Dirty Shirts

A battalion is a sub-unit of a regiment. A regiment is a body of regular troops sharing a common corporate identity. A battalion (meaning roughly ‘battle formation’) might number anywhere between five hundred and a thousand personnel, and there might be one, or two, or three battalions to a regiment. It all depends on the time and the place.

In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in the last decade of its existence as such, there was a minimum of two battalions to each regiment, but it wasn’t quite that simple. For a start, a British regiment was not a tactical unit, but a family united by shared insignia and tradition rather than by organisational structure.

Each battalion lived its own life, largely independent of its sisters, regarding its own lieutenant colonel as its supreme regimental authority. Even when a higher formation was demanded, battalions were not grouped together according to regiment, as in other armies, but were joined together in brigades of unassociated battalions in marriages of geographical convenience. For instance: in 1914, the 1st Battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers was scattered across Burma. The 2nd Battalion was half the world away in Aldershot, where it was brigaded alongside battalions from English and Scottish regiments.

Each of these two units could and did claim to be the Munster Fusiliers, without mentioning that it was really only a battalion thereof. Each was the embodiment of the regiment.

There were three other bodies in Ireland claiming to be the 3rd, 4th and 5th Battalions of the regiment respectively. These featured on the Army List but were not factored into the army’s fighting strength. They upheld the regiment’s traditions, but they did not usually go out into the world and emulate on the battlefield the actions of the two ‘regular’ battalions. When the war came and the army vastly expanded, no new regiments were raised, but existing regiments were enlarged, so that a 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th Battalion of the Munsters were formed for foreign service.

In a four-battalion British brigade an untrained eye might spot few differences between one unit and the next, but it was in the differences that regimental identity was cherished.

A regiment jealously treasured its eccentricities as a mark of privileged individuality in an otherwise uniform world. Examples are legion, so much as to almost make nonsense of the very pretence at uniformity. The officers and warrant officers of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (not only insisting on spelling Welsh with a C) delighted in affixing their eighteenth-century hair ribbons to the collars of their twentieth-century tunics. But even if you factor their regimental goat into the reckoning, the oddities of the Royal Welch are not so remarkable.

The 4th Gurkha Rifles, a regiment of Nepalese mercenaries raised in the nineteenth century, proudly wore as their badge the three feathers that the Black Prince of Wales had taken from the blind King of Bohemia on the field of Crècy in 1346. Better yet, the Gurkhas also played the bagpipes and took careful precautions at dinner against the spread of Jacobitism (this was done by assiduously removing the water glasses from the mess table before the drinking of the Loyal Toast so that, when the wine glasses were raised, there might be no sly turning of ‘The King’ into ‘The King over the water’). Thus, even in the twentieth century, no officer of this largely Hindu regiment might surreptitiously toast the restoration of the Catholic Stuart monarchy.

The Gurkhas tended to dress rather soberly though, favouring – even at their dressiest – an elegant dark green that traced its origin to the forests of England’s American colonies. Even with their bagpipes the Gurkhas could never match the barbaric flamboyance of soldiers from the Scottish highlands, with their pleated kilts of hunting tartan and their white spats and their tall bonnets made of ostrich feathers.

If for pure outlandishness none of His Majesty’s regiments of the United Kingdom could match the Highlanders, none could be called sombre either. As late as 1914, there were regiments of Irish cavalry dressed, with romantic theatricality, as Polish and Hungarian horsemen, in costumes that had been first designed in the eighteenth century, when the fashion was all for something evoking the wild men of the great steppe. Headgear of sable or bearskin that added twelve or more inches to a man’s stature was commonplace.

Ireland’s four fusilier regiments wore towering caps of black sealskin or raccoon skin above their uniforms of scarlet and blue. This distinguished them from the other Irish line regiments in their spiked helmets with gleaming gilt fittings. None of this, by the way, was an Irish, or even a British peculiarity: every army in Europe had similar costumes. These were peacetime dress uniforms though.

Since the South African War (usually remembered as the Boer War and technically the Second Boer War) the British service uniform was a utilitarian khaki, and most of the world’s armies were likewise adopting military clothing in greys and browns and dull greens.

The older Irish regiments celebrated a seventeenth-century heritage, when they had held the kingdom for Good King Billy against the Catholic James. The younger regiments were largely Catholic themselves, but, whether Catholic or Protestant, Methodist or Presbyterian or, in the regiments of Indian army, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Buddhist, the real religion – the true unifying faith in the armies of the king and king-emperor – was ancestor worship.

A man coming to the end of his enlistment might be only twenty-five, but still he boasted of the deeds he had done a hundred years before. The fact that he himself had not been alive then was the merest technicality. His regiment had been there, and it had done mightily. As with the Prince of Wales’s feathers from Crècy, so with the Egyptian sphinxes and Napoleonic eagles: the trophies from those days were blazoned on badges, the names of the battlefields embroidered on flags, and the memories of the dead heroes toasted in overflowing cups.

Our fathers’ names are remembered. Let our deeds be great that our names too be so celebrated.

There were tales that grew in the telling. The portraits, red-coated and bewigged, listened from where they hung in the mess, and they didn’t mind.

A government might be cruelly heedless of a regiment’s pride, might abolish or amalgamate or disband at a whim. They might trample on tradition, but they could not erase history. Men died. Their successors lived, and soldiered on.

In 1914, the Royal Munster Fusiliers had been in existence for all of thirty-three years, yet they proudly held to two and a half centuries of history. Had it all been true, their earliest claimed ancestors, a band of English and Portuguese mercenaries guarding a trading post on the Bay of Bengal, might have looked down the centuries and wondered how their distant descendants could possibly have ended up, of all places, in Tralee.