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