In the following pages I have endeavoured to give a brief description of the various actions the names of which are emblazoned on the colours and appointments of the regiments in the British army. So far as I have been able, I have shown the part that each individual corps has played in every engagement, by appending to the account a return of the losses suffered. Unfortunately, in some cases casualty rolls are not obtainable; in others, owing to the returns having been hurriedly prepared, and later corrections neglected, the true losses of regiments do not appear.

The whole question of the award of battle honours abounds in anomalies. Paltry skirmishes have been immortalized, and many gallant fights have been left unrecorded. In some cases certain corps have been singled out for honour; others which bore an equal share in the same day's doings have been denied the privilege of assuming the battle honour. In some campaigns every skirmish has been handed down to posterity; in others one word has covered long years of fighting. Mysore, with its one honour, and Persia, with four, are cases in point. In some instances honours have been refused on the plea that the headquarters of the regiment was not present in the action; in others the honour has been granted when but a single troop or company has shared in the fight. There are regiments whose colours bear the names of battles in which they did not lose a single man; others have suffered heavy losses in historic battles which are as yet unrecorded. At Schellenberg, for example, Marlborough's earliest victory, and one unaccountably absent from our colours, the losses of the fifteen regiments engaged exceeded the total casualties of the whole army in the campaign in Afghanistan from 1879 to 1881, for which no less than seven battle honours were granted.

Esprit de corps is the keystone of the discipline of the British army, and the regimental colours are the living symbol of that esprit de corps. It is to their colours that men look as the emblems of their regimental history, and on those colours are—or should be—emblazoned the names of all historic battles in which the regiment has been engaged. A soldier knows—or ought to know—the history of his own regiment, but the moment arrives when his curiosity is piqued, and he wishes to learn something about a corps which has fought side by side with his own. Perchance curiosity may be excited as to the reason why Copenhagen appears on the appointments of the Rifle Brigade, and Arabia on the colours of the York and Lancaster; or how it comes about that Dominica is alone borne by the Cornwalls and Pondicherry by the Dublin Fusiliers. I have made no attempt to deal exhaustively with the subject; that would be beyond my powers and would open up too wide a field. I have therefore touched but lightly on those campaigns, such as the Peninsular and Waterloo, which are familiar to everyone in the least conversant with the history of his country, and have dwelt in more detail with those wars which are less well known. Memories are short. Already the South African War has been effaced by that titanic struggle between Russia and Japan. How, then, can the ordinary man be expected to carry in his mind even the rough outline of the Defence of Chitral, an episode which rivals Arcot in the heroism of its few defenders, or of Mangalore and Corygaum, which were in no way inferior in point of steadfast gallantry. When I read of the efforts made to insure the regular supply of jam during the South African War, my mind turns to Chitral, where the daily ration for six long weeks was one pound of flour a day, rice and meat being issued only on the doctors' orders, the one antiseptic available being carbolic tooth-powder! Or I think of Mangalore, which capitulated after Campbell had cut up his last horse and served out his last ration of flour. Yet I know that the men who defended Mangalore were in no way the superior of those who "muddled through" in South Africa, and that these were in no way inferior to the men who drove the French out of Spain. There were complaints of the stamp of recruits two centuries ago, as there are to-day. "The men you send me," wrote Grey from Martinique, "are not fit to bear arms." "I know not which are worse, officers or men," wrote Moore. "Send me men, not boys," wrote Sir Colin Campbell from India. Yet the boys who were not fit to bear arms captured the West Indies from the French; the worthless officers and men traversed Spain and held Napoleon's veterans in check at Corunna while their leader lay dying; and the boys in Sir Colin's regiments helped to restore peace in India.

Does the nation realize the calls it has made upon the army, or what oceans of blood have been shed owing to the vacillation and parsimony of successive Ministries? Three times have we captured the West India Islands; twice have our troops taken the Cape of Good Hope; three times have our armies marched from sea to sea in Spain; and there are few towns of importance in the Low Countries which have not been captured more than once by British troops. Conquests have been restored at the conclusion of a war in the full knowledge that on the outbreak of fresh hostilities those same conquests would have to be freshly undertaken and more lives sacrificed. Armies hastily reduced on the conclusion of a spurious peace had to be as hastily improvised on the renewal of war. Officers have been censured, broke, and shot if they have not performed prodigies with raw, untrained recruits. Uncomplainingly, all ranks went forth to die, eager only to uphold the honour of their Sovereign, of their regiments, and of their country.

