‘At twilight,’ wrote a captain of the 43rd whose narrative was quoted by Napier, but is well worth quoting again, ‘we overlooked the enemy within a stone’s throw, and from the summit of a precipice: the river separated us: but the French were wedged in a narrow road, with rocks enclosing them on one side and the river on the other. Such confusion took place among them as is impossible to describe. The wounded were thrown down in the rush and trampled upon: the cavalry drew their swords and endeavoured to charge up the pass to Echalar[1035], the only opening on their right flank. But the infantry beat them back, and several of them, horse and man, were precipitated into the river. Others fired up vertically at us, while the wounded called out for quarter, and pointed to the numerous soldiers borne on the shoulders of their comrades on stretchers composed of the branches of trees, to which were looped great-coats clotted with gore, or blood-stained sheets taken from houses to carry their wounded—on whom we did not fire[1036].’
The officer commanding in the French rear finally got out a battalion behind a stone wall, whose fire somewhat covered the defiling mass. All the bolder spirits ran the gauntlet through the zone of fire and escaped up the road to Echalar[1037]. The weak, the wounded, and the worn-out surrendered to the leading troops of the 4th Division, who now closed in on them. About 1,000 prisoners were made, largely soldiers of the train and other non-combatants, but including stragglers from nearly every division in Soult’s army. There was no pursuit—the Light Division troops could not have stirred a step: the 4th Division were almost as weary after a long day’s hunt. The casualties of both had been absurdly small—3 officers and 45 men in Cole’s regiments, 1 officer and 15 men in Alten’s. The Spanish battalion engaged in the afternoon must, of course, have lost on a very different scale during its highly creditable operations; but its casualties have, unluckily, not been recorded. The French may have had 500 killed and wounded, and 1,000 prisoners—but this was the least part of their loss—the really important thing was that thousands of men were scattered in the hills, and did not rally to their eagles for many days. That night Soult’s army was not only a demoralized, but a much depleted force.
Wellington was, not unnaturally, dissatisfied with the day’s work. ‘Many events,’ he wrote to Graham, ‘turned out for us unfortunately on the 1st instant, each of which ought to have been in our favour: we should have done the enemy a great deal more mischief than we did during his passage down this valley[1038].’ For one of these things, Alten’s late arrival, he was himself mainly responsible[1039]: for the others—Longa’s and Barcena’s strange failure to detach more troops to help the regiment of Asturias at Yanzi[1040], and Dalhousie’s late arrival with the 7th Division—which never got into action or lost a man—he was not.
It must be confessed, however, that Wellington’s intentions on August 1st are a little difficult to follow. One would have supposed that he would have devoted his main attention to a direct attempt to smash up Soult’s main body—but he never allotted more than the 4th, 7th, and Light Divisions to that task—while he had obviously another idea in his head, dealing with a larger scheme for the destruction of the enemy. At 9.30, when he had occupied Santesteban, he sent orders to Byng, then at Elizondo, to bid him to march at once on the Pass of Maya, and to throw an advanced party into Urdax, on the French side of the defile. At the same time Hill, at Irurita, is desired to follow Byng, occupy Elizondo, and—if his troops can bear the strain—advance even to the Pass of Maya. Should this prove possible, Byng, when relieved by Hill, should descend into France as far as Ainhoue on the Nivelle. The 2nd Division, and the Portuguese division attached to it, would follow him next morning. Hopes are expressed in the dispatch that Pakenham and the 6th Division—last heard of at Eugui on the 31st—would be in a position to combine their operations with those of Hill[1041].
This descent into the valley of the Nivelle from the Maya pass must surely have been imagined with the idea of encircling the whole French army at Echalar, for Ainhoue was well in Soult’s rear, and troops placed there could cut him off from the direct road to Bayonne. On the same evening Wellington was dictating a dispatch to Graham telling him that he hoped to be at Maya next morning, and beyond the frontier: Graham was therefore to prepare to cross the Bidassoa and attack Villatte with his and Giron’s full force, including cavalry and guns, leaving St. Sebastian blockaded by the necessary minimum detachment[1042]. Meanwhile Alten, Dalhousie, and Cole were to mass in front of the enemy’s position at Echalar. The only possible meaning that can be drawn from these orders, when read together, is that Wellington had now developed the complete encircling scheme for Soult’s destruction, which he had not thought out on July 31.
