The eyes of Santa Cruz were not less alert in viewing the manœuvres of his enemy; and at the very moment he was looking around to see whom he could entrust with the important commission of opposing this force, to his astonishment he beheld Louis de Montemar at his side. He had heard the roll of cannon, and required no other summons. He was now mounted, and in arms, as if in perfect vigour, from his hardly closed wounds. Without asking a question, the Marquis ordered him to take the command of a certain body of cavalry; and lead them towards the hill, to the attack of the detachment dispatched from the Moorish camp.
Louis obeyed; and performed his commission so completely, that the Moors were obliged to fall back, and shelter their flying squadrons behind the nearest batteries. But part of the troops which had previously been sent to watch the motions of Sidi Ali, seeing the way clear, joined the chase; and so left a passage for the enemy. Profiting by the oversight, Ali rushed from his lines; and taking the pursuing Christians in the rear, the shouts of the Moors, reanimated their fugitive brethren in front, who turned like a host of tigers at bay; and all at once Louis found himself between two fires.
But it was not the object of Sidi Ali to waste his time in the extirpation of a part, when the whole was near, to yield a mightier revenge to the conqueror. He advanced with rapidity and good order, to the support of the Basha; whose left flank, where he had thrown himself in person, was already turned by the furious onset of the Spaniards. Seeing the approaching squadrons of Ali, Aben Humeya rallied his receding men; and precipitating himself and a chosen cohort upon the most effective engine of the enemy, (which was one of the Moorish batteries turned upon themselves,) he retook it, and discharged it on its late masters. The fresh troops of Ali came on with shouts like thunder; and the Christians, who expected nothing less than this new attack, supported the charge only for a while. Aben Humeya brought up a kind of flying battery of his own construction; and his adversaries being thrown into confusion by its incessant fire, turned to fly. The Basha left the fugitives to Ali, and moved to the centre, which was now hardly pressed by Santa Cruz himself.
Until now, the Spanish leader had not exposed his own person; but when he found that part of his army assuming the same retrograde motion with the left wing, he saw the necessity of shewing his own personal courage, and fighting man to man.
Here was the shock and the tug of the day. Aben Humeya and Santa Cruz, were alike seen in every part of the field, as if their bodies, as well as their minds, had the property of omnipresence. Blood streamed on every side; and the terrific screams of the wounded horses, mingling with the groans of the dying; and the yells or shouts of the victors; the braying of the trumpets, the rolling of the drums; and the roaring of the guns, shook the earth, and seemed to tear the heavens. The echoes were tremendous from the caves and summits of the overhanging mountains; and to the crazed imagination of fear, the Genius of Spain and of Barbary appeared to hang in the clouds of battle, and to clash their dreadful arms, in horror of the equal fight.
But in the moment of loudest acclaim in the centre, while the helmeted turban of the Basha shone resplendent in anticipated victory, and his watchmen looked from his towers in the camp, for the approach of Adelmelek, a howl of dismay issued from the left; and the thronging squadrons of half Ali's division spiked themselves upon the points of the Spanish line.
Louis had no sooner seen that the Sidi had passed, and driven this wing of the Spaniards from their ground, than recalling his own squadrons, and marching behind the rolling smoke to the right, he came in van of their flying comrades; and making a hasty chevaux de frize of his pikes, he permitted the fugitives to pass through and form behind, while the enemy's horse found their fate on his iron rampart. Field-pieces were rapidly brought forward to confirm this stand; and the leader of the Arabs falling by the first explosion, the Moors turned and fled towards their lines.
The centre and the right flank deserved the confidence of their leader; but the star of Ripperda was now on its last horizon. The Moors fought with desperation for empire,—for paradise! He performed prodigies of valour! The fabled exploits of romance were no longer marvellous to them who beheld Aben Humeya; but the Spanish numbers and discipline overpowered it all.
Louis saw that, on that field, his father's power in Africa, and perhaps himself, would on that day perish. Through the flashes of musquetry and of cannon shot, he saw that father moving in every direction, with the consummate generalship of a practised soldier, with a determined resolution that merited a better cause. Louis was desperate and devoted as himself; and though actuated by different principles, and exposing their lives on adverse sides, they seemed actuated by the same spirit, to conquer or to die.
The Moorish entrenchments were forced in every point, the ditch filled with the slain, the camp set on fire that no delay might be made for plunder; and the infidels who survived, flying in every direction, without a leader, and without a refuge.