I USED to congratulate myself on having quite blindly chosen the Royal Welch Fusiliers, of all regiments in the army. ‘Good God!’ I used to think. ‘Suppose that when the war broke out I had been living in Cheshire, and had applied for a commission in the Cheshire Regiment.’ How ashamed I should have been to find in the history of that regiment – the old Twenty-second Foot, just senior in the line to the Royal Welch, the Twenty-third – that it had been deprived of its old tide ‘The Royal Cheshires’ as a punishment for losing a battle. (This was a quite unhistorical libel, but we all believed it.) Or how lucky not to have joined the Bedfords, who were making a name for themselves in this war, but were still called ‘The Peacemakers’; for they had only four battle-honours on their colours, none more recent than the year 1711, and we misquoted their regimental motto as: ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ Even the Black Watch had a stain on its record; and everyone knew about it. If a Tommy of another regiment went into a public bar where men of the Black Watch were drinking, and felt brave enough to start a fight, he would ask the barmaid not for ‘pig’s ear’, which is rhyming-slang for beer, but for a pint of ‘broken square’. Then belts would be unbuckled.
The Royal Welch had twenty-nine battle-honours, a number equalled only by a couple of other two-battalion regiments. And here, too, the Royal Welch had the advantage, since these were not single regiments, but 1888 combinations of two each with its separate history. The First Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers could boast twenty-six battle-honours of its own, the remaining three having fallen to the Second Battalion in its short and interrupted existence. They were all good bloody battle-honours, none of them like that battle into which, it was said, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had gone with nine hundred men and from which they emerged with nine hundred and one – no casualties, and a band-boy come of age and promoted a private. For many hard fights, such as The Boyne and Aughrim and the capture of Lille, the Royal Welch had never been honoured. The regiment shared in each of the four hardest fought victories of the British Army, as listed by Sir John Fortescue. My regimental history is rusty now, but I believe that they were Malplaquet, Albuhera, Waterloo, and Inkerman. The Royal Welch was also one of the six Minden regiments, who performed the unprecedented feat of charging a body of cavalry many times their own strength and driving it off the field. Even the surrender at York Town in the American War of Independence, the regiment’s single disaster, could not be accounted a disgrace. The Navy had let the Army down; and the Royal Welch were accorded the full honours of war, won by their conduct in the hard fighting at Lexington and Guildford Court House, and their suicidal advance up Bunker Hill. The original ‘Thomas Atkins’ was a Royal Welch Fusilier in that war.
I caught the sense of regimental tradition a day or two after my arrival at the depôt. In a cupboard at the mess, I came across a big leather-bound ledger and pulled it out to read. It proved to be the Daily Order Book of the First Battalion in the trenches before Sevastopol, and I opened it at the page giving orders for an attack on the Redan Redoubt. Such and such a company was desired to supply volunteers for the storming party under Lieutenant So-and-so. Next followed details of their arms and equipment, the number of ladders they must carry, and the support to be afforded by other companies. Then details of rations and supply of ammunition, with an earnest ‘Godspeed!’ from the commanding officer. (A sketch of the commanding officer hung on the wall above my head, lying sick in his tent at Scutari, wearing a ‘Balaclava helmet’, or cap-comforter, against the intense cold.) The attack failed, and among subsequent entries were orders for the burial of the dead, appreciation from headquarters of the gallantry vainly displayed, and a notice that the effects of Lieutenant So-and-so, who had led the storming party, would be sold at public auction in the trenches next day. Another Daily Order contained the citation of a certain Sergeant Luke O’Connor’s gallantry, for which he received one of the first Victoria Crosses when the award was instituted in 1856. He still lived – Lieutenant-General Sir Luke O’Connor, now colonel of the regiment.
The most immediate piece of regimental history that I met as a recruit-officer was the flash: a fan-like bunch of five black ribbons, each two inches wide, seven and a half inches long, and ending in a dove-tail. The angle at which the fan must be spread has been exactly regulated by regimental convention. The flash is stitched to the back of the tunic collar, and only the Royal Welch are privileged to wear it. The story goes that the Royal Welch were abroad on foreign service for several years in the 1830s, and by some mischance never received the army order abolishing the queue. When the regiment returned and paraded at Plymouth, the inspecting general reprimanded the commanding officer because his men were still wearing their hair in the old fashion. The commanding officer, angered by the slight, immediately rode up to London and won from King William IV, through the intercession of some Court official, a regimental privilege of continuing to wear the bunch of ribbons with which the end of the queue was tied – the flash. The King made it a distinctive badge to be worn by all ranks in recognition of exemplary service during the Napoleonic Wars.
