The battle was opened by Beresford at about 9 A.M., but, although he pushed in the enemy's right and carried the village of St Boes, he was in turn forced to retire, and was roughly handled by the French guns. Picton, who had at the same time been pressing forward against the centre, met with no better success, and was also driven back. For the moment the situation was critical, and it seemed as if Soult would snatch a victory; but Wellington's master-mind realised what was happening, and, quick as thought, he hurled a counter-attack of Alten's and Picton's men in between two parts of the French army which had become separated. Beresford turned, recaptured St Boes, and cut off Soult's retreat by the Dax road; and at the same time Hill forded the Gave de Pau a little above Orthes, and menaced Soult's left. The French, smitten in front and flank, drew off rapidly to the north-east, and the battle resolved itself into a race between Hill's Division and Soult's army for the bridge at Sault de Navailles, three miles away. The retreat was well carried out, and though Hill's cavalry pursued with a certain amount of success, Soult contrived to pass the bridge and destroy it, thus putting an end to the pursuit.
This was the last general action of the Peninsular War in which the 51st was engaged, for although the regiment crossed the Adour at St Sever, and advanced as far as Mont de Marsan, it was then detached, in order to accompany Beresford to Bordeaux, which city was wavering between allegiance to Napoleon or to the Bourbons. To settle matters, and to give confidence to the Bourbon party, Wellington sent Beresford with twelve thousand men, and the appearance of this force before Bordeaux, on the 12th March, had the desired result; whereupon Beresford, leaving Lord Dalhousie with the 7th Division and three squadrons of cavalry to occupy the place, marched back to the army. But as soon as Beresford had departed, the Napoleonists took heart and attempted an insurrection, in which they were supported by the advance of a French force from outside. For the next few weeks, therefore, the 51st was constantly engaged in skirmishes with the enemy, who was eventually dispersed by the arrival of a British fleet in the Garonne.
While these events were passing in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux, Wellington was following Soult. On the 20th March, a short but fierce fight at Tarbes resulted in the defeat of the French, who, however, retiring towards Toulouse, continued to dispute the advance of the Allies towards the upper Garonne, until, on the 10th April, Wellington caught them at Toulouse, and overthrew them. With this victory the war was brought to a close, for, the day after Wellington entered the town, the news of Napoleon's abdication was received from Paris, and the preliminaries for a permanent peace were entered into.
At Bordeaux the 51st remained in the enjoyment of a good deal of pleasure and gaiety until July, when it embarked for England, and proceeded first to Plymouth and then to Portsmouth, from which latter place it had started three years and a half before for the Peninsula. In that time the regiment had lost many officers and a great number of men, but these gallant dead had helped to gain seven fresh battle honours for the colours of the 51st. Personal rewards were restricted to the three senior officers, each of whom received the Gold Medal and brevet promotion, otherwise the officers and men found their reward only in the knowledge that they had fought for the glory of England, and had upheld the good name of their regiment. Napier, in the concluding paragraph of his 'Battles and Sieges,' writes of the Peninsular army as follows:—
"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."
But, if one turns to the lighter side of the war, one gathers from the journals and letters of officers that, in all this campaigning, with its attendant bloodshed and misery, there was usually some bright lining to the cloud. The vast majority of the officers, as has been shown, were of an age particularly susceptible to sparkling eyes and suchlike things, and the Spanish and French ladies appear to have been no less susceptible to the charming manners of the brave young Englishmen—even though the latter loved and rode away. There were not a few instances, however, of attachments which ended in marriage, and some of the non-commissioned officers and men also brought home Spanish or French wives. These men of war certainly carried large hearts buttoned within their tight-fitting coatees, and the cordiality of the entente was beyond dispute, as is evident from the following words with which one of Napier's subalterns concludes his account of the war[80]—words which, when compared with the above-quoted paragraph, show with what different eyes a bachelor lieutenant and a married lieutenant-colonel looked on life:—
"But at the conclusion of the war there was such an abundance of kissing as probably the like of it was never seen before, which put one in mind of the adage, 'that none but the brave deserve the fair.' There was kissing in the valleys, and kissing upon the hills, and, in short, there was embracing, kissing, and counter-kissing from Toulouse to Bordeaux."