These orders brought on very heavy fighting, for Foy had held his forward positions so long that he had great difficulty in withdrawing his troops from them, when he found that he was outflanked, and even attacked in the rear. At the south end of the field, along the chaussée, the allied attack failed entirely, the strength of the fortifications of the town having been under-estimated. When the leading battalion (1st Light Battalion K.G.L.) approached the gate, it came into a cross-fire from the blockhouses, and still heavier frontal musketry from the well-lined ramparts, which proved wholly inaccessible. Scaling ladders would have been required to mount them. The line broke, but the men did not retire, but threw themselves down behind walls and in ditches and tried to answer the fire from such cover as they could find. Many took refuge in the courtyard of a convent not far outside the Vittoria gate, from which their colonel, Ompteda, led out a second assault, which melted away under the fire as the first had done. In truth, the attempt was a misjudged one on Graham’s part—possibly his bad eyesight had failed to note the strength of the defences. The 1st Light Battalion lost five officers and 58 men killed and wounded in a quarter of an hour[659], and had to keep under shelter as best it could; the supporting troops were halted and ordered to lie down, while guns were brought up from the rear to batter the gate. This should obviously have been done before, and not after, the assault. The check was unnecessary, as was shown a little later when the artillery smashed the gate by a few shots, and cleared the neighbouring walls.
Meanwhile there had been fierce fighting on the eastern side of the town, where Bradford’s Portuguese, and the three German line-battalions, with Longa’s men on their northern flank, had fallen upon the three French brigades lying outside the town. Bonté’s and St. Pol’s battalions, still frontally engaged against Bradford, suddenly realized the danger of their position, when the Germans attacked their left flank, and Longa appeared almost in their rear. They retreated in haste towards Tolosa, and got jammed outside the Pampeluna gate, which had been blocked for defence and could not readily be entered. To avoid being crushed against the walls, they massed themselves for a counter-stroke, and thrusting back the Germans for a moment, raced along the river-bank, past the foot of the ramparts, till they got under the cover of Foy’s second brigade on the hill of Jagoz, and escaped beyond the north end of the town. The Germans, though in great disorder, made an attack on the Pampeluna gate, which failed for the same reason that had wrecked that on the Vittoria gate—the impossibility of escalading a well-defended rampart.
Meanwhile there was heavy skirmishing going on to the north-west of Tolosa: Mendizabal’s bands had appeared on the mountain road from Aspeytia, and had engaged Rouget’s brigade, which was covering Foy’s right flank. The French general’s dispatch confesses that the troops from the Bilbao garrison, which included some conscript battalions from the Bayonne reserve, behaved badly, lost ground, and had to be rallied by their general’s personal exertions. They were apparently thrown into a panic by an attack delivered on their flank, by the small Spanish-Portuguese detachment which Graham had sent out on his left: it had worked up by the narrow space between the walls of Tolosa and the precipice above, and came up very opportunely to aid Mendizabal. Rouget held on till dark, but with difficulty, and the knowledge that his route of retreat was threatened added to Foy’s anxiety, for Longa was also pushing behind the town on the other side. Accordingly he ordered Deconchy’s brigade to evacuate Tolosa at once, just as the sun was setting, and prepared for a general retreat.
If the order had been given half an hour later, the garrison of Tolosa would probably have been captured whole, for Graham’s guns had just blown the defences of the Vittoria gate to pieces, and the German light battalions burst in with ease at the point where they had been checked before. There was some confused fighting in the streets, but the French got off with no great loss under cover of the darkness, and fell in with the rear of their main column, which went off down the chaussée at great speed. Mendizabal made some prisoners from Rouget’s brigade, as it fell back to join the rest across the slopes, and Longa caught some fugitives on the other flank[660].
Foy says that he lost some 400 men in the fight, which would seem a low estimate, as the Allies could show 200 prisoners, and Bonté’s and Rouget’s brigades had been very roughly handled. Graham reports 58 killed, 316 wounded, and 45 missing—the last all from Bradford’s brigade. Of the Spaniards Longa and Mendizabal only were engaged: Giron’s report (as so often occurs with Spanish documents) gives no figures, only remarking that some of Longa’s 1st battalion of Iberia ‘perished by reason of their rash courage, but had a great share in deciding the day’—presumably by pushing far ahead in the turning movement which caused Foy to order a general retreat. If we allow 200 Spanish killed and wounded, we shall probably not be far out of our reckoning. Had Graham withheld his unlucky assault on the Vittoria gate till it had been well battered, and trusted entirely to his turning movements, he would have got off with a much smaller casualty list. His original design of manœuvring Foy out of Tolosa was the right game, considering the strength of the position. The French general could plead in defence of his risky tactics that he had held up a superior force for a whole day—but at that particular moment time did not happen to matter—as Graham’s leisurely pursuit on the subsequent days sufficiently shows. He was only set on getting Foy across the Bidassoa; and nothing in the general course of the campaign depended on whether he did so a day sooner or a day later. On the other hand, by standing too long at Tolosa Foy nearly lost three brigades, and might indeed have lost his whole force.
The remainder of this side-campaign displays none of the interest of its four first days. Foy retired to Andoain on the night of the combat of Tolosa, where he was joined by the battalions of the 40th and 101st under General Berlier, which had escorted Maucune’s convoy to the frontier, and by the 62nd and a Spanish ‘Juramentado’ regiment withdrawn from Biscay garrisons. This, despite of his recent losses, gave him a force of 16,000 infantry, 400 sabres, and 10 guns. Graham did not press him, his troops being much fatigued: only the indefatigable Longa appeared with his Cantabrians in front of the position. On the 27th the whole French force retired unmolested to Hernani.
