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To: DesertRhino

They’re Coldstream Guards.

If they had laid a finger on her, they would have been drummed out of the Regiment for dishonouring it. I mean that literally, the ceremony and everything, even without a Court Martial. Banished to a lesser Regiment.

Sometimes it means being publicly humiliated by allowing yourself to be beaten up by a “slip of a girl”.

Sometimes it means “Birkenhead Drill”. These are the people who invented that, go look it up. That was the 73rd Regiment of Foot, who have had a rivalry with the Coldstream Guards since Waterloo.

I notice that her husband, when he added his 2c, got his nose bitten off in the course of being rendered hors de combat. They were... upset.. at having to take this from her. But they didn’t have to take it from him.


48 posted on 09/16/2009 12:17:16 AM PDT by Zoe Brain (Rocket Scientist, Naval Combat System Architect)
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To: Zoe Brain
They’re Coldstream Guards.

If they had laid a finger on her, they would have been drummed out of the Regiment for dishonouring it. I mean that literally, the ceremony and everything, even without a Court Martial. Banished to a lesser Regiment.

Sometimes it means being publicly humiliated by allowing yourself to be beaten up by a “slip of a girl”.

Sometimes it means “Birkenhead Drill”. These are the people who invented that, go look it up. That was the 73rd Regiment of Foot, who have had a rivalry with the Coldstream Guards since Waterloo.

I notice that her husband, when he added his 2c, got his nose bitten off in the course of being rendered hors de combat. They were... upset.. at having to take this from her. But they didn’t have to take it from him.

Zoe, Thanks for explaining that. How that all went down makes sense now.

I did not know what the "Birkenhead Drill" was, so I looked it up:

On 26 February 1852 ... There were not enough serviceable lifeboats for all the passengers, and the soldiers famously stood firm, thereby allowing the women and children to board the boats safely. Only 193 of the 643 people onboard survived, and the soldiers' chivalry gave rise to the "women and children first" protocol when abandoning ship, while the "Birkenhead Drill" of Rudyard Kipling's poem came to describe courage in face of hopeless circumstances.

51 posted on 09/16/2009 6:42:33 AM PDT by Screaming_Gerbil (The light at the end of the tunnel might be a muzzle flash...)
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