"Then out spoke brave Horatius,
The captain of the gate:
'To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?'"
--MACAULAY.
Hill's front stretched through two miles; his left; a wooded craggy
ridge, was held by Pringle's brigade, but was parted from the centre by
a marshy valley and a chain of ponds; his centre occupied a
crescent-shaped broken ridge; his right, under General Byng, held a
ridge parallel with the Adour. The French gathered in great masses on
a range of counter-heights, an open plain being between them and Hill's
centre. The day was heavy with whirling mist; and as the wind tore it
occasionally asunder, the British could see on the parallel roads
before them the huge, steadily flowing columns of the French.
Abbé led the attack on the British centre. He was "the fighting
general" of Soult's army, famous for the rough energy of his character
and the fierceness of his onfall. He pushed his attack with such
ardour that he forced his way to the crest of the British ridge. The
famous 92nd, held in reserve, was brought forward by way of
counter-stroke, and pushed its attack keenly home. The head of Abbé's
column was crushed; but the French general replaced the broken
battalions by fresh troops, and still forced his way onward, the 92nd
falling back.
[Illustration: Battle of St. Pierre, December 9th & 13th, 1813. From
Napier's "Peninsular War."]
In the meanwhile on both the right and the left of the British position
an almost unique disaster had befallen Hill's troops. Peacock, the
colonel of the 71st, through some bewitched failure of nerve or of
judgment, withdrew that regiment from the fight. It was a Highland
regiment, great in fighting reputation, and full of daring. How black
were the looks of the officers, and what loud swearing in Gaelic took
place in the ranks, as the gallant regiment--discipline overcoming
human nature--obeyed the mysterious order to retire, may be imagined.
Almost at the same moment on the right, Bunbury, who commanded the 3rd
or Buffs, in the same mysterious fashion abandoned to the French the
strong position he held. Both colonels were brave men, and their
sudden lapse into unsoldierly conduct has never been explained. Both,
it may be added, were compelled to resign their commissions after the
fight.
Hill, surveying the spectacle from the post he had taken, commanding
the whole field of battle, hastened down, met and halted the Buffs,
sent them back to the fight, drew his whole reserves into the fray, and
himself turned the 71st and led them to the attack. With what joy the
indignant Highlanders of the 71st obeyed the order to "Right about
face" may be imagined, and so vehement was their charge that the French
column upon which it was flung, though coming on at the double, in all
the _élan_ of victory, was instantly shattered.
Meanwhile the 92nd was launched again at Abbé's column. Cameron, its
colonel, was a soldier of a very gallant type, and, himself a
Highlander, he understood the Highland temperament perfectly. He
dressed his regiment as if on parade, the colours were uncased, the
pipes shrilled fiercely, and in all the pomp of military array, with
green tartans and black plumes all wind-blown, and with the wild
strains of their native hills and lochs thrilling in their ears, the
Highlanders bore down on the French, their officers fiercely leading.
On all sides at that moment the British skirmishers were falling back.
The 50th was clinging desperately to a small wood that crowned the
ridge, but everywhere the French were forcing their way onward.
Ashworth's Portuguese were practically destroyed; Barnes, who commanded
the centre, was shot through the body. But the fierce charge of the
92nd along the high-road, and of the 71st on the left centre, sent an
electric thrill along the whole British front. The skirmishers,
instead of falling back, ran forward; the Portuguese rallied. The 92nd
found in its immediate front two strong French regiments, and their
leading files brought their bayonets to the charge, and seemed eager to
meet the 92nd with the actual push of steel. It was the crisis of the
fight.
At that moment the French commander's nerve failed him. That
steel-edged line of kilted, plume-crested Highlanders, charging with a
step so fierce, was too much for him. He suddenly turned his horse,
waved his sword; his men promptly faced about, and marched back to
their original position. The French on both the right and the left
drew back, and the battle for the moment seemed to die down. Hill's
right was safe, and he drew the 57th from it to strengthen his sorely
battered centre; and just at that moment the sixth division, which had
been marching since daybreak, crossed the bridge over the Nive, which
the British engineers with rare energy had restored, and appeared on
the ridge overlooking the field of battle. Wellington, too, appeared
on the scene, with the third and fourth divisions. At two o'clock the
allies commenced a forward movement, and Soult fell back; his second
counter-stroke had failed.
St. Pierre was, perhaps, the most desperately contested fight in the
Peninsular war, a field almost as bloody as Albuera. Hill's ranks were
wasted as by fire; three British generals were carried from the field;
nearly the whole of the staff was struck down. On a space scarcely one
mile square, 5000 men were killed and wounded within three hours.
Wellington, as he rode over the field by the side of Hill after the
fight was over, declared he had never seen the dead lie so thickly
before. It was a great feat for less than 14,000 men with 14 guns to
withstand the assault of 35,000 men with 22 guns; and, at least where
Abbé led, the fighting of the French was of the most resolute
character. The victory was due, in part, to Hill's generalship and the
lion-like energy with which he restored his broken centre and flung
back the Buffs and the 71st into the fight. But in a quite equal
degree the victory was due to the obstinate fighting quality of the
British private. The 92nd, for example, broke the French front no less
than four times by bayonet charges pushed home with the sternest
resolution, and it lost in these charges 13 officers and 171 rank and
file.
