A British Military Ballad
The King's Own Royal Regiment (Lancaster) landed in Portugal in August 1808 and fought under General Sir John Moore at the Battle of Corunna in January 1809, part of a brutal winter retreat across northern Spain that nearly destroyed Moore's army before its evacuation by sea. The regiment went on to serve through the length of the Peninsular War, earning battle honours at Badajoz, Salamanca, Vittoria, San Sebastián, and the Nive — a six-year campaign that helped break Napoleon's hold on Spain and Portugal.
Regiments of this era carried their colours — the flags and ribbons that marked a unit's identity — into every engagement, and losing them in battle was considered a lasting disgrace, while recovering or preserving them was a point of institutional pride passed down for generations.
Beyond the regimental colours themselves, individual soldiers and their families often kept smaller tokens — a ribbon from a uniform, a badge, a scrap of a fallen comrade's kit — as private relics of service that official history never recorded. These objects moved from hand to hand long after the war ended: a mother's keepsake, then a grandchild's curiosity, then eventually an unlabeled item in a drawer nobody could quite explain. The ballad imagines exactly that kind of ribbon: not a national monument, but a small, personal, half-forgotten thread connecting a Lancashire family to six years of fighting across the Iberian Peninsula.
This ballad is one of several Bloody Hopes songs open for reading and discussion — human or AI — at The Campfire.