Soult, according to the French method, now made another attack, or rather demonstration against the centre to cover his new dispositions, but he was easily repulsed, and at the same moment Buchan drove D’Armagnac headlong off the Moguerre ridge. The French masses continued to maintain a menacing position on the high road, and on a hillock rising between the road and the mill-pond, but were soon dispossessed by Wellington, who sent Byng with two battalions against the hillock, and some troops from the centre against those on the high road. At this last point however the generals and staff had been so cut down, that Colonel Currie, the aide-de-camp, could find no superior officer to deliver the order to and led the troops himself to the attack. Both charges were successful, and two of the light guns, sent down in the early part of the fight by Soult and which, had played without ceasing, were taken.
The battle now abated to a skirmish, under cover of which the French endeavoured to carry off their wounded and rally their stragglers, but at two o’clock Wellington commanded a general advance of the whole line. Then the French retreated fighting, and the allies, following close on the side of the Nive, plied them with musketry until dark; yet they maintained their line towards the Adour, and Sparre’s cavalry passing out that way rejoined Pierre Soult. This last general and Paris had during the day skirmished with Morillo and Vivian’s cavalry at Ureurray, until the ill-success at St. Pierre became known, when they retired.
In this bloody action Soult had designed to employ seven divisions of infantry with one brigade of cavalry on the front, and one brigade of infantry with a division of cavalry on the rear; but the state of the roads and the narrow front did not permit more than five divisions to act, and only half of those were seriously engaged. His loss was certainly three thousand, making a total, on the five days’ fighting, of six thousand men with two generals, Villatte and Maucomble, wounded. Hill had three generals and fifteen hundred men killed or wounded, and Wellington’s loss on the five days’ fighting was five thousand, including five hundred prisoners. Five generals, Hope, Robinson, Barnes, Lecor and Ashworth, were wounded.
Operations beyond the Nive. (Dec. 1813.)
When Soult lost the battle of St. Pierre, he left three divisions on the Mousserolles camp, sent two over the Nive to reinforce Reille, and passing the Adour in the night with Foy’s division, extended it up the right bank of that river to the confluence of the Gave de Pau, to protect the navigation, on which his supplies now depended. To intercept those supplies, to cut the French communication with St. Jean Pied de Port, and open a fertile tract of country for the subsistence and action of his powerful cavalry, had been Wellington’s object in forcing the passage of the Nive; for Bayonne could not be assailed with success until the army occupying the entrenched camp in its front was drawn away by want. Soult was resolved to hold his position around that fortress, and the country beyond the Nive favoured that object, being deep, traversed by many rivers, which flooding with every shower in the mountains furnished in their concentric courses to the Adour barriers not easy to break through without great loss: and to turn them by their sources near the mountains required wide movements, and fine weather to harden the roads. But the winter of 1813 was peculiarly wet. Still Soult’s security depended on the weather, and three fine days made him tremble. He was now also dependent on water-carriage for his supplies, his chief magazines being at Dax on the Adour, and Peyrehorade on the Gave de Pau; the latter only twenty-four miles from Bayonne, and both so exposed to sudden incursions that he was compelled to entrench them.
While thus watching clouds and skies for the signal of great operations, the two commanders carried on a minor warfare of posts and surprises. Soult, finding the navigation of the Adour most endangered near Urt, where the river narrowed, sent Foy across to cast a bridge and fortify a head to it; but Wellington, forestalling the attempt, drove him back again, and the supplies were then only brought down at night by stealth or with a guard of gunboats under fire: indeed the French army could not have been thus supplied if the coasting trade from Bordeaux to Bayonne had been interrupted by the English navy, but Wellington’s remonstrances on that head were still unheeded by the Admiralty. However Soult was so embarrassed, that leaving Reille with but four divisions in Vauban’s camp, he transferred his head-quarters to Peyrehorade, and sent Clausel with two divisions, all the light cavalry and Trielhard’s heavy dragoons beyond the Adour to take post on the Bidouze, one of the many rivers descending concentrically from the Pyrenees to the Adour. His advanced posts were then pushed to the Joyeuse and Aran rivers, close to Wellington, who immediately made counter dispositions, and thus the principal fronts of opposition were placed on a line perpendicular to that against Bayonne, which thus became secondary.
