Santa Cruz bit his way out of the toils, however, but not so his band. They were surrounded at Vera, caught, with a few exceptions, disarmed, assembled and addressed in Spanish by the Marquis de Valdespina, whose remarks were translated to them into Basque by the Cura of Ollo. They cried "Viva el Rey!" Their arms were subsequently restored to them, and the men were distributed among other battalions. But they still regret their old leader, and Santa Cruz is popular by the firesides of the mountaineers of Guipúzcoa. One of his mountain guns fell into the hands of Lizarraga, but the other was buried in some spot only known to himself and a few trusted companions.
During my interview I made it my business to study the priest attentively, and this is what I honestly thought of him. He was a fanatic, a sullen self-willed man with but one idea—the success of the cause; and but one ambition—that it should be said of him that it was he, Santa Cruz, who put Don Carlos on the throne of his ancestors. The globe for him was bounded by the Pyrenees and the sea; he had but one antipathy after the heretics (all who did not worship God as he did) and the Liberals, and that was Lizarraga. I considered it a mistake that Lizarraga was not the Cura of Hernialde, and Santa Cruz the Commandant-General of Guipúzcoa. The priest had a natural military instinct—I would almost go so far as to say a spice of military genius; and had he had a knowledge of the profession of arms would probably have developed into a great general of the Cossack type. His hatred to Lizarraga led him into littleness and injustice. He chuckled at the idea of Lizarraga not being able to find the buried gun, as if that were any great triumph over him; and he sneered at the idea of Lizarraga, who was not able to take Oyarzun, meditating an attempt on Tolosa. I could thoroughly understand that the Carlist priest bore malice to the officer who supplanted him and condemned him to death. But what Lizarraga did was done in compliance with the King's will. At the same time there could be no doubt that Santa Cruz was treated with scant courtesy after all he had accomplished, and had a right to feel himself ill-used, and the victim of jealous rivalry. He said that he was prepared, any day the King permitted him, to traverse the four provinces, and hold his enemies in terrorem with five hundred men. And he was the very worthy to do it. He complained bitterly that three of his followers had been shot by Lizarraga. One story relates that they stole into Guipúzcoa to levy blackmail, another that they merely went to dig up some money that was interred when the legion was disbanded. In any case they appeared in arms in a forbidden district, and incurred the capital penalty. Santa Cruz went to Bordeaux to beg for their lives at the feet of Doña Margarita. She received him most graciously, and promised to send a special courier to her husband to intercede in their behalf. Before the King's reprieve could possibly have arrived the three were executed.
As we were about to leave, a colleague who was with me asked the Cura if he would permit him to visit his camp, if it came to pass that he took up arms again in Spain.
"We shall see," said Santa Cruz; "wait till I am there."
My own conviction is that the priest held correspondents in abhorrence, and that his first impulse would have been to tie a zealous one up to a tree, and have thirty-nine blows given him with a stick. Perhaps I did him wrong, but if ever he did take up arms again, it was my firm intention to be south when he was north, for he was about the last person in creation to whose tender mercies I should care to entrust myself.
CHAPTER XI.
An Audible Battle—"Great Cry and Little Wool"—A Carlist Court Newsman—A Religious War—The Siege of Oyarzun—Madrid Rebels—"The Money of Judas"—A Manifesto from Don Carlos—An Ideal Monarch—Necessity of Social and Political Reconstruction Proclaimed—A Free Church—A Broad Policy—The King for the People—The Theological Question—Austerity in Alava—Clerical and Non-Clerical Carlists—Disavowal of Bigotry—A Republican Editor on the Carlist Creed—Character of the Basques—Drill and Discipline—Guerilleros versus Regulars.
When a man's office is to chronicle war and he is within hearing of the echoes of battle, but cannot reach a spot from which the scene of action might be commanded, it is annoying in the extreme. Such was my strait on the 21st of August, a few days after my arrival from San Sebastian. I was at Hendaye, the border-town of France. From the Spanish frontier the report of heavy firing was audible for hours, apparently coming from a point between Oyarzun and Renteria. First one could distinguish the faint spatter of musketry, and afterwards the undeniable muffled roar of artillery. Then came a succession of sustained rolls as of volley-firing. About noon the action must have been at its height. The distant din was subsequently to be caught only at long intervals, as if changes of position were in course of being effected; but at three o'clock it regained force, and raged with fury until five, when it suddenly died away.
I was burning with impatience, and made several unavailing attempts to cross the Bidassoa. The ferryman, acting under instructions from the gendarmes, refused to take passengers. By the evening train a delegate from the Paris Society for the Succour of the Wounded arrived from Bayonne with a box of medicine and surgical appliances. He, too, was unable to pass into Spain. Meantime, rumour ran riot. Stories were current that there had been fearful losses.
"At eleven o'clock men were falling like flies," said one eye-witness, who succeeded in running away from the field before he fell.