Hill’s operations, till Wellington took over charge of the field, had been limited to cautious reconnaissances of the enemy’s flanks. But with the change in command decisive action began: Cameron’s brigade was sent out by the steep hillsides on the right to turn Gazan’s left flank; O’Callaghan’s, with Ashworth’s Portuguese in support, crossed the ravine in front of Aniz, and deployed on each side of the road to attack his centre. If Gazan had stood to fight, and brought up all his reserves, it is hard to see how he could have been moved: indeed he ought to have scored a big success if he had dared to counter-attack—for Wellington had no reserves save Da Costa’s Portuguese brigade. But, like Murray at Tarragona, the French general had been making himself dreadful pictures of the strength that might conceivably be in front of him. Three prisoners taken at Ziga on the preceding day had told him that they belonged to Hill’s corps—he presumed it complete in front of him, with all its six brigades, instead of the actual three. Then a heavy column had come up at noon—Da Costa’s brigade—Gazan judged it to be some fresh division from Pampeluna. In addition he had received a cry of alarm from Conroux at St. Jean-Pied-du-Port—that officer reported that on July 4 a Spanish corps was threatening his flank from the Val Carlos—this was no more than a reconnaissance thrown out by Morillo. Also he got news from the Alduides valley of the arrival of A. Campbell’s Portuguese brigade at Eugui—he deduced from this information, joined to the report about Morillo, a turning movement against his left flank, by forces of unknown but probably considerable strength. Lastly, by drawing in Villatte’s division to his main body, he had left open a gap on his right, between his own positions in front of Elizondo and those of Leval at Santesteban. He was seized with a panic fear lest another British column might pour into this gap, by the mountain roads leading from Lanz and Almandoz into the middle Bastan[751]. And, indeed, Wellington had started the 7th Division on one of these passes, the Puerto de Arraiz—but it was still 20 miles away.
Already on the night of the 4th Gazan had written to the King that he must ask for leave to make his stand at the Maya pass, rather than to hold all the minor defiles which converge into the Bastan—a complicated system of tracks whose defence involved a terrible dissemination of forces. By noon on the 5th, having seen Wellington’s arrival with Da Costa’s brigade, he made up his mind that if the enemy attacked him frontally it must be to engage his attention, while encircling columns closed in upon his flanks and rear, from the Alduides on the one side and the western passes on the other. When the movement against his front began, his troops in the position by Ziga retired, without waiting to receive the attack, and took cover behind Villatte’s division, drawn up on the heights of Irurita. Hill had to spend time in re-forming his lines before he could resume the offensive; but when he did so against Villatte’s troops, they gave way in turn, and retired behind Maransin’s division, which was now placed above the village of Elizondo. In this way the enemy continued to retire by échelons, without allowing the pursuers to close, until by dusk he stood still at last at the Col de Maya, where he offered battle. Gazan was extremely well satisfied with himself, and considered that he had made a masterly retreat in face of overwhelming hostile forces. As a matter of fact he had been giving way, time after time, to mere demonstrations by a force of little more than half his own strength—four weak brigades were pushing back his six. But he never made a long enough stand to enable him to discover the very moderate strength of the pursuers. The whole business was a field day exercise—the total casualties only reached a few scores on each side. Gazan’s elaborate narrative about the various occasions on which British vanguards were surprised to run into heavy fire, suffered heavily, and had to halt, find its best comment in the fact that the total loss of English and Portuguese during three days of petty combats was only 5 officers and 119 men, and that this day, July 5, was the least bloody of the three.
Well satisfied to have manœuvred the enemy out of the Bastan without any appreciable loss to himself, Wellington accepted the challenge which the Army of the South offered him by halting on the Maya positions. But he waited for the 7th Division to come up, rightly thinking that the two British and two Portuguese brigades hitherto employed were too weak a force, now that the enemy showed signs of making his final stand. The 7th Division, acting under the senior brigadier, Barnes, for Lord Dalhousie had been left behind to conduct the blockade of Pampeluna, had marched on the 4th, the day when Hill was commencing to push the French north of the Col de Velate. Wellington had intended from the first that it should take a route which would enable it to turn Gazan’s right: it went north from Marcalain, where it had concentrated on giving up its blockading work, by Lizaso, to the pass of Arraiz, by which it descended into the Bastan on the 6th. It then occupied Santesteban, from which Leval’s division had been withdrawn by Gazan at the same moment at which he fell back himself on to the pass of Maya. Pending its arrival Wellington remained halted in front of the French positions for the whole of the 6th, filling the enemy with various unjustifiable fears; for they over-valued his strength, and credited him with much more ambitious projects than those which he really entertained. This halt on the 6th seemed to them to cover some elaborate snare, while its real purpose was only to allow him to make his next move with 14,000 instead of with 8,000 men. The plan for the morning of the 7th was that Hill’s column should attack the Maya positions in front, while the 7th Division should cross the Bidassoa at Santesteban, and take a mountain road which would bring it out upon the flank of Gazan’s line, which rested on the Peak of Atchiola. This would be a hard day’s march by a rough track, along interminable crests and dips. Meanwhile, on July 8th, another British unit would come up: the Light Division was relieved at Pampeluna by the 4th Division on the 5th, and following in the track of Barnes, Charles Alten was to be at Santesteban on the night of the 7th, and at the fighting front by the next morning.
