The courage of countless generations

The most stirring sermon I ever heard was delivered by a company sergeant-major in the Black Watch to a cadre of young lance-corporals, barely 19 years old, who were about to experience their first deployment to Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Like an old-fashioned Presbyterian minister, he warned them of the dangers of the world, in this case roof-top snipers and stone-throwing rioters, and the temptation these presented to the unwary soul, in this case, as he put it, ‘to run like buggery’.

But they would not succumb, he said; indeed, they would lead their sections looking such dangers fearlessly in the face, because they were armed with a greater power — the red hackle, or feather, they wore in their khaki bonnets. The courage of countless generations before them, back to the battle of Fontenoy in 1745, had, he promised, imbued this symbol of the regiment with a steadfastness they would feel in their bones when the dustbin lids rattled and the petrol bombs exploded.

The text from which that sermon was drawn is now provided in definitive form by Victoria Schofield’s official history of the regiment, and the last one ever, as a consequence of its reduction in 2006 to a battalion within the Royal Regiment of Scotland. The book’s immediate military and regimental interest is obvious, but a wider value should also come from an exploration of those intangible factors that allow people to act beyond their normal capacity, and institutions to renew themselves beyond their natural lifespan.

Apart from creating a fabulous name and an internationally popular tartan, the birth of the Black Watch in 1743 marked the start of a military revolution. Although intended as a police force to keep insurrectionary Highlanders in check, the impact in battle of this ‘hardy and intrepid race of men’, as William Pitt termed them, encouraged the recruitment of more Highland regiments, and later of Irish units, who replaced continental mercenaries, transforming a European-style army into one distinctively British.