It will be the end of an era when the last British general officer hands over command and leaves the North, writes Fionnuala O'Connor.
WILL ANYONE notice? On January 1st when the last general officer commanding British troops in Northern Ireland hands over to a mere brigadier, crowds will not cry or cheer in the streets. Like so much else in the past 10 years, this is a change only the most nerdish can invest with passion. But then British army history in Ireland is long and complicated.
The North is a special case because of what happened this last half-century. Until 1969, indeed for a year afterwards, Northern Catholics held on to gratitude that British soldiers had replaced Protestant police and part-time B Specials.
Until they became the blunt instrument of Stormont, of unionist government security policy, conviction lingered that the British army was somehow impartial, above bigotry. Being a British soldier was not intrinsically bad to Catholics, nor even alien.
It did not mean what unionists took it to mean. It did not mean declaring loyalty to the state, meaning the Stormont of the day.
Tribal memory said the "military" in bygone days had stopped Orange marches and always offered gainful occupation as an alternative to starving. Some learned their soldiering in the queen's army then used their knowledge in the IRA of the 1920s and each successive decade.
Some went from the trenches to "Collins's army," one uniform exchanged for another. Redmond's call to defend small nations might have convinced a few but who knows how many more "joined up" from economic necessity and found they were treated better than at home, their Catholicism for the first time not a liability.
The Sunday morning sergeant major's shout of "RC to the right, CofE to the left, all other fancy religions fall in behind" was a culture shock.
Change only arrived comparatively recently. The propagandist who coined the "ballot-box and Armalite" slogan for the IRA shift that eventually took republicans into politics was Danny Morrison.
In the early 1990s he told this reporter (for a book on Catholic identity) his personal experience of how gradually British soldiers became targets for murder.
In the first years of the Troubles he often shared a bedroom with a soldier "courting" one of his sisters. (Two sisters married soldiers.) The teenage Morrison, whose father disliked his growing republicanism, lectured the bewildered visitors about Irish history.
One brother-in-law, as he became, stayed overnight occasionally until early 1971 - the year the IRA for the first time shot and killed a soldier.
Did the Irish State distort its own history by whiting out those who joined the army of the British state? Or is the history entirely understandable after a war of independence? In Northern Ireland, where perhaps more clarity might be expected, you still have to dig a little to find conflicting attitudes beneath the necessity to line up behind unionist or nationalist dogma - even now when dogma is not what it was.
Some will always want the last troops to "go home" to Britain, even though a number of the soldiers will always be Northern Ireland-bred and no matter how few are actually still in residence behind the walls of Lisburn's Thiepval barracks. Some need to know that soldiers are billeted in Northern Ireland - or at least are down on paper as billeted there - to confirm in perpetuity that the North is UK territory, though on another island. And yet unionist attitudes to British troops have swung wildly through the years, while military attitudes have combined bluff "holding the line" with enthusiasm for the techniques of a dirty war.
"The end of an era," said the departing Maj Gen Chris Brown this week, "we have had a GOC in Northern Ireland since partition but I am now superfluous and it is time to go." Perhaps aware that words like era, partition and superfluous might be considered loaded he had a soothing military term for the change.
His departure with 30 of his staff was a "draw down" made possible by political progress. The army had been supporting the police, which was no longer necessary. Neither Scotland nor Wales had a GOC, so Northern Ireland was "now in the same framework as any other part of the UK."
Most will note, if they notice at all, that Maj Gen Brown is off to Iraq, pointing out that many of the remaining soldiers based in Northern Ireland will likewise be stationed in Afghanistan. As with troops based elsewhere in the UK.
Nobody said much in response, as you would hope. Unionists anxious about the closure of successive northern British army barracks can relish the symbolism of a post-Troubles garrison twice the size of the pre-1969 one, at least on paper. Whatever its real size at any particular moment. republicans whose fight was to "send the soldiers home" have nothing to relish, except peaceful if lacklustre reality. The troops, theirs and the British, are off the streets.