Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, May 1921 · page 36 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #20 — page 36: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains no cartoon or illustration—it's purely text: a romantic, nostalgic essay about drums in history and culture. The author celebrates the drum as a symbol of liberty and national heroism, tracing its power from the Alhambra to the French Revolution (the Bastille storming). The piece invokes the German poet Heine and references classical military traditions—reveille, tattoos, funeral marches. The centerpiece is a sentimental anecdote about Napoleon's unnamed drummer-boy, swept into an Alpine valley by avalanche. Despite separation from his regiment, he drums commands (advance, charge) until playing a funeral march as soldiers pass overhead. This isn't satire but rather patriotic nostalgia typical of *Whiz Bang*'s mix of humor and earnest sentiment. The drum represents duty, sacrifice, and the call to arms—themes resonating for post-WWI American readers.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
34 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang to that same noise in modern Cairo. The dull sound that waked my dreams in the Alhambra was from a drum the Moor had brought from the East after a crusade. Music is a universal language, and the despised, unmusical drum has a polyglot tongue. All other musical instruments have their speech of sentiment, love and emotion, but the voice of the drum knows the eloquent language of liberty and can get more vol- unteers for God, home and native land than all the orators. The roll of the drum, like that of the sea, fills the soul's shore-line and its every bay and gulf. Heine says that the history of the storming of the Bastile cannot be correctly understood until we know how the drumming was done. The reveille of the drum means that it is time to get up, and there is a fable of its resurrection meaning in the old legend of soldiers, fallen in battle, who by night rose from the grave in the battlefield, and with drummer at their head, marched back to their native home. There is a pathetic story in French history of Napoleon's nameless drummer-boy being swept from the ranks, by the sudden dash of an avalanche, into an Alpine valley. He was uninjured and the drum still hung suspended from his neck. He waved his hands to the soldiers 200 feet above him and began to drum, playing the tattoo, the reveille, the advance and the charge. But there was no time to rescue him, the soldiers passed on, and the last thing they heard in the clear, cold air was the beat of a funeral march.