Hail! To the Victors Valiant

 

This diary will not be about the Siege of Ceuta, other than a mere mention. Just like the story of Michigan’s perfect season will not be about hamburgers or signs, or whatever they come up with, other than a wisp of a memory that in future years you can’t quite put your finger on what exactly it was. This diary, like Michigan’s season, will be about The Victors. This diary will be about the soul of Michigan, and how it it binds all of our souls together like a tapestry that stretches across the world, space, into the echoes of the past and into the promise of the future. This diary will be about the keystone of the Michigan arch that for almost a century and a half, for almost all 1004 wins, has been the hymn that connects generations, inspires hope, pride and fear. It will be about The Victors. 

 

Since the day Sargon formed his Akkadian infantry into the first organized formation to step onto the battlefield, music has played a dual role in the fabric of martial society. Originally a method of controlling the chaos of battle, the sounds of drums, bugles, and an assortment of other instruments have rung out across all the battlefields of humanity. They have issued orders, saved lives, and changed the course of history. These orders have become interwoven in our society as a whole, from “Charge” to “Taps”. They were simple tunes. The chaos and sounds of battle necessitated it. “You don’t see a battle” a Major in the British Army’s 95th Rifles once say “you hear it”. Those simple beats, easy to remember, easy to follow, and easy to duplicate across battlefields that stretched either a few acres or a few miles moved armies great and small. You can barely hear in a battle, your basest instincts are triggered and your lizard brain claims you. You can not expect a farmer from Franconia to remember the difference between Mozart and Bach as he faces an Ottoman cavalry charge, but he can count drum beats, or remember a 6 note bugle call.

 

Music’s ability to raise the spirits of one side while simultaneously lowering the morale of the other gives music a unique quality that all other forms of propaganda only dream of replicating. Music can inspire men to greatness, it can help you push past the limits of your body and soul and give you one last gasp of strength to reach for victory. It fills the soul with pride, resolve, and has inspired a millennia of warriors into battle, while hammering cold fear into the hearts of their opponents.

 

The Romans marched into battle to the notes of the Cornu over the same fields French infantry advanced through murderous British musketry and cannon fire singing “Chanson de l'Oignon” a thousand years later. As Homer (not the yellow one) said, “Noble and manly music invigorates the spirit, strengthens the wavering man, and incites him to great and worthy deeds”

 

Hail! To the Concquering Heroes

 

But music’s true power is to capture moments in time, bring people together, build tradition, and to soothe a shattered soul. While modern armies rarely use music to issue their ever more complex battlefield plans, (outside of the songs of the retrieval boats from Starship Troopers’ Rodger Young), technology has brought all music to the forefront of the battlefield. 

 

Many years ago, a young US Army Lieutenant in Iraq would start every mission off with the same song, hitting play on the unauthorized iPod he had wired to his vehicle’s internal communications. Every mission in the vehicle the college educated and veteran Lieutenant shared with his 19 year old driver from Alabama who had barely graduated high school, and his 22 year old gunner from Texas started, and ended, the same way. They started with “She fucking hates me” by Puddle of Mudd, and every mission ended with “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers. Over a hundred missions in Iraq started with Wes Scantlin sending the young Americans off into the deadly night, and over a hundred missions ended with Brandon Flowers welcoming bruised, bleeding and exhausted boys back through the gate and into the relative safety of the cement wall of the tiny base they shared. 

 

Years later, that Lieutenant took that 22 year old from Texas who a lifetime before had been his gunner to his first college football game at the Big House. Both cried when they played Mr. Brightside, and pretended the other didn’t see. 

 

Hail! Hail! To Michigan the Leaders and Best

 

Music and war are strange bedfellows. Two things that should be polar opposites wrap themselves back around the spectrum of life and hold hands in the most paradoxical and intimate of ways. 

 

Somewhat ironically it is rarely the heavy metal you would expect young men (and women) to turn to that you hear soldiers singing as they try desperately to occupy their thoughts before battle. A few years after that Lieutenant left Iraq, he found himself in Afghanistan this time as a Captain. While he sat with his unit, sweating out the long minutes that felt like centuries before a mission started, he heard someone from the back of his vehicle singing. Turning around he saw it was one of his sergeants, a veteran of a handful of deployments and as hardened as any man could be…singing “We Belong” by Pat Benatar. The Captain switched his radio so the rest of his unit, battling nerves, fear, heat, and exhaustion could hear, thinking it was a joke to ease to minds. But then the driver started to sing, off key, and with a thick accent, and before long, he could hear on the radio other vehicles joining in. An entire unit of men, from various backgrounds, histories, religions and favorite college football teams, all screaming “we belooooooooooooong” into the radio. 

 

After the mission it was never discussed, never brought up again. Regardless of what came after, that song brought them together, and they will always have those few last few minutes together. 

