The Soul of a Regiment | Page 3

on and the band
played them back to barracks with a swing and a rhythm that was new
not only to the First Egyptian Foot; it was new to Egypt! The tune was
half a tone flat maybe, and the drum was a sheepskin business bought
in the bazaar, but a new regiment marched behind it. And behind the
regiment -- two paces right flank, as the regulations specify -- marched
a sergeant-instructor with a new light in his eyes -- the gray eyes that
had looked out so wearily from beneath the shaggy eyebrows, and that
shone now with the pride of a deed well done.
Of course the Colonel was still scornful. But Billy Grogram, who had
handled men when the Colonel was cutting his teeth at Sandhurst, and
who knew men from the bottom up, knew that the mob of unambitious
countrymen, who had grinned at him in uncomfortable silence when he
first arrived, was beginning to forget its mobdom. He, who spent his
hard-earned leisure talking to them and answering their childish
questions in hard-won Arabic, knew that they were slowly grasping the
theory of the thing -- that a soul was forming in the regiment -- an
indefinable, unexplainable, but obvious change, perhaps not unlike the
change from infancy to manhood.
And Billy Grogram, who above all was a man of clean ideals, began to
feel content. He still described them in his letters home as "blooming
mummies made of Nile mud, roasted black for their sins, and good for
nothing but the ash-heap." He still damned them on parade, whipped
them when the Colonel wasn't looking, and worked at them until he
was much too tired to sleep; but he began to love them. And to a big,

black, grinning man of them, they loved him. To encourage that
wondrous band of his, he set them to playing their two tunes on guest
nights outside the officers' mess; and the officers endured it until the
Colonel returned from furlough. He sent for Grogran and offered to pay
him back all he had spent on instruments, provided the band should
keep away in future.
Grogram refused the money and took the hint, inventing weird and
hitherto unheard-of reasons why it should be unrighteous for the band
to play outside the mess, and preaching respect for officers in spite of it.
Like all great men he knew when he had made a mistake, and how to
minimize it.
His hardest task was teaching the Gyppies what their colors meant. The
men were Mohammedans; they believed in Allah; they had been taught
from the time when they were old enough to speak that idols and the
outward symbols of religion are the signs of heresy; and Grogram's
lectures, delivered in stammering and uncertain Arabic, seemed to them
like the ground-plan of a new religion. But Grogram stuck to it. He
made opportunities for saluting the colors -- took them down each
morning and uncased them, and treated them with an ostentatious
respect that would have been laughed at among his own people.
When his day's work was done and he was too tired to dance for them,
he would tell them long tales, done into halting Arabic, of how
regiments had died rallying round their colors; of a brand new paradise,
invented by himself and suitable to all religions, where soldiers went
who honored their colors as they ought to do; of the honor that befell a
man who died fighting for them, and of the tenfold honor of the man
whose privilege it was to carry them into action. And in the end,
although they did not understand him, they respected the colors
because he told them to.

II

When England hovered on the brink of indecision and sent her greatest
general to hold Khartum with only a handful of native troops to help
him, the First Egyptian Foot refused to leave their gaudy crimson
behind them. They marched with colors flying down to the steamer that
was to take them on the first long stage of their journey up the Nile, and
there were six fifes and a drum in front of them that told whoever cared
to listen that "The Campbells were coming -- hurrah! hurrah!"
They marched with the measured tramp of a real regiment; they carried
their chins high; their tarbooshes were cocked at a knowing angle and
they swung from the hips like grown men. At the head of the regiment
rode a Colonel whom the regiment scarcely knew, and beside it
marched a dozen officers in a like predicament; but behind it, his sword
strapped to his side and his little swagger-cane tucked under his left
arm-pit, Inconspicuous, smiling and content, marched
Sergeant-Instructor Grogram, whom the regiment knew and loved, and