Explore "Goodbye to all That" by Robert Graves on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I USED to congratulate myself on having quite blindly chosen the Royal Welch Fusiliers, of all regiments in the army. 'Good God! ' I used to think. 'Suppose that when the war broke out I had been living in Cheshire, and had applied for a commission in the Cheshire Regiment. ' How ashamed I should have been to find in the history of that regiment - the old Twenty-second Foot, just senior in the line to the Royal Welch, the Twenty-third - that it had been deprived of its old tide 'The Royal Cheshires' as a punishment for losing a battle. (This was a quite unhistorical libel, but we all believed it.) Or how lucky not to have joined the Bedfords, who were making a name for themselves in this war, but were still called 'The Peacemakers'; for they had only four battle-honours on their colours, none more recent than the year 1711, and we misquoted their regimental motto as: 'Thou shalt not kill! ' Even the Black Watch had a stain on its record; and everyone knew about it.
If a Tommy of another regiment went into a public bar where men of the Black Watch were drinking, and felt brave enough to start a fight, he would ask the barmaid not for 'pig's ear', which is rhyming-slang for beer, but for a pint of 'broken square'. Then belts would be unbuckled.