"Beating from the wasted vines
Back to France her banded swarms,
Back to France with countless blows,
Till o'er the hills her eagles flew
Beyond the Pyrenean pines;
Follow'd up in valley and glen
With blare of bugle, clamour of men,
Roll of cannon and clash of arms,
And England pouring on her foes.
Such a war had such a close."
--TENNYSON.
"In both the passes, and on the heights above them, there was desperate
fighting. They fought on the mountain-tops, which could scarcely have
witnessed any other combat than that of the Pyrenean eagles; they
fought among jagged rocks and over profound abysses; they fought amidst
clouds and mists, for those mountain-tops were 5000 feet above the
level of the plain of France, and the rains, which had fallen in
torrents, were evaporating in the morning and noon-day sun, were
steaming heavenward and clothing the loftiest peaks with fantastic
wreaths." These words describe, with picturesque force, the most
brilliant and desperate, and yet, perhaps, the least known chapter in
the great drama of the Peninsular war: the furious combats waged
between British and French in the gloomy valleys and on the
mist-shrouded summits of the Western Pyrenees. The great campaign,
which found its climax at Vittoria, lasted six weeks. In that brief
period Wellington marched with 100,000 men 600 miles, passed six great
rivers, gained one historic and decisive battle, invested two
fortresses, and drove 120,000 veteran troops from Spain. There is no
more brilliant chapter in military history; and, at its close, to quote
Napier's clarion-like sentences, "the English general, emerging from
the chaos of the Peninsular struggle, stood on the summit of the
Pyrenees a recognised conqueror. From those lofty pinnacles the
clangour of his trumpets pealed clear and loud, and the splendour of
his genius appeared as a flaming beacon to warring nations."
But the great barrier of the Pyrenees stretched across Wellington's
path, a tangle of mountains sixty miles in length; a wild table-land
rough with crags, fierce with mountain torrents, shaggy with forests, a
labyrinth of savage and snow-clad hills. On either flank a great
fortress--San Sebastian and Pampeluna--was held by the French, and
Wellington was besieging both at once, and besieging them without
battering trains. The echoes of Vittoria had aroused Napoleon, then
fighting desperately on the Elbe, and ten days after Vittoria the
French Emperor, acting with the lightning-like decision characteristic
of his genius, had despatched Soult, the ablest of all his generals, to
bar the passes of the Pyrenees against Wellington. Soult travelled day
and night to the scene of his new command, gathering reinforcements on
every side as he went, and in an incredibly short period he had
assembled on the French side of the Pyrenees a great and perfectly
equipped force of 75,000 men.
Wellington could not advance and leave San Sebastian and Pampeluna on
either flank held by the enemy. Some eight separate passes pierce the
giant chain of the Pyrenees. Soult was free to choose any one of them
for his advance to the relief of either of the besieged fortresses, but
Wellington had to keep guard over the whole eight, and the force
holding each pass was almost completely isolated from its comrades.
Thus all the advantages of position were with Soult. He could pour his
whole force through one or two selected passes, brush aside the
relatively scanty force which held it, relieve San Sebastian or
Pampeluna, and, with the relieved fortress as his base, fling himself
on Wellington's flank while the allied armies were scattered over the
slopes of the Pyrenees for sixty miles. And Soult was exactly the
general to avail himself of these advantages. He had the swift vision,
the resolute will, and the daring of a great commander. "It is on
Spanish soil," he said in a proclamation to his troops, "your tents
must next be pitched. Let the account of our successes be dated from
Vittoria, and let the fête-day of his Imperial Majesty be celebrated in
that city." These were brave words, and having uttered them, Soult led
his gallant troops, with gallant purpose, into the gloomy passes of the
Pyrenees, and for days following the roar of battle sank and swelled
over the snow-clad peaks. But when the Imperial fête-day
arrived--August 15--Soult's great army was pouring back from those same
passes a shattered host, and the allied troops, sternly following them,
were threatening French soil!
Soult judged Pampeluna to be in greater peril than San Sebastian, and
moved by his left to force the passes of Roncesvalles and Maya. The
rain fell furiously, the mountain streams were in flood, gloomy mists
shrouded the hill-tops; but by July 24, with more than 60,000 fighting
men, and nearly seventy guns, Soult was pouring along the passes he had
chosen. It is impossible to do more than pick out a few of the purple
patches in the swift succession of heroic combats that followed: fights
waged on mountain summits 5000 feet above the sea-level, in shaggy
forests, under tempests of rain and snow. D'Erlon, with a force of
20,000 men, took the British by surprise in the pass of Maya. Ross, an
eager and hardy soldier, unexpectedly encountering the French advance
guard, instantly shouted the order to "Charge!" and with a handful of
the 20th flung himself upon the enemy, and actually checked their
advance until Cole, who had only 10,000 bayonets to oppose to 30,000,
had got into fighting form. A thick fog fell like a pall on the
combatants, and checked the fight, and Cole, in the night, fell back.
The French columns were in movement at daybreak, but still the fog hid
the whole landscape, and the guides of the French feared to lead them
up the slippery crags. At Maya, however, the French in force broke
upon Stewart's division, holding that pass. The British regiments, as
they came running up, not in mass, but by companies, and breathless
with the run, were flung with furious haste upon the French. The 34th,
the 39th, the 28th in succession crashed into the fight, but were flung
back by overpowering numbers. It was a battle of 4000 men against
13,000.
The famous 50th, fiercely advancing, checked the French rush at one
point; but Soult's men were full of the _élan_ of victory, and swept
past the British flanks. The 71st and 92nd were brought into the
fight, and the latter especially clung sternly to their position till
two men out of every three were shot down, the mound of dead and dying
forming a solid barrier between the wasted survivors of the regiment
and the shouting edge of the French advance. "The stern valour of the
92nd," says Napier, "principally composed of Irishmen, would have
graced Thermopylae." No one need question the fighting quality of the
Irish soldier, but, as a matter of fact, there were 825 Highlanders in
the regiment, and 61 Irishmen. The British, however, were steadily
pushed back, ammunition failed, and the soldiers were actually
defending the highest crag with stones, when Barnes, with a brigade of
the seventh division, coming breathlessly up the pass, plunged into the
fight, and checked the French. Soult had gained ten of the thirty
miles of road toward Pampeluna, but at an ominous cost, and, meanwhile,
the plan of his attack was developed, and Wellington was in swift
movement to bar his path.
Soult had now swung into the pass of Roncesvalles, and was on the point
of attacking Cole, who held the pass with a very inadequate force,
when, at that exact moment, Wellington, having despatched his aides in
various directions to bring up the troops, galloped alone along the
mountain flank to the British line. He was recognised; the nearest
troops raised a shout; it ran, gathering volume as it travelled down
all the slope, where the British stood waiting for the French attack.
That sudden shout, stern and exultant, reached the French lines, and
they halted. At the same moment, round the shoulder of the hill on the
opposite side of the pass, Soult appeared, and the two generals, near
enough to see each other's features, eagerly scrutinised one another.
"Yonder is a great commander," said Wellington, as if speaking to
himself, "but he is cautious, and will delay his attack to ascertain
the cause of these cheers. That will give time for the sixth division
to arrive, and I shall beat him." Wellington's forecast of Soult's
action was curiously accurate. He made no attack that day. The sixth
division came up, and Soult was beaten!
[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!