It was of course all-important to Foy to know what were the situation and intentions of the King. Nothing could be heard of the main army at Andoain or Hernani, so he detached Berlier’s brigade to seek for news in the Bastan, along the upper Bidassoa. On the 28th Berlier discovered Reille and two divisions of the Army of Portugal at Vera. They were in bad order, without guns and much under strength, though stragglers were rejoining in considerable numbers. Reille had been as ignorant of Foy’s whereabouts as Foy had been of that of the main army. He was rejoiced to hear that all the Biscay garrisons had been saved, and that there was a solid force ready to co-operate with him in the defence of the line of the Bidassoa. His own troops were not yet fit for fighting. Accordingly he sent Foy orders to evacuate Hernani and come back to the frontier, though he need not actually cross the Bidassoa unless he were compelled to do so. By stopping at Oyarzun he could keep up communication with St. Sebastian, which must be needing attention.
The condition of that fortress, indeed, had already been troubling the mind of Foy on his last day of independent command. It lay so near the French border, and had been for years so far from any enemy—Guipuzcoan guerrilleros excepted—that it had been much neglected. When General Rey, named as Governor by King Joseph two days before the battle of Vittoria, arrived with orders to put it in a state of defence, he found it garrisoned only by 500 gendarmes, a battalion of recruits on the way to join the 120th Line, and two weak companies of pioneers and sappers—1,200 men in all. The stores of food were low, the glacis was cumbered with huts and sheds, there was no provision of gabions, fascines, or timber. Moreover, the town was full of Spanish and French fugitives who had preceded the King on his retreat—there were (it is said) as many as 7,000 of them, lingering in Spain till the last moment, in the hope that Wellington might be stopped on the Ebro. The news of Vittoria arrived on the 23rd, and caused hopeless consternation—the place was not ready to stand a siege—the garrison so small that it could not even spare a battalion to escort the tiresome mass of refugees to Bayonne. Rey began in feverish haste to clear the glacis, palisade the outworks, and rearrange the cannons on the walls, but he had too few hands for work, and was in a state resembling despair when on the 28th Foy turned up for a flying visit, saw and acknowledged the nakedness of the land, and promised to do all that he could to help—though it was less than the Governor required. He took away the old garrison—the recruits were not too trustworthy, the gendarmes not siege troops: to replace them he threw in the whole of Deconchy’s brigade—four battalions, about 2,000 infantry—and all the gunners that he could spare. As the garrison of Guetaria, 450 strong, escaped by sea to San Sebastian two days later, and a number of stragglers dropped into the place before the siege began, the gross total of the garrison was raised to some 3,000 men. Rey asked for 4,000, but Foy would not grant him another battalion—and was justified by the course of the siege, for the place was very small and, if it could be held at all, was defensible by the lesser number. The only doubt was whether there would be time to get it in order before the Allies appeared[661]. But perhaps the best service that Foy did for Rey was that he removed, at two hours’ notice, the whole mass of refugees. They marched, much lamenting, for Bayonne, under the escort of the old outgoing garrison. On the 29th Reille ordered Foy to evacuate Oyarzun and fall back to the Bidassoa, and before he had been gone three hours Mendizabal’s Guipuzcoan irregulars, 3,000 strong, appeared in front of the fortress and cut its communication with France. They were an unorganized band, without artillery, but effective enough for stopping the highway.
Graham, seeing that the French had escaped him, and had a clear retreat to the frontier, had made no serious attempt to press them. He was quite content that they should go at their own pace, and was determined not to harass the 1st Division, who, as he wrote to Wellington, were in a state of great exhaustion. To have hurried Foy out of Spain two days earlier would have cost men, and would have had no beneficial effect on the general course of the campaign; for Wellington and the main army were far away in Navarre, and if Graham had reached the Bidassoa on the 26th or 28th, with his own and Giron’s 25,000 men, they could have done nothing, since they had in front of them the fortress of Bayonne, with Foy’s 16,000 men, the 7,000 whom Reille had brought up from Santesteban, and the remains of the general reserve—for though Rouget’s battalions and other detachments had been lent from Bayonne already, there were still a few thousand men in hand. In all, Reille would have had an army as large as Graham’s own, and though some of it was rather demoralized, the fortress, and the strong positions in front of it along the Bidassoa, Nive, and Nivelle, counterbalanced this disadvantage. If Wellington had chosen to march on Bayonne with his main body, the day after Vittoria, the problem would have been a very different one. But since he had preferred to move in pursuit first of King Joseph and then of Clausel, there was nothing more which the commander of a detached corps like that of Graham could accomplish. He did all that his chief required of him, when he pushed Foy out of Spain and laid siege to St. Sebastian. That the project for cutting off the French detachments at Villafranca came to nothing was no fault of Graham’s—being due partly to bad staff-work at Head-Quarters, partly to the chances of rough weather, and partly to Foy’s laudable caution and celerity.
The side-show in Guipuzcoa came to a tame end twenty-four hours after the blockade of St. Sebastian had been formed. On the 30th Reille ordered all the troops on the south bank of the lower Bidassoa to retire into France. Foy’s and Maucune’s divisions crossed the bridge of Behobie, under the protection of four battalions of the Bayonne reserve, which remained on the heights by the hermitage of St. Marcial, and marched to Urogne and other villages down-stream. Lamartinière’s division remained at Vera, Fririon’s (late Sarrut’s) at Hendaye.