The loss of the allies since crossing the Nive had exceeded 5,000; that of the French was 6,000, besides 2,400 Germans who deserted to the British during the night of the 9th in obedience to orders from home. Ever since he assumed the command Soult had shown military ability of a rare order. Bayonne, the base of all his operations, was indefensible before he fortified it. A great proportion of his troops were raw conscripts, or demoralised by defeat, before he inspired them with his own courage and vigour. He was practically dependent for subsistence in his own country on the very system of pillage which had roused a patriotic frenzy of resentment in Spain and other lands ravaged by French armies. He now stood at bay in the south of France, as Wellington had so long stood at bay in Portugal, and continued there during the early part of 1814 a defensive campaign not unworthy of comparison with the prodigious exploits of Napoleon himself against the invaders of his eastern provinces.
THE INVESTMENT OF BAYONNE.
A respite of two months succeeded the battles on the Nive. During this interval Wellington's difficulty in paying his troops was great, owing to the enormous drain of specie from England into Central Europe. He was further embarrassed by the appearance of the Duke of Angoulême, elder son of Charles, Count of Artois, afterwards Charles X., at his headquarters. The British government was by no means committed to a restoration of the Bourbons, and Wellington deprecated the duke's appearance as at least premature. He therefore insisted upon his remaining incognito and as a non-combatant at St. Jean de Luz. Soult was in great straits, not only because he was compelled to "make war support war" by exorbitant requisitions upon the French peasantry, but also because the exigencies of Napoleon were such that large drafts of the best troops were drawn from the army of the south. When hostilities were resumed in the middle of February, 1814, the Anglo-Portuguese and Spanish force combined outnumbered the French by nearly five to three, but Soult retained the decisive advantage of having a strong point d'appui in Bayonne at the confluence of the Nive and Adour. Careful preparations were made by Wellington for throwing a large force across the Lower Adour below Bayonne, in concert with a British fleet. Contrary winds and a violent surf delayed the arrival of the British gunboats, but on February 23 Hope sent over a body of his men on a raft of pontoons in the face of the enemy's flotilla, with the aid of a brigade armed with Congreve rockets, which had been first used at Leipzig, and produced the utmost consternation in the French ranks. The gunboats soon followed, but with the loss of one wrecked and others stranded in crossing the bar. By the joint exertions of soldiers and sailors a bridge was then constructed, by which Hope's entire army with artillery passed over the river, and, two days afterwards, began the investment of Bayonne.
Meanwhile, the centre and right wing, under the command of Wellington, had forced a passage across the Upper Adour and threatened Bayonne on the other side. Leaving a garrison of 6,000 men in Bayonne, Soult took his stand at Orthez, with an army of about 40,000 men, on the summit of a formidable ridge. Wellington attacked this ridge on the 27th, with a force of nearly equal strength in three columns so disposed as to converge from points several miles distant from each other. The veterans of the French army, admirably handled, fought with tenacity, and all but succeeded in foiling the attack before Wellington could bring up his reserves. The conscripts, however, were not equally steady, and when Hill, advancing from the extreme right, pressed upon the French left, Soult's orderly retreat became a precipitate flight. The French loss greatly exceeded the British, and was soon afterwards swelled by wholesale desertions; the road to Bordeaux was thrown open, and the royalist reaction against Napoleon, stimulated by the depredation of the French troops, ripened into a general revolt.
Meanwhile, Napoleon had lost Germany by the battle of Leipzig; early in 1814 the allied armies of Austria, Prussia, and Russia had entered France, and a congress was being held at Châtillon-sur-Seine, to formulate, if possible, terms of peace. The city of Bordeaux was the first to declare itself openly in favour of the Bourbons. Wellington sent a large detachment to preserve order, with strict instructions to Beresford, who commanded it, to remain neutral, in the event of Louis XVIII. being proclaimed, pending the negotiations with Napoleon at Châtillon. But the excitement of the people could not be restrained, and the arrival of the Duke of Angoulême evoked a burst of royalist enthusiasm which anticipated by a few weeks only the abdication of Napoleon at Fontainebleau. The defection of Bordeaux forced Soult to fall back rapidly on a very formidable position in front of Toulouse. The British army followed in pursuit, encumbered with a great artillery and pontoon train. After a lively action at Tarbes, it arrived in front of Toulouse on March 27, to find the Garonne in flood, and the French army strongly entrenched around the town, with a prospect of being joined by 20,000 or 30,000 veterans, under Suchet, from Catalonia.
