The Roll of the Drums

The Weekly Machen

The following article, not to be confused with the earlier posted piece “The Shudder of Drums,” was written by Arthur Machen during the early months of the Great War. In it, he sticks to his favorite theme of man’s interior reality, and thereby, conjurers glory in an almost Arthurian grandeur. Here we get a taste of the excited atmosphere still pervading the public attitude toward the new conflict when many believed it would be won with great triumph by Christmas. The truly hard times had not yet come for the nation, which faced four years of slaughter, or for Machen personally in the form of the Angels of Mons controversy. The Bowmen had been published in September, but its effects would not be fully felt till the following summer.

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The Roll of the Drums
by
Arthur Machen
November 4, 1914

Everywhere in London one meets them in these tremendous days. In companies of a hundred, five hundred, a thousand they come marching along the streets; men in khaki, in blue serge, in grey tweeds. They march well and briskly, and if we have lively imaginations, our hearts are stirred at the sight of them. We know where they are going; to the front, which means to fire and blood and death, to the most awful battle that has ever been joined since the foundation of the world. We realise all this if we choose to meditate on the passing of these dingy battalions; but to the casual, careless eye, how do they appear? To be quite frank, and speaking for myself, they always make me think of convict batches being marched to forced labour. It is strong faith alone which can see beneath the veil of those dismal ranks the glory and the majesty of a righteous war. I am glad to find that all England is agreed that this grim and grisly way of doing things is altogether mistaken, that while, on the face of it, it pretends to be practical and sensible it is neither one nor the other; that on the contrary it is radically unpractical, since it fails to draw recruits into the ranks.

Gray, Stupid Fashion

I cannot say I am surprised that this mistake has been made; I am rather surprised that the public and general sense has so swiftly recognised that it is a mistake. I am not astonished that we have gone to work in the grey, stupid fashion, since for three hundred years or more that mode of thought—or confusion—which has called itself “liberal” and “advanced” has preached that outward show, ceremonial and pomp are altogether foolish and childish things, fit only for savages and the world’s infancy. Eighty years ago The Times spoke of the rite and ceremony of crowning and sacring the Kings of England in terms of coarse contempt, seventy years ago “reformed” corporations were busy in getting rid of their insignia. Lord Westbury once spoke of a herald as “a silly old man who did not understand his silly old trade”; and up to quite recent years churchmen who thought that the most solemn rites of religion should be a performed with a certain visible solemnity and worship were laughed at as being addicted to “man millinery.”

So it is not wonderful that in this awful business of the world we have begun by trying to make heroes look as much like convicts as possible, but it is both happy and wonderful that we have found out our mistake in time. I hear that the drums will soon begin to roll, and I am glad of it.

For, whether you like it or don’t like it, the fact remains that is is not by argument and logical propositions and reasoned discourses that you will fetch men out of their comfortable homes and snug firesides to so forward to the dreadful lines of battle.

The Beating of the Drum

You can show them, with the clearest reasoning that it is their duty and their interest to join the Army—and they will assent and be convinced, and stay where they are. You may, perhaps, succeed in getting voters to the polling booth by means of logic, but you will not get man to face death by this way. We have parted, for a while at all events, from our liberalisms and nationalisms, and Norman Angellisms, and all such elaborate follies; we are back in a world of vital things, of life and death and reality, and we find, to our amazement, that it is just those aids which we have condemned as childish trifles that we must now summon to help us. It may be a strange thing that a number of men beating sheepskin with knobby sticks and blowing hard through brass horns can stir the soul and summon other men to the array of battle, to agony and to triumph, to the subdual of the most imperative instincts of human nature; but so it is. It is not a matter for argument: it is so; it is as much a fact as it is a fact that a cup of cold water is heaven to a parched gullet.

So “bon gré, mal gré,” when the bugler sets his lips to the brass he is is a veritable and most mightly enchanter. “Tara, tara, tara” goes his horn, and men like you and me who love our lives and whole skins and pleasant places come leaping out of security, and so to horse and away, with a great shout of joy and with shining swords, riding into the very gates of the furnace, outfacing death, “Tuba mirum spargens sonum”: wondrous sound, indeed, the trumpet flingeth: since its summons has power to change the natural heart of man, to make him for the moment, as we may fairly say, superhuman. “It’s thin red line of ‘eroes when the drums begin to roll.”

To Make Recruiting Go

The sound of the drum, the ringing trumpet call are in that cup of wine proceed by Bacbuc, the priestess of the Holy Bottle in Rabelais. By wine, says the priestess—that is, by noble ecstasy, by that “life beyond life” of which the lance-corporal of the London Scottish speaks in to-day’s Daily Mail—man becomes divine; and this sacrament of heroic ecstasy is communicated to us, in spite of our pride and false thinking, by the beat of the drum and the trumpet blast. Indeed, it is by such simple ways that the great emotions are often communicated. I was once at St. Paul’s, at some service for the dead. We heard many noble things, the notes of great music. And at the end, the rubric on the service paper directed us to stand. We stood and listened, and looked perplexed. Then there was a faint sense as if the air were troubled, as if there were a beating and fluttering of mighty wings, high in the mist of the dome. A sense more than a sound; but it grew and swelled, and so increased and prevailed that it became the roll of the drums introducing the Dead March. And then ten thousand wept—at this ruffle on stout parchment.

And so it is that a great multitude of men have died very gladly for a square of crimson cloth, embroidered in gold thread, called a regimental colour, though the niggard throats of Manchester would assuredly bawl that such an action is utterly uneconomic.

I think that recruiting will go better when these things are remembered.

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Introduction and supplementary material – Copyright 2023 by Christopher Tompkins. All rights reserved.