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.