"After having crossed the river, we marched a few miles up the right bank, or contiguous thereto, on the main road, and took up our camp-ground for the night in a newly-ploughed field, rendered a complete mire by the rain and hail which fell upon us with dreadful fury as we were piling our arms on the broken ridges. Yet, notwithstanding the severity of this headlong torrent, a hundred fires were blazing in a few minutes along the side of the fences that bordered the fields. Fortunately for us, General Pack had taken up his quarters in the farmhouse adjoining, and allowed straw, of which there was abundance, to be taken for the bottom of the tents; this was an unexpected indulgence, even although the straw was rather wet.
"I was General Pack's orderly this night, and had a good roof over my head, and the dry floor of a cartshed, with plenty of dry straw for a bed; but my poor wife was absent, for the first time since we left home. She was detained, along with several other women, on the right bank of the Adour, until the bridge was repaired. While this was doing, one of the women belonging to the regiment begged her to take charge of a little ass-colt with a couple of bundles, until she should go back to St. Severe to make some purchases; she complied, and before the other returned, the bridge was repaired. One regiment had passed, and she followed, driving the colt before her; but before she got to the farther end, the stubborn animal stood still and would not move a foot. Another regiment was advancing, the passage was impeded, and what to do she knew not.
"She was in the act of removing the woman's bundles from the beast's back, and struggling to get out of the way, determined to leave the animal, when a grenadier of the advancing regiment, casting his eye on a finely-polished horn with the masonic arms cut on it, and slung over her shoulder, stepped aside, saying, 'Poor creature, I shall not see you left struggling there, for the sake of what is slung by your side.' At the same time, handing his musket to one of his comrades, he lifted the colt in his arms and carried it to the end of the bridge. My poor wife thanked him with the tear in her eye, the only acknowledgment she could make for his kindness."
In the fighting at Toulouse, one of the married men in the regiment was killed, and Anton gives a somewhat laboured, but touching, account of the grief of the soldier's widow:—
"Here fell Cunningham, a corporal in the grenadier company, a man much esteemed in the regiment; he was a married man, but young, and was interred before his wife entered the dear-bought field; but she had heard of his fate, and flew, in spite of every opposition, to the field; she looked around among the yet unburied soldiers to find her own, but she found him not. She flew to the place where the wreck of the regiment lay on the field. 'Tell me,' she asked, 'where Cunningham is laid, that I may see him and lay him in the grave with my own hand!' A tear rose in the soldier's eye as he pointed towards the place, and twenty men started up to accompany her to the spot, for they respected the man and esteemed the woman.
"They lifted the corpse; the wounds were in his breast; she washed them, and pressing his cold lips to hers, wept over him, wrapped the body in a blanket, and the soldiers consigned it to the grave. Mournful she stood over the spot where her husband was laid, the earth was again closed over him, and she now stood a lonely, unprotected being, far from her country or the home of her childhood. I should not, perhaps, say unprotected, for, however callous our feelings may occasionally be, amidst a thousand distressing objects that surround us, any one of which, if individually presented to our consideration at any other time or place than the battle-field, would excite our sympathy, yet amidst all these neither the widow nor the orphan is left unregarded, or in some measure unprovided for. In this instance, the officer who commanded the company to which Cunningham belonged, having been severely wounded, sent for the widow; she became his sick-nurse, and under his protection was restored in decent respectability to her home.
"The only protection a poor soldier can offer to a woman, suddenly bereft of her husband, far from her kinsfolk, and without a residence or home, would, under more favourable circumstances, be considered as an insult, and perhaps under these, from the pressure of grief that actually weighs her down, be extremely indelicate.
"I make free to offer this remark, in justification of many a good woman, who, in a few months, perhaps weeks, after her sudden bereavement, becomes the wife of a second husband; and, although slightingly spoken of by some of little feeling, in and out of the army, yet this is, perhaps, the only alternative to save a lone, innocent woman's reputation; and the soldier who offers himself may be as little inclined to the connection through any selfish motive as the woman may be from any desire of his love, but the peculiar situation in which she is placed renders it necessary, without consulting false feelings, or regarding the idle remarks that may be made, to feel grateful for a protector, and in a soldier, the most binding is the surest."
FIGHTING IN THE PYRENEES
Anton's own adventures in the Peninsula were brief, but of a stern and exciting quality. His regiment embarked on August 17, 1813, and thus reached Spain when the war had come to its latest stage—on the rough and hilly floor of the Pyrenees. The 42nd landed at Passages on September 7. The first sound of war which reached its ears was the sullen and distant boom of the guns thundering on San Sebastian. Anton had an eye for the picturesque, and he gives some interesting pictures of the scenery of the Pyrenees. Here is his description of a scene which met his eyes one daybreak shortly after landing:—
"The view from the summits of these mountains at that early hour, when the sun began to gild their tops, and to throw his cheering rays on the white canvas which speckled their sides, was grand beyond description. The valleys below were hidden under an ocean of white, wreathing mist, over which the hills, like a thousand islands, raised their rocky summits amidst the pure serenity of a cloudless atmosphere; the white tents of a British army spotted their sides, while ten thousand bayonets glittered around. The drums, fifes, bugles, and wild, warlike strains of the Highland bag-pipe, drowned the notes of a hundred useless instruments that offered their softer sounds to the soldiers' ears. Flocks of vultures hovered around to feed on the bodies of men who had fallen in sequestered spots by the hostile bullet, and were left to wolves and birds of prey, along with the carcasses of the exhausted animals that had failed in bearing their oppressive burdens to the expectant camp.
"As the sun rose over the mountains, the misty vapours rolled away, and all the vales, woods, streams, and distant cottages appeared to view. What a lovely prospect this must have been to the once happy native of the soil!"