XI
I will try to recall my war-time feelings about the Royal Welch Fusiliers. I used to congratulate myself on having chosen, quite blindly, this of all regiments. ‘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.’ I thought how ashamed I should have been to find in the history of that regiment (which was the old Twenty-second Foot, just senior in the line to the Royal Welch, which was the Twenty-third) that it had been deprived of its old title ‘The Royal Cheshires’ as a punishment for losing a battle. Or how lucky not to have joined the Bedfords. Though the Bedfords had made a name for themselves in this war, they were still called ‘The Peacemakers.’ For they only had four battle-honours on their colours and none of these more recent than the year 1711; it was a sneer that their regimental motto was: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Even the Black Watch, the best of the Highland regiments, 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 record was beyond reproach. There were twenty-nine battle-honours on its colours, a number only equalled by two other two-battalion regiments. And the Royal Welch had the advantage of these since they were not single regiments, but recent combinations of two regiments each with its separate history. The First Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers had twenty-six battle-honours of its own, the remaining three having been won by the Second Battalion in its short and interrupted existence. They were all good bloody battle-honours, none of them like that battle of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders into which, it was said, they had gone with nine hundred men and from which they had come out with nine hundred and one—no casualties, and a band-boy come of age and promoted a private. For many hard battles, such as The Boyne and Aughrim and the capture of Lille, the Royal Welch had never been honoured. The regiment had fought in each of the four hardest fought victories of the British army, as listed by Sir John Fortescue. My regimental history is rusty, but I believe that they were The Boyne, Malplaquet, Albuhera and Inkerman. That is three out of four. It may have been Salamanca or Waterloo instead of The Boyne. It was also one of the six Minden regiments and one of the front-line regiments at that. They performed the unprecedented feat of charging a body of cavalry many times their own strength and driving it off the field. The surrender at York Town in the American War of Independence was the regiment’s single disaster, but even that was not a disgrace. It was accorded the full honours of war. Its conduct in the hard fighting at Lexington, at Guildford Court House, and in its suicidal advance up Bunker’s Hill, had earned it them.
I caught the sense of regimental tradition a day or two after I arrived at the depot. In a cupboard in the junior anteroom at the mess, I came across a big leather-bound ledger and pulled it out to see what it was about. It was the Daily Order-book of the First Battalion in the trenches before Sebastopol. I opened it at the page giving orders for the attack on the Redan Fort. Such and such a company was desired to supply volunteers for the storming party under Lieutenant So-and-so. There followed details of their arms and equipment, the number of ladders they were to 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 was on the wall above my head, lying sick in his tent at Scutari, wearing a cap-comforter for the cold.) And the next entries were about clearing up after an unsuccessful attack—orders for the burial of the dead, thanks from headquarters for the gallantry vainly displayed, and a notice that the effects of the late Lieutenant So-and-so, who had led the storming party, would be sold at public auction in the trenches next day. In another day’s orders was the notice of the Victoria Cross awarded to Sergeant Luke O’Connor. He had lived to be Lieutenant-General Sir Luke O’Connor and was now colonel of the regiment.
The most immediate piece of regimental history that I met as a recruit-officer was the flash. The flash is a fan-like bunch of five black ribbons, each ribbon two inches wide and seven and a half inches long; the angle at which the fan is spread is exactly regulated by regimental convention. It is stitched to the back of the tunic collar. Only the Royal Welch are privileged to wear it. The story is that the Royal Welch were abroad on foreign service for several years in the 1830’s, and by some chance never received the army order abolishing the queue. When the regiment returned and paraded at Plymouth the inspecting general rated the commanding officer because his men were still wearing their hair in the old fashion. The commanding officer, angry with the slight, immediately rode up to London and won from King William IV, through the intercession of some Court official, the regimental privilege of continuing to wear the bunch of ribbons in which the end of the queue was tied—the flash. It was to be a distinctive badge worn by all ranks in reward for the regiment’s exemplary service in the Napoleonic wars.
The Army Council, which is usually composed of cavalry, engineer, and artillery generals, with the infantry hardly represented, had never encouraged regimental peculiarities, and perhaps could not easily forget the irregularity of the colonel’s direct appeal to the Sovereign in the matter of the flash. The flash was, at any rate, not sanctioned by the Army Council on the new khaki service dress. None the less, the officers and warrant-officers continued to wear it. There was a correspondence in the early stages of the war, I was told, between the regiment and the Army Council. The regiment maintained that since the flash was a distinctive mark won in war it should be worn with service dress and not merely with peace-time scarlet. The Army Council put forward the objection that it was a distinctive mark for enemy marksmen and particularly dangerous when worn only by officers. The regiment 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? The Army Council was firm, but the regiment was obstinate, and the matter was in abeyance throughout the war. Once in 1917, when an officer of my company went to Buckingham Palace to be decorated with the Military Cross, the King, as colonel-in-chief of the regiment, showed a personal interest in the matter. He asked: ‘You are serving in one of the line battalions?’ ‘The Second Battalion, Your Majesty.’ So the King gave him the order: ‘About turn,’ and looked 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.’ The regiment was delighted. After the war, when scarlet was abandoned on the grounds of expense, the Army Council saw that it could 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’. The permission was published in a special Army Order in 1919. The Daily Herald commented ‘’Strewth!’ as if it were unimportant. That was ignorance. 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: was it at Quatre Bras?). I have seen a young officer sent off battalion parade because his buttons read Welsh instead of Welch. ‘Welch’ referred us somehow to the antique 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, Lloyd George, and the tourist trade.