The halt which Wellington imposed on his leading column upon July 6th gave time for the French Higher Command to make an astounding series of blunders. To discriminate between true and false reports is one of the most difficult tasks for any general, and the faculty of making a correct decision after receiving a number of contradictory data is undoubtedly one of the best tests of military ability. All men may err—but greater errors have seldom been made in a day than those of Jourdan and King Joseph on July 6th. They started, perhaps naturally, with the leading idea that Wellington was about to undertake the invasion of France on a grand scale. Where would the blow fall? Graham had been quiescent for some days on the Bidassoa, and it was obvious that the troops on his front were mainly Spaniards—the Army of Galicia and Longa’s Cantabrians were alone visible. Gazan, though making constant complaints that he was outnumbered and oppressed by a ‘triple force’, had not as yet accounted for anything but Hill’s corps as present in his front. Where, then, was the rest of Wellington’s army? The concentration of troops in front of Pampeluna had been ascertained—what had become of them? Now Conroux at St. Jean-Pied-du-Port kept sending in messages of alarm. Morillo’s reconnaissances had induced him to push most of his division forward to watch the passes in his front, and he reported Byng’s brigade at Roncesvalles as a considerable accumulation of British troops. Then came the news that A. Campbell’s Portuguese brigade had entered the Alduides valley, by descending which it could cut in between Conroux and the rest of the army. Probably it was the over-emphasis of Conroux’s cries of warning which set the King and Jourdan wrong—but whatever the cause, they jumped to the conclusion that the serious invasion was to come on the inland flank—that Byng and Campbell were the forerunners of a great force marching to turn their left, by Roncesvalles and the eastern passes. Acting on this utterly erroneous hypothesis, they issued a series of orders for the hasty transference of great bodies of troops towards St. Jean-Pied-du-Port. Leval’s division of the Army of the South—which had retired to Echalar after evacuating Santesteban—Cassagne’s and Darmagnac’s divisions of the Army of the Centre—which had handed over the Bastan to Gazan and retired to St. Pée—and Thouvenot’s provisional division of troops of the Army of the North[752], from the Lower Bidassoa, were all started off by forced marches to join Conroux at St. Jean-Pied-du-Port. Only Reille with the four divisions of the Army of Portugal was left to face Graham[753], and Gazan was directed to hold the Maya positions with Maransin’s and Villatte’s divisions and Gruardet’s brigade alone. Thus, while Wellington was about to deliver his rather leisurely blow at the French centre, all the enemy’s reserves were sent off to their extreme left. Nothing could have been more convenient to the British general, if he had attacked one or two days later on the Maya front, when the troops on the move would all have got past him on their way south-eastward. But as he made his assault the day after the King’s orders were issued, it resulted that the marching columns were passing just behind the part of the enemy’s line at which he was aiming, so that Gazan had more supports at hand than might have been expected. But this was neither to the credit of the King, who had not intended to provide them, nor to the discredit of Wellington, who could not possibly have foreseen such strategical errors as those in which his enemy was indulging.
On the morning of July 7th Gazan was in battle order at Maya, with Maransin’s division and Gruardet’s brigade holding the pass, and the heights on each side of it from the hill of Alcorrunz on the west to the rock of Aretesque on the east. Villatte’s division (commanded on this day by its senior brigadier, Rignoux, for Villatte was sick) formed the reserve, on the high road to Urdax, behind the main crest. Wellington’s simple form of attack was to send O’Callaghan’s brigade to turn the French left by a mountain road, Cameron’s brigade to seize the peak of Atchiola beyond his extreme right, so as to outflank Gazan on that side, to demonstrate with the Portuguese and his two batteries in the centre, and to wait for the crucial moment when the 7th Division, on the march since the morning by the hill road from Santesteban to Urdax, should appear in the enemy’s rear. Then a general assault would take place.
