For about two hours after daybreak no movement whatever was made on the
left of the army. Parties of cavalry and light infantry were, indeed,
from time to time sent forward, for the purpose of guarding against a
sudden return of the enemy's columns; but the main body kept its ground
as it had done the day before, and the stations of the outposts were
not altered. About nine o'clock in the morning, however, a few changes
occurred. My picket, for example, marched a little to the right, and
relieved a body of Brunswickers, which occupied a farmhouse near the
point where the ravine wound inwards upon the enemy's position; and
this body, together with several other battalions, proceeded at a quick
pace towards the station of General Hill's corps. The indefatigable
Soult, it appeared, had withdrawn his forces from before us, only
to carry them against the opposite flank. The whole of the night of
the 12th was spent in filing his battalions through the intrenched
camp; and by daybreak on the 13th he showed himself in force upon
the right of the army. But Sir Rowland was prepared for him. His own
division kept the enemy in play till reinforcements arrived, when a
decided attack was made; and the French, worn out with the exertions
of the four preceding days, were totally defeated. They escaped, with
difficulty, within their fortified lines, leaving five thousand men
upon the field.
But I must not presume to intrude upon the province of the historian:
let me therefore return to myself and my own little party.
The house of which we now took possession exhibited very unequivocal
symptoms of having been the arena of sundry desperate conflicts.
The walls were everywhere perforated with cannon-shot; the doors
and windows were torn to pieces; a shell or two had fallen through
the roof, and, bursting in the rooms on the ground-floor, had not
only brought the whole of the ceiling down, but had set fire to the
woodwork. The fire had indeed been extinguished, but it left its usual
traces of blackened timbers and charred boarding. Several dead bodies
lay in the various apartments, and the little garden was strewed with
them. These we of course proceeded to bury; but there were numbers
concealed by the bushes on the hillside beyond, on which no sepulture
could be bestowed, and which, as afterwards appeared, were left to
furnish food for the wolves and vultures. Then the smell, which hung
not only about the interior, but the exterior of the cottage, was
shocking. Not that the dead had as yet begun to putrefy; for though
some of them had lain a couple of days exposed to the influence of
the atmosphere, the weather was far too cold to permit the process of
decomposition to commence; but the odour even of an ordinary field of
battle is extremely disagreeable. I can compare it to nothing more
aptly than the interior of a butcher's slaughter-house, soon after he
may have killed his sheep or oxen for the market. Here that species of
perfume was peculiarly powerful; and it was not the less unpleasant
that the smell of burning was mixed with it.
Having remained at this post till sunset, my party was relieved, and
we fell back to join the regiment. We found it huddled into a single
cottage, which stood at one extremity of the green field where we had
halted yesterday, hoping to bring the enemy to the bayonet. Of course
our accommodations were none of the best: officers and men, indeed,
laid themselves down indiscriminately upon the earthen floor, and
heartily glad was he who obtained room enough to stretch himself at
length without being pushed or railed at by his neighbours. The night,
however, passed over in quiet; and sound was the sleep which followed
so many dangers and hardships, especially on the part of us, who had
spent the whole of the preceding night in watchfulness.
Long before dawn on the morning of the 14th, we were, as a matter of
course, under arms. In this situation we remained till the sun arose,
when, marching to the right, we halted at a rising ground in front
of the village of Bedarre, and immediately in rear of the church of
Arcanques. When we set out the sky was cloudy and the air cold, but
no rain had fallen. We had hardly got to our station, however, when a
heavy shower descended, which, but for the opportune arrival of our
tents, would have speedily placed it out of our power to experience
any degree of bodily comfort for the next twenty-four hours. Under
these circumstances, the tents, which a few weeks ago we had regarded
with horror, were now esteemed dwellings fit for princes to inhabit;
whilst the opportunity which their shelter afforded of disencumbering
ourselves of our apparel, was hailed as a real blessing. No man who
has not worn his garments for five or six days on end can conceive the
luxury of undressing; and, above all, the feeling of absolute enjoyment
which follows the pulling off of his boots.
