Lancers, Fusiliers, Rats...The ongoing glory of the British regiment

National Review, April 21, 2003

WHEN the British, over 40,000 strong, arrived in the Persian Gulf they brought more than troops, hardware, support staff, and supplies. There was history, too, in their baggage. One need look no further than the names of just some of the units now deployed in the war—storied regiments with lineages that stretch back through the centuries, from Kuwait to Normandy, the Somme, the Crimea, and often far past. The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (the successors of a regiment that served in Afghanistan, but in 1879-80) are in the Gulf for the war against Saddam, and so to pick out but a few more, are the Black Watch (whose battle honors include, ahem, a "'successful action" in Brooklyn. N.Y.. against one George Washington), the Life Guards (who first saw action in 1685), and that enduring symbol of Churchill's defiance and determination, the Parachute Regiment.

Each British regiment usually specializes in a specific type of soldiering. There are, for example, artillery, infantry, armored, and engineering (the "sappers") regiments—but when they go to war they are joined together in larger formations, "much like," a brigadier explained to me, "the way in which the different sections. woodwind, strings, and so on, are combined to make up an orchestra." This orchestra is one that often reprises the past: Much of the move across the sands towards Basra has been led by formations grouped together into the 7th Armoured Brigade, a unit that still wears the insignia of the "Desert Rat," that strange scrawny rodent that became a symbol of strange scrawny Monty's World War II triumphs in North Africa.

British history, it seems, is not ready to end quite yet. Who would have thought it? When, more than 20 years ago, the "task force," Margaret Thatcher's marvelous makeshift armada, returned from its Falklands victory to cheers, tears, and Union Jacks on the quayside, Brits were told that it was. at last, goodbye to all that. The curtain had fallen, chaps, and there was no time for an encore. The rascally, glittering, wicked, and glorious age of empire was finally done, finished, buried, and anathematized—exchanged for the obligations of a grayer, more sober era.

And so, it seemed, was the British military. The downsized heirs of Kipling's rough-and-tumble conquistadors were destined now for the shrunken campaigns of a mid-sized European power, fighting budget cuts at home, terrorists in Belfast, and boredom in West Germany as they waited, and watched, and waited some more for the Red Army that never came.

After the Wall came down, so did the money that the U.K. was prepared to spend on its military. A defense "review," carrying the sort of bland. vaguely threatening name—"Options for Change"—that is more McKinsey & Co. than Sandhurst, saw the size of the army reduced by a little under one-third; to not much more than 100,000 men. Regiments were merged or disbanded, often with startlingly little sentiment. To take just one example, the 16th/5th Lancers, a regiment with roots that stretched back over 300 years, led the way into Iraq in February 1991, yet within two years found its proud name on the scrap pile, lost in a merger with little patience for the past.

Yet, somehow, the past has endured, taught in every recruit's basic training and nourished by a system that is the British army's greatest strength: the regiment. To borrow the words of Field Marshal Wavell, "The regiment is the foundation of everything." The concept of the regiment stems from the fact that recruitment was once organized on a local basis, but its survival as an institution owes a great deal to one crucial psychological insight: Men may enlist to serve their country, but they will fight hardest to protect their friends. Most British soldiers spend their entire career within the same regiment—over the years it becomes their principal source of friendship, their clan., their community, almost a surrogate family.

This sense of community is intensified still further by the British army's perception of itself as a caste set somewhat apart from the rest of society. Currently the army is, as it has been for much of British history, made up entirely of volunteers. The notion of the citizen soldier has been rejected in favor of the creation of a smallish force of highly trained professionals. This professionalism is a source of enormous pride to the troops, something Donald Rumsfeld may have discovered if he paid heed to Sgt. McMenamy of the Queen's Royal Lancers in early March. After hearing misinterpreted reports that the defense secretary was considering either leaving the Brits behind or giving them a secondary role in the coming conflict, the sergeant (described by the London Times as an "intimidating figure") was quoted as saying: "We are second to none, so it's a bit cheeky to suggest we can't be trusted to fight in the front line." ("A bit cheeky," let's be clear, is a classic example of British understatement.)

Like any community, the regiment has its own institutional memory that, added to the shared experience of highly intensive training and active duty, binds together the current generation and develops a sense of collective identity far more effectively than abstract notions of patriotism ever could. Visit the head- quarters of a British regiment, and there will almost certainly be a museum dedicated to its past campaigns; dine in its officers' mess and you will, in all probability, eat amid the portraits and the heirlooms of those who came before—silver from India, perhaps, or a tattered banner from one of Napoleon's lost legions.

Even the regiments that have been merged or amalgamated away into bureaucratic oblivion still manage to live on in the souls of their successors. Take the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, which is now with the Desert Rats in Iraq. Its men celebrate their regimental forebears—the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, the Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers, the City of London Regiment, and the Lancashire Fusiliers—on four separate days each year (for Gallipoli, Normandy, Albuhera, and Minden). These honored ancestors are the insistent ghosts of countless past glories, and it would not do to let them down.

Today's warriors, the latest in a long line of British expeditionary forces, as they march through a dusty landscape not so different from the battlefields of Victoria's old empire, are fighting for the honor of their clan, for its past, and for its totems. For some of the men, a former captain in the Irish Guards told me, it's a little "like playing for a famous football team." And would a little scrap of cloth bearing the caricature of a rat really mean something to those who wore it? "Oh yes," he said. Another officer agreed, particularly for those who fought together as Desert Rats in the last Gulf War, but stressed that much of the attention on that famous rodent has been a media creation. a hook to catch the attention of the wider British public, to whom the name of Monty's legendary army will mean much more than the history of any one regiment.

But to the soldiers themselves, it is their regiment that counts the most—not the Desert Rats. It should come as no surprise that Lt. Col. Tim Collins of the Royal Irish, when he spoke to his troops about the conduct that would be expected of them as they prepared to fight in Iraq, chose to emphasize the duty they owed their regiment: Cruelty or cowardice, he warned, could "harm the regiment or its history." And nothing could be worse than that.

It's early yet in this war, but somehow I don't think that Lt. Col. Collins will he disappointed.