Battle Honours and Colours
The following battle honours or honorary distinctions were borne on the regimental colours, representing actions fought by the 71st and 74th Regiments of Foot or the HLI prior to 1914:
- For the Second Anglo-Mysore War: "Carnatic", "Hindustan", "Sholingur",
- For the Third Anglo-Mysore War: "Mysore";
- For the Siege of Gibraltar: The Castle and Key superscribed "Gibraltar 1780-83"
- For the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War: "Seringapatam"
- For the Second Anglo-Maratha War: An elephant superscribed "Assaye",
- "Cape of Good Hope 1806"
- For the Peninsula War: "Rolica", "Vimiera", "Corunna", "Busaco", "Fuentes d'Onor", "Ciudad Rodrigo", "Badajos"' "Almaraz", "Salamanca", "Vittoria", "Pyrenees", "Nivelle, "Nive", "Orthes", "Toulouse", "Peninsula",
- "Waterloo";
- For the 8th Xhosa War: "South Africa 1851-2-3"
- For the Invasion of Egypt "Egypt 1882", "Tel-el-Kebir"
- For the Second Boer War: "Modder River", "South Africa 1899-1902"
Ten representative battle honours for each of the First and Second World Wars were borne on the queen's colours:
- First World War: "Mons", "Ypres 1914,'15,'17,'18", "Loos", "Somme 1916,'18", "Arras 1917,'18", "Hindenburg Line", "Gallipoli 1915-16", "Palestine 1917-18", "Mesopotamia 1916-18", "Archangel 1919".
- Second World War: "Odon", "Scheldt", "Walcheren Causeway", "Rhine", "Reichswald", "North-West Europe 1940, '44-45", "Keren Cauldron", "Landing in Sicily", "Greece 1944-45"
The 74th Foot had been awarded a third colour, known as the "Assaye Colour" by the Governor General of India in 1803. This was a white silk flag bearing an elephant with regimental number "LXXIV" and the honours "Assaye" and "Seringapatam". The colour continued to be carried by the 2nd Battalion HLI from 1881 to 1948, and the 1st Battalion from 1948 to 1959.
Read more about this topic: Highland Light Infantry
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—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)