I am not a musician, so if I speak as a barbarian I must ask you and several gentlemen on the platform here to forgive me.  From the lowest point of view a few drums and fifes in the battalion mean at least five extra miles in a route march, quite apart from the fact that they can swing a battalion back to quarters happy and composed in its mind, no matter how wet or tired its body may be.  Even when there is no route marching, the mere come and go, the roll and flourishing of drums and fifes around the barracks is as warming and cheering as the sight of a fire in a room.  A band, not necessarily a full band, but a band of a dozen brasses and wood-winds, is immensely valuable in the district where men are billeted.  It revives memories, it quickens association, it opens and unites the hearts of men more surely than any other appeal can, and in this respect it aids recruiting perhaps more than any other agency.  I wonder whether I should say this—­the tune that it employs and the words that go with that tune are sometimes very remote from heroism or devotion, but the magic and the compelling power is in them, and it makes men’s souls realize certain truths that their minds might doubt.

Further, no one, not even the Adjutant, can say for certain where the soul of the battalion lives, but the expression of that soul is most often found in the band. [Cheers.] It stands to reason that 1,200 men whose lives are pledged to each other must have some common means of expression, some common means of conveying their moods and their thoughts to themselves and their world.  The band feels the moods and interprets the thoughts.  A wise and sympathetic bandmaster—­and the masters that I have met have been that—­can lift a battalion out of depression, cheer it in sickness, and steady and recall it to itself in times of almost unendurable stress. [Cheers.] You may remember a beautiful poem by Sir Henry Newbolt, in which he describes how a squadron of weary big dragoons were led to renewed effort by the strains of a penny whistle and a child’s drum taken from a toyshop in a wrecked French town.  I remember in India, in a cholera camp, where the men were suffering very badly, the band of the Tenth Lincolns started a regimental sing-song and went on with that queer, defiant tune, “The Lincolnshire Poacher.”  It was their regimental march that the men had heard a thousand times.  There was nothing in it—­nothing except all England, all the East Coast, all the fun and daring and horse play of young men bucketing about big pastures in the moonlight.  But as it was given, very softly at that bad time in that terrible camp of death, it was the one thing in the world that could have restored, as it did restore, shaken men back to their pride, humor, and self-control. [Cheers.] This may be an extreme instance, but it is not an exceptional one.  Any man who has had anything to do with the service will tell you that the battalion is better for music at every turn, happier, more easily handled, with greater zest in its daily routine, if that routine is sweetened with melody and rhythm—­melody for the mind and rhythm for the body.