This did not prevent the minor warfare for the command of the navigation of the Adour being continued. Hill seized the island of Holriague in the Adour; those of Berens and Broc above it, were taken by Foy, and the allies were momentarily embarrassed by the loss of their boat-bridge on the Nive, which was carried away by a flood. On their extreme right Morillo, having without authority taken two squadrons of the 18th Hussars to aid one of his foraging incursions, abandoned them at a critical moment, whereby their major, Hughes, two captains and a lieutenant were wounded and many men lost. Mina also invaded the valleys of Baygorry, plundering, burning, and murdering men, women, and children; whereupon the people there took arms, and being reinforced with two hundred regulars from St. Jean Pied de Port surprised one of his battalions and pressed the others with vigour. This gave Soult hopes of exciting the Basques to an insurgent warfare; and General Harispe, a Basque by birth and of great reputation, who had been long expected from Suchet’s army, now arrived to aid this plan. If Harispe had come in November, Wellington’s strict discipline being then unknown, a formidable warfare would have been raised. It was now too late for a general rising, yet his presence, and Mina’s incursions, with the licentious conduct of Morillo, had so awakened the warlike propensities of the Baygorry Basques, that Harispe soon made a levy and commenced active operations. To aid him Soult extended and strengthened his own left, and made the light cavalry menace all the outposts, whereupon Wellington, thinking he sought a general battle, resolved to fall on him at once, but was stopped by the sudden swelling of the rivers. When they subsided, he marched to attack Clausel in the centre, and as Soult was there in person a general battle seemed inevitable; but the movements on both sides were founded on mistakes, and the matter ended with a slight skirmish.
Harispe reinforced with Paris’s division and Dauture’s brigade then drove Mina with loss into the high mountains, surprised Morillo’s foragers, and captured some English dragoons. Lord Wellington, fearing this warfare, put forth his authority in a vigorous manner to check the Spanish generals, and a sullen obedience followed, yet the Basque insurrection spread, and he therefore published a manifesto calling on the people to declare for war or peace, announcing his intention to burn their villages and put them to death if they continued insurgent—in fine, to treat them as the French generals had treated the insurgents in Spain. This stopped Harispe’s efforts, and Soult, who now expected reinforcements and was desirous to resume the offensive with his whole army, ordered him to abandon his Peasant war, to concentrate his regular force and hem in the allies’ right. Then Harispe, always daring and active, drove back all Morillo’s foragers, and with them a body of English cavalry: at the same time one of Hill’s cavalry posts on the left was cut off in retaliation for a French post which had been surprised by the sixth division, with circumstances entirely opposed to good feeling and to the generous habits long established between the light division and the French soldiers, of which the following are fine illustrations.
On the 9th of December, the 43rd was assembled within twenty yards of a French out-sentry, yet he continued his beat for an hour without concern, relying so confidently on the customary system as to place his knapsack on the ground. When the order to advance was given, one of the British soldiers told him to go away and helped him to replace his pack before the firing commenced. Next morning the French in like manner warned a 43rd sentry to retire. At another time Lord Wellington, desirous to gain the top of a hill occupied by the enemy near Bayonne, ordered his escort of riflemen to drive the French away, and seeing the soldiers stealing up too close, as he thought, called out to fire, but with a loud voice one of those veterans replied, No firing! Holding up the butt of his rifle towards the French, he tapped it in a peculiar way, and at the private signal, which meaned, We must have the hill for a short time, the French, who could not maintain yet would not have relinquished it without a fight if they had been fired upon, quietly retired: yet this signal would never have been made if the post had been one capable of a permanent defence, so well did those veterans understand war and its proprieties.
Soult’s conscripts were now deserting fast, and the inclemency of the weather filled his hospitals, while Wellington’s bronzed soldiers, impassive to fatigue, patient to endure, fierce in execution, were free from serious maladies, ready and able to plant their colours wherever their general listed. The country was however a vast quagmire; neither provisions nor orders could be conveyed to the different quarters; a Portuguese brigade was several days without food from the swelling of the rivulets, which stopped the commissariat mules. At the sea-side the troops were better off, yet with a horrible counterpoise; for on that iron-bound coast, storms and shipwrecks were so frequent, that scarcely a day passed without some vessel, sometimes many together, being seen embayed and drifting towards the reefs, which shoot out like needles for several miles. Once in that situation there was no human help! A faint cry might be heard at intervals, but the tall ship floated solemnly onwards until the first rock arrested her, when a roaring surge would dash her to pieces and the shore was strewed with broken timbers and dead bodies. January was thus passed by the allies, but February saw Wellington break into France, the successful invader of that mighty country.