lected the army: its troops were neither clothed nor paid by its exertions, but left to depend on the British rations; and there was good reason to fear that, if allowed to enter France, the Spanish soldiers would excite a national resistance, by the measures of retaliation they might be expected to adopt toward the inhabitants of that country, in consideration of all they had themselves endured at the hands of the French soldiers. Nor were these the only difficulties to be encountered. The Cortes, excited

to madness by the incessant efforts of the republican press at Cadiz, now dreaded nothing so much as the success of the allied arms; and did all in their power to thwart the designs of Wellington, whom they openly accused of aspiring to the crown of Spain. Mutual recriminations soon rose to such a height, that the British general more than once offered to resign the supreme command; and, despairing of success with such lukewarm or treacherous allies, he advised the cabinet at London, to demand St. Sebastian as a hostage, and, if this were refused, to withdraw their forces from the Peninsula.

But weighty considerations induced the British goverment to insist on an invasion of France, notwithstanding all the arguments that could with propriety be urged against the measure. They believed with reason, that, in the present crisis of Napoleon's affairs, the moral effect of such a demonstration, even if but partially successful, would greatly promote the purposes of the Grand Alliance; and, in this point of view, the object to be attained was worth all the risk it implied. Wellington desired in the first instance to reduce Pampeluna, and afterward turn his arms against Suchet, who still held Catalonia; but when he found that the government had decided otherwise, he, like a good soldier, set himself to execute, to the best of his ability, an offensive campaign, which, on military principles, he deemed premature.

Soult's position on the northern side of the Bidassoa consisted of the base of a triangle, of which Bayonne was the apex, and the great roads running thence to Irun, on the sea-coast, and St. Jean Pied-de-Port, in the interior country, were the sides. The area of this triangle was filled with rugged mountains, and intersected by ridges and defiles easily capable of defence. The French army was posted in this wild and rocky district, and their position, overlooking the valley of the Bidassoa, was strengthened at various points by field-works, while a complete redoubt crowned the summit of the Rhune Mountain, that rose twenty-eight hundred feet from the level of the sea, and flanked the eastern extremity of their line. In the midst of these strong defences, Soult felt secure from any attempt of the allies to dislodge him; yet Wellington did not hesitate to hazard an attack, which he planned in two columns, directing one of them, twenty-four thousand strong, against the Lower Bidassoa, and the other, twenty thousand strong, against the Rhune Mountain and its adja. cent ridges.

A tempestuous night preceded the attack; and during the darkness and tumult, Wellington advanced a number of his guns so as to bear on the enemy's lines, and brought the troops destined to lead the charge close to the river's banks, at the several points of crossing; but the tents of the army were left standing on the heights in the rear, and thus, in the morning, Soult could not discover that the allies had made any important moveAt seven o'clock, on the 7th of October, Lord Aylmer's brigade, which led the attack, suddenly emerged from behind the ridge that

ment.

screened them, and advanced rapidly into the ford: at the same moment, the allied batteries opened their fire, and, so completely were the French surprised, Soult was passing his troops in review, in the centre of his position, when he heard the first guns fired. He immediately set out on a gallop toward the threatened point; but before he could arrive, the allies had carried it, and firmly established themselves on the French territory. Similar success attended the allied right; every post in the neighborhood of the Rhune was forced; Clausel, who commanded the redoubt on its summit, retreated during the night, lest his escape should be entirely cut off, and on the morning of the 8th, the whole ridge, from that mountain to the sea-coast, was in possession of the allies.

Wellington's first care was, now, to prevent plundering on the part of his troops, and to establish that admirable system of paying regularly for the supplies of the army, which had so largely contributed to his success in the Peninsula. He accordingly issued a proclamation to the army, in which, after recounting the miseries brought on Spain and Portugal by the exactions of the French soldiers, he declared it would be unworthy of a great nation to retaliate these evils on the innocent inhabitants of France; that he would rigorously punish plundering and every kind of excess; and that in all cases, provisions for the men would be regularly paid for, as had been done in the kingdoms of the Peninsula. At first, neither the Spanish nor French soldiers credited the declarations of this manifesto so utterly at variance was it from the system by which the former had been accustomed to suffer, and the latter to profit, during the Peninsular campaigns. But Wellington was both serious and resolute; and he soon gave convincing proof of this by hanging several British and Spanish soldiers, who were detected in disobeying his orders. While the allies were thus occupied in France, the siege of Pampeluna was vigorously pressed, and, on the 31st of October, the garrison of that fortress surrended at discretion.

