070- The Drums of the Fore and Aft -Ben Wright

Suspense, which is usually heard at this hour on Thursday nights, is taking its customary summer holiday. Suspense returns to the air seven weeks from tonight on Thursday, September 1st. You are deep in the remote hill country of Afghan, face to face with the fierce baton warriors, trapped into a hopeless fight from which there seems no escape.

We offer you escape, designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure. Tonight we escape to the north of India and to a battle long remembered as Rudyard Kipling described it in his famous story, the drums of the four and aft.

When I came out from England to serve as a news correspondent with the British troops on the northwest frontier of India, I was attached to a regiment known as the Four and Fit. Princess Hohenzalen's own royal light infantry, four and fifth, but now behind their backs, men call them the four and aft.

When certain words are shouted in front of other barracks, the troops may come out with belts and fists, but the meal whisperer of four and aft brings out the men of this regiment with rifles in their hands and murder in their eyes.

I think perhaps the story of how the four and aft got its name. Maybe really more the story of Jakey and Piggy Lou, two of the toughest and most lovable different monsters who ever banged a drum or two-tooted a fight in a military band.

They were both about the same age, with curly hair and the paces of cheriffs, and inside were two souls that should have belonged to a pair of devils. I must have seen them before, of course, but the first occasion I can recall was at an In informal court, the colonel was holding in the orderly room one morning.