1795
The Waal having become frozen so as to bear an army with its matériel, the Eighty-Eighth retired across the Leek, and the men, being exposed to the storms of a severe winter, endured great hardships. Robert Brown states in his Journal (7th January, 1795), “Nearly half the army are sick, and the other half much fatigued with hard duty; this is now the tenth night since any of us had a night’s rest.” The enemy continuing to advance in overwhelming numbers, the army retreated during the night of the 14th of January, through a country covered with ice and snow. On the subsequent days, numbers of the men, exhausted with fatigue and want of food, were unable to proceed, and many were frozen to death by the road-side. The Eighty-Eighth proceeded to Deventer, the capital of a district in the province of Overyssel; from whence the Regiment marched on the 27th of January, and, continuing its route for several days across a region of ice and snow, arrived in the Duchy of Bremen.
In April the Regiment embarked for England; after its arrival it went into quarters at Norwich, and proceeded to fill up its thinned ranks with recruits from Ireland.
In the autumn of 1795, the Eighty-Eighth was ordered to form a part of the expedition under Major-General Sir Ralph Abercrombie, destined for the reduction of the French West India Islands, and accordingly embarked under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel (now Viscount) Beresford. The disasters which attended the sailing of this expedition form a sad page in the naval history of England, and were not easily obliterated from the memory of the survivors. Various circumstances co-operated to delay the fleet, under Admiral Christian, till a very late period of the year, and it had scarcely quitted port when it encountered a hurricane by which it was completely dispersed. Many of the ships foundered at sea; some returned disabled into English ports; some were taken by the enemy, and a small part only were able to weather the storm and proceed to their original destination. The dispersion of the Eighty-Eighth Regiment was as complete as that of the fleet; two companies, commanded by Captain Trotter, were all that reached the West Indies; of the others, some were in the captured ships, some in those which put back to England, and a crazy transport, in which one division under Captain Vandeleur was embarked, was actually blown through the Straits of Gibraltar as far into the Mediterranean as Carthagena. Here the vessel was frapped together, and with great difficulty navigated back to Gibraltar, where the men were removed out of her, and on loosening the frapping the transport fell to pieces.
1796
The two companies which reached the West Indies, after being employed in the reduction of Grenada and the siege of St. Lucie, returned to England in the autumn of 1796, when the whole battalion was again assembled, and embarked under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Beresford for Jersey, where its numbers were once more completed to a full establishment, by recruits from Ireland.
1799
On the 1st of January, 1799, it sailed from Portsmouth for the East Indies, still commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Beresford, and arrived at Bombay 10th June, 1800.
1800
The next active service of the Eighty-Eighth was with the expedition which the government of India fitted out, under the command of Major-General Sir David Baird, in 1800, to co-operate with the army under Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercrombie, in the expulsion of the French from Egypt.