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. XII In 1916, when on leave in England after being wounded on the Somme, I began an account of my first few months in France. Unfortunately, I wrote it as a novel and I have now to retranslate it into history. I will give one reconstituted chapter: On arrival in France we six Royal Welch Fusilier officers went to the Harfleur base-camp near Havre. Later it was to become an educational centre for trench-routine, use of bombs, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, gas-helmets, and similar technicalities. But now we did a route-march or two through the French countryside and that was all, except for fatigues in Havre at the docks, helping the Army Service Corps unload stores from ships. The town was gay. As soon as we had arrived we were accosted by numerous little boys pimping for their sisters. ‘I take you to my sister. She very nice. Very good jig-a-jig. Not much money. Very cheap. Very good. I take you now. Plenty champagne for me?’ We were glad when we got orders to go up the line. But disgusted to find ourselves attached not to the Royal Welch Fusiliers, but to the Welsh Regiment.