At the London office of the sympathizers with the cause I was furnished with the address of certain Carlists in confidential positions in France, and letters were sent on in advance, so as to secure me a favourable reception. Armed with a sheet of flimsy stamped in blue with the escutcheon of Charles VII., and the legend "Secretaria Militar de Lóndres," and with, what was more potent, a big credit on a banking-house, I started afresh on the now familiar route.
Before undertaking the journey into the territory in revolt I halted at Bayonne to procure the necessary passes. These were obtained with ease from the Junta sitting in the Rue des Ecoles, the members of which professed that they desired nothing so much as the presence of the representatives of impartial foreign journals, so that the truth about the struggle should be made known to the rest of Europe. From Bayonne I proceeded to Biarritz, where I had a conference with the Duke de La Union de Cuba, a warm Carlist partisan, to whom I had an introduction, and thence I went to St. Jean de Luz, a drowsy, quaint, world-forgotten nook. A petit Paris it was called in a vaunting quatrain by some minstrel of yore. But Brussels may be comforted. It is nothing of the kind, but something infinitely better. The breezes from the main and the mountains, from the Bay of Biscay and the Pyrenees, conspire to supply it with ozone. There is music in the boom of the surf as it pulsates regularly on the velvet sands of a semicircular inlet, where dogs frisk and youngsters gambol in the sunshine.
In a hotel on the edge of that inlet, the Fonda de la Playa, where I put up, a young Irish gentleman named Leader was recuperating from a severe wound in the leg. He had received it in the service of Don Carlos, in a skirmish near Azpeitia, where he was the only man hit. He was out with a party of the guerrilleros, and came across a company of the Madrid troops. To encourage his own people, or rather the people with whom he had cast in his fortunes, he went well to the front, and mounting on a bank of earth, hurled defiance at the enemy. He was picked down by a stray shot, and if he had been taken prisoner it is probable that he would have paid for his temerity with his life. The Spaniards were not clement towards foreigners who interposed in their domestic quarrel. Leader was carried off by his companions and secreted in a peasant's hut. The troops, swearing vengeance, searched the hut next to it, but, by some accident, failed to continue the quest to the refuge of the wounded man. He bled profusely, but the hæmorrhage was finally arrested by some rude bandaging, and at night he was helped astride a donkey, and conveyed across the frontier into France. He told me he had suffered excruciating torments at every jolt of the jog-trotting animal on that mountain journey. Had the bullet struck him an inch higher he would have had to suffer amputation; but his luck stood to him, and at the time we met he was getting on fairly towards recovery, thanks to youth, a good constitution, and the healthy air of St. Jean de Luz. I could not understand the ardour of Leader's partisanship for the Carlists. He spoke the merest smattering of Spanish, and had no profound intimacy with the vexed question of Spanish politics or the rights of the rival Spanish houses. The ill-natured whispered that he was crying "Viva la República" when he was knocked over. It is possible, for he had fought for the French Republic with Bourbaki's army, and may, in his excitement, have forgotten under what flag he was serving. I take it he was a soldier by instinct, and ranged himself on the side of Don Carlos more from the love of adventure than from any other motive. He was a fine athletic young fellow, with a handsome determined cast of features. He had been an ensign in the 30th Foot, and had resigned his commission to enjoy a spell of active service when the Franco-German war was proclaimed. That he had behaved bravely in the campaign which led to internment in Switzerland was evidenced by the ribbon of the Legion of Honour which he wore. Leader was very anxious that an Anglo-Irish legion in aid of Don Carlos should be organized. I felt it my duty to warn those to whom he appealed to think twice before they embarked on such a crusade. He was very wroth with me for having thrown cold water on the project, but that did not affect me. I had more experience of such follies than he, and my conscience approved me. A man may be justified in playing with his own life, but he should be slow in playing with the lives of others. He prepares a vexing responsibility for himself if he is sensitive.
In the next room to Leader was a fellow-enthusiast, Mr. Smith Sheehan, an ex-officer of Pontifical Zouaves, and son of a popular and eccentric town-councillor of Cork. He was an agile stripling, skilled in all gymnastic exercises. He had also done some fighting with the Carlists, and was in France on furlough, which the soldiers in the Royalist force appeared to have no insuperable difficulty in getting. He told me there was a large infusion of his old regiment amongst the guerrilleros, and that they helped to bind the partisan levies in the withes of discipline. Most of them had smelt gunpowder at Mentana and Patay. The famous cabecilla, Saballs, had been a captain at Rome, and Captain Wills, a Dutchman, who had been killed in a brush at Igualada, had been sergeant-major in Sheehan's company.
