To the Colours!

Ist Battalion (The Lady Alison’s Own) Rotenburg Legion Britanique. A short and noble account of their raising; or the real, true, secret, inside story of the scandal that dare not speak its name.

It is a fact, universally acknowledged by no one at all save one, that a woman in possession of great wealth and intellect is in want of her own battalion. But such a thing is not easily obtained particularly when it is considered a rather unladylike plaything. Better that the fairer sex should content themselves with sowing, fashionable hairstyles, intrigue and gossip about puppies and butterflies and who is doing who behind the folly.

However, in a minority opinion of one to everybody else in the whole world, Lady Alison, recent widow of Prince Frederick of Hesse-Homburg (a man who knew a thing or two about millinery) had decided she wanted a battalion all of her own and she would bloody well get what she wanted. She did after all now possess the vast fortune that her father had paid in dowry to the Prince only last week.

Lady Allison’s father had made a fortune through the not quite illegal, but certainly morally questionable practice, of investing other people’s money in a complex web of financial products to do with the import and export of leeches, and both the avoiding and paying of tariffs and duties. No accountant in whole of Europe could quite grasp how the scheme made money as shipments of leeches transited around the globe, never unloading at any port visited. It was almost as if the leeches were on a sightseeing cruise of the rather more unattractive ports of Europe.

As the recently married but even more recently widowed Lady Allison sat in her drawing room reflecting on the socially imposed constraints upon female empowerment, the denial of education, the exclusion from the right to play an active part in the political, civic and military spheres of life, she resolved to take action. She would cast off the whale bone constraints of society and her corset and raise, outfit and deploy her own regiment.

Whilst still only a slip of a girl, Alison had embarked upon the most prestigious correspondence course in Military History, Strategy, Theory and Practice. She had read all the great texts on the art of war, written essay’s on long forgotten and obscure campaigns from history, formulated conceptual models to explain success and failure, commented on the latest developments in battlefield etiquette and dress in the professional journals of the age. All of this however, had to be accomplished through deception; one of her own principles of war and getting what she wanted. The Lady Alison had undertaken the course and corresponded with the greatest strategic minds of the day, in the guise of Kevin. She liked to think of her alias as Kevin the Clever, or Kevin the Capable or at least Kevin the Curious and so she set her considerable intellect to the problem of acquiring her own regiment.

She possessed the requisite funds for the regiment, she had spent considerable time browsing through the swatches of the finest uniform cloth Europe had to offer before settling on her preferred colour scheme and matching military accessories (it was vital to get the essential triangle of triceorn, gaiters and turn backs just so). The real difficulty lay in manpower recruitment to the ranks and finding a commander who could do her regiment justice in the field.

The first problem was solved through the granting of pardons to those criminals, bigamists, swindlers and ne'r-do-wells who would take up the Lady’s shilling. The second problem was proving rather more taxing and obstinate. None of the twenty eight interviews she had conducted so far had revealed a single applicant for command who had the slightest grasp of current operational planning concepts, the levels of war or even which end of a sharp piece of metal to actually point at the enemy.

There had been one who might, as a last resort, be able to fill the post of aide de camp purely by virtue of his family connections to the aristocracy of Europe; it would facilitate the passage of the regiment when on campaign if a viable logistical chain of run down hovels were established for the rank and file in addition to a steady supply of marzipan leeches and invitations to most fashionable balls and drawing rooms for the officers. But one worthy of overall command of her pride and joy continued to elude her. When suddenly the idea struck her, quickly forming the idea into a sensible research question she wondered under her breath, ‘Why didn’t she take command?’ She had after all fooled the greatest strategic minds in Christendom that she was a man called Kevin. She could simply write out the warrant of commission to Kevin, dress up in a pair of trousers and present herself to a rather dim, but likable well-connected second in command. With letters patent, a sealed commission and references from academic tutors that ran to several dozen pages of unintelligible drivel, she could easily fool him.

So it came to pass that the 1st Battalion (Lady Alison’s Own) Legion Britanique formed up in the sunshine of a late spring morning to await with anticipation the arrival of their new commander, Colonel Kevin. Presently a surprisingly modest in stature officer, in tight ankle length trousers and an incredible, if not unbelievable, moustache, marched up to Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable Percy Nil-Mandible. With a strong voice that fluctuated over several octaves, Kevin introduced herself and presented Percy with an impressive stack of paper, parchment and papyrus and formally assumed command of the battalion.

Percy was at once struck dumb by the imposing, if short and slight figure of Colonel Kevin. He found himself transfixed by the way the colonel’s moustache ends flopped about his face when he spoke, they appeared to tickle his little button nose, as if he were unused to their presence on his top lip. But surely anything that long and luscious would have taken years of manly grooming to cultivate. Percy knew at once that he was lost, he had found his Adonis, his Hector, his Achilles, he would forever be crushed by feelings of devotion to his new commander; unspoken, unacknowledged and surely unrequited.