The Army Council, which is usually composed of cavalry, engineer, artillery, and Guards generals, with the Line hardly represented, had never encouraged regimental peculiarities, and could not easily forget the irregularity of our direct appeal to the Sovereign. The Army Council did not, at any rate, sanction the flash on the new khaki service-dress. Yet our officers and warrant-officers continued to wear it. In a pre-war correspondence between the regiment and the Army Council, Sir Luke O’Connor maintained that the flash, being a distinctive mark honourably won, should be worn with service-dress, and not merely with peacetime scarlet. The Army Council objected that it would be a distinctive mark for enemy snipers, and particularly dangerous when worn by officers. Sir Luke retorted by inquiring on what occasion, since the retreat from Corunna, when the regiment was the last to leave Spain, with the key of the town postern in the pocket of one of its officers, had any of His Majesty’s enemies seen the back of a Royal Welch Fusilier officer? The Army Council stood firm; and the matter remained in abeyance throughout the war. Once, in 1917, when an officer of my company went to be decorated with the Military Cross at Buckingham Palace, King George, as Colonel-in-chief of the regiment, showed a personal interest in the flash. He asked: ‘You are serving in one of the line battalions?’ ‘The Second Battalion, sir.’ So the King gave him the order ‘About turn!’ for a look at the flash, and then ‘About turn!’ again. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘you’re still wearing it, I see,’ and then, in a stage whisper: ‘Don’t ever let anyone take it from you!’
After the war, when scarlet was abandoned on the grounds of expense, the Army Council saw that it could now reasonably sanction the flash on service-dress for all ranks. As an additional favour it consented to recognize another defiant regimental peculiarity: the spelling of the word ‘Welch’ with a c. This permission was published in a special Army Council Instruction of 1919. The ignorant Daily Herald commented ‘’Strewth!’ as though it were unimportant, but the spelling with a c was as important to us as the miniature cap-badge worn at the back of the cap was to the Gloucesters (a commemoration of the time when they fought back to back in Egypt). I have seen a young officer sent off Battalion Parade because his buttons read ‘Welsh’ instead of ‘Welch’. ‘Welch’ referred us somehow to the archaic North Wales of Henry Tudor and Owen Glendower and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the founder of the regiment; it dissociated us from the modern North Wales of chapels, Liberalism, the dairy and drapery business, slate mines, and the tourist trade.
The regiment insisted strictly on the standard measurements of the flash. When New Army battalions were formed, and rumours came to Wrexham that in the Eighteenth Battalion officers were wearing flashes nearly down to their waists, great consternation ensued. Our adjutant sent off the youngest subaltern on a special mission to the Eighteenth Battalion, the colonel of which had been borrowed from some Yorkshire regiment. The subaltern had orders to present himself at the Orderly Room with a large pair of shears.
The New Army battalions were, however, as anxious to be regimental as the line battalions. Once in France a regular major of the Royal Fusiliers entered the mess of the Nineteenth (Bantam) Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He greeted the mess with ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ and called for a drink from the mess-sergeant. After he had chatted for a while, he asked the senior officer present: ‘Do you know why I ordered that drink from the mess-sergeant?’ ‘Of course, you wanted to see whether we remembered the Peninsular War.’ The Royal Fusilier nodded: ‘Our mess is just along behind that wood there. We haven’t forgotten either.’ After Albuhera, the few survivors of the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Royal Fusiliers had messed together on the captured hill; deciding that henceforth and for ever, the officers of each regiment would be honorary members of the other’s mess, and the N.C.O.s the same.
I must tell of St David’s Night: the raw leeks eaten to the roll of the drum, with one foot on a chair and one on the mess table enriched by spoils of the Summer Palace at Peking – 1900, when we struck up another solemn friendship with the U.S. Marine Corps. (Leeks are not at all bad to eat, despite Shakespeare.) And the Royal Goat with gilded horns, that once leaped over the mess table bearing a drummer-boy on its back. And the toast to Major Toby Purcell’s golden spurs, worn at The Boyne and lost in a shipwreck off Newfoundland about 1840. And the toast to Shenkin Ap Morgan, the First Gentelman of Wales. And The British Grenadiers, the regimental march-past: for the British Grenadiers does not mean, as most people think, merely the Grenadier Guards. The term includes all regiments, the Royal Welch among them, that wear a bursting grenade as a collar- and cap-badge, to recall their early employment as storm troops armed with bombs.