There was another ex-British officer of short service, who had a remarkably imposing and well-cultivated growth of moustache. He was a violent doctrinaire Carlist, but suffered from a chronic malady which prevented him from taking the field; still there was none who could plot with a more tremendous air of mystery. He was a Carlist because it was "the correct thing" to be one in the fashionable ring at St. Jean de Luz, where he had settled, and because he inherited a name associated with chivalric insurrection. For the sake of his family I shall call him Barbarossa. He was no honour to his house, for he was an inveterate gambler, and was not careful in discharging the obligations he wantonly contracted. He is dead. His death was no loss to society. In fact, if the whole host of gamblers, lock, stock and barrel, were swept by a fairy-blast to the regions of thick-ribbed ice, the world would be the gainer.
When I left Spain, Carlism was to be put down in a fortnight—in Madrid. Now it threatened to last as long as a Chinese play. The Royalists—I suppose they had earned the title to be so named by their perseverance—had achieved numerous small successes which had raised their morale, and they were being supplied with arms of precision from abroad, and trained to their use. They had even taken some mountain-guns from their enemy. Leader made me laugh with his accounts of Lizarraga shouting "Artillería al frente!" and a couple of mules, with one wretched little piece, moving forward; and of the intimidating clatter made by three shrunk cavaliers in cuirasses a world too wide for them, and alpargatas, trotting up a village street. The alpargata is the mountain-shoe of canvas, with a hempen sole, worn by the Basque peasants. The association of surcoats of mail and rope slippers is incongruous; but what does that reck? Those cuirasses were spolia opima.
And Santa Cruz?
The honest gentleman had retired into private life. His excesses had raised such a storm of opprobrium against the Carlists that they had to request him to desist. Lizarraga summoned him to render himself up a prisoner. "Come and take me," replied Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz had near two thousand followers; Lizarraga a few hundred. Lizarraga declined the invitation. But the priest caused seven-and-twenty Carabineros, taken prisoners at the bridge of Endarlasa, near Irun, to be shot, and this filled the cup to overflowing. The Carlists averred they would slay him; the Republicans vowed they would garrote him for a Madrid holiday; the French Government declared its intention of putting him under lock and key if it caught him within its jurisdiction. His band was disarmed "by order of the King," and dispersed, and the Cura himself nebulously vanished—whither we may see anon.
There was a large accretion to the population of St. Jean de Luz in Iberian refugees, and as they sat and conversed under the foliage of the public promenade, frequent sighs might be overheard, and remarks that if this sort of thing were to go on, "Spain would soon be in as bad a condition as France." At all hours there came to the beach poor exiles of Spain, who turned their eyes sadly to the line where sky met ocean. Of what were their thoughts—of home and friends, of the flutters of the casino or the ecstasies of the bull-ring? If they were looking for the Spanish fleet they did not see it, for a reason as old as the "Critic." It was not in sight. They came down in numbers in front of my hotel at nine o'clock on the morning of Monday, July 28th, a few days after my arrival, when a strange yellow funnel turned the point, and a long low Red-Roverish three-masted schooner-yacht steamed into Socoa, the roadstead of St. Jean de Luz. If the exiles were correctly informed, that was the Spanish fleet in a sense—the notorious Carlist privateer, the San Margarita, which had recently landed arms and ammunition for the Royalists at Lequeieto and elsewhere. She had been doing a stroke of business in the same line that morning. In the grey dawn she had dropped into the embouchure of the Bidassoa, at a few hundred yards from the town of Fontarabia. The work was well and quickly done. Boats requisitioned by friends on land put off to her, and returned laden with bales of merchandise. These artless bales were packages of breechloaders, with bayonets to match, wrapped in sail-cloth. As soon as they were received on shore they were distributed amongst some thousands of Carlists in waiting, who at once proceeded to fix bayonets, fall into ranks, and with shouts of exultation march off in good order.
Meanwhile, the "volunteers of liberty," as the Basque Republicans called themselves, ensconced their persons out of range in a sort of castle beside the church of Fontarabia's "wooded height," and amused themselves taking pot-shots at the rising sun. But they did not venture from their shelter; they knew a large body of armed Royalists were watching their movements from the summit of Cape Higuer, and only awaited the provoke to pounce down upon and swallow them. A detachment of Frenchmen from the frontier hamlet of Hendaye quietly took up ground on the strand to see that there was no breach of neutrality, and had an uninterrupted view of the whole operation. As soon as the daring little privateer had done her work she innocently steamed to Socoa; the Carlists on the hills waved adieu and disappeared; the French soldiers returned to their quarters; and the Fontarabian "volunteers of liberty "—well, most probably they swore terribly, and effected a masterly retrograde movement on the nearest posada.