It was a quick passage. After a clashing impact, the Black Watch broke the French column and scattered it in flight. Seeing the Highlanders eagerly pursuing, and in danger of being cut off by three squadrons of cavalry, General Moore ordered the pursuers to retire. It appears that, in the crash and roar of the battle, this order was lost upon the foremost pursuers, who were dealing death right and left, and they were not aware of what threatened until the French cavalry was thundering down upon them. It was so sudden that the Highlanders had barely time to retrieve their scattered state, and rally back to back. Thus, raising their fierce northern battle-cry, they fought against fearful odds, a small body of men surrounded on every hand. But even from this they emerged victorious, routing the very flower of the French cavalry. So it was that in one day this regiment won three brilliant victories, each one of which had seemed at first almost a forlorn hope. It must be remembered that the Royal Highlander has always been a perfect swordsman, terrible with his rifle, and deadly with his pistol. His strength is renowned in history. There have been men among them who have claimed no great superiority over their fellows from the fact of being able to twist a horseshoe, or drive a skeandhu up to the hilt in a pine log. Fatigue, hunger, thirst, the extremes of heat and cold--all these are with those men the mere commonplace foes of a Spartan existence--foes which have always found and left them silent, patiently contemptuous, where foes of flesh and blood would at once arouse them to anger of the grimmest kind. Perhaps no part of the world has seen the Black Watch in as true a light as the Peninsula. From all quarters of it their honours are drawn. They were with Moore at Corunna on that memorable occasion, when on a sudden he cried out to them: "Highlanders, remember Egypt!" With reference to this speech, and the moment it was delivered, tradition has clothed it with romance. At many a Highland fireside, when the eerie spirit sits in the glen and whispers round the lonely sheilings, it has been said by aged warriors, who had lived on in peace perhaps into the sixties, that, at those words, the men around him, who loved him best, saw, with the uncanny second sight of their race, a misty shimmering shroud enclosing their commander's form, portentous of his coming death. The words "Highlanders, remember Egypt!" referred to the occasion when, at Alexandria, Sir Ralph Abercromby being taken prisoner, and his captor being shot by a Royal Highlander, the regiment, though broken, continued to fight individually. It is no wonder that Sir John Moore, who had marvelled at their prowess, should exhort them, eight years later, at Corunna, to remember Egypt.