Pipe & Drum

"What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?" So the U.S. might well ask (with Keats) at the alarming sound that was heard in the land last week. The same sort of sound had rent the air as General Washington was being pushed out of Brooklyn, as Napoleon went down at Waterloo, as the British in Kenya marched off against the Mau Mau. For Scotsmen in the U.S., normally outshouted and out-paraded by the Irish, it was a great and noisy occasion: on hand for a 57-city U.S. and Canadian tour were the pipes and drums, regimental band and Highland dancers of Scotland's own Black Watch, under the command of Major Claud MacBeth Moir.

High-Kneed Unison. The Black Watch opened in Washington (where it stirred its audiences to exuberant Dixie rebel yells), moved into jampacked Madison Square Garden, last week skirled through Canada and New York State before heading for points west. Even for a non-Scots observer, the Watch has swank. First off come the trumpeters and the regimental band playing Great Little Army and wearing the somber kilts that gave the Watch its name when it mustered for its first parade on the banks of the River Tay in 1740.*

While they march and wheel, their cymbals whirling, their diced hose and white spats blurring in high-kneed unison, they play such lilting Scots tunes as Thistle Green and Wee MacGregor. On their heels, majestically slow, come 28 pipers and twelve drummers in a stunning rendition of standard Black Watch ceremonials. The Crimean Reveille starts with a single, furiously impatient bugle call that gives way to the pipes and drums skirling and moaning through The Soldier's Return and other wild pipe tunes--The Green Hills of Tyrol, King George V's Army, The Highland Laddie.

Solo Lights Out. Then the dancers come out, lay their swords and scabbards in a cross on the floor and perform the Gillie Callum, or individual sword dance (which is said to date from 1054). Their arms held aloft like antlers, their thumbs and forefingers held delicately together, the dancers leap around and over the swords in a crescendo of movement that usually sets the crowd to whooping, yelling and stomping. Toward the end, a solo piper--spotlighted on a platform as though he were walking a battlement--softly plays Lights Out, and with a final scream of pipes and whang of drums the Watch marches out.

The regimental routine has been jazzed up a little, Major MacBeth Moir admitted, for the benefit of the public: "Possibly some old regimental officers might turn in their graves, but I hope not. I think they would be proud."

*The Watch was originally thrown together as a force of Highland police to prevent cattle stealing, soon became a regiment. Unkilted and wearing khaki battle dress instead, the Watch fought in World War II in Greece, Tobruk, Alamein, Burma, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, Germany. The regiment's most famed legendary wartime exploit: arresting General Eisenhower while he was roaming Gibraltar in civilian clothes (Ike was held, fuming and incommunicado, in the guardhouse for almost four hours).

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