On attaining a strength of 780 men, chiefly by the zealous exertions of its original colonel, Allan Cameron of Errach, it was ordered on foreign service, and so, in 1799, joined the expedition destined to act against the enemy in Holland. There, placed in the fourth brigade under Major-General afterwards Sir John Moore, it was associated with the second battalion of the First Royals, the Twenty-fifth King’s Own Borderers, the Forty-ninth Foot, and the Ninety-second Gordon Highlanders. In all the actions which marked this brief and ineffectual campaign, the Seventy-ninth was worthily distinguished, and won the memorial thereof now borne upon its colours—“Egmont-op-Zee.”
In the Egyptian expedition of 1800, under Sir Ralph Abercromby, the Seventy-ninth was brigaded with the Second or Queen’s and the Fiftieth Regiments, commanded by the Earl of Cavan.
Having helped to the deliverance of Egypt from the yoke of France, it returned to England in 1801. Whilst at home it was increased by a second battalion raised in 1804, when the vindictive wrath of Napoleon, roused into madness by the defeat of his armies by the British in Egypt, had gathered a countless host around Boulogne, whence, looking across, he longed but once to set foot upon our shores, and then he hoped to blot us out from the map as a nation, and so satisfy the bitter hatred of years. Whilst the tempest of human passion stood arrayed in portentous awfulness on the other side of the Channel, the Seventy-ninth was with our troops who anxiously waited the result. Suddenly the spirit of the imperial dream was changed, and the armed multitude, melting away, reappeared with a real terror upon the devoted plains of Germany.
Allied with Napoleon, the Danes, in 1807, once more were pressed into a quarrel with Britain. A British armament appeared upon the coasts of Denmark. Our army, under Lieutenant-General Lord Cathcart, consisting of the first battalions of the 2d (Coldstream) and 3d (Scots Fusileers) Foot Guards; first battalions of the 4th, 7th, 8th, 23d, 28th, 32d, 43d, 50th, 52d (second battalion), 79th (Cameron), 82d, 92d (Gordon), and five companies of the first and second battalions of the 95th (Rifles), and several regiments of the King’s German Legion, comprising a total of 28,000, of which 17,000 were British, advanced upon Copenhagen, overcame all opposition, occupied the capital, arrested the enemy’s fleet, and having achieved this almost bloodless victory, baffled the deep-laid schemes of Napoleon, charged with our destruction.
CHAPTER XL.
“Though my perishing ranks should be strew’d in their gore,
Like ocean-weeds heaped on a surf-beaten shore,
Lochiel, untainted by flight or by chains,
While the kindling of life in his bosom remains,
Shall victor exult, or in death be laid low,