Although for the present retiring, the effects of these campaigns were very different upon the combatants. The British, elated with hope, incited to perseverance, brought a new and living energy into the field when the rest of the winter had passed away and the operations of the war been resumed in the spring. On the other hand, the French—depressed by the evil tidings of the Grand Army in Russia; tired, moreover, with incessant yet fruitless fightings; disunited by discontent, privation, and jealousy—when the season once more invited action, found their armies dispirited and disorganised. No wonder, then, that the forward march of the British led to a series of victories ever gracing our arms, until, surmounting the natural barriers of the Pyrenees, our troops descended into the plains of France in the day of that country’s humiliation. In the various actions of the “Pyrenees,” the Seventy-ninth was not seriously engaged.
It was present at the passage of the “Nivelle” and the “Nive.” On the latter occasion it was specially distinguished for its well-directed fire, which caused great havoc in the dense masses of the enemy which strove to defend the passage.
At the battle of Toulouse, in the brigade of General Pack, with the Forty-second Royal Highlanders and the Ninety-first (Argyllshire) Regiment, the Seventy-ninth was engaged in a desperate attack which carried a redoubt strongly situated, and resolutely defended, on the crest of a series of heights on the right of the position. A French officer, witnessing the advance of the Highlanders, exclaimed, “My God! how firm these sans culottes are!” Another French officer in conversation said of them, “Ah! these are brave soldiers. I should not like to meet them unless well supported. I put them to the proof on that day, for I led the division of more than 5000 men which attempted to retake the redoubt.” A British officer, high in command, thus yields his testimony to the valour of the brigade: “I saw your old friends the Highlanders in a most perilous position; and had I not known their firmness, I should have trembled for the result.”
On the abdication of Napoleon, peace for a time dispelled the thunder-storm of war, and permitted the return of the regiment to Britain. His escape from Elba again threatened to crush out the reviving spirit of liberty beneath the iron heel of his sanguinary tyranny. Happily for Europe and for France, the convulsive effort by which he strove to redeem and avenge the past was utterly defeated by his total discomfiture at Waterloo, for ever dissipating his dream of conquest, and closing his ambitious career.
Purposing to sever the British from the Prussians, and beat each in detail ere the Austrian and Russian armies could arrive from Germany to resume the war, Napoleon, by one of those rapid marches for which he was so famous, suddenly falling upon and defeating the Prussians at Ligny, turned with the full weight of his power against the British, who were already engaged in a desperate struggle with the corps of Marshal Ney at Quatre Bras—fitly introducing the grander event of Waterloo. Although impetuously assailed by an immensely superior force, and suffering a loss of more than 300 men, the Seventy-ninth behaved with the utmost heroism.
“And wild and high the ‘Cameron’s gathering’ rose!
The war-note of Lochiel, which Albyn’s hills
Have heard—and heard, too, have her Saxon foes:
How in the noon of night that pibroch thrills,
Savage and shrill! But with the breath which fills