In the following pages I have endeavoured to give a brief description of the various actions the names of which are emblazoned on the colours and appointments of the regiments in the British army. So far as I have been able, I have shown the part that each individual corps has played in every engagement, by appending to the account a return of the losses suffered. Unfortunately, in some cases casualty rolls are not obtainable; in others, owing to the returns having been hurriedly prepared, and later corrections neglected, the true losses of regiments do not appear. The whole question of the award of battle honours abounds in anomalies. Paltry skirmishes have been immortalized, and many gallant fights have been left unrecorded. In some cases certain corps have been singled out for honour; others which bore an equal share in the same day's doings have been denied the privilege of assuming the battle honour. In some campaigns every skirmish has been handed down to posterity; in others one word has covered long years of fighting. Mysore, with its one honour, and Persia, with four, are cases in point. In some instances honours have been refused on the plea that the headquarters of the regiment was not present in the action; in others the honour has been granted when but a single troop or company has shared in the fight. There are regiments whose colours bear the names of battles in which they did not lose a single man; others have suffered heavy losses in historic battles which are as yet unrecorded. At Schellenberg, for example, Marlborough's earliest victory, and one unaccountably absent from our colours, the losses of the fifteen regiments engaged exceeded the total casualties of the whole army in the campaign in Afghanistan from 1879 to 1881, for which no less than seven battle honours were granted.