keep step for a hundred yards or so, and then lapse into the
listless shrinking stride that was the birthright of centuries.
He pestered the Colonel for a band of sorts until the Colonel told him
angrily to go to blazes; then he wrote home and purchased six fifes
with his own money, bought a native drum in the bazaar, and started a
band on his own account.
Had he been able to read music himself he would have been no better
off, because of course the fellaheen he had to teach could not have read
it either, though possibly he might have slightly increased the number
of tunes in their repertory.

As it was, he knew only two tunes himself -- "The Campbells Are
Coming," and the National Anthem.
He picked the six most intelligent men he could find and whistled those
two tunes to them until his lips were dry and his cheeks ached and his
very soul revolted at the sound of them. But the six men picked them
up; and, of course, any negro in the world can beat a drum. One golden
morning before the sun had heated up the desert air the regiment
marched past in really good formation, all in step, and tramping to the
tune of "God Save the Queen."
The Colonel nearly had a fit, but the regiment tramped