It is recorded by Archibald Forbes in his admirable _History of the Black Watch_ that on the rescue of the guns General Dundas addressed the Highlanders saying, “Forty-second, the 11th Dragoons shall never wear the red plume on their helmets any more, and I hope the 42nd will carry it so long as they are the Black Watch.” It was this red plume or “hackle” that the gallant 42nd have worn on their feather bonnets to this day, and on June 4, 1795, upon the King’s birthday, it was first distributed. This was to prove the only bright episode in the retreat on Bremen. The numbers of the enemy increased daily, the British were not only in danger of defeat, but were in imminent peril of starvation, were also ill equipped for a campaign in the depths of winter, and throughout the march endured the tacit hostility of the peasantry on their line of route. “Day after day,” says Mr. Fortescue in his _History of the British Army_, “the cold steadily increased; and those of the army that woke on the morning of the 17th of January saw about them such a sight as they never forgot. Far as the eye could reach over the whitened plain were scattered gun-limbers, waggons full of baggage, stores, or sick men, sutlers’ carts, and private carriages. Beside them lay the horses, dead; here a straggler who had staggered on to the bivouack and dropped asleep in the arms of the frost; there a group of British and Germans round an empty rum-cask; here forty English Guardsmen huddled together about a plundered waggon.... Had the retreat lasted but three or four days longer, not a man would have escaped; and the catastrophe would have found a place in history side by side with the destruction of the Army of Sennacherib and with the still more terrible disaster of the retreat from Moscow.” Out of all the army, only the Highlanders endured the rigours of the weather and such awful privation with any success, losing not more than twenty-five dead. That for the time being concluded the operations of the Highland regiments on the Continent, for in October 1795 the Government decided to launch an attack directed against the ascendancy of the French Republic in the West Indies. CHAPTER IX WITH ABERCROMBY IN EGYPT (1801) Farewell to Lochaber, farewell to my Jean, Where heart-some wi’ her I ha’e mony a day been; For Lochaber no more, Lochaber no more, We’ll maybe return to Lochaber no more. Those tears that I shed they are all for my dear; And no for the dangers attending on weir; Tho’ borne on rough seas to a far distant shore, Maybe to return to Lochaber no more. _Highland Burial March._ To return to the main centre of operations is to be confronted with the great figure of Napoleon.