During the war, the Royal Welch Fusiliers swelled to a size that imperilled regimental esprit de corps. Before the war we had two line battalions and the depôt. The affiliated and flash-less territorials – four battalions recruited for home service – could be disregarded, despite their regular adjutants. The Special Reserve Battalion, which trained at the depôt, was a poor relation. Now more and more New Army battalions were added: even a Twenty-fifth Battalion went to Palestine in 1917, and proved as good as the Eighth. So the regiment (that is, consensus of opinion in the two line battalions) tentatively accepted the New Army battalions one by one as they proved themselves worthy by service in the field. It never accepted the territorials, disowning them contemptuously as ‘dog-shooters’. The fact was that three of the four territorial battalions failed signally in the Suvla Bay landing at Gallipoli. One battalion, it became known, had offered violence to its officers; the commanding officer, a regular, had not cared to survive a disgrace which even the good work that these battalions did later at Gaza could not cancel. The remaining territorial battalion joined the First Division in France early in 1915, and quite unnecessarily lost its machine-guns at Givenchy. Regimental machine-guns, in 1915, were regarded almost as sacred. To lose them before the wiping-out of the entire battalion was considered as shameful as losing the regimental colours would have been in any eighteenth-or nineteenth-century battle. The territorial machine-gun officer who abandoned his guns had congratulated himself on removing the bolts; this would make them useless to the enemy. But he had forgotten the boxes of spare-parts. The Second Battalion made a raid in the same sector, a year and a half later, and recaptured one of the guns, which had been busy against our trenches ever since.
On arrival at the depôt, we Special Reserve officers were reminded of our great good fortune: if the war lasted, we should have the privilege of serving with one or the other of the line battalions. In peacetime, a candidate for a commission had not only to distinguish himself in the passing-out examination at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and be strongly recommended by two officers of the regiment, but to possess a guaranteed independent income that would enable him to play polo and hunt and keep up the social reputation of the regiment. These requirements were waived in our case; but we were to understand that we did not belong to the ‘regiment’ in the special sense. Permission to serve with it in time of war should satisfy our highest military aspirations. We were not temporary officers, like those of the New Army, but held permanent commissions in the Special Reserve Battalion. The Royal Welch, we were reminded, considered themselves second to none, even to the Guards. Representations had been made to them, after the South African War, inquiring whether they would like to become the Welsh Guards, and the offer had been indignantly declined; such a change would have made the regiment junior, in the brigade, even to the recently formed Irish Guards.
We were warned that while serving with a line battalion, none of us must expect to be recommended for orders or decorations. An ordinary campaigning medal, inscribed with a record of battalion service, should suffice as reward. Decorations were not considered by the Royal Welch as personal awards, but as representative awards for the whole regiment. They would therefore be kept for the professional soldiers, who would find them useful as aids to extra-regimental promotion. This was what, in fact, happened. There must have been something like two or three hundred Special Reserve officers serving overseas with the regiment before the war ended. But except for three or four, who were not directly recommended by the battalion commander, but distinguished themselves while attached to brigade or divisional staffs, or who got sent to New Army battalions or other regiments, we continued undecorated. I can recall only three exceptions. The normal proportion of awards, considering the casualties we suffered, which was about sixty or seventy killed, should have been at least ten times that amount. Let me hasten to say that I myself never performed any feat for which I might conceivably have been decorated throughout my service in France.
The regimental spirit persistently survived all catastrophes. Our First Battalion, for instance, was practically annihilated within two months of joining the British Expeditionary Force. Young Orme, who joined straight from Sandhurst, at the crisis of the first battle of Ypres, found himself commanding a battalion reduced to only about forty rifles. With these, and another small force, the remnants of the Second Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment, reduced to thirty men and two officers, he helped to recapture three lines of lost trenches and was himself killed. The reconstituted battalion saw heavy fighting at Bois Grenier in December, but got smashed up at the Aubers Ridge and Festubert in the following May; and again at Loos in September, when only one combatant officer survived the attack – a machine-gun officer on loan from the South Staffordshire Regiment. The same sort of thing happened time after time in fighting at Fricourt, the Quadrangle, High Wood, Delville Wood, and Ginchy on the Somme in 1916; and again at Puisieux and Bulle-court in the spring fighting of 1917; and again, and again, until the Armistice. In the course of the war, at least fifteen or twenty thousand men must have passed through each of the two line battalions, whose fighting strength never stood at more than eight hundred. After each catastrophe the ranks were filled up with new drafts from home, with the lightly wounded from the disaster of three or four months before, and with the more seriously wounded of earlier ones.
In the First and Second Battalions, throughout the war, not merely the officers and N.C.O.s knew their regimental history. The men had learned far more about Minden, Albuhera, and Waterloo, and the Battle of the Pyramids, than they had about the fighting on the other fronts, or the official causes of the war.