Sock It to 'Em, Argylls

It has less seniority (168 years) than any other Scottish regiment, and many of its "Highlander" troops come from Glasgow or London. Still, that has not prevented the British army's Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders from enjoying a reputation almost as fierce as that of the mountain lairds of ancient Scotland. Some of the kilted troops, in fact, especially when the skirling of the pipers is loudest, trace the beginning of the regiment to "the licking we gave the English at Bannockburn" in 1314, when Scotland won temporary independence. Last week Britain finally gained a revenge of sorts. As part of its military cutback, the Defense Ministry announced, one of Scotland's most famous military units will be permanently disbanded.

Elders & Bearskins. Originally separate regiments, the Argylls and Sutherland Highlanders were both formed in the late 1700s, when the Crown was anxious to quell the defiant mood of Scotland that had resulted in the Jacobite rebellion. Their language and manner, from the beginning, made them a strange breed among Britain's tough foot soldiers. On their first foreign tour, at the Cape of Good Hope, the Sutherland regiment showed up with three elders of the kirk in their ranks, piously sent part of their pay home to the missionary society.

Even weirder, of course, was their uniform--an affront to starched red coat propriety from the tops of their bearskin hats to the tips of their famous diamond-patterned Argyll stockings. In fact, these fineries, plus the tartan kilt, so effectively kept Englishmen from signing on with the regiment that Britain's adjutant-general at one point ordered it to adopt a uniform less "objectionable to the natives of South Britain."

There has never been anything objectionable, however, or timid either, about the style of Argyll and Sutherland fighting. The regiment became famous throughout the empire when a London Times correspondent in 1854 sent back a dispatch on "the thin red line" of Argylls, standing two deep, that withstood a Russian charge at Balaklava in the Crimean War. When the outnumbered troops started to move forward to fight it out hand to hand, their commander, General Sir Colin Campbell, halted them only by bellowing out: "Ninety-third! Ninety-third! Damn all that eagerness!"

Victoria Cross. The same eagerness crushed Indian mutineers at Lucknow in the Sepoy Rebellion in 1858. It scattered Nazi Germany's Afrika Korps in the Battle of El Alamein during World War II and earned the regiment the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military honor, for service during the Korean War. On its last assignment, helping to quell last year's Aden rebellion, the regiment displayed its typical bravado, marching to the strains of bagpipe music into the middle of the Arab-terrorized Crater district under the colorful command of Captain Colin ("Mad Mitch") Mitchell.

When the sad news about the Argylls became known, angry Scots immediately announced a drive to save the historic regiment, and one of the first men to sign their petition was the Duke of Argyll, Sir Ian Douglas Campbell, a descendant of the unit's traditional officer clan. But unless Whitehall recants--and it seldom does--the Argylls played their swan song as they piped themselves out of Aden.

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