I am subscribed
to the British magazine called The Economist. This weekly newspaper
was first published in 1843. Walter Bagehot, author of The English
Constitution, was among its early editors. The Economist contains
leading articles in which "free-trade principles are most rigidly
applied to all the important questions of the day". Topics range from
finance and economics, to politics, arts, science, and business, among others.
It has sections devoted exclusively to the UK (Bagehot), the US (Lexington),
Latin America (Bello), Europe (Charlemagne), Business (Schumpeter),
and it also includes books reviews and sets of economic and financial
indicators. Before reading the Bagehot section that
covers UK´s politics, it is the weekly obituary of this magazine that gets
my full attention. These obituaries are usually dedicated to global leaders,
top economists, Nobel prize winners, universal
artists, philanthropists and such. However, from time to time,
the editors surprise me with hardly known, unique characters. To me, it is in
those obituaries that this weekly publication excels. I would like to share one
of the best I have ever read. Pure gold. Enjoy it!
BILL MILLIN
Piper at the D-Day landings, died on August 17th 2010, aged 88
ANY reasonable observer might
have thought Bill Millin was unarmed as he jumped off the landing ramp at Sword
Beach, in Normandy, on June 6th 1944. Unlike his colleagues, the pale
21-year-old held no rifle in his hands. Of course, in full Highland rig as he
was, he had his trusty skean dhu, his little dirk, tucked in his
right sock. But that was soon under three feet of water as he waded ashore, a
weary soldier still smelling his own vomit from a night in a close boat on a
choppy sea, and whose kilt in the freezing water was floating prettily round
him like a ballerina's skirt.
But Mr Millin was not unarmed;
far from it. He held his pipes, high over his head at first to keep them from
the wet (for while whisky was said to be good for the bag, salt water wasn't),
then cradled in his arms to play. And bagpipes, by long tradition, counted as
instruments of war. An English judge had said so after the Scots' great defeat
at Culloden in 1746; a piper was a fighter like the rest, and his music was his
weapon. The whining skirl of the pipes had struck dread into the Germans on the
Somme, who had called the kilted pipers “Ladies from Hell”. And it raised the
hearts and minds of the home side, so much so that when Mr Millin played on
June 5th, as the troops left for France past the Isle of Wight and he was
standing on the bowsprit just about keeping his balance above the waves getting
rougher, the wild cheers of the crowd drowned out the sound of his pipes even
to himself.
His playing had been planned as
part of the operation. On commando training near Fort William he had struck up
a friendship with Lord Lovat, the officer in charge of the 1st Special Service
Brigade. Not that they had much in common. Mr Millin was short, with a broad
cheeky face, the son of a Glasgow policeman; his sharpest childhood memory was
of being one of the “poor”, sleeping on deck, on the family's return in 1925
from Canada to Scotland. Lovat was tall, lanky, outrageously handsome and
romantic, with a castle towering above the river at Beauly, near Inverness. He
had asked Mr Millin to be his personal piper: not a feudal but a military
arrangement. The War Office in London now forbade pipers to play in battle, but
Mr Millin and Lord Lovat, as Scots, plotted rebellion. In this “greatest
invasion in history”, Lovat wanted pipes to lead the way.
He was ordering now, as they
waded up Sword Beach, in that drawly voice of his: “Give us a tune, piper.” Mr
Millin thought him a mad bastard. The man beside him, on the point of jumping
off, had taken a bullet in the face and gone under. But there was Lovat,
strolling through fire quite calmly in his aristocratic way, allegedly wearing
a monogrammed white pullover under his jacket and carrying an ancient
Winchester rifle, so if he was mad Mr Millin thought he might as well be
ridiculous too, and struck up “Hielan' Laddie”. Lovat approved it with a
thumbs-up, and asked for “The Road to the Isles”. Mr Millin inquired,
half-joking, whether he should walk up and down in the traditional way of
pipers. “Oh, yes. That would be lovely.”
Three times therefore he walked
up and down at the edge of the sea. He remembered the sand shaking under his
feet from mortar fire and the dead bodies rolling in the surf, against his
legs. For the rest of the day, whenever required, he played. He piped the
advancing troops along the raised road by the Caen canal, seeing the flashes
from the rifle of a sniper about 100 yards ahead, noticing only after a minute
or so that everyone behind him had hit the deck in the dust. When Lovat had
dispatched the sniper, he struck up again. He led the company down the main
street of Bénouville playing “Blue Bonnets over the Border”, refusing to run
when the commander of 6 Commando urged him to; pipers walked as they played.
He took them across two bridges,
one (later renamed the Pegasus Bridge) ringing and banging as shrapnel hit the
metal sides, one merely with railings which bullets whistled through: “the
longest bridge I ever piped across.” Those two crossings marked their
successful rendezvous with the troops who had preceded them. All the way, he
learned later, German snipers had had him in their sights but, out of pity for
this madman, had not fired. That was their story. Mr Millin himself knew he
wasn't going to die. Piping was too enjoyable, as he had discovered in the
Boys' Brigade band and all through his short army career. And piping protected
him.
The pipes themselves were less
lucky, injured by shrapnel as he dived into a ditch. He could still play them,
but four days later they took a direct hit on the chanter and the drone when he
had laid them down in the grass, and that was that. The last tune they had
piped on D-Day was “The Nut-Brown Maiden”, played for a small red-haired French
girl who, with her folks cowering behind her, had asked him for music as he
passed their farm.
He gave the pipes later to the
museum at the Pegasus Bridge, which he often revisited, and sometimes piped
across, during his long and quiet post-war career as a mental nurse at Dawlish
in Devon. On one such visit, in full Highland rig with his pipes in his arms,
he was approached by a smartly dressed woman of a certain age, with faded red
hair, who planted a joyous kiss of remembrance on his cheek.
Extracted from The Economist (August 28th 2010)
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