Deeds that Won the Empire / Historic Battle Scenes

by W. H. Fitchett

MOUNTAIN COMBATS

"At length the freshening western blast
Aside the shroud of battle cast;
And first the ridge of mingled spears
Above the brightening cloud appears;
And in the smoke the pennons flew,
As in the storm the white sea-mew.
Then marked they, dashing broad and far,
The broken billows of the war,
And plumèd crests of chieftains brave
Floating like foam upon the wave,
But nought distinct they see."
—SCOTT.

The brilliant and heroic combats on the Nive belong to the later stages of the Pyrenean campaign; and here, as on the Bidassoa, Soult had all the advantages of position. He had a fortified camp and a great fortress as his base; excellent roads linked the whole of his positions together; he held the interior lines, and could reach any point in the zone of operations in less time than his great opponent. Wellington, on the other hand, had almost every possible disadvantage. The weather was bitter; incessant rains fell; he had to operate on both sides of a dangerous river; the roads were mere ribbons of tenacious clay, in which the infantry sank to mid-leg, the guns to their axles, the cavalry sometimes to their saddle-girths. Moreover, Wellington's Spanish troops had the sufferings and outrages of a dozen campaigns to avenge, and when they found themselves on French soil the temptations to plunder and murder were irresistible. Wellington would not maintain war by plunder, and, as he found he could not restrain his Spaniards, he despatched the whole body, 25,000 strong, back to Spain. It was a great deed. It violated all military canons, for by it Wellington divided his army in the presence of the enemy. It involved, too, a rare sacrifice of personal ambition. "If I had 20,000 Spaniards, paid and fed," he wrote to Lord Bathurst, "I should have Bayonne. If I had 40,000 I do not know where I should stop. Now I have both the 20,000 and the 40,000, … but if they plunder they will ruin all." Wellington was great enough to sacrifice both military rules and personal ambition to humanity. He was wise enough, too, to know that a policy which outrages humanity in the long-run means disaster.

Wellington's supreme advantage lay in the fighting quality of his troops. The campaigns of six years had made them an army of veterans. "Danger," says Napier, "was their sport," and victory, it might also be added, was their habit. They fought with a confidence and fierceness which, added to the cool and stubborn courage native to the British character, made the battalions which broke over the French frontier under Wellington perhaps the most formidable fighting force known in the history of war. To quote Napier once more: "What Alexander's Macedonians were at Arbela, Hannibal's Africans at Cannae, Caesar's Romans at Pharsalia, Napoleon's Guards at Austerlitz, such were Wellington's British soldiers at this period."

On November 10, 1813, was fought what is called the battle of Nivelle, in which Wellington thrust Soult roughly and fiercely from the strong positions he held on the flanks of the great hills under which the Nivelle flows. The morning broke in great splendour; three signal-guns flashed from the heights of one of the British hills, and at once the 43rd leaped out and ran swiftly forward from the flank of the great Rhune to storm the "Hog's Back" ridge of the Petite Rhune, a ridge walled with rocks 200 feet high, except at one point, where it was protected by a marsh. William Napier, who commanded the 43rd, has told the story of the assault. He placed four companies in reserve, and led the other four in person to the attack on the rocks; and he was chiefly anxious not to rush his men—to "keep down the pace," so that they would not arrive spent and breathless at the French works. The men were eager to rush, however; the fighting impulse in them was on flame, and they were held back with difficulty. When they were still nearly 200 yards from the enemy, a youthful aide-de-camp, his blood on fire, came galloping up with a shout, and waving his hat. The 43rd broke out of hand at once with the impulse of the lad's enthusiasm and the stroke of his horse's flying hoofs, and with a sudden rush they launched themselves on the French works still high above them.

Napier had nothing for it but to join the charging mass. "I was the first man but one," he says, "who reached and jumped into the rocks, and I was only second because my strength and speed were unequal to contend with the giant who got before me. He was the tallest and most active man in the regiment, and the day before, being sentenced to corporal punishment, I had pardoned him on the occasion of an approaching action. He now repaid me by striving always to place himself between me and the fire of the enemy. His name was Eccles, an Irishman." The men won the first redoubt, but simply had not breath and strength enough left to reach the one above it, and fell gasping and exhausted in the rocks before it, the French firing fiercely upon them. In a few minutes, however, they had recovered breath; they leaped up with a shout, and tumbled over the wall of the castle; and so, from barrier to barrier, as up some Titanic stairway, the 43rd swept with glittering bayonets. The summit was held by a powerful work called the Donjon; it was so strong that attack upon it seemed madness. But a keen-eyed British officer detected signs of wavering in the French within the fort, and with a shout the 43rd leaped at it, and carried it. It took the 43rd twenty minutes to carry the whole chain of positions; and of the eleven officers of the regiment, six were killed or desperately wounded. The French showed bravery; they fought, in fact, muzzle to muzzle up the whole chain of positions. But the 43rd charged with a daring and fury absolutely resistless.

