As the second battalion had only just returned from New Zealand and Australia, it was the turn of the first battalion, under the newly introduced system, to go abroad; and on January 18, 1872, Lieutenant-Colonel G. H. Pocklington, with 26 officers and 606 other ranks, embarked for Malta. After three years the first battalion, 917 strong, sailed for India under command of Lieutenant-Colonel E. L. Dillon, and early in December reached Bareilly, where it was quartered for nearly four years. While it was at this station His Majesty King Edward VII., then Prince of Wales, made a Royal progress through the Eastern Empire that would one day be his, and on the 6th of March, 1876, stopped at Bareilly on his way from the Terai to Allahabad: His Royal Highness was received by a guard of honour of the Royal Irish, while the remainder of the battalion lined the avenue through which he passed on his way to the palace of the Nawab of Rampore. In the evening the Prince did the battalion the honour of dining with the officers, and gave to the mess portraits of the Princess of Wales and himself as a memento of his visit, and a few days later two large steel engravings of the Prince and Princess of Wales were sent by His Royal Highness as a present to the sergeants’ mess. A year later the death occurred of Field-Marshal Sir John Forster Fitzgerald, G.C.B.,[227] who since 1850, when he succeeded Lord Aylmer, had been the Colonel of the XVIIIth, Royal Irish regiment. This veteran, whose age had earned for him the title of “the father of the British Army,” was born in Ireland in 1786, before the abolition of the iniquitous system by which wealthy men were allowed to buy commissions for infants prattling in the nursery. At the mature age of eight Fitzgerald was a captain in the regular army, at seventeen he was a major, and he obtained his lieutenant-colonelcy when only twenty-four years of age. He served in the Peninsula, commanding a brigade in the battle of the Pyrenees in 1813; in 1854 he became General, and in 1875 received a Field-Marshal’s bâton. He died in March, 1877, at Tours, and by the special order of Marshal Macmahon, then President of the French Republic, the whole of the garrison attended the funeral to pay to the British officer the honours accorded to Frenchmen of his exalted military rank. He was succeeded as Colonel of the XVIIIth by Lieutenant-General Clement A. Edwards, C.B.[228]