Page:British campaigns in Flanders, 1690-1794; being extracts from "A history of the British army," (IA britishcampaigns00fort).pdf/287

 be considered of such importance as to justify a sacrifice of the opportunity for acquiring the French West Indies. Plainer evidence could not have been given of the utter unfitness of both to direct a formidable war.

But the Government's measures for the augmentation of the regular Army at the close of 1793, though not yet criticised in Parliament, were still more questionable than its military policy. In the first place, from blind assurance of an easy triumph, no sufficient provision had been made in time for raising additional men; and the result was that in October 1793 it was a matter of the greatest difficulty to furnish a draft of one hundred men to stop the gaps in Abercromby's brigade in Flanders. In August, however, Alan Cameron of Erracht after much importunity had received permission to raise a regiment of Highlanders without levy-money, and with a special stipulation that the men should not be drafted; and thus was created the Seventy-ninth or Cameron Highlanders. In September 1793, new regiments began to follow each other more rapidly. First came a battalion formed by Lord Paget, whom we shall know better as a leader of cavalry under the successive titles of Lord Uxbridge and Marquis of Anglesey. The commission which he received to command it was the first that he ever held in the Army; and the regiment took, and still keeps, the number of the Eightieth. Then came in succession Colonel John Doyle's regiment, now the Eighty-seventh; Colonel Albemarle Bertie's, now the Eighty-first; Colonel Thomas De Burgh's, recruited chiefly in Connaught