“The country was too much intersected with ditches for cavalry to act with effect in a pursuit; and infantry, who moved in military order, could not at their utmost speed keep up with a rout of fugitives. Yet, precipitate as their flight was, they took great pains to bear off their wounded, and dismounted a regiment of cavalry to carry them on. And they carefully endeavoured to conceal their dead, stopping occasionally to collect them and throw them into ditches, where they covered them with bushes. Many such receptacles were found containing from ten to twenty bodies.”
[228] “It was rather more than a foot long, and covered with blue velvet, on which the imperial eagles were embroidered; and it had been tipped with gold, but the first finder had secured the gold for himself. The case was of red morocco, with silver clasps, and with eagles on it, and at either end the marshal’s name imprinted in gold letters.”—Southey.
[229] “The Bivouac.”
[230] Like the tidings of Marmont’s disaster at Salamanca, the news of Joseph’s defeat reached Napoleon at a crisis, when a lost battle was a calamity indeed. With him, every previous armistice had obtained concessions; and, had Vitoria terminated differently, battles, in no way decisive, might from a fortunate success in Spain, have produced results similar to those of Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena. With ominous rapidity, the intelligence reached every European court that Joseph had been driven from his throne, and Wellington overlooked the fields of France—and none could gainsay it—a conqueror. With what astonishment these tidings were received, those immediately round the person of Napoleon have since narrated. Nothing could be more humiliating—nothing, the time considered, more ruinous. His brother no longer prosecuted the war in Spain, but, defeated and shaken in confidence, had sought shelter in the plains of Gascony. “Accustomed as he had been to receive reports from the Peninsula little calculated to give satisfaction, or to confirm his impression of the invincible qualities of those troops which he had personally ever led to certain victory, so extensive and alarming a reverse as that now made known must have been as unexpected as it was disastrous; but with all the promptitude of a person born to command, instead of yielding to gloomy circumstances, he issued orders for a bold effort to counteract the tide of war, to recover the ground lost by Vitoria, and to awaken to energy, as he conceived, the dormant spirit of his soldiers. Troops marched from the interior to reinforce, artillery from the depôts completed the equipment, and the marshal Duke of Dalmatia was entrusted with full powers to conduct the renewed hostilities, and retrieve the errors of his predecessors.”—Leith Hay.
[231] “Here a battery was erected; the covered-way to it passed through the convent, and the battery itself was constructed in a thickly-peopled burial-ground.
“A more ghastly circumstance can seldom have occurred in war, for coffins and corpses, in all stages of decay, were exposed when the soil was thrown up to form a defence against the fire from the town, and were used, indeed, in the defences; and when a shell burst there it brought down the living and the dead together.
“An officer was giving his orders when a shot struck the edge of the trenches above him; two coffins slipped down upon him with the sand, the coffins broke in their fall, the bodies rolled with him for some distance, and when he recovered he saw that they had been women of some rank, for they were richly attired in black velvet, and their long hair hung about their shoulders and their livid faces.
“The soldiers, in the scarcity of firewood, being nothing nice, broke up coffins for fuel with which to dress their food, leaving the bodies exposed and, till the hot sun had dried up these poor insulted remains of humanity, the stench was as dreadful as the sight.”
[232] The peninsular sieges were always remarkable for displays of personal intrepidity and adventure. On the 21st, in carrying a parallel across the isthmus, the pipe of a ruined aqueduct was accidentally laid bare. It opened on a long drain, four feet in length, and three feet wide. “Through this dangerous opening Lieutenant Reid of the engineers, a young and zealous officer, crept even to the counterscarp of the horn-work, and finding the passage there closed by a door, returned without an accident. Thirty barrels of powder were placed in this drain and eight feet was stopped with sand-bags, thus forming a globe of compression designed to blow, as through a tube, so much rubbish over the counterscarp as might fill the narrow ditch of the horn-work.”—Napier.
[233] “Marshal Soult issued a proclamation in imitation of those spirit-stirring productions by which Napoleon was accustomed to call forth the enthusiastic admiration of his soldiers; but the essential quality calculated to give effect was wanting. When the emperor, by the roll of the drum, called attention to his emphatic words, the troops knew that he would fulfil the promise of leading them to victory, and that knowledge gave effect to the concise but brilliant announcement of his intentions, and what he expected from them. When the Duke of Dalmatia’s proclamation appeared, it was that of an ordinary man, promising more than he could perform, and as such was received by those to whom it was immediately addressed.”—Leith Hay.