TABLE TALK

Marching through Iowa

DENIS BROGAN

Iowa—I am not, normally, much of a devotee of outdoor sports (still less a prac-

titioner of them) and it has been a stroke of American genius to enliven a fundamen- tally dull game (American college football) with sideshows. These help to pass away the time while the gladiators of the gridiron conduct their complicated manoeuvres and huddle together in the middle of the field before attempting, for a brief minute or so, to put the other team off balance. Then the rearrangement begins again; the number of yards gained or lost appears on the score- board; and, sometimes, there is a rush through or a successful forward pass and the rather tedious ballet is resumed Tedious? Yes; with the possible exception of cricket, American college football is the most elaborately time-wasting spectator sport I know, although it has the advantage of not lasting interminably like cricket and it is not usually at the mercy of the weather. At any rate, the sombre note 'rain stops play' is seldom struck and, on my visit here this week, at the opening of the winter college game, the average temperature at Drake Stadium was eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit, rising at one period to eighty- six degrees Fahrenheit.

But the real charm of the great college games are the side shows—if, indeed, the parades of majorettes, bands, baton twirlers, etc. are the side shows and not the main game. The players have a curious Japanese appearance, got up like so many armoured samurai, posing ferociously for photographs, and battle-worthiness is assessed as much in terms of weight as anything else.

Even in the now rapidly disappearing all- male colleges, the tediousness of the game was lessened by the bands and by young men standing on their hands and otherwise imitating the jongleur de Noire Dame while the solemn liturgy of the formal game was performed. Just before the war, Harvard gave a half-letter (i.e. a half-blue) for cheer- leading to a young man I knew; and it is worth noting that the first publicly per- formed composition of that great Yale man, Cole Porter, was a simple setting of a simple verse: 'Bull dog Bull Dog/Bow wow wow/Eli Yale.'

There are, of course, more solemn mu- sicks like 'Fair Harvard' set to the tune of the most mendacious of Thomas Moore's lyrics. 'Believe me if all those endearing young charms'. (Mendacious, because the Minstrel Boy asserted, in face of all the evidence, that the verses represented the sentiments of the first Duke of Wellington towards his duchess.) But college songs are not usually possessed of much merit except in the ears of the loyal alumni.

But the main entertainment in the grid- iron battles of the great educational institu- tions of the Middle West is provided by the shapely young women who step 'high, wide, and handsome' to the music of the march- ing bands. At Drake's Stadium. as it hap- pened, although I had not foreseen it, I was to discover an embarrassment of riches, since the football game was mixed up with a reunion of twenty-six high school march- ing bands, the pride and glory of Iowa secondary education. It will have struck foreign visitors in the past that American soldiers (even American marines) do not march as well as the Brigade or a good High- land regiment. Nor are they as ambitious in their choice of tunes to march to as are the bandmasters at Trooping the Colour. (I know a distinguished alumnus of West Point who took one of his sons to London so that he could see how real soldiers could march and go through the rituals of mounting the guard, etc.)

But American girls can do better in this field (and in other fields, too) than Ameri- can boys. For one thing they have a free choice of uniforms. Some were clad in

versions of the Coldstream or Napoleon's Old Guard. They had high nylon busbies and tight dress trousers with multi-coloured tunics—all of which must have been deci- dedly uncomfortable at eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit. More modern Millies were clad in golden semi-bikinis which were more revealing and, no doubt, more com- fortable. And they revealed the determined effort of the young women of a great agri- cultural state to keep in shape.

But I was at least as much struck by their skill in keeping time with the bands or. per- haps. with skill of the bands in accom- panying the marchers. True, there was nothing quite up to the standard of the Irish Guards. on the last occasion when I saw Trooping the Colour, marching per-

fectly to that anti-militarist masterpiece, 'Non pill andrar. But I never saw so many young women shaped by nature and art to look like perfect Cherubinos as in Des Moines. And as they paraded and were ap- plauded (the players occasionally interrup- ting the more serious business of the bands) I could not help recalling the parallel I had once made with the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn': 'To what green altar, 0 mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies And all her silken flanks with garlands

dressed.' Of course, many of the silken flanks were not dressed at all but Keats could not foresee everything.

I know that not everybody likes massed music, even massed music as superior as the marching music of Iowa. I can remember our taking a French boy, whom we knew well, to see the Cowal Games. In addition to tossing cabers, and playing shinty and dancing in mini-kilts, there were 1,100 pipers. They appealed to me more than did the mini-kilted girl dancers, although one of the dancers, a very celebrated performer, was my second cousin. Her kilt was so mini and she so spirited that it was rumoured that it was her bravura dancing that had led Queen Mary to ban female kilted dancing at the Braemar gathering. But I thought the 1,100 pipers were magnificent, beyond the dreams of a Madison Avenue whisky ad. Not so our French guest. He listened in wonder, then in horror and almost broke and ran.

Well, when the enlightened Due de la

Rochefoucauld-Liancourt visited Adam Smith. the philosopher took the duke to a piping competition and while the noble apostle of the enlightenment shuddered, the philosopher could hardly contain his de- light. After all. Adam Smith not only wrote The Wealth of Nations: he believed in A- sian.