“Among those distant heights,
Had many a day the wrathful cannon roared.
Through black ravine and sunny field of Spain
War’s headlong torrent rolled amain.
Irun’s defile and Bidassoa’s ford
Beheld a hundred fights.
“Last, by this sea-like wave,
Threatening the fort our martial lines were drawn.
Fierce broke upon their watch at midnight hour
The swift sortie, the bullets’ shower.
Red carnage ceased with slowly wakening dawn.
France keeps the true and brave.”
A kilometre or two outside the walls of Bayonne—the same which defied the British in 1814—is a guide-post bearing the inscription (the writer thinks in English) “To the Guards’ Cemetery.” Down a by-road around a turning or two, and past a score of vine-clad cottages of Basque peasants one comes to the spot in question, a little railed-in plot of hallowed ground. Here are seen the original weather-worn headstones of nearly a century ago, and a newer series, practically replicas of the former.
There is also a tablet stating that on this spot stood the “Third Guards Camp.” That is all. It resembles the conventional cemetery not at all, and may be considered a memorial, nothing more. Certainly there is nothing pathetic or sad about it, for all is green and bright and smiling. If one can put themselves in this mood it is certainly a good one in which to make a pilgrimage to a city of the dead.
There is another warlike reminiscence connected with Bayonne, which is worth recalling, and that is that Bayonne was the birthplace of the bayonet, as was Troyes (in France) the birthplace of that species of weights which is not avoirdupois.
A mid-Victorian writer in England criticized Dickens’ story in Household Words, called “Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” wherein the soldiers carried bayonets in their muskets and cartridges in their haversacks. This particular critic nodded, as they sometimes do. Cartridges were invented in 1586, and bayonets first made their appearance at Bayonne in 1641, and the scene of Dickens’ tale was laid a hundred or two years later.
Those who think that York ham, which even the French know as Jambon d’Yorck, is a superlative sort of pig-product, should become acquainted with the jambons de Bayonne, from Basque pigs, cured with the natural salts of the commune of Salies. There is no room left for comparison with other hams. Those of Bayonne are the peers of their class, not forgetting even the sugar-cured variety of the Old Dominion.
There is a considerable chocolate business at Bayonne, too, though not with the interior, which mostly gets its supplies from Paris, but with the French colonies, notably with the tiny market of St. Pierre-et-Miquelon, which, by some business pact or reasoning, is held to be sacred to the chocolate manufacturers of Bayonne.