But the scheme was never put into execution. On August 2 Byng was halted at Maya, Graham received no order to pass the Bidassoa, and all that was done was to execute an attack on Echalar—attended with complete success, it is true, but only resulting in pushing Soult back towards the Nivelle, where there was no intercepting force waiting to waylay him. Somewhere between 8 p.m. on the 1st and dawn on the 2nd Wellington, for reasons which he did not avow to his staff or his most trusted lieutenants, gave up the greater game, which had in it immense possibilities: for Soult had no longer an army that could fight—as events at Echalar were to prove a few hours later. Minor causes for this great piece of self-restraint can be cited. One was that Hill and Pakenham turned out not to be within easy supporting distance of Byng, so that the dash into Soult’s rear could not be executed with a sufficient force. If this operation were not carried out, Graham’s became useless. Certainly a reflection on the extremely depleted condition of the 2nd Division, which had suffered such heavy losses at Maya, Beunza, and the Venta de Urroz, helped to deter Wellington from using this exhausted force for his main stroke. Writing to Graham two days later, he mentioned its condition as a cause of delay, along with a general dearth of musket ammunition and shoes. But the main reason, as we shall see later, lay rather in the higher spheres of European politics, and the explanation was reserved for the Minister of War in London alone. Next morning no general attack was delivered: Wellington did not go to Maya, but merely joined the 4th and Light Divisions on the Bidassoa. The great scheme was stillborn, and never took shape.
Soult had gathered the wrecks of his army on the range of mountains behind Echalar, where the Spanish-French boundary line runs. The cavalry had been at once packed off to the rear. The infantry took up a position. Clausel’s three divisions were in the centre—Vandermaesen holding the village with a company, and with his main body—certainly not 2,000 men that day—across the road on the slope above. Conroux’s division was on Vandermaesen’s right: Taupin’s, in reserve to both the others, on the crest where the frontier runs. Reille’s corps—still more depleted than Clausel’s, continued the line westward—Lamartinière’s division next to Conroux’s, as far as the Peak of Ivantelly: Maucune’s—the most dilapidated unit in a dilapidated army—holding the ground beyond the Ivantelly, with a flank-guard out on its right watching the road from Vera to Sarre. D’Erlon’s divisions—still by far the most intact units of the whole command, were on Clausel’s left, prolonging the line eastward and holding a commanding position on the mountain side as far as the Peaks of Salaberry and Atchuria. It is doubtful whether the Marshal had 25,000 men in line that day in his eight divisions—not because the remainder were all casualties or prisoners, but because the long retreat, with its incessant scrambling over mountain sides, had led to the defection of many voluntary and still more involuntary stragglers. The former were scattered over the country for miles on every side, seeking for food and for ‘a day off’—the latter had dropped behind from sheer exhaustion: there had been no regular distribution of rations since July 29th, and the first convoy of relief had been captured by Byng at Elizondo on the 31st.
Wellington had only 12,000 men available in front of a very formidable position—hills 1,500 or 1,800 feet high, with the peaks which formed the flank protection rising to 2,100 or 2,300. Under ordinary circumstances an attack would have been insane. Moreover, his troops were almost as way-worn as those of Soult: the Light and 4th Divisions had received no rations since the 30th, and the latter had lost a good third of its strength in the very heavy fighting in which it had taken the chief part between the 25th and the 30th. But their spirits were high, they had the strongest confidence in their power to win, and they were convinced that the enemy was ‘on the run’—in which idea they were perfectly right.
The plan of attack was that the 4th and 7th Divisions should assail the enemy’s centre, on each side of the village of Echalar, while the Light Division turned his western flank. This involved long preliminary marching for Alten’s men, despite of their awful fatigues of the preceding day. They had to trudge from the bridge of Yanzi and Aranaz to Vera, where they turned uphill on to the heights of Santa Barbara, a series of successive slopes by which they ascended towards the Peak of Ivantelly and Reille’s flank. Just as they began to deploy they got the first regular meal that they had seen for two days: ‘The soldiers were so weak that they could hardly stand; however, our excellent commissary had managed to overtake us, and hastily served out half a pound of biscuit to each individual, which the men devoured in the act of priming and loading just as they moved off to the attack[1043].’ The morning was dull and misty—a great contrast to the blazing sunshine of the preceding day, and it was hard to get any complete view of the position—clouds were drifting along the hills and obscuring parts of the landscape for many minutes at a time. This chance put Wellington himself in serious danger for a moment—pushing forward farther than he knew, with a half-company of the 43rd to cover him, he got among the French outposts, and was only saved by the vigilance of his escort from being cut off—he galloped back under a shower of balls—any one of which might have caused a serious complication in the British command—it is impossible to guess what Beresford would have made of the end of the campaign of 1813.
While the Light Division was developing the flank attack, the front attack was already being delivered—somewhat sooner than Wellington expected or intended. The plan had been for the 4th Division to operate against the French right—the 7th against their centre and left centre. Cole, however, was delayed in getting forward by the immense block of French débris along the narrow defile from Sumbilla to the bridge of Yanzi. ‘For two miles there were scattered along the road papers, old rugs, blankets, pack-saddles, old bridles and girths, private letters, hundreds of empty and broken boxes, quantities of entrenching tools, French clothes, dead mules, dead soldiers, dead peasants, farriers’ tools, boots and linen, the boxes of M. le Général Baron de St. Pol[1044] and other officers, the field hospital of the 2nd Division (Darmagnac’s), and all sorts of things worth picking up—which caused stoppage and confusion[1045].’