 

Hail! To the Victors Valiant

 

My Grandfather made us Michigan fans. He didn’t speak a ton of English when he came to the United States, but he learned the words of his new adopted team’s Hail to the Victors. I learned them too, on a VHS tape my parents have somewhere, you can see a 2 year old me struggling through the song. It was the first song I learned. Before the Pound Puppies or Fraggle Rock. 

 

I suspect for most of us it may have been the same. We grew up with this. We were bequeathed Michigan fandom by our families and it has been part of us since childhood. Which is what makes The Victors so magical. It is simple. It is just…..us.

 

A child can not learn the words to most college fight songs, with their long sentences and their complex timing and rhythm. But anyone can learn The Victors. It is simplicity in and of itself. If the Gettysburg Address was a picture of perfection because it was merely 272 words, The Victors and its 37 words clearly blows it out of the water. 

 

The Victors is the perfect martial song. Not only for its simplicity, but for its energy. It isn’t telling a story of the banks of a river, it isn’t a song recycled from another source , it is an order. A command. Hail! Hail to whom? Hail to the Victors Valiant. The Victors even has roots in America’s victory. In 1918, the band of the 125th Infantry Regiment, a National Guard unit from Michigan, played it as the victorious doughboys crossed the border and occupied the Kaiser’s Germany. 

 

Simple words, combined with a simple gesture, 109,000 strong, all in unison (slightly delayed in some of the blue hair sections) is as iconic a scene as Desmond Howard in the South Endzone against Ohio State. You see that sea of maize, and in unison they sing, and hold out their hands. I have never played football against Michigan, but I can’t imagine what that scene does to the psyche of the opposing team, after Charles Woodson returns a punt for a touchdown. 

 

Hail! To the Conquering Heroes 

 

There is something magical about sports, embodied for us in form of Michigan Football. Something that brings people out of their normal lives, and transforms them for a few hours on a Saturday (or a Monday!) into someone totally different. I will never forget seeing my Grandfather, a giant of a man, who would have hated the word stoicism but could have been its definition for Websters, pump his fist and sing. In the 34 years I knew my grandfather, it was one of two songs I ever heard him sing. 

 

You don’t need to be Beyoncé to sing Louis Elbel’s song, first played by the master of America’s martial music John Phillip Sousa in 1899. It doesn’t require the ability to carry a tune, it doesn’t require you to have rhythm, it just requires you to know the words, and to believe. To believe in something that we can’t touch, and can’t control. To have faith that eventually, given enough time and enough faith, you will be rewarded with moments like these. With moments of watching Hassan Haskins open up the corporeal body of Ohio State, Donovan Edwards reaching deep into the hearts of Ohio, and Blake Corum stealing their souls. Moments like Michigan stuffing the SEC on 4th and Goal in Overtime at the Rose Bowl. Moments like, Monday night. 

 

With moments of Mike Sainristil, the guy who wasn’t going to get playing time at WR, who we all wondered how Michigan would protect him, a certain liability at defensive back, pick off a Heisman contender and carry it all the way down the field, nearly reaching the end zone and securing the dream so many of us have waited over two and a half decades for. 

 

And all of these moments, every beautiful thing that has ever happened in our collective experiences with Michigan Football, all happened to the sounds of The Victors. Every. Single. One. 

 

Hail! Hail! to Michigan

 

The odd thing about attending a game where access to the venue equates to some people’s mortgages is that despite the number of people in Maize and Blue, many were casual fans…at best. I sat in front of a woman wearing a Texas jersey. A guy down the row from me had a Missouri shirt on. But despite Michigan fans clearly outnumbering Washington fans (who are all almost uniformly the nicest fans I’ve ever met) there were thousands of people in Maize and Blue who may have been attending their first game, and maybe hadn’t even been fans before last week. And you could tell. There was a simple shibboleth. They couldn’t sing the Victors. I can excuse not knowing Temptation, or Mr Brightside, but The Victors is our song. It is us. 

 

And when Donovan Edwards woke up from his long slumber and put Washington on the ropes, those of us who had been through troubles with the snap, pre-Dieon Colorado Hail Marys, late hits out of bounds, a defense that couldn’t cover crossing routes and spotty spots sprang to our feet and sang. We sang The Victors together, like it was the first time all over again. We cried and sang and hugged and it didn’t matter that the rich ticket buyers were taking up seats of real Michigan fans, because we knew. We knew who was a part of our family, and who wasn’t, we knew because they could sing The Victors. No matter where we watched the game, no matter what comes in our individual lives, we will always have that one magical moment together, and the song that was playing, that has always been playing during the best of our times, was The Victors. Stretching like a wave of sound through the entire Michigan fandom wherever it was, into the endless infinity of space. That song and that moment will forever carry Michigan, and Michigan fans, together. 

 

 

So anyway, in 1694 the Moroccans besieged the Spanish at the Siege of Ceuta. The Spanish refused to surrender, but the Moroccans (not the Moops) kept at it, slowly working away, slowly keeping faith that eventually Ceuta would fall. It wasn’t always pretty, or promising, but they kept after it, and after 26 years of siege… Ceuta finally fell. 

 

 

The Champions of the West