It has been my object to write this book as far as possible on the lines of a biography, and by quotations from regimental sources of information to let the Royal Irish describe their doings in their own words. In the wars of William III. and of Anne this was comparatively easy, for though the regiment has preserved no official records for the 17th and 18th centuries, during the first thirty years of its existence it produced four military historians, three of them officers, one a sergeant. Brigadier-General Kane, Captain Robert Parker, and Sergeant John Millner have left books, and Brigadier-General Robert Stearne a manuscript journal describing the events they witnessed. Unfortunately they all wrote for a public far more concerned in the general results of a battle or a siege than in the doings of an individual regiment; and though they gave excellent accounts of an engagement, they failed as a rule to describe the part played in it by the men under their command. Whether their laconic style was due to modesty--for the three officers were all distinguished soldiers--or to want of descriptive power, it is impossible to say, but the fact remains that they have bequeathed to their successors in the Royal Irish accounts singularly deficient in regimental detail. In some cases they failed to record the casualties among the XVIIIth in a battle or a siege, and when they remembered to do so, often forgot to give the names of killed or wounded officers. Their indifference to the losses of the lower ranks is characteristic of all armies in the 17th and 18th centuries; and they tell us nothing of the deaths by disease, or of the drafts of recruits by which the waste of war was made good. Sergeant Millner is equally unenlightening. If, instead of devoting his undoubted talents to the production of a sort of Quartermaster-General’s diary of Marlborough’s movements, he had written an account of the life of the regiment on active service, he would have left behind him a very interesting book, instead of a comparatively dull one.
The adventures of the XVIIIth in the campaign of 1745 in the Low Countries were described in the journal of one of the officers, whose name has not been preserved. For a hundred years the regiment produced no more authors, until, after the end of the first Chinese war, Lieutenant A. Murray wrote an interesting account of the Royal Irish in that campaign.