A FAMOUS RECRUITING BAND.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 98, 26 April 1916, Page 5

A FAMOUS RECRUITING BAND.

LORD DERBY DESCRIBES ITS PLAYING. In Lancashire, where he made his most effective appeals for recruits, Lord Derby is known as a big-hearted sportsman, a generous friend, and a sentimentalist. It is the sentimentalist who' has won all hearts. People in Lancashire know that he expresses their spirit—that he is a straightspeaking man, a cheerful-Sonled man, and a most tender-hearted man all the same. One day he told a friend about his recruiting band—the finest in the country—and began to describe a new piece of music which the band had lately introduced.

“1 shall never forget the first time I heard it,” he said. “It is supposed to create a feeling of a battlefield. You hear music that suggests the dawn, the 1 beginning of a new day. Then reveille sounds, and there is a mustering of men, and the sense of preparations for a tight. Then come various regimental calls, the sound of big guns booming through the bugles, and then the charge ig sounded. There is all the thunder of a great charge, the roar and clash of a mighty battle, and gradually it dies away, the sense of sunset and twilight' stealing into the music, and then—so gently at first that you scarcely realise what ig coming—the music is the music of a hymn, 'Abide With Me. 7 I looked at the great audience. Men were glancing at each other, not knowing what to make of it; and then, what do you think happened? Very slowly hands went up to caps, and almost sheepishly those caps were drawn off heads and taken downward to the men’s knees, and there were hundreds of people there with tears in their eyes.”