[Daniel Defoe]
At a time when some thousands of women are living who did good service of various kinds about the front during the late war, the biography of our first eminent female soldier should be welcome. Not that she was the last, even in the eighteenth century. [...] But the fame of all these pales before that of Mrs. Ross. Possibly she owes a part of it to the distinction that her biography was, rightly or wrongly, attributed to Daniel Defoe, and that consequently it is included in printed colections of his works. But be that as it may, and whether her story was embroidered by some hackwriter or by the exuberant fancy of Mrs. Ross herself in the years of senile garrulity, there is a sufficient basis of facts in it to make her career of singular interest. [...] The campaigns of the British under William III. and Marlborough were fought in Ireland and Flanders. Neither of these countries is very remote from our own shores, and yet the short passage across the water, amid the corruption and mismanagement of those days, often signified misery, and even death, to the unfortunate "private centinel", as he was then called. [...] Sergeant Deane of the First Guards described his passage to Flanders as "hell in the forecastle [...]." These details are given to show that a woman needed some courage in those days to enlist and go on foreign service with a regiment. Enlist, however, Christian Ross did, being then the wife of one Richard Welsh, who, having imprudently got blind drunk in Dublin, woke up to find himself in Holland, a duly enlisted private in the Royal Regiment of Foot. Quite distracted at the loss of him, Christian Welsh, as she then was, trimmed her hair after the appoved masculine fashion, dressed herself as a man, and offered herself as a recruit to a regiment of foot [...]. This was in the year 1693, when King William was fighting the French in the Low Countries, Christian being then twenty-six years of age. From the Introduction by John Fortescue
Published by Peter Davies, London 1928 Text and Illustration © 1928 Peter Davies |