The regiment was extremely strict on the standard measurements of the flash. When new-army battalions were formed and rumours came to Wrexham that in, I think, the Eighteenth Battalion officers were wearing flashes nearly down to their waists, there was great consternation. The adjutant sent off the youngest subaltern on a special mission to the camp of the Eighteenth Battalion, the colonel of which was not a Royal Welch Fusilier, but a loan from one of the Yorkshire regiments. He was to present himself at the Battalion Orderly Room with a large pair of shears.
The new-army battalions were as anxious to be regimental as the line battalions. It once happened in France that a 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 talked for a bit he asked the senior officer present: ‘Do you know why I ordered that drink from the mess sergeant?’ The Welch Fusilier said: ‘Yes, you wanted to see if we remembered about Albuhera.’ The Royal Fusilier answered: ‘Well, 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. It was then decided that henceforth and for ever the officers of each regiment were honorary members of the other’s mess, and the N.C.O.’s the same.
Perhaps the most legendary item was Thomas Atkins. He was a private soldier in the First Battalion who had served under Wellington in the Peninsular War. It is said that when, many years later, Wellington at the War Office was asked to approve a specimen form for military attestation, he had ordered it to be amended from: ‘I, Private John Doe of the blank regiment, do hereby, etc.,’ to ‘I, Private Thomas Atkins of the Twenty-third Foot, do hereby, etc.’ And now I am going to spoil the story, because I cannot for the life of me remember what British grenadierish conduct it was that made Wellington remember. And so here ends my very creditable (after eleven years) lyrical passage.
I was, as a matter of fact, going on to St. David’s Night. To the raw leeks eaten to the roll of the drum with one foot on a chair and one on the mess table enriched with spoils of the Summer Palace at Pekin. (They are not at all bad to eat raw, despite Shakespeare.) And to the Royal Goat with gilded horns that once leapt over the mess table with the drummerboy on its back. And Major Toby Purcell’s Golden Spurs. And Shenkin Ap Morgan, the First Gentleman of Wales. And ‘The British Grenadiers,’ the regimental march-past. I was going to explain that British grenadiers does not mean, as most people think, merely the Grenadier Guards. It includes all regiments, the Royal Welch among them, which wear a bursting grenade as a collar and cap-badge to recall their early employment as storm troops armed with bombs.
In the war the Royal Welch Fusiliers grew too big; this damaged regimental esprit de corps. Before the war there were the two line battalions and the depot; the affiliated and flash-less territorials, four battalions recruited for home service, could be disregarded, in spite of their regular adjutants. The Third Battalion, which trained at the depot, was a poor relation. Now more and more new-army battalions were added (even a Twenty-fifth Battalion was on service in 1917, and was as good a battalion as the Eighth). So the regiment (that is, consensus of opinion in the two line battalions) only tentatively accepted the new-army battalions one by one as they proved themselves worthy, by service in the field. The territorials it never accepted, 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 was known, had offered violence to its officers; the commanding officer, a regular, had not cared to survive that day. Even the good work that these battalions did later in Palestine could not cancel this disgrace. The remaining territorial battalion was attached to the First Division in France early in 1915, where, at Givenchy, it quite unnecessarily lost its machine-guns. Regimental machine-guns in 1915 were regarded almost as sacred. To lose one’s machine-guns before the annihilation of the entire battalion was considered as bad as losing the regimental colours would have been in any eighteenth or nineteenth-century battle. The machine-gun officer had congratulated himself on removing the machine-gun bolts before abandoning the guns; it would make them useless to the enemy. But he had forgotten to take away 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 the British trenches ever since.
As soon as we arrived at the depot we Special Reserve officers were reminded of our great good fortune. We were to have the privilege of serving with one or the other of the line battalions. In peace-time a candidate for a commission in the regiment 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 he had to have a guaranteed independent income that enabled him to play polo and hunt and keep up the social reputation of the regiment. These requirements were not insisted on; but we were to understand that we did not belong to the ‘regiment’ in the special sense. To be allowed to serve with it in time of war should satisfy our ambitions. We were not temporary officers, like those of the new army, but held permanent commissions in the Special Reserve battalion. We were reminded that the Royal Welch considered themselves second to none, even to the Guards. Representations had been made to the regiment after the South African War, inquiring whether it was willing to become the Welsh Guards, and it had indignantly refused; such a change would have made the regiment junior, in the Brigade of Guards, even to the Irish Guards only so recently formed. We were warned that while serving with a line battalion we were none of us to expect to be recommended for orders or decorations. An ordinary campaigning medal inscribed with a record of service with the battalion should be sufficient reward. Decorations were not regarded in the regiment as personal awards, but as representative awards for the whole battalion. They would therefore be reserved for the professional soldiers, to whom they would be more useful than to us as helps to extra-regimental promotion. And this was what happened. There must have been something like two or three hundred Special Reserve officers serving overseas. 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 those who happened to be sent to new-army battalions or other regiments, we remained undecorated. I can only recall 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. 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 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, after heavy fighting at Bois Grenier in December, was again all but annihilated at the Aubers Ridge and Festubert in the following May, and again at Loos in September, when the one officer-survivor of the attack was a machine-gun officer loaned 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 Bullecourt in the spring fighting of 1917. 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 was never more than eight hundred. After each catastrophe the ranks were filled up with new drafts from home, with the lightly wounded from the previous disaster returning after three or four months’ absence, and with the more seriously wounded returning after nine months or a year.
In the First and Second Battalions throughout the war it was not merely the officers and non-commissioned officers who knew their regimental history. The men knew far more about Minden and Albuhera and Waterloo than they did about the fighting on the other fronts or the official causes of the war.