As the rain continued during the whole of the day, little inducement
was held out to wander abroad. On the contrary, I perfectly recollect
that, for the first time in our lives, we succeeded in lighting a fire
in our tent, and escaped the inconvenience of smoke by lying flat upon
the ground, and that the entire day was consumed in eating, drinking,
smoking, conversing, and sleeping. No doubt, my unwarlike readers
will exclaim that the hours thus spent were spent unprofitably; but
I cannot, even now, think so, inasmuch as they were hours of great
enjoyment.
We were not without serious apprehension that circumstances had
occurred which would compel Lord Wellington to keep us during the
remainder of the winter under canvas, when the better half of the day
following had passed over, and no order arrived for our return into
quarters. Nor were these feelings of alarm diminished by witnessing
the march of the whole of the fifth division through our encampment,
confessedly on their way to comfortable cantonments. As the event
proved, however, our apprehensions were groundless, for about an hour
and a half after noon we too received orders; and two o'clock saw our
tents struck, our baggage packed upon the mules, and ourselves in
motion towards the highroad. Of course we flattered ourselves that
we were destined to return to those rural billets which, by dint of
mechanical skill and manual labour, we had made so snug; but there we
were disappointed.
We traversed almost step by step the same ground over which we had
travelled in the course of the late military operations, till we
reached the identical green field in which it had been our lot to
bivouac, with so little comfort, on the 10th of the preceding November.
I believe I have already mentioned--if not, I may state here--that
adjoining to these fields were several farmhouses; one of them, indeed,
of very respectable size and appearance, though the rest hardly rose
above the rank of cottages. In a mansion of the latter description--in
that same mansion, indeed, where I and a host of more active animals
had formerly contended for the possession of a bed--were Grey, myself,
and our men stationed; nor can I say, though the place was certainly
in better plight than when last I saw it, that we were particularly
delighted with our abode.
The room allotted to us was an apartment on the ground-floor. It was
furnished with a fireplace, which had been built by the corps that
preceded us, and among the members of which it was very evident that
there existed no one possessing an equal degree of skill in masonry
with ourselves. It smoked abominably. In the construction of their
window, our predecessors had, however, been more fortunate; their oiled
paper held out against the wind and rain with much obstinacy. But the
quarters were, on the whole, exceedingly comfortless, especially when
contrasted, as it was impossible not to contrast them, with those
which we had so lately fitted up. Nevertheless we were too happy in
finding ourselves once more under shelter of a roof to waste many
repining thoughts upon unavoidable evils; and we had the satisfaction
to know that our abode here would be of no longer continuance than the
duration of the winter, if, indeed, it continued so long.
It is an old and just observation, that the term comfort is one of
relative rather than of direct significance. To the truth of this
saying we were compelled to bear testimony, when, about two o'clock
in the afternoon of the 18th, we found ourselves once more in line of
march, and advancing to the front, for the purpose of relieving another
brigade in the outpost duty. Everybody who is old enough recollects, I
daresay, the severity of the winter of 1813-14. Even in the south of
France, the frost was at times so intense as to cast a complete coat of
ice over ponds and lakes of very considerable depth; whilst storms of
cold wind and rain occurred at every interval when the frost departed.
The 18th of December chanced to be one of these wet and windy days, and
hence we could not help acknowledging, when we found ourselves once
more exposed to the "pelting of the pitiless storm," that our chamber,
on the disagreeables of which we had dilated with characteristic
minuteness, was, after all, an abode by no means to be despised.