Another amazing feature in the day's fight was the manner in which Colborne, with the 52nd, carried what was called the Signal Redoubt, a strong work, crowning a steep needle-pointed hill, and overlooking the whole French position. Colborne led his men up an ascent so sharp that his horse with difficulty could climb it. The summit was reached, and the men went in, with a run, at the work, only to find the redoubt girdled by a wide ditch thirty feet deep. The men halted on the edge of the deep cutting, and under the fire of the French they fell fast. Colborne led back his men under the brow of the hill for shelter, and at three separate points brought them over the crest again. In each case, after the men had rested under shelter long enough to recover breath, the word was passed, "Stand up and advance." The men instantly obeyed, and charged up to the edge of the ditch again, many of the leading files jumping into it. But it was impossible to cross, and each time the mass of British infantry stepped coolly back into cover again.

One sergeant named Mayne, who had leaped into the ditch, found he could neither climb the ramparts nor get back to his comrades, and he flung himself on his face. A Frenchman leaned over the rampart, took leisurely aim, and fired at him as he lay. Mayne had stuck the billhook of his section at the back of his knapsack, and the bullet struck it and flattened upon it. Colborne was a man of infinite resource in war, and at this crisis he made a bugler sound a parley, hoisted his white pocket-handkerchief, and coolly walked round to the gate of the redoubt and invited the garrison to surrender. The veteran who commanded it answered indignantly, "What! I with my battalion surrender to you with yours?" "Very well," answered Colborne in French, "the artillery will be up immediately; you cannot hold out, and you will be surrendered to the Spaniards." That threat was sufficient. The French officers remonstrated stormily with their commander, and the work was surrendered. But only one French soldier in the redoubt had fallen, whereas amongst the 52nd "there fell," says Napier, "200 soldiers of a regiment never surpassed in arms since arms were first borne by men." In this fight Soult was driven in a little more than three hours from a mountain position he had been fortifying for more than three months.

Amongst the brave men who died that day on the side of the British were two whose portraits Napier has drawn with something of Plutarch's minuteness:—

"The first, low in rank, for he was but a lieutenant; rich in honour, for he bore many scars; was young of days—he was only nineteen—and had seen more combats and sieges than he could count years. So slight in person and of such surpassing and delicate beauty that the Spaniards often thought him a girl disguised in man's clothing; he was yet so vigorous, so active, so brave, that the most daring and experienced veterans watched his looks on the field of battle, and, implicitly following where he led, would, like children, obey his slightest sign in the most difficult situations. His education was incomplete, yet were his natural powers so happy that the keenest and best-furnished shrank from an encounter of wit; and every thought and aspiration was proud and noble, indicating future greatness if destiny had so willed it. Such was Edward Freer of the 43rd. The night before the battle he had that strange anticipation of coming death so often felt by military men. He was struck by three balls at the first storming of the Rhune rocks, and the sternest soldiers wept, even in the middle of the fight, when they saw him fall."

"On the same day, and at the same hour, was killed Colonel Thomas Lloyd. He likewise had been a long time in the 43rd. Under him Freer had learned the rudiments of his profession; but in the course of the war, promotion placed Lloyd at the head of the 94th, and it was leading that regiment he fell. In him also were combined mental and bodily powers of no ordinary kind. Graceful symmetry, herculean strength, and a countenance frank and majestic, gave the true index of his nature; for his capacity was great and commanding, and his military knowledge extensive, both from experience and study. Of his mirth and wit, well known in the army, it only need be said that he used the latter without offence, yet so as to increase the ascendency over those with whom he held intercourse; for, though gentle, he was ambitious, valiant, and conscious of his fitness for great exploits. And he, like Freer, was prescient of and predicted his own fall, but with no abatement of courage, for when he received the mortal wound, a most painful one, he would not suffer himself to be moved, and remained to watch the battle, making observations upon its changes until death came. It was thus, at the age of thirty, that the good, the brave, the generous Lloyd died. Tributes to his memory have been published by Wellington, and by one of his own poor soldiers, by the highest and by the lowest. To their testimony I add mine. Let those who served on equal terms with him say whether in aught it has exaggerated his deserts."

A pathetic incident may be added, found in Napier's biography, but which he does not give in his History. The night before the battle Napier was stretched on the ground under his cloak, when young Freer came to him and crept under the cover of his cloak, sobbing as if his heart would break. Napier tried to soothe and comfort the boy, and learnt from him that he was fully persuaded he should lose his life in the approaching battle, and his distress was caused by thinking of his mother and sister in England.

