And vultures strip the bones which Heaven will clothe at last!
HISTORICAL AND ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES TO CANTO X.
The Passage of the Bidasoa, with the military movements which immediately ensued, completing that operation and establishing the left wing of our army on the soil of France, occupies the entire of this Canto. The events with which it deals will be found very fully and satisfactorily recorded in Napier’s History, book xxii. chap. 4. The thunder-storm which rolled over the district on the eventful morning chosen by Wellington for this remarkable strategical evolution is by no means exaggerated in the text. It is in the Pyrenees that thunder is witnessed to perfection. The exploits which in this Canto I attribute to Nial have all their foundation in the genuine history of the campaign.
General Alten had the command of the Light Division, and the Rifle corps, to which I suppose Nial to have belonged, was under the immediate guidance of the gallant Colborne.
Captain Batty’s description of the Passage of the Bidasoa, with which operation, the first in which he shared, he commences his Campaign of the Western Pyrenees, is very animated, and illustrated by spirited etchings of the event of the Passage and of Pyrenean scenery. His view of Fuenterrabia and of the mountain of Jaizquibel is particularly deserving of praise. It is impossible to describe the effect upon my feelings of going over this heroic mountain ground from Andaye to the Louis Quatorze, from Bildox and Mandale to the Bayonnette and Commissari, and from thence to the greater Rhune.
The allusion in the commencement of this Canto to the Vale of Baigorri refers to the rescue of an enormous amount of forage by Mina’s Guerrilla from the French, including 2,000 sheep.
The pastoral habits, to which large districts in Spain are still addicted, cause the people to occupy five times the extent of land, which with agricultural pursuits would be sufficient for their maintenance. The pastoral institution of the mesta encourages the feeding of sheep, and the enormous migratory flocks of Estremadura and elsewhere move every year some hundreds of miles, devastating the tracts over which they pass. “By the increase of pasture,” says Sir Thomas More, “your sheep, that are naturally mild, may be said now to devour men, and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.”—Utopia, book i. The invaders found their account in this primitive system, and their entire subsistence was derived from ready plunder. The French in their Peninsular prowlings resembled in one other respect, as well as in their Republican and Heathen names, the Lacedæmonians, who held a grand hunt annually, in which the agricultural peasantry were pursued and destroyed like wild beasts—a fact which, though Müller questions the testimony that supports it, is as well authenticated as any other incident in the Dorian history. The argument, taken from the improbable inhumanity of the fact, is refuted by the modern practices of the French in Spain and Portugal, and in their Algerian Razzias to this hour. They differ from the Lacedæmonians, it would seem, in this, that the Spartans perpetrated the enormity only once a year, while the French perform it weekly. I have seen with my own eyes the ravages which they have left in the Peninsula, the glorious monuments of antiquity which they have disfigured and defaced, the desecration which they have brought upon shrine and tomb. And, much as I may be disposed to forget and forgive, it is not easy to suppress one’s choler amidst the mutilated glories of Burgos, Alcobaça, and Batalha.