The corps employed in guarding the front of the left column consisted
of a brigade of three battalions--in other words, of about eighteen
hundred men. Of these, six hundred were appointed to furnish the
pickets; whilst the remaining twelve hundred acted as a support in case
of need, and busied themselves till the hour of need should arrive in
fortifying their post. The ground on which our tents stood was the
identical green field where, during the late action, we had bivouacked
for two successive nights; and our working parties were employed in
felling the wood round the mayor's house, in throwing up breastworks
contiguous to it, and in constructing a square redoubt capable of
holding an entire battalion. The redoubt was named after a daughter
of the worthy magistrate, who resided for the present in the little
town of Biaritz, and had already declared himself a partisan of the
Bourbons. It was called Fort Charlotte, and gave rise to as many puns
as are usually produced by the appearance of a tongue or a dish of
brains at a Cockney's table; nor was any one more parturient of such
puns than the father of the young lady himself. Between this gentleman
and the officer commanding the outposts, a constant intercourse
was kept up. The town of Biaritz, where he dwelt, lying upon the
sea-shore, and out of the direct line of operations, was not occupied
either by the French or Allied troops. It constituted, on the contrary,
a sort of neutral territory, which was visited occasionally by patrols
from both armies; but so far retained its independence that its
inhabitants were in the constant practice of carrying their commodities
for sale, not only to our camp, but to the camp of the enemy. Though
the mayor professed to keep up no such species of traffic, the state of
his property, overrun by the invading force, furnished him also with a
legitimate excuse for occasionally looking after its preservation; and
hence he contrived from time to time to make his appearance amongst us,
without becoming, as far as I could learn, an object of suspicion to
his countrymen.
As the duty on which we were now employed was by no means agreeable,
and as any very lengthened exposure to the inclemency of such a season
must have proved detrimental to the health of those engaged in it, the
custom was to relieve the advanced corps at the end of three days, by
which means each brigade, at least in the left column of the army,
found itself in the field, and under canvas, only once in three weeks.
That to which I was attached held what may be termed the stationary
outposts only four times during the entire winter; nor have I any
reason to believe that we were in this respect peculiarly favoured. Of
the events which took place during our present interval of more active
service, it is needless to enter into any minute detail. They were
such as generally occur on like occasions: that is to say, our time
was passed in alternate watching and labour; whilst an uninterrupted
continuance of cold and stormy weather rendered the arrival of the
troops destined to succeed us highly acceptable. Nor was this temporary
endurance of hardship and fatigue without its good effect. We learned
from it to lay aside what yet remained to us of fastidiousness; and
returned to our quarters perfectly reconciled to those inconveniences
and drawbacks which existed more perhaps in our imagination than in
reality.
I should try, beyond all endurance, the patience of my reader, were I
to relate in regular detail the occurrences of each day from the 21st
of December 1813, when we returned to our cantonments, to the 2d of
January 1814, when we again quitted them. Enough is done when I state
in few words that the ordinary resources against _ennui_--that is to
say, shooting, coursing, and even fishing--were adopted; and that the
evenings were spent, for the most part, in convivial parties, to the
inordinate consumption of cigars, wine, and sometimes of patience. Nor
were other and more rational employments wanting. On more than one
occasion I visited St Jean de Luz, attended high mass, and the theatre;
and once I rode as far to the rear as Irun. The effect of the latter
ride upon myself was vivid at the time, and may, perhaps, be worth
conveying to others.
The distance from our present cantonments to Irun might amount to
sixteen or eighteen miles. Over the whole of that country, between the
two extreme points, the tide of war, it will be recollected, had swept;
not boisterously, but with comparative harmlessness--as when one army
rapidly retreats and another rapidly follows--but slowly and ruinously;
every foot of ground having been obstinately contested, and every
fold, garden, and dwelling exposed to the ravages inseparable from the
progress of hostilities. Hence the spectacle which met the traveller's
gaze on either side of the road was distressing in the extreme.