The French, it might almost be said, lost the field by the momentary
failure in nerve of the officer commanding the column upon which the
92nd was rushing in its last and most dramatic charge. His column was
massive and unbroken; the men, with bent heads and levelled bayonets,
were ready to meet the 92nd with a courage as lofty as that of the
Highlanders themselves, and the 92nd, for all its parade of fluttering
colours and wind-blown tartans and feathers, was but a single weak
battalion. An electrical gesture, a single peremptory call on the part
of the leader, even a single daring act by a soldier in the ranks, and
the French column would have been hurled on the 92nd, and by its mere
weight must have broken it. But the oncoming of the Highlanders proved
too great a strain for the nerve of the French general. He wheeled the
head of his horse backward, and the fight was lost.
Weeks of the bitterest winter weather suspended all military operations
after St. Pierre. The rivers were flooded; the clayey lowlands were
one far-stretching quagmire; fogs brooded in the ravines; perpetual
tempests shrieked over the frozen summits of the Pyrenees; the
iron-bound coast was furious with breakers. But Wellington's hardy
veterans--ill-clad, ill-sheltered, and ill-fed--yet kept their watch on
the slopes of the Pyrenees. The outposts of the two armies, indeed,
fell into almost friendly relations with each other. Barter sprang up
between them, a regular code of signals was established, friendly
offices were exchanged. Wellington on one occasion desired to
reconnoitre Soult's camp from the top of a hill occupied by a French
picket, and ordered some English rifles to drive them off. No firing
was necessary. An English soldier held up the butt of his rifle and
tapped it in a peculiar way. The signal meant, "We must have the hill
for a short time," and the French at once retired. A steady traffic in
brandy and tobacco sprang up between the pickets of the two armies. A
rivulet at one point flowed between the outposts, and an Irish soldier
named Patten, on sentry there, placed a canteen with a silver coin in
it on a stone by the bank of the rivulet, to be filled with brandy by
the French in the usual way. Canteen and coin vanished, but no brandy
arrived. Patten, a daring fellow, regarded himself as cheated, and the
next day seeing, as he supposed, the same French sentry on duty, he
crossed the rivulet, seized the Frenchman's musket, shook the amazed
sentry out of his accoutrements as a pea is shaken out of its pod, and
carried them off. The French outposts sent in a flag of truce,
complained of this treatment, and said the unfortunate sentry's life
would be forfeited unless his uniform and gun were restored. Patten,
however, insisted that he held these "in pawn for a canteen of brandy,"
and he got his canteen before the uniform was restored.
On February 12 a white hard frost suddenly fell on the whole field of
operations, and turned the viscid mud everywhere to the hardness of
stone. The men could march, the artillery move; and Wellington, whose
strategy was ripe, was at once in action.
Soult barred his path by a great entrenched camp at Bayonne, to which
the Adour served as a Titanic wet ditch. The Adour is a great river,
swift and broad--swiftest and broadest through the six miles of its
course below the town to its mouth. Its bed is of shifting sand; the
spring-tide rises in it fourteen feet, the ebb-tide runs seven miles an
hour. Where the swift river and the great rollers of the Bay of Biscay
meet is a treacherous bar--in heavy weather a mere tumult of leaping
foam. Soult assumed that Wellington would cross the river above the
town; the attempt to cross it near the mouth, where it was barred with
sand, and beaten with surges, and guarded, too, by a tiny squadron of
French gunboats, was never suspected. Yet exactly this was
Wellington's plan; and his bridge across the Adour is declared by
Napier to be a stupendous undertaking, which must always rank amongst
"the prodigies of war." Forty large sailing-boats, of about twenty
tons burden each, carrying the materials for the bridge, were to enter
the mouth of the Adour at the moment when Hope, with part of Hill's
division, made his appearance on the left bank of the river, with
materials for rafts, by means of which sufficient troops could be
thrown across the Adour to capture a battery which commanded its
entrance.
On the night of February 22, Hope, with the first division, was in the
assigned position on the banks of the Adour, hidden behind some
sandhills. But a furious gale made the bar impassable, and not a boat
was in sight. Hope, the most daring of men, never hesitated; he would
cross the river without the aid of the fleet. His guns were suddenly
uncovered, the tiny French flotilla was sunk or scattered, and a
pontoon or raft, carrying sixty men of the Guards, pushed out from the
British bank. A strong French picket held the other shore; but,
bewildered and ill led, they made no opposition. A hawser was dragged
across the stream, and pontoons, each carrying fifteen men, were in
quick succession pulled across. When about a thousand men had in this
way reached the French bank, some French battalions made their
appearance. Colonel Stopford, who was in command, allowed the French
to come on--their drums beating the _pas de charge_, and their officers
waving their swords--to within a distance of twenty yards, and then
opened upon them with his rocket brigade. The fiery flight and
terrifying sound of these missiles put the French to instant rout. All
night the British continued to cross, and on the morning of the 24th
the flotilla was off the bar, the boats of the men-of-war leading.