The scheme did not work out accurately. The Portuguese demonstrated, as was ordered. O’Callaghan’s brigade accomplished its turning movement, and got into contact with Remond’s brigade of Maransin’s division, on the extreme French left at the rock of Aretesque. Cameron’s brigade took the hill of Alcorrunz without difficulty, but was then held up by the bulk of Villatte’s division, which came up from the rear and held the crest of the Atchiola with six battalions; it could not be dislodged. So far so good—the enemy was engaged all along the line and had used up three-fourths of his reserve. But early in the afternoon a dense fog set in, and the 7th Division never appeared in the enemy’s rear. It had got involved in the darkness, lost its way, and wandered helpless. Wherefore the other attacks were never pressed. ‘If the 7th Division had arrived in time, and the sea fog had held off for an hour or two, we should have made a good thing of it,’ wrote Wellington to Graham[754]. ‘Our loss is about 60 wounded—on the other days; (4th and 5th) there was a good deal of firing, but we sustained no loss at all.’
Early on the morning of July 8 Gazan, after having written a most insincere report concerning the skirmish of the preceding day, combat des plus opiniâtres, in which he had checked the enemy with loss, abandoned the Maya positions before he was again attacked. He had the impudence to write to Jourdan that he had only recoiled because Head-Quarters refused to send him any supports[755]. As a matter of fact the King had checked the progress of the troops marching to St. Jean-Pied-du-Port, and was sending them straight to Urdax and Ainhoue, where all the four divisions arrived on the 8th, early in the day. If Gazan had chosen to hold on to the pass he would have had 15,000 men added to his strength by the evening. But he went off at 6 a.m., and Hill occupied the crest an hour later. Wellington was so far from intending any further advance that he wrote that afternoon to Graham that he was now at leisure to take a look at the whole line of the Bidassoa down to the sea, and intended to pay his lieutenant a visit. A day later he told Lord Bathurst that ‘the whole of our right being now established on the frontier, I am proceeding to the left to superintend the operations there’—which meant in the main the siege of St. Sebastian. The troops which had been brought up to the Bastan took up permanent quarters—the Light Division at Santesteban, the 7th at Elizondo, Hill’s two British brigades at the Maya positions, to which artillery was brought up, while Ashworth’s and Da Costa’s Portuguese were set to guard the minor eastern passes which open from the Bastan into the Alduides, or Val de Baygorri—the Col d’Ispegui and the Col de Berderis. They connected themselves with A. Campbell’s Portuguese brigade, which watched the southern exit from that long French valley. Campbell, for his part, had to keep touch along the frontier with Byng and Morillo in the Roncesvalles country. The 3rd, 4th, and 6th Divisions still lay round Pampeluna, anxiously expecting to be relieved by the Army of Reserve of Andalusia. But Henry O’Donnell, though due on the 12th, did not appear and take over the blockade till the 16th-17th. This delay began to worry Wellington a few days later, but on the 8th-9th he was still content with the position of affairs, rightly judging that the enemy was in no condition to make a push in any direction, till he should have got his troops rested, his artillery replaced, and his transport reorganized.
Otherwise he could not have taken so lightly the fact that opposite the Maya positions the enemy had now accumulated six and a half divisions, expecting to be attacked by columns descending from the Bastan within the next few days. Joseph and Jourdan spent an immense amount of unnecessary pains in the hurried shifting of troops, during the short space that intervened before the thunderbolt which was coming from Germany fell on their unlucky heads. But who, in their position, could have guessed that a mainly political consideration was intervening, to prevent Wellington from undertaking that invasion of France which seemed his obvious military duty?
One last measure of precaution on their adversary’s part modified the front at the end of the petty campaign of the Bastan—but by that time Joseph and Jourdan were gone. On July 15th Wellington made up his mind that the defensive position on the lower Bidassoa, by which he was covering the siege of St. Sebastian, was not safe on its inland flank, where the French were still in possession of the town of Vera, at the gorge of the Bidassoa, where it emerges from its high upland course in the Bastan. Vera and its bridge presented an obvious point of concentration for a force intending to trouble the right wing of Graham’s corps. Wherefore it was necessary to clear the enemy out of this point of vantage, and to shorten the line between Hill in the Bastan and Giron on the lower Bidassoa. Uncertain as to whether the French would make a serious stand or not, Wellington ordered up large forces—the 7th Division and the newly-arrived Light Division from Santesteban, Longa, and one brigade of Giron’s Galicians from the covering troops. But the enemy—Lamartinière’s division of Reille’s army—offered only a rearguard action, and withdrew to the other side of the hills which separate the Bastan from the coast region—abandoning the ‘Puertos’ or passes of Vera and Echalar. They feared that the advance of the allied left centre might be the prelude to a general attack, and began to make preparations to receive it. But their anxiety disappeared when it became clear that Wellington only wanted Vera and its defile, and had no further offensive purpose. The Light Division occupied Vera: the 7th, extending to the right, took over the pass of Echalar and got into touch with Hill’s advanced guard at Maya.