THE BATTLE OF TOULOUSE.
The dispositions of Wellington, ending in the battle of Toulouse, on April 10, have not escaped criticism. Hill, with two divisions and a Spanish contingent, threw a bridge across the Garonne below Toulouse, but discovered that he could make no progress in that direction, owing to the impassable state of the roads. Beresford crossed the river with 18,000 men at another point, but a sudden flood broke up the pontoon bridge in his rear, and he remained isolated for no less than four days, exposed to an attack from Soult's whole army. Having missed this rare opportunity, Soult calmly awaited the attack, with a force numerically inferior, but with every advantage of position. On the 10th Wellington's troops advanced in two columns, separated from each other by a perilous interval of two miles. One of these, including Freyre's Spaniards and Picton's division, was fairly driven back after furious attempts to storm the ramparts of the fortified ridge held by the French. Beresford, however, who in this battle combined generalship with brilliant courage, restored the fortunes of the day by a dashing advance against the redoubts on the French right. Having carried these he swept along the ridge, which became untenable, and Soult withdrew his army within his second line of defences. Two days later, seeing that Hill menaced Toulouse on the other side, and fearing that if defeated again he would lose his only line of retreat along the Carcassonne road, he evacuated Toulouse by that route, leaving his magazines and hospitals in the hands of the British army. By so doing he left to Wellington the honour and prize of victory, but few victories have been so dearly bought, and the loss in killed and wounded was actually greater on the side of the victors than on that of the vanquished.
Toulouse received Wellington on the 12th with open arms, and as news reached him on the same day announcing the proclamation of Louis XVIII. at Paris, he no longer hesitated to assume the white cockade. Soult loyally declined to accept the intelligence until it was officially confirmed, when a military convention was made on the 18th, whereby a boundary line was established between the two armies. Suchet had already withdrawn from Spain, and at last recalled the garrisons from those Spanish fortresses in which Napoleon had so obstinately locked up picked troops which he sorely needed in his dire extremity. But on the 14th, a week after Napoleon's abdication, the famous "sortie from Bayonne" took place, in which each side lost 800 or 900 men, and Hope, wounded in two places, was made prisoner. For this waste of life the governor of Bayonne must be held responsible, since he was informed of the events at Paris by Hope, and instead of awaiting official confirmation, like Soult, chose to risk the issue of a night combat, which must needs be deadly and could not be decisive.
Thus ended the Peninsular war. This war on the British side has seldom been surpassed in the steady adherence to a settled purpose, through years of discouragement and failure, maintained by the general whose name it has made immortal. Neither his strategy nor his tactical skill was always faultless; and afterwards in comparing himself with Soult, he is reported to have said, that he often got into scrapes, but was extricated by the valour of his army, whereas Soult, when he got into a scrape, had no such men to get him out of it. However this might be, Wellington's foresight in appreciating the place to be filled by the Peninsular war in the overthrow of Napoleon's domination, and his truly heroic constancy in striving to realise his own idea will ever constitute his best claim to greatness. No other man in England or in Europe discerned as he did, that with Portugal independent and guarded by the power of Great Britain on its western coast and its eastern frontier, the permanent conquest of Spain by the French would become impossible. No one else saw beforehand, what Napoleon discovered too late, that a war in Portugal and Spain would drain the life-blood of his invincible hosts, and at length help towards the invasion of France itself. No other general would have shown equal statesmanship in managing Spanish juntas and controlling even Spanish guerillas, or equal forbearance in sparing the French people the evils which a victorious army might have inflicted upon them.