https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3748417.html

I am hugely grateful to Wim Uyttebroeck, expert on the 1693 Battle of Landen aka Neerwinden, for flagging this up to me. Christian Cavenaugh, born in Dublin in 1667, ran an inn there and married her barman; but then he was unexpectedly conscripted into the Duke of Marlborough's army and disappeared from Ireland completely. Christian Welsh, as she now was, decided to go looking for him by dressing as a man and enlisting at the Golden Last (which incidentally has just been refurbished); it took her several years to track him down, and then several more years before an army doctor treating her after the Battle of Ramillies discovered that she had breasts (her secret had survived earlier treatment for a hip injury). In the meantime she had courted many women in male guise, while forbidding her husband to go near anyone else once she had found him.
Once the secret was out, she became a camp follower, ensuring logistics and provisions for her husband in particular and his comrades, and also unapologetically and frequently engaging in the looting of civilian property. Her long-lost first husband was eventually killed in action. She married twice more, ending her life as Christian Davies. When peace finally came she got a pension from Queen Anne and on 19 November 1717 was admitted to Chelsea Hospital as a Pensioner; she is recorded there as a "fatt, jolly-breasted woman [who] received several wounds in the Service in ye habitt of a man".
Her account really is an extraordinary document. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been attributed to Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe; but this seems very unlikely as he died eight years before it was published. (And also I think he would have written it more smoothly.) It's a combination of detailed military history of the wars, which has been fairly thoroughly checked out for accuracy and consistency of dates, and Christian's own personal history, which seems a lot more vulnerable to inaccuracy - to give the most blatant example, we are told that between the Battle of Aughrim, where her father was supposedly killed, and the Battle of Landen/Neerwinden, where she herself received her hip injury, she ran the Dublin tavern, got married, had three children, wondered where her husband was for a year, and finally enlisted. But the two battles were only two years apart, so it seems improbable. However, it's clear from the rubric of the book that she was delivering it as oral history, without documentation, to an unnamed scribe, who then quite possibly finessed the military history research.
I really want this to be largely true. It fully caught my attention in the second sentence, where she states that her father's landlord soon after her birth in 1667 was an Arthur White of Leixlip. As it happens, an Arthur White of Leixlip, born in 1611, was the son of my 7x great-grandfather Sir Nicholas White and brother of my 6x great-grandfather Charles White/Whyte (therefore my 7x great-uncle, if you're counting). There is evidence to suggest that my Arthur White died before 1648; but he may well have had a son or a nephew of the same name, or Christian may be wrong about the dates. The coincidence seems a bit too good to ignore. (Especially since, as Cailtin White (no relation as far as I know) points out, a lot of her other Irish details are shaky.)
I was also struck by the local details regarding our part of Belgium. When she finally finds her husband in Breda, she is drinking a pint of "hougarde", ie the Hoegaarden blond beer which we still know and love today. After Ramillies, her secret is discovered while she is being treated for a skull wound at Meldert, which is the next village to Hoegaarden, very close to where B and U live. The bits about Flanders are very definitely written by someone who knew this part of the world. (The bits in Germany seem a bit vaguer - in particular the description of the Battle of Blenheim doesn't actually use the name "Blenheim" for it, which seems odd for the climactic battle of the earlier war.)
I've used she / her pronouns here, because that's clearly what Christian used, but she's equally clearly an early well-documented case of genderqueerness. I bet that she gave a lot of physical joy to the Dutch and Belgian women she courted, though they may have been puzzled that she did not go as far as most male soldiers would have done. (Of course, some of them may have known perfectly well, and been happy enough!) By her own account, supported by the existence of the Chelsea record, she was as effective (and brutal) as any other soldier in the army, and thrived living as a man.
And she was not alone - one of her early anecdotes is that a French officer who died in her parents' house in Ireland turned out to be a woman when she was laid out for burial. An appendix to the original 1740 book alleges that the dead French soldier had a device for easy urination standing up, which Christian then appropriated and used during her own military career. This seems perhaps a little too good to be true; but then so does the entire story.
Terry Pratchett must surely have known about this when he wrote Monstrous Regiment; in fact I would not be surprised if there is some direct borrowing (which was his usual MO), but I have not checked. You can access the original copy of the Life and Adventures here: https://books.google.be/books?id=IZ9CAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22The%20life%20and%20adven... ( )