Medal roll confirms, may also have served in the Crimea.
Throughout 1858 the 2nd and 3rd Battalions served under the Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Colin Campbell—raised to the peerage that summer as Lord Clyde—as they helped to disperse and finally destroy the still numerous rebel forces. On March 6th they led Sir Colin's army in skirmishing order , the Line regiments following in quarter-column distance, at the start of the final battle of Lucknow, which resulted, after a fortnight's fierce fighting, in the capture of the city—the capital of Oudh—and in the winning of a new and much valued battle honour for the Regiment.
In its course an officer and two men of the 2nd Battalion gained the Victoria Cross, Corporal W. Nash and Rifleman David Hawkes carrying a wounded comrade to safety under heavy fire while their retreat from an apparently hopeless cul-de-sac was covered, single-handed, by their Company Commander, Captain Henry Wilmot. Another V.C. was gained for the Regiment later that year by Corporal Samuel Shaw of the 3rd Battalion who, though wounded in the head, coolly took on in single combat, and killed, a giant fanatic Ghazee.
During the summer of 1858, with the thermometer often standing at 110 and sometimes even higher, the Regiment exchanged its green cloth jackets for a campaign-uniform of dust-coloured linen—or khaki as it became called—with black facings. For neither Battalion, engaged in ceaselessly pursuing the scattered columns of the enemy, was there much rest.
On their long marches the men suffered much from heat-stroke, some fatally; on one terrible march that June the 2nd Battalion lost nearly a hundred men. Working in close co-operation with the 7th Hussars—among whose troopers it was a standing joke "that they could not get rid of these little fellows' who kept up with their horses so gamely—the Battalion spent the autumn in routing out rebel forces in Rohilkhand. The Times correspondent, William Howard Russell, sent home a description of it at the end of the year when for nearly a fortnight it had made a series of marches of up to twenty miles with hardly a casualty: "The Rifle Brigade, who are with us, are as hard as nails; faces tanned brown and muscles hardened into whipcord; and to see them step over the ground with their officers marching beside them is a very fine sight for those who have an eye for real first-class soldiers. Lord Clyde is greatly pleased with the officers be-cause they do not ride on ponies as many officers of other regiments are accustomed to do."
Meanwhile the 3rd Battalion was similarly engaged, often operating in thick jungle where large parties of the rebels had taken refuge. On one occasion a detachment of a hundred Riflemen advancing in extended order under a young officer, Lieutenant Andrew Green, lost touch with three of their number who were attacked by a large band of Sepoys. Hearing firing, Green, who was on horseback, went to their aid but was himself set on by six assailants. Shooting two with his revolver, he was cut down while dismounting and hacked at repeatedly as he lay on the ground.
But, despite his wounds, he managed to rise and fell two more of his adversaries—now joined by three others—with the butt of his revolver and to shoot a third before they finally left him senseless and apparently dead with fourteen sabre cuts as well as a gunshot wound. Notwithstanding loss of blood, extreme fatigue—for he and his men had been under arms from four in the morning till three that afternoon—and the amputation of his left arm and right thumb, he recovered. Subsequently he rose to the rank of colonel, being universally known throughout the service as "Jolly" Green on account of his unfailing good-humour. He died in 1902 at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, where for the last thirty- two years of his life he was Captain of Invalids.
Not till the summer of 1859 were all the mutineers hunted down and the campaign at an end. During it the 2nd Battalion alone marched 1745 miles in 161 marches, keeping the field for twenty months without once going into quarters. Nearly a quarter of its officers and more than a fifth of its men had been killed, wounded or invalided. It remained in India as part of the British garrison until 1867, when it returned to England after an absence of ten years. The 3rd Battalion, which took part in 1863 in a punitive expedition against the Mohmund tribe on the North-west Frontier, did not leave India until the end of 1870, concluding its thirteen years' tour of overseas service with a year at Aden before landing at Portsmouth on New Year’s Day, 1872.
