[Illustration: Combat of Roncesvalles, July 25, 1813. From Napier’s “Peninsular War.”]
There were two combats of Sauroren, and each was, in Wellington’s own phrase, “bludgeon work”—a battle of soldiers rather than of generals, a tangle of fierce charges and counter-charges, of volleys delivered so close that they scorched the very clothes of the opposing lines, and sustained so fiercely that they died down only because the lines of desperately firing men crumbled into ruin and silence. Nothing could be finer than the way in which a French column, swiftly, sternly, and without firing a shot, swept up a craggy steep crowned by rocks like castles, held by some Portuguese battalions, and won the position. Ross’s brigade, in return, with equal vehemence recharged the position from its side, and dashed the French out of it; the French in still greater force came back, a shouting mass, and crushed Ross’s men. Then Wellington sent forward Byng’s brigade at running pace, and hurled the French down the mountain side. At another point in the pass the French renewed their assault four times; in their second assault they gained the summit. The 40th were in reserve at that point; they waited in steady silence till the edge of the French line, a confused mass of tossing bayonets and perspiring faces, came clear over the crest; then, running forward with extraordinary fury, they flung them, a broken, tumultuous mass, down the slope. In the later charges, so fierce and resolute were the French officers that they were seen dragging their tired soldiers up the hill by their belts!
It is idle to attempt the tale of this wild mountain fighting. Soult at last fell back, and Wellington followed, swift and vehement, on his track, and moved Alten’s column to intercept the French retreat. The story of Alten’s march is a marvellous record of soldierly endurance. His men pressed on with speed for nineteen consecutive hours, and covered forty miles of mountain tracks, wilder than the Otway Ranges, or the paths of the Australian Alps between Bright and Omeo. The weather was close; many men fell and died, convulsed and frothing at the mouth. Still, their officers leading, the regiment kept up its quick step, till, as evening fell, the head of the column reached the edge of the precipice overlooking the bridge across which, in all the confusion of a hurried retreat, the French troops were crowding. “We overlooked the enemy,” says Cook in his “Memoirs,” “at stone’s-throw. The river separated us; but the French were wedged in a narrow road, with inaccessible rocks on one side, and the river on the other.” Who can describe the scene that followed! Some of the French fired vertically up at the British; others ran; others shouted for quarter; some pointed with eager gestures to the wounded, whom they carried on branches of trees, as if entreating the British not to fire.
In nine days of continual marching, ten desperate actions had been fought, at what cost of life can hardly be reckoned. Napier, after roughly calculating the losses, says: “Let this suffice. It is not needful to sound the stream of blood in all its horrid depths.” But the fighting sowed the wild passes of the Pyrenees thick with the graves of brave men.
Soult actually fought his way to within sight of the walls of Pampeluna, and its beleaguered garrison waved frantic welcomes to his columns as, from the flanks of the overshadowing hills, they looked down on the city. Then broken as by the stroke of a thunderbolt, and driven like wild birds caught in a tempest, the French poured back through the passes to French soil again. “I never saw such fighting,” was Wellington’s comment on the struggle.
For the weeks that followed, Soult could only look on while San Sebastian and Pampeluna fell. Then the allied outposts were advanced to the slopes looking down on France and the distant sea. It is recorded that the Highlanders of Hill’s division, like Xenophon’s Greeks 2000 years before them, broke into cheers when they caught their first glimpse of the sea, the great, wrinkled, azure-tinted floor, flecked with white sails. It was “the way home!” Bearn and Gascony and Languedoc lay stretched like a map under their feet. But the weather was bitter, the snow lay thick in the passes, sentinels were frozen at the outposts, and a curious stream of desertions began. The warm plains of sunny France tempted the half-frozen troops, and Southey computes, with an arithmetical precision which is half-humorous, that the average weekly proportion of desertions was 25 Spaniards, 15 Irish, 12 English, 6 Scotch, and half a Portuguese! One indignant English colonel drew up his regiment on parade, and told the men that “if any of them wanted to join the French they had better do so at once. He gave them free leave. He wouldn’t have men in the regiment who wished to join the enemy!”
Meanwhile Soult was trying to construct on French soil lines of defence as mighty as those of Wellington at Torres Vedras; and on October 7, Wellington pushed his left across the Bidassoa, the stream that marks the boundaries of Spain and France. On the French side the hills rise to a great height. One huge shoulder, called La Rhune, commands the whole stream; another lofty ridge, called the “Boar’s Back,” offered almost equal facilities for defence. The only road that crossed the hills rose steeply, with sharp zigzags, and for weeks the French had toiled to make the whole position impregnable. The British soldiers had watched while the mountain sides were scarred with trenches, and the road was blocked with abattis, and redoubt rose above redoubt like a gigantic staircase climbing the sky. The Bidassoa at its mouth is wide, and the tides rose sixteen feet.
But on the night of October 7—a night wild with rain and sleet—Wellington’s troops marched silently to their assigned posts on the banks of the river. When day broke, at a signal-gun seven columns could be seen moving at once in a line of five miles, and before Soult could detect Wellington’s plan the river was crossed, the French entrenched camps on the Bidassoa won! The next morning the heights were attacked. The Rifles carried the Boar’s Back with a single effort. The Bayonette Crest, a huge spur guarded by battery above battery, and crowned by a great redoubt, was attacked by Colborne’s brigade and some Portuguese. The tale of how the hill was climbed, and the batteries carried in swift succession, cannot be told here. It was a warlike feat of the most splendid quality. Other columns moving along the flanks of the great hill alarmed the French lest they should be cut off, and they abandoned the redoubt on the summit. Colborne, accompanied by only one of his staff and half-a-dozen files of riflemen, came suddenly round a shoulder of the hill on the whole garrison of the redoubt, 300 strong, in retreat. With great presence of mind, he ordered them, in the sharpest tones of authority, to “lay down their arms,” and, believing themselves cut off, they obeyed!
A column of Spanish troops moving up the flanks of the great Rhune found their way barred by a strong line of abattis and the fire of two French regiments. The column halted, and their officers vainly strove to get the Spaniards to attack. An officer of the 43rd named Havelock—a name yet more famous in later wars—attached to Alten’s staff, was sent to see what caused the stoppage of the column. He found the Spaniards checked by the great abattis, through which flashed, fierce and fast, the fire of the French. Waving his hat, he shouted to the Spaniards to “follow him,” and, putting his horse at the abattis, at one leap went headlong amongst the French. There is a swift contagion in valour. He was only a light-haired lad, and the Spaniards with one vehement shout for “el chico blanco”—“the fair lad”—swept over abattis and French together!