In all the after battles and actions, which resulted in the expulsion of the French from Spain, and their repeated defeats and ultimate rout on their native plains, the Seventy-first bore an honourable part, returning to Britain in 1814, richly laden with a harvest of glory. A short interval of peace soon recruited the “precious remnant” of the regiment, and so restored its strength as enabled it once more to go on foreign service. Ordered to embark for America, it was fortunately detained by tempestuous weather, and so privileged to win laurels on a mightier field. Napoleon having escaped from his honourable exile in Elba, by his presence in France, overturning the ricketty government of the Bourbon, involved that bleeding country in a universal war, since it brought down the combined wrath of Europe, whose allied armies now hastened to arrest and punish the ambitious man who had proved himself so dire a curse to Christendom. Upon the plains of Waterloo the die for empire was cast and lost. In that great battle the Seventy-first had a part, forming with the first battalion of the Fifty-second, and the second and third battalions of the Ninety-fifth, or Rifles—a light infantry brigade which sustained the charge of three regiments of French cavalry: one of cuirassiers, one of grenadiers-à-cheval, and one of lancers. It also withstood the shock of the grand final charge of the Old Imperial Guard, witnessing the discomfiture of these choice troops, so long the citadel of imperial strength, now reeling, broken, dying, dead—of whom, borrowing the words, it may well be said— “They never feared the face of man.” This great victory having ruined irretrievably the fortunes of Napoleon, the allied army, rapidly advancing, entered Paris a second time, and there dictated the terms of peace. The Seventy-first remained in France as part of the “army of occupation;” and whilst stationed at the village of Rombly in 1816, its soldiers were presented with the Waterloo medals by Colonel Reynell, who thus, addressing the regiment, said:—“These honourable rewards bestowed by your Sovereign for your share in the great and glorious exertions of the army of His Grace the Duke of Wellington upon the field of Waterloo, when the utmost efforts of the army of France, directed by Napoleon, reputed to be the first captain of the age, were not only paralysed at the moment, but blasted beyond the power of even a second struggle. [Illustration: WATERLOO 18^{TH} JUNE 1815. from 4.30 to 6.30 o’clock pm ] “To have participated in a contest crowned with victory so decisive, and productive of consequences that have diffused peace, security, and happiness throughout Europe, may be to each of you a source of honourable pride, as well as of gratitude to the Omnipotent Arbiter of all human contests, who preserved you in such peril, and without whose protecting hand the battle belongs not to the strong, nor the race to the swift.