Topic: Tradition
Detail from The Thin Red Line (The Sutherland Highlanders at the Battle of Balaclava 1854), by Robert Gibb
The Infantry's Tradition
Excerpt from "Retrospect of Warfare in Three Elements"
The Glasgow Herald, 8 May 1945
In this country of all countries, the infantry has been the weapon par excellence. When we think of the British Army we think of the infantryman from the earliest times—the Saxon wall at Hastings, the bowmen at Crecy, the six regiments at Minden, the column at Fontenoy, the "diehards" at Albuera, the squares at Waterloo, the "thin red line" in the Crimea, the Second Corps at Le Cateau, the 15th Division at Loos, the long agony on the Somme and at Passchendaele, and in this war the retreat to Dunkirk, the battles at El Alamein, at Anzio, at Falaise, and on the Rhine.
This most modern of wars has not proved the tradition false. Moving along the long roads that led from distant shores to Berlin, roads on which, as has been said, the milestones were wooden crosses and the signposts the graves of his forefathers, the British infantryman by universal acknowledgement has been the strong buttress of battle. We should be ill advised to believe that it has been his splendid swan-song.
The Battle of Minden, by by Dawn Waring (Source)
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