Changing Lifestyles : Budget Cuts Swallow Up Some Royal Regiments : The British army will merge units to save money. It means the end to the singular identities of some of history’s proudest infantries.

They’ll be playing “The Last Post,” the British version of “Taps,” for some of the most illustrious regiments in Her Majesty’s Army in the next couple of years.

Under new budget cuts announced by Defense Secretary Tom King, a dozen of the proudest infantry regiments in the British army will lose their singular identities--identities which often reach back through many generations and battles.

After weeks of bitter infighting in a nation where such traditions are part of the warp and woof of society, Britain’s top soldier, Gen. Sir John Chapple, said it was his “sad duty” to cut the number of infantry battalions from 55 to 41.

The reductions, to be accomplished over the next four years, will slash the British army from 156,000 to 116,000 men--the lowest force level since 1830--as part of NATO-wide defense budget cuts in the aftermath of the Cold War.

If there’s any military consolation in the drastic cuts, it is that no infantry regiment has been specifically deposed. Several, however, will lose battalions, and others will be amalgamated.

Thus, the Royal Scots--Britain’s oldest regiment, formed in 1633 during the Thirty Years War to fight the French--will be merged with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers; the Queen’s Own Highlanders with the Gordon Highlanders; the Cheshire Regiment with the Staffordshire Regiment; the Gloucestershire Regiment with the Duke of Edinburgh’s Royal Regiment, which fought in the American Revolutionary War; and the Royal Hampshire Regiment with the the Queen’s Regiment.

Such elite infantry units as the Foot Guards, the Royal Green Jackets and the Parachute Regiment were spared amalgamation.

While American soldiers are usually sent to whichever military units need replacements and are moved frequently in their careers without instilling any deep sense of unit identity and commitment, the British system is very different. Men are generally recruited from within designated geographical areas, and they and their officers spend most of their careers with the same regiment.

A regiment has its own special uniform and insignia; regimental mess silver; mascots and mottoes; its customs and history.

The Royal Hussars, one of those to be merged, are known as the “Cherrypickers” because of their bright red trousers and matching peaked cap. It sounds “The Last Post” at 9:50 p.m., 10 minutes earlier than other regiments, to commemorate the death at that time of the Earl of Cardigan, once its commander.

Another regiment treasures the battered trumpet that sounded the charge of the Light Brigade.

“A British regiment is a military family,” says historian John Keegan, “and like a family it commands deep loyalty. Regiments are not just pretty names. They represent real values, both to the fighting worth of the army and to the national heritage.”

Or as retired Gen. Ken Perkins points out: “You don’t really fight to the death for Queen and Country. You fight because you don’t want to let your regimental mates down.”

A crack regiment like the Grenadier Guards includes among its battle honors: Tangier, 1680; Namur, 1695; Blenheim and Gibraltar, 1704; the War of the Spanish Succession, 1706; Waterloo, 1815; the Crimea, 1854; Khartoum, 1898; the Boer War, 1899-1902; World Wars I and II, and with soldiers assigned to the Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) in the Falklands and Persian Gulf wars.

This is not the first time there have been such amalgamations in the British military, of course. Double-named armored cavalry regiments such as the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards, for example, are products of earlier amalgamations, as are most infantry regiments themselves.

Early in the last century, the 2nd Foot Regiment merged with the 31st Foot Regiment to form the Queen’s Royal (West Surrey) Regiment, which in turn amalgamated with the East Surrey Regiment in 1881 to become the Queen’s Royal Surrey in 1959, which combined with the Queen’s Own Buffs in 1966 as the Queen’s Regiment, which will now join up with the Royal Hampshire Regiment, which itself had an equally complex background.

The new names of the merged regiments have not yet been chosen but will be a matter for the members of the combined regiment to decide. In most cases, the titles will refer to the former regiments.

The most politically controversial of the new mergers is that of the Ulster Defense Regiment--which is heavily Protestant and serves in Northern Ireland--with the Royal Irish Rangers, which is 30% Catholic and 15% enlisted from the Irish Republic. Protestant leader Ian Paisley complained that the government had “caved in” and that Roman Catholics would take over the combined new regiment. But Defense Secretary King insisted: “This is in the interests of everyone.”

Among armored cavalry regiments, which fought as hussars at Waterloo, the Life Guards and the Blues and Royals--elite regiments of the Household Cavalry--will be amalgamated. This, according to palace sources, is much to the relief of Queen Elizabeth II, who was afraid one of the units might be dropped. These are the resplendent troops who canter by at the annual trooping of the color, but whose armored reconnaissance units also fought in the Gulf War.

Other armored cavalry units to be amalgamated are: the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards with the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, whose motto is: “We do not retreat”; the 16th/5th The Queen’s Royal Lancers with the 17th/21st Lancers, known as the “Death or Glory Boys” because of their death’s head cap insignia; and 13th/18th Royal Hussars with the 15th/19th The King’s Royal Hussars.

The renowned Gurkha Brigade of Nepalese troops will survive, but its numbers will be halved by 1997 when Britain leaves Hong Kong and the Chinese take over what has been the Gurkhas main outpost. Another question remains to be resolved: what will happen to the colonels-in-chief of the regiments, since the honorary title is often held by a member of the Royal Family.

The Princess of Wales, for instance, is colonel-in-chief of the Royal Hampshires; Princess Juliana of the Netherlands and Queen Marrethe II of Denmark are allied colonels-in-chief of the Queen’s Regiment.

And there’s a possible father-son confrontation because Prince Philip is colonel-in-chief of the Queen’s Own Highlanders, while his son, the Prince of Wales, holds the same position with the Gordon Highlanders.

In any case, most military men realized that Secretary King and Gen. Chapple were faced with hard choices, and as historian Keegan says: “It is entirely right to have preserved the regimental system because it is integral to the way the nation feels about the army and the army feels about itself.”