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.