Most of these are hundreds of years old, and the list of their battle honours is impressive, if not a little awesome. The honour of the regiment was no little thing. The name, also, of the regiment, was no little thing, but recent governments seem to have been determined to belittle these emotive names along with their traditions and record.
By chance I noticed in our last edition a Note from the British Embassy in Madrid. It mentioned a young bugler playing something plaintive at the Cenotaph. Apparently he is a British soldier, belonging to something called ‘The Rifles’; just that: ‘The Rifles’. I suppose this unimaginative and absurd title was the idea of some brain dead ‘expert’ at the War House. What could it mean? Was the article correct?
Yes it was. The Internet tells our researchers that ‘The Rifles’ is the term used to describe a new regiment formed by amalgamating several very well known regiments into one, and ‘thinking’ up a collective name. This was the practice started in the late Fifties and early Sixties. For instance, I joined The Royal Norfolk Regiment, 9th of Foot on September 4, 1958, but by the time I was demobbed this once glorious name had become The Royal Anglians by a merger of the Suffolks, the Essex, the Beds and Herts and I think the Cambridgeshire regiments. That is an awful lot of military history to be wiped out by some civil servant. ‘No longer civil and no longer a servant’ aptly said W. Churchill.
Well, ‘The Rifles’ turns out to be a light infantry group formed by making a coalition of the Devonshire and Dorset Light Infantry, the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire Light Infantry, the Light Infantry itself and the Royal Green Jackets. The first two were amalgams even before the amalgamation! The light infantry you will remember are famous for marching at high speed when on parade or on route marches – 160 paces per minute. The Spanish Foreign Legion, similar in many ways, does the same thing. You had to be remarkably fit to be a member of these light infantry units. But why, oh why, did the Ministry of War have to call the new group ‘The Rifles’? The name is ridiculous. You might just as well call the Royal Marines ‘The SMG’ because they are issued with sub-machine guns.
   The concept of British light infantry was the brain child of General Sir John Moore, who died during the battle of ‘Corunna’ (La Coruña) in 1809. He had established the original regiments at Shorncliffe in the early nineteenth century. If the eggheads in Whitehall had to find a name for their dreadful conmingling of these illustrious and resounding military groups, why didn’t they go the whole hog and dub them all by the name of one - The Light Infantry?