“What stirs a man’s fighting spirit quicker or better than the right sort of music?” I asked myself.  “And what sort of music does it best of all?”

There can be only one answer to that last question!  And so I organized my recruiting band, that was to be famous all over Britain before so very long.  I gathered fourteen of the best pipers and drummers I could find in all Scotland.  I equipped them, gave them the Highland uniform, and sent them out, to travel over Britain skirling and drumming the wail of war through the length and breadth of the land.  They were to go everywhere, carrying the shrieking of the pipes into the highways and the byways, and so they did.  And I paid the bills.

That was the first of many recruiting bands that toured Britain.  Because it was the first, and because of the way the pipers skirled out the old hill melodies and songs of Scotland, enormous crowds followed my band.  And it led them straight to the recruiting stations.  There was a swing and a sway about those old tunes that the young fellows couldn’t resist.

The pipers would begin to skirl and the drums to beat in a square, maybe, or near the railway station.  And every time the skirling of the pipes would bring the crowd.  Then the pipers would march, when the crowd was big enough, and lead the way always to the recruiting place.  And once they were there the young fellows who weren’t “quite ready to decide” and the others who were just plain slackers, willing to let better men die for them, found it mighty hard to keep from going on the wee rest of the way that the pipers had left them to make alone!

It was wonderful work my band did, and when the returns came to me I felt like the Pied Piper!  Yes I did, indeed!

I did not travel with my band.  That would have been a waste of effort.  There was work for both of us to do, separately.  I was booked for a tour of Britain, and everywhere I went I spoke, and urged the young men to enlist.  I made as many speeches as I could, in every town and city that I visited, and I made special trips to many.  I thought, and there were those who agreed with me, that I could, it might be, reach audiences another speaker, better trained than I, no doubt, in this sort of work, would not touch.

So there was I, without official standing, going about, urging every man who could to don khaki.  I talked wherever and whenever I could get an audience together, and I began then the habit of making speeches in the theatres, after my performance, that I have not yet given up.  I talked thus to the young men.

“If you don’t do your duty now,” I told them, “you may live to be old men.  But even if you do, you will regret it!  Yours will be a sorrowful old age.  In the years to come, mayhap, there’ll be a wee grandchild nestling on your knee that’ll circle its little arms about your neck and look into your wrinkled face, and ask you: 

“‘How old are you, Grandpa?  You’re a very old man.’