The first boat that plunged into the tumult of breakers, leaping and
roaring over the bar, sank instantly. The second shot through and was
safe; but the tide was running out furiously, and no boat could follow
till it was high water again. When high water came, the troops
crowding the sandbanks watched with breathless interest the fight of
the boats to enter. They hung and swayed like a flock of gigantic
sea-birds on the rough and tumbling sea. Lieutenant Bloye of the
_Lyra_, who led the way in his barge, dashed into the broad zone of
foam, and was instantly swallowed up with all his crew. The rest of
the flotilla bore up to right and left, and hovered on the edge of the
tormented waters. Suddenly Lieutenant Cheyne of the _Woodlark_ caught
a glimpse of the true course and dashed through, and boat after boat
came following with reeling decks and dripping crews; but in the whole
passage no fewer than eight of the flotilla were destroyed. The bridge
was quickly constructed. Thirty-six two-masted vessels were moored
head to stern, with an interval between each vessel, across the 800
yards of the Adour; a double line of cables, about ten feet apart,
linked the boats together; strong planks were lashed athwart the
cables, making a roadway; a double line of masts, forming a series of
floating squares, served as a floating boom; and across this swaying,
flexible, yet mighty bridge, Wellington was able to pour his left wing,
with all its artillery and material, and so draw round Bayonne an iron
line of investment.
This movement thrust back Soult's right, but he clung obstinately to
the Gave. He held by Napoleon's maxim that the best way to defend is
to attack, and Wellington's very success gave him what seemed a golden
opportunity. Wellington's left had crossed the Adour, but that very
movement separated it from the right.
Soult took up his position on a ridge of hills above Orthez. He
commanded the fords by which Picton must cross, and his plan was to
crush him while in the act of crossing. The opportunity was clear, but
somehow Soult missed it. There failed him at the critical moment the
swift-attacking impulse which both Napoleon and Wellington possessed in
so high a degree. Picton's two divisions crossed the Gave, and climbed
the bank through mere fissures in the rocks, which broke up all
military order, and the nearest point which allowed them to fall into
line was within cannon-shot of the enemy. Even Picton's iron nerve
shook at such a crisis; but Wellington, to use Napier's phrase, "calm
as deepest sea," watched the scene. Soult ought to have attacked; he
waited to be attacked, and so missed victory.
By nine o'clock Wellington had formed his plan, and Ross's brigade was
thrust through a gorge on Soult's left. The French were admirably
posted: they had a narrow front, abundant artillery, and a great
battery placed so as to smite on the flank any column forcing its way
through the gorge which pierced Soult's left. Ross's men fought
magnificently. Five times they broke through the gorge, and five times
the fire of the French infantry on the slopes above them, and the grape
of the great battery at the head of the gorge, drove the shattered
regiments back. On Soult's right, again, Foy flung back with loss an
attack by part of Picton's forces. On both the right and left, that
is, Soult was victorious, and, as he saw the wasted British lines roll
sullenly back, it is said that the French general smote his thigh in
exultation, and cried, "At last I have him!"
Almost at that moment, however, the warlike genius of Wellington
changed the aspect of the scene. He fed the attacks on Soult's right
and left, and the deepening roar of the battle at these two points
absorbed the senses of the French general. Soult's front was barred by
what was supposed to be an impassable marsh, above which a great hill
frowned; and across the marsh, and upon this hill, the centre of
Soult's position, Wellington launched the famous 52nd.
Colborne plunged with his men into the marsh; they sank at every step
above the knee, sometimes to the middle. The skirmishers shot fiercely
at them. But with stern composure the veterans of the light
division--soldiers, as Napier never tires in declaring, who "had never
yet met their match in the field"--pressed on. The marsh was crossed,
the hill climbed, and with a sudden and deafening shout--the cheer
which has a more full and terrible note than any other voice of
fighting men, the shout of the British regiment as it charges--the 52nd
dashed between Foy and Taupin. A French battalion in their path was
scattered as by the stroke of a thunderbolt. The French centre was
pierced; both victorious wings halted, and began to ebb back. Hill,
meanwhile, had crossed the Gave, and taking a wider circle, threatened
Soult's line of retreat. The French fell back, and fell back with
ever-quickening steps, but yet fighting sternly; the British, with
deafening musketry and cannonade, pressed on them. Hill quickened his
pace on the ridge along which he was pressing. It became a race who
should reach first the single bridge on the Luy-de-Béarn over which the
French must pass. The pace became a run. Many of the French broke
from their ranks and raced forward. The British cavalry broke through
some covering battalions and sabred the fugitives. A great disaster
was imminent; and yet it was avoided, partly by Soult's cool and
obstinate defence, and partly by the accident that at that moment
Wellington was struck by a spent ball and was disabled, so that his
swift and imperious will no longer directed the pursuit.
Orthez may be described as the last and not the least glorious fight in
the Peninsular war. Toulouse was fought ten day afterwards, but it
scarcely belongs to the Peninsular campaigns, and was actually fought
after a general armistice had been signed.