On December 9, Wellington, by a daring movement and with some fierce fighting, crossed the Nive. It was a movement which had many advantages, but one drawback—his wings were now separated by the Nive; and Soult at this stage, like the great and daring commander he was, took advantage of his position to attempt a great counter-stroke. It was within his power to fling his whole force on either wing of Wellington, and so confident was he of success that he wrote to the Minister of War telling him to "expect good news" the next day. Wellington himself was on the right bank of the Nive, little dreaming that Soult was about to leap on the extremity of his scattered forces. The country was so broken that Soult's movements were entirely hidden, and the roads so bad that even the cavalry outposts could scarcely move. On the night of the 9th Soult had gathered every available bayonet, and was ready to burst on the position held by Sir John Hope at Arcanques.

In the grey dawn of the 10th the out-pickets of the 43rd noticed that the French infantry were pushing each other about as if in sport; but the crowd seemed to thicken and to eddy nearer and nearer the British line. It was a trick to deceive the vigilance of the British outposts. Presently the apparently sportive crowd made a rush forwards and resolved itself into a spray of swiftly moving skirmishers. The French columns broke from behind a screen of houses, and, at a running pace, and with a tumult of shouts, charged the British position. In a moment the crowd of French soldiers had penetrated betwixt the 43rd and 52nd, and charging eagerly forward, tried to turn the flanks of both. But these were veteran regiments; they fell coolly and swiftly back, firing fiercely as they went. It was at once a race and a combat. The roads were so narrow and so bad that the British could keep no order, and if the French outpaced them and reached the open position at the rear first, the British line would be pierced. The 43rd came through the pass first, apparently a crowd of running fugitives, officers and men jumbled together. The moment they had reached the open ground, however, the men fell, as if by a single impulse, into military form, and became a steadfast red line, from end to end of which ran, and ran again, and yet again, the volleying flame of a sustained musketry fire. The pass was barred!

The troops to the right of the French were not quite so quick or so fortunate, and about 100 of the British—riflemen and men of the 43rd—were intercepted. The French never doubted that they would surrender, for they were but a handful of men cut off by a whole column. An ensign of the 43rd named Campbell, a lad not eighteen years of age, was in the front files of the British when the call to surrender was heard. With a shout the boy-ensign leaped at the French column. Where an officer leads, British soldiers will always follow, and the men followed him with a courage as high as his own. With a rush the column was rent, and though fifty of the British were killed or taken, fifty, including the gallant boy who led them, escaped.

The fighting at other points was of the sharpest, and was strangely entangled and confused. It was a fight of infantry against infantry, and the whole field of the combat was interlaced by almost impassable hedges. At one point, so strangely broken was the ground, and so obscured the fight with smoke and mist, that a French regiment passed unseen betwixt the British and Portuguese, and was rapidly filing into line on the rear of the 9th, fiercely occupied at that moment against a strong force in front. Cameron, its colonel, left fifty men of his regiment to answer the fire in his front, faced about, and went at a run against the French regiment, which by this time had commenced volley-firing. Cameron's men fell fast—eighty men and officers, in fact, dropped in little more than five minutes—but the rush of the 9th was irresistible. The Frenchmen wavered, broke, and swept, a disorganised mass, past the flank of the Royals, actually carrying off one of its officers in the rush, and disappeared.

The sternest and most bewildering fighting took place round a building known as the "mayor's house," surrounded by a coppice-wood. Coppice and outbuildings were filled with men of all regiments and all nations, swearing, shooting, and charging with the bayonet. The 84th was caught in a hollow road by the French, who lined the banks above, and lost its colonel and a great proportion of its rank and file. Gronow tells an amusing incident of the fight at this stage. An isolated British battalion stationed near the mayor's house was suddenly surrounded by a flood of French. The French general galloped up to the British officer in command and demanded his sword. "Upon this," says Gronow, "without the least hesitation the British officer shouted out, 'This fellow wants us to surrender! Charge! my boys, and show them what stuff we are made of.'" The men answered with a shout, sudden, scornful, and stern, and went with a run at the French. "In a few minutes," adds Gronow, "they had taken prisoners or killed the whole of the infantry regiment opposed to them!"

On the 11th desperate fighting took place on the same ground, but the British were by this time reinforced—the Guards, in particular, coming up after a rapid and exhausting march—and Soult's attack had failed. But on the night of the 12th the rain fell fast and steadily, the Nive was flooded, the bridge of boats which spanned it swept away, and Hill was left at St. Pierre isolated, with less than 14,000 men. Soult saw his opportunity. The interior lines he held made concentration easy, and on the morning of the 13th he was able to pour an attacking force of 35,000 bayonets on Hill's front, while another infantry division, together with the whole of the French cavalry under Pierre Soult, attacked his rear. Then there followed what has been described as the most desperate battle of the whole Peninsular war.