BOOK XV.
Passages of the Gaves and the Adour—Passage of the Gaves—Combat of Garris—Passage of the Adour—Passage of the Gaves continued—Battle of Orthes—Combat of Aire.
Passages of the Gaves and the Adour. (Feb. 1814.)
While the armies remained inactive, political difficulties accumulated on both sides in a strange manner. What those difficulties were and their causes must be sought for in the original History: this work treats only of battles. Yet their gravity will be understood when it is said, that Soult, surrounded with traitors and lukewarm friends, had his army again so reduced by drafts that he proposed to Napoleon, then driven from Germany and striving hard to defend France on the east, no longer to contend with Wellington in regular warfare, but to scatter his forces as great partizan corps in opposition to the invasion. On the other hand, Wellington seriously warned his Government that he looked to San Sebastian as a post where he should soon have to fight for an embarkation against the united French and Spanish armies! In fine that the war could no longer be continued. Suddenly however his position was ameliorated by a change in the Spanish councils, by the approach of fine weather, and the simultaneous receipt of a large sum in gold, which enabled him again to employ the Spaniards in France with less danger of their plundering the country. He had sent before him the fame of a just discipline and wise consideration for the people, and there was indeed nothing he dreaded more than the insurgent warfare projected by Soult. Harispe’s Basques had done him more mischief than the French army, the terrible menace of destroying their villages and killing all the male population, by which he stopped their warfare, marked his apprehensions, and he neglected no means of conciliation.
He permitted the local authorities to carry on the internal government, to take their salaries and raise the necessary taxes, and by opening the ports he drew a large commerce to support his army; he established many channels for intelligence, political and military, and would have extended his policy further if the English ministers had not abruptly and ignorantly interfered with his proceedings. Finally, foreseeing that his gold, being in foreign coin, would create embarrassment, he adopted an expedient which he had before practised in India; for knowing that in a British army a wonderful variety of vocations, good and bad, may be found, he secretly caused false coiners and die-sinkers to be sought for amongst the soldiers, and they, when assured no ill was designed for them, very readily acknowledged their peculiar talents. With these men he secretly coined gold Napoleons, marking them with a private stamp and carefully preserving their just fineness and weight, to enable the French government, when peace should be established, to call them in again. He thus avoided all the difficulties of exchange, and removed a fruitful source of quarrels between the troops and shopkeepers, the latter being always fastidious in taking and desirous of abating the real worth of strange coin; while the former attribute to fraud any declination from the value at which they receive their money. This sudden increase of current coin tended also to diminish the pressure necessarily attendant upon troubled times.
Nor was his provident sagacity less eminent in military than in administrative and political operations. During the bad weather he had formed large magazines at the ports, examined the course of the Adour, and carefully meditated on his plans. To penetrate France and rally a great Bourbon party under the protection of his army was the system he desired to follow; and though the last depended on the proceedings of the allied sovereigns, his own military operations would not clash, because to drive the French from Bayonne and blockade or besiege it were the first steps in either case.
That fortress and its citadel, comprising in their circuit the confluence of the Nive and the Adour, could not be safely invested with less than three times the number necessary to resist the garrison at any one point; and hence the whole must be so numerous as seriously to weaken the forces operating towards the interior. How and where to cross the Adour for the investment was also a subject of solicitude. It was a great river with a strong current, and well guarded by troops and gun-boats above Bayonne; still greater was it below the town, and there the ebb-tide run seven miles an hour; there also, gun-boats, a sloop of war, and armed merchant-vessels could be employed to interrupt the passage. To collect boats enough to bridge the stream above or below Bayonne, and the carriage of them, an immense operation in itself, would inevitably give notice of the design, unless the French army were first driven away; and even then the garrison of Bayonne, fifteen thousand men, might baffle the attempt. Nevertheless in the face of these difficulties he resolved to pass, his preparations being proportionate to the greatness of the design.
Many reasons concurred to make him throw his bridge below and not above Bayonne, and in that view he had collected at St. Jean de Luz forty large sailing-boats of from fifteen to thirty tons’ burthen, called chasse-marées, as if for the commissariat service; but he had them secretly loaded with materials for his bridge, designing with naval aid to run up the Adour to a certain point, upon which the troops and artillery were to move; then with hawsers, and rafts made of pontoons, he designed to throw over a covering body, trusting that the greatness and danger of the attempt would lull suspicion. No obstacles deterred him. All the French trading vessels in the Adour had in January secretly offered to come out upon licenses and serve his commissariat; but he was compelled to forego that advantage by the silly meddling of the English ministers, which added greatly to the difficulty of his enterprise, inasmuch as it forced him, instead of receiving these men as friends and coadjutors, to prepare means for burning their vessels.
Soult was not less active in defensive measures. He had fortified all the main passes of the rivers on the great roads leading against his left; yet the diminution of his force in January had compelled him to withdraw his outposts from Anglet, which enabled Wellington to examine the whole course of the Adour below Bayonne and arrange for the passage with more facility. Soult then, in pursuance of Napoleon’s system of warfare, which always prescribed a recourse to moral force to cover physical weakness, concentrated his left wing against the allies’ right beyond the Nive, and renewed that harassing partizan warfare already noticed, endeavouring to throw his adversary entirely upon the defensive.