I have not confined myself to the honours which appear only on the colours of British regiments, but have included all which have been granted to any corps which bears allegiance to our King. Some of the noblest feats of arms have been achieved by a few British officers at the head of a handful of Indian troops. At Mangalore and at Lucknow the sepoy regiments fought no less gallantly than the British corps which bear the same battle honour. The despatches of Colonel Campbell and of Sir John Inglis bear testimony to this fact; but at Seedaseer, Saugor, and Seetabuldee, at Corygaum, Arrah, and Kahun, and last, but by no means least, at Chitral, the sepoys had no British soldier to stiffen the defence. Yet there was no wavering. So long as the fighting races of India show the devotion to their officers and their loyalty to the Crown they have ever shown, we may smile at the frothy vapourings of the over-educated Bengalis, who have never furnished a single man for the defence of the country which they wish to emancipate from our rule. We read in the story of Chitral how the water-carrier, with his jaw smashed by a bullet, insisted as soon as his wound was dressed in taking more water to his Sikhs in the fighting-line. Is there not a story rife of a British regiment in the Mutiny which wished to recommend the regimental bheesti for a similar act of valour? There are few names amongst these battle honours around which stories of equal gallantry have not been woven. The memory of those deeds which men have dared, and in daring which they have gone forth to certain death, is the heritage not merely of those who serve under the colours, but of every man and woman of our race: Hardinge, rallying the men round the colours of the 57th at Albuera, with the now historic words, "Die hard, my men, die hard!"—a title that has clung to the regiment to this day. Luke O'Connor, then a colour-sergeant, holding high the colours of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers at the Alma, under which ten young subalterns had fallen, and he with bullet through the breast, refusing to leave his sacred charge. Souter, of the 44th, tearing the colours from their staff and wrapping them under his sheepskin coat, and so saving them, when 667 officers and men fell under the fierce onslaughts of the Afghans in the dim defiles of the Khurd Kabul Pass, one solitary survivor reaching the shelter of the mud walls, held by the 13th, at Jelalabad. Or those two boy heroes, Melville and Coghill, whose dead bodies were found in the bed of the Tugela River, hard by the colours they had died to save. Or Quentin Battye, the first of three brothers to fall in the "Guides," dying with the old tag on his lips: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."

These are the stories our colours have to tell, these the lessons the names upon them teach. Not merely gallantry in action—that is a small thing, and one inherent in our race. They teach of privations uncomplainingly borne, of difficulties nobly surmounted, of steadfast loyalty to the Crown, and of cheerful obedience to orders even when that obedience meant certain death. Such are the honours which have found an abiding-place on the colours of the British army.

I am aware that I possess few qualifications for the task I have undertaken, and I am also painfully aware that I have entirely failed to do justice to my theme. That failure would have been immeasurably greater had I not received the most valuable assistance from those far better qualified than I am to bring into relief the history of our army.

To these I would now venture to offer my most cordial thanks—to the Army Council, for some invaluable casualty returns, which I believe are now published for the first time; to the ever-courteous officials at the Record Office and in the libraries of the British Museum, the India Office, and the Royal United Service Institution, for the patience with which they have suffered my many importunities; last, but by no means least, to the many officers of regiments, British and Indian, who have so kindly given me unrecorded details of their regimental histories.

For the reproduction of the colours of "The Queen's" and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers I am indebted to the courtesy of the commanding officers of those two distinguished regiments. A close relationship exists between them. When Tangier and Bombay passed into our possession as the dowry of Queen Catharine of Braganza two regiments were raised as garrisons for our new possessions. The one proceeded to Tangier, and after some years of hard fighting, returned to England, to be known as "The 2nd Queen's." The other went to Bombay, and for two long centuries nobly upheld the honour of our name under the title of "The Bombay Europeans." On the transfer of the East India Company to the Crown the regiment appeared in the Army List as the 103rd Royal Bombay Fusiliers. Twenty years later, when regimental numbers were thrown into the melting-pot and the nomenclature of historic regiments changed, the Bombay Regiment became the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and as such worthily maintained its old reputation in South Africa. The Royal Scots and the Munster Fusiliers may claim seniority to the Queen's and the Dublins, but the battle honours on the colours I have selected cover the whole period with which I deal—from Tangier to Ladysmith, from Arcot to Lucknow.

I would, in conclusion, beg those—and they are many—whose knowledge of regimental history is far deeper than my own to deal gently with the many imperfections in this book—an unworthy tribute of homage to the incomparable heroism of the British soldier.

C. B. NORMAN.

January, 1911.

BATTLE HONOURS OF
THE BRITISH ARMY