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.