But before the messenger, who had to take a vast détour, could reach this desperate little party, the last episode of the combat of Maya had begun. It was a sufficiently surprising end to the day. At about 6 o’clock there arrived, marching hard along the mountain road which continues the Chemin des Anglais westward, two battalions under General Barnes from the 2nd Brigade of the 7th Division[895], which Lord Dalhousie had sent from Echalar on getting the appeal for help. These two units—the 1/6th and Brunswick-Oels—were only 1,500 bayonets, and had done nine miles at a hot pace. But they were fresh troops, and led by a very thunderbolt of war—Barnes was the brigadier who a few days later made what Wellington declared to be the most gallant charge that he had seen, a charge that drew notes of admiration from the most reticent of pens[896]. They came in diagonally from an unexpected side road, unseen by the enemy till the moment of contact, and crashed in upon the leading French battalion with such an impetus that it was trampled down—losing 15 officers in a minute. The whole of the rest of the British troops present cheered, and advanced in the wake of Barnes’s men—even the poor wreck of the right wing of the 92nd, headed by its one surviving piper. A counter-attack on troops who have already done much, and are taken by surprise in what seems the moment of success, is often astoundingly effective—as the war of 1914-18 has showed. In this case the result was surprising: Maransin’s leading brigade fell back in disorder on his supports, the latter gave way also, and the whole mass retired uphill, as far as the camping-ground of Cameron’s regiments at the head of the pass. D’Erlon, wrongly believing that the whole 7th Division had arrived en masse, threw a brigade of Abbé’s division across the crest of the col, behind which the beaten troops took shelter. He expected to end the day with a defensive action, and even recalled a brigade of Darmagnac’s troops, who had been sent down towards the village of Maya, in pursuit of Pringle’s brigade, and who had just got engaged near it with Ashworth’s Portuguese, then retiring by order from the pass of Ispegui.
But Stewart would have been mad to press on with six battalions—three of them mere remnants—against eighteen, and halted on the summit, content to have blocked the pass, though the enemy had possession of it, and of ground in front of it on which he stood deployed. The firing continued for a time, and then died down as the dusk came on. By 8 o’clock all was over—if D’Erlon had frankly put in Abbé’s strong division of ten battalions, it is clear that he might yet have turned the fortune of the day. But he did not: hypnotized by the idea that he had the whole of the 2nd and 7th Divisions in front of him, instead of a mere fragment of each. The battle was well over when General Hill arrived from the Alduides, bringing with him unlucky news—he had intercepted and read, at Elizondo, Cole’s dispatch to Head-quarters saying that he had been attacked at Roncesvalles by 35,000 men, and that he was giving up the pass. Wherefore Hill resolved that he also must retire, and ordered the weary troops of Stewart and Barnes to retreat after midnight to Elizondo and cross the upper Bidassoa. It is scarcely credible that the men who had fought for ten hours under such conditions on such rough ground, retained strength to move another furlong—but the order was obeyed, though many badly wounded men had to be abandoned, and though the chaussée was strewn for miles by dead-beat stragglers, who dropped out and slept till daylight. They were not disturbed—for D’Erlon made no move till the sun was well up—he had won the pass and was expecting to have to fight again at dawn, for the right to emerge from it.
The losses in a fight so honourable to the British battalions, if so discreditable to British generalship, had been immense in Cameron’s brigade, heavy in Pringle’s, appreciable among Barnes’s men, who only struck in at the eleventh hour. The first-named had lost 800 men out of 1,900 present, of whom 343 belonged to the gallant and unlucky 1/92nd. Pringle’s three battalions had 530 casualties out of 2,000 present, including 140 unwounded prisoners taken on the Gorospil knoll from its light companies. Barnes and the 7th Division troops had won a glorious success with a loss of only 140 men. The total list gives just under 1,500 casualties out of 6,000 men engaged—of whom 349 were prisoners (200 of them wounded). These are very different figures from the 3,500 total at which D’Erlon stated Stewart’s loss—but sufficiently distressing. The enemy had suffered still more, but from infinitely greater numbers—their commander reported 1,400 casualties in Darmagnac’s division out of 7,000 present, 600 in Maransin’s. Abbé was barely engaged at the eleventh hour: one of his brigadiers (Rignoux) was hit and only four other officers, with perhaps 100 men. The total reported is therefore about 2,100—no very formidable proportion out of 20,000 men present. But some battalions had been badly cut up—the 103rd of Maransin’s division, which bore the first fury of Barnes’s attack, had 15 officers killed and wounded out of 20 present; and the 28th of Darmagnac’s division lost a similar number in sustaining the attack of the right wing of the 1/92nd and the British 28th. But this was a two-battalion regiment with 40 officers present. Nevertheless, D’Erlon’s report to Soult sings victory in very modest terms—he has captured the enemy’s position and holds it at the end of the day—the affair had been one of the most desperate that he has ever seen—the enemy’s loss has been far greater than his own—but there is no blowing of trumpets.
SECTION XXXVIII: CHAPTER IV
SORAUREN. JULY 26-28
The first day’s fighting in the Pyrenean passes could not be called satisfactory either to Wellington or to Soult. The former had lost both the defiles in which he had intended to make his first stand, and had lost them in a very tiresome fashion—he thought that Maya might have been held at least for twenty-four hours, if there had been a divisional general on the spot to direct the defence: while Roncesvalles had not been forced, but abandoned by Cole, who could certainly have made a longer resistance, if only the orders sent to him had been obeyed. It was, above all things, necessary to gain time for the concentration of the army, and a precious day had been lost—and need not have been lost.
But Soult can have been no better pleased: time, to him also, meant everything; and the orders which he had issued to his lieutenants had presupposed an easy triumph by surprise in the early morning, with a forward march in the afternoon. Instead of this he had won by nightfall a bare foothold on the summit of each pass, after much fighting of an unsatisfactory sort. He, too, had lost a day; and it was only on the morrow that he discovered that both at Maya and at Roncesvalles the enemy had slipped away in the dark, leaving to him the power to debouch from the defiles.
