Brigadier Shawe, on the 1st of March, was compelled to proceed to Rangoon, in consequence of ill health. On the 8th of March, the portion of the army that was ordered to return by land, marched from Yandaboo, under the command of Brigadier Hunter Blair. It consisted of the EIGHTY-SEVENTH, the Governor-General’s body-guard, the Horse artillery, the Twenty-eighth, Thirty-eighth, and Forty-third Madras native infantry, and a battalion of the Madras pioneers. The column reached Prome, a distance of two hundred and ninety miles, on the 3rd of April, having had only one halting day, which was St. Patrick’s. The EIGHTY-SEVENTH remained at Prome, as the rear-guard of the army, until the arrangements for the final evacuation of the province was completed; on the 15th of April it embarked in the flotilla, and reached Rangoon on the 21st of that month. On the 27th of April was received the melancholy intelligence of the death of Lieut.-Colonel Matthew Shawe, C.B., which lamented event took place on board His Majesty’s sloop, “Slany,” Captain Thornton, on the 10th of that month, within one day’s sail of Penang, where he was buried with all military honors. He was much regretted as an excellent man, and an officer of conspicuous gallantry. His life was sacrificed to his zeal for active service, for such was the state of his health, on leaving Calcutta, that his medical advisers used every endeavour to dissuade him from proceeding to Ava.[9] Lieut.-Colonel Hunter Blair, became senior Lieut.-Colonel of the regiment, of which he assumed the command on the 1st of June, on the reduction of the staff in Ava. On the 1st of September, Lieutenant Edmund Cox, with twenty-eight flankers, proceeded to Ava, as escort to the envoy, they being the first British soldiers who had visited that capital. An order was received at Rangoon, on the 16th of October, directing that in consequence of the intended return of the EIGHTY-SEVENTH to England, the men should be permitted to volunteer for the Forty-fifth regiment, also in garrison: one hundred and twenty-three men availed themselves of this offer. On the 22nd of October, the head-quarters embarked for Calcutta, which they reached on the 16th of November, and were joined by the rest of the regiment on the 24th of that month. Besides those already named, the regiment had to regret the death (in Ava) of two old and much valued officers, Captain Peter Benson Husband and Surgeon Alexander Leslie; and of Lieutenant Nicholas Milley Doyle, and Ensign Richard Loveday, two most promising young men, who were drowned in the Irrawaddy, and of above one hundred and eighty non-commissioned officers and soldiers, chiefly from dysentery. After the return of the regiment from Ava, it had the honor of being reviewed at Calcutta by General Lord Combermere, G.C.B., Commander-in-chief in India, and inspected by Major-General Robert Alexander Dalzell, afterwards the Earl of Carnwath.