Sally from Bayonne. (April, 1814.)
During the progress of the main army in the interior, General Hope had conducted the investment of Bayonne with all the unremitting vigilance that difficult operation required. He had gathered gabions and fascines and platforms, and was ready to attack the citadel, when rumours of the events at Paris reached him, yet indirectly and without any official character to warrant a formal communication to the garrison: he made them known indeed at the outposts, but to such irregular communications, which might be intended to deceive, the governor naturally paid little attention. At this time the fortified posts at St. Etienne were held by a brigade of the fifth division; from thence to the extreme right the Guards had charge of the line, one company being in St. Etienne itself; Hinuber’s German brigade was encamped as a support to the left; the remainder of the first division was in the rear.
In this state, about one o’clock in the morning of the 14th, a deserter gave General Hay, who commanded the outposts that night, an exact account of a projected sally; the general could not speak French, and sent him to Hinuber, who interpreted the man’s story to Hay, put his own troops under arms, and transmitted the intelligence to Hope. It would appear that Hay, perhaps disbelieving the man’s story, took no additional precautions, and it is probable neither the German brigade nor the reserves of the Guards would have been under arms but for Hinuber. However, at three o’clock, the French, commencing with a false attack on the left of the Adour as a blind, poured suddenly out of the citadel to the number of three thousand combatants; they surprised the picquets, and with loud shouts, breaking through the chain of posts at various points, carried with one rush the church and the village of St. Etienne, with exception of a fortified house defended by Captain Forster of the 38th. Masters of every other part, and overbearing all before them, they drove picquets and supports in heaps along the Peyrehorade road, killed General Hay, took Colonel Townsend of the Guards prisoner, divided the wings of the investing troops, and, passing in rear of the right, threw the whole line into confusion. Then it was that Hinuber, having his Germans in hand, moved up to Etienne, rallied some of the fifth division, and being joined by a battalion of Bradford’s Portuguese, bravely gave the counter-stroke to the enemy and regained the village and church.
On the right the combat was still more disastrous. Neither picquets nor reserves could sustain the fury of the assault, and the battle was most confused and terrible; for on both sides the troops, broken into small bodies by the inclosures, and unable to recover their order, came dashing together in the darkness, fighting often with the bayonet;—and sometimes friends encountered, sometimes foes—all was tumult and horror. The guns of the citadel, vaguely guided by the flashes of the musketry, sent their shot and shells booming at random through the lines of fight, while some gun-boats, dropping down the river, opened their fire upon the flank of the supporting columns, which being put in motion by Hope on the first alarm were now coming up. One hundred pieces of artillery were thus in full play at once, the shells set fire to the fascine depôts, and to several houses, the flames from which cast a horrid glare over the striving masses.
Amidst this confusion General Hope suddenly disappeared, none knew how or wherefore at the time. Afterwards it became known, that having brought up the reserves, he had pushed for St. Etienne by a hollow road behind the line of picquets; but the French were on both banks; he endeavoured to return, was wounded, and his horse, a large one, as was necessary to sustain the gigantic warrior, having received eight bullets fell on his leg. His staff had escaped from the defile, yet two of them, Captain Herries and Mr. Moore, nephew to Sir John Moore, returning, endeavoured to draw him from beneath the horse, but were both dangerously wounded and carried off with Hope, who was again badly hurt in the foot by an English bullet.
Light now beginning to break enabled the allies to act with more unity. The Germans were in possession of St. Etienne, the reserve brigades of the foot Guards, rallied in mass by General Howard, suddenly raised their shout, and running in upon the French drove them back to their works with such slaughter, that their own writers admit a loss of one general and more than nine hundred men. On the British side General Hay was killed, Stopford wounded, and the whole loss was eight hundred and thirty men and officers, of which more than two hundred, with the commander-in-chief, were taken. Captain Forster’s firm defence of the fortified house first, and next the ready gallantry with which Hinuber’s Germans retook St. Etienne, had staved off a very terrible disaster.
A few days after this piteous event the convention made with Soult became known and hostilities ceased.
All the French troops in the south were then reorganized in one body under Suchet, but so little inclined to acquiesce in the revolution, that Prince Polignac, acting for the duke of Angoulême, applied to the British commissary-general Kennedy, for a sum of money to quiet them.
The Portuguese soldiers returned to Portugal; the Spaniards to Spain; their generals, it is said, being inclined to declare for the Cortes against the king, but they were diverted from it by the influence of Lord Wellington.
The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America, some for England; the cavalry, marching through France, took shipping at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all remembrance of the veterans’ services.
Yet those veterans had won nineteen pitched battles and innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from Portugal, once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed, wounded, or captured two hundred thousand enemies—leaving of their own number forty thousand dead, whose bones whiten the plains and mountains of the Peninsula.
THE END.
LONDON: PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET, AND CHARING CROSS.