The houses and hovels were everywhere in ruins; the enclosures and
cultivated fields were all laid waste and desolate; the road itself was
strewed with the carcasses of oxen, mules, horses, and other animals,
which had dropped down from fatigue, and died upon their march. I was
particularly struck with the aspect of things in and about Urogne. Of
the works on the heights above it, so carefully and skilfully erected
by Marshal Soult, some had already begun to yield to the destructive
operation of the elements, and others had been wantonly demolished
by the followers of the camp. In the town itself, where so lately was
heard the roar of cannon and the rattle of musketry, the most perfect
silence prevailed. It was wholly tenantless; not even a sutler or
muleteer had taken up his abode there; the cavalry were all withdrawn;
and of the original inhabitants not one had returned. The reader will
easily believe that I looked round, during this part of my journey,
with peculiar interest, for the fields across which I had myself
skirmished; more especially for a friendly hedge, the intervention of a
stout stake in which had saved my better arm; and that I did not pass
the churchyard without dismounting to pay a visit to the grave of my
former comrades. Neither was I unmindful of the chateau in which, to my
no small surprise, I had found a letter from my father; and the change
wrought in it since last I beheld it gave me a more perfect idea of the
disastrous effects of war than any other object upon which I had yet
looked.
When a man of peaceable habits--one, for example, who has spent his
whole life in this favoured country under the shelter of his own sacred
roof--reads of war, and the miseries attendant upon war, his thoughts
invariably turn to scenes of outrage and rapine, in which soldiers
are the actors, and to which the hurry and excitement of battle give
rise. I mean not to say that a battle is ever fought without bringing
havoc upon the face of that particular spot of earth which chances to
support it; but the mischief done by both contending armies to the
buildings and property of the inhabitants is as nothing when compared
to that which the followers of a successful army work. These wretches
tread in the steps of the armed force with the fidelity and haste of
kites and vultures. No sooner is a battle won and the troops pushed
forward, than they spread themselves over the entire territory gained;
and all which had been spared by those in whom an act of plunder, if
excusable at all, might most readily be excused, is immediately laid
waste. The chateau of which I am speaking, for example, and which I had
left perfectly entire, fully furnished, and in good order, was now one
heap of ruins. Not a chair or a table remained; not a volume of all the
library so lately examined by me existed; nay, it was evident from the
blackened state of the walls, and the dilapidation of the ceilings,
that fire had been wantonly applied to complete the devastation which
avarice had begun. To say the truth, I could not but regret at the
moment that I had not helped myself to a little more of Monsieur
Briguette's property than the Spanish Grammar already advertised for
redemption.
Having cleared Urogne, and passed through the remains of the barricade
which I had assisted in carrying on the 10th of the last month, I
arrived next at the site of the village of which I have formerly taken
notice, as being peopled and furnished with shops and other places
of accommodation, by sutlers and adventurers. The huts or cottages
still stood, though they were all unroofed, and many of them otherwise
in ruins; but the sign of the "Jolly Soldier" was gone. Like other
incitements to folly, if not to absolute vice, it had followed the
track of the multitude. I marked, too, as I proceeded, the bleak
hillside on which our tents had so long contended with the winds of
heaven; and I could not help thinking how many of those who had found
shelter beneath their canvas, were now sleeping upon the bosom of
mother earth. Of course I paid to their memories the tribute of a
regret as unavailing as I fear it was transitory.
By-and-by I reached the brow of the last height on the French border,
and the Bidassoa once more lay beneath me. The day on which my present
excursion was made chanced to be one of the few lovely days with which,
during that severe winter, we were favoured. The air was frosty, but
not intensely so; the sky was blue and cloudless; and the sun shone
out with a degree of warmth which cheered without producing languor
or weariness. High up, the mountains which overhang the river were
covered with snow, which sparkled in the sunbeams, and contrasted
beautifully with the sombre hue of the leafless groves beneath; whilst
the stream itself flowed on as brightly and placidly as if it had never
witnessed a more desperate struggle than that which the fisherman
maintains with a trout of extraordinary agility and dimensions. Fain
would I have persuaded myself that I was quietly travelling in a land
of peace; but there were too many proofs of the contrary presented at
every stage to permit the delusion to keep itself for one moment in the
mind.