One effect of this speech – which, you will agree, reads very poorly by comparison with the other one – was that ever since I made it the Ninth have been familiarly known not as the ‘Ninth Spanish’ (their full title) but as the ‘Ninth Snails’. The Twentieth, too, whose full title is ‘The Conquering Valerian Twentieth’ are known to other regiments as the ‘Drunken Lions’; and when a man of the Fourteenth meets a man of the Second they are now expected to salute each other as ‘Comrade Backbone’. The French auxiliaries are always known as ‘The Ribs’.