Soult had, in the meantime, made good use of the month's respite that was allowed him, to strengthen his present position on the Nivelle. His defences consisted of three lines, one behind another, which equalled those of Torres Vedras in strength and solidity. They ran along a chain of hills forming, in part, the northern boundary of the valley of the Nivelle, and stretched from the sea and St. Jean de Luz, on the right, to Mount Dareu on the left, and thence to St. Jean Pied-de-Port; the line was protected by a ridge of rocks so rugged that neither army could cross it. A second line, in the rear of the first, extended from St. Jean de Luz on the right, to Cambo on the left, and embraced the camps of Espelette, Suraide, and Sarre; the principal points where the allied forces were assembled. A third line was extended behind Santa Pe, on the road to Ustaritz, but its redoubts were incomplete. To protect these works, Soult had eighty thousand troops under his command, of whom seventy thousand were present in the field.

On the 9th of November, Wellington prepared for a general attack; and as, after a careful survey, he judged that the French position was weakest in the centre, he determined to direct his principal effort to that point. The action began at daylight on the 10th, by an assault on the French outwork at the Lesser Rhune, which was so far in advance of the main line, that it required to be carried before the main attack could commence. This fort, perched on a craggy summit and surrounded by

precipices two hundred feet high, was accessible only on the east by a long, narrow belt of rocks, stretching to the valley of the Nivelle: yet, despite the great strength of the post, the indomitable bravery of the 43rd and 52nd regiments, aided by the Portuguese Caçadores, carried it at the point of the bayonet; the walls were scaled, the garrison captured, and the British colors planted on the highest summit of the castle, at an early hour in the morning.

The moment that this fort was won, the whole allied lines pressed forward with loud cheers and wild enthusiasm. Point after point yielded to their charge; and, although occasionally arrested by the formidable redoubts that lay in their way, the flood of war did not the less impetuously roll on, until these isolated landmarks were overwhelmed and submerged by the foaming tide. Before night, Soult's army was in full retreat, and the whole line of the Nivelle, with its superb positions and six miles of intrenchments, fell into the hands of the allies. On the 11th, Soult reached his fortified camp on the Nive, before Bayonne, which town, situated at the confluence of the Nive and the Adour, commands the passage of both rivers, and he resolved there to make a final stand against the advance of the allies. The camp, being under the protection of the guns of the fortress immediately in its rear, could not well be attacked in front, for which reason Soult stationed there but six divisions, under D'Erlon. The right wing, consisting of Reille's divisions and Vilatte's reserve, lay to the west of the fortress on the Lower Adour, where a flotilla of gun-boats rode at anchor, while the approach to it was covered by a swamp and an artificial inundation. The left, under Clausel, posted on the west of Bayonne, was protected partly by an inundation and partly by a large fortified house, which had been converted into an advanced work. The country in front, was inclosed and intersected by woods and hedgerows, and a portion of D'Erlon's men occupied it beyond the Nive, in front of Ustaritz, and as far as Cambo. The great advantage of Soult's position lay in this, that the troops, in case of disaster, might find refuge under the cannon of Bayonne; and, as he had an interior line of communication through that fortress, he could, at pleasure, throw the weight of his forces from one flank to another upon the enemy.

But, although in a military point of view, Soult was thus advantageously posted, he had to contend with serious difficulties in the body of his army and in the country by which he was surrounded. The reaction of the system of making war maintain war, now pressed with terrible but just severity on the falling state. Money could not be obtained from Paris; and the usual resource of the French government on such emergenciesthat of levying contributions-however warmly approved while foreign countries bore the burden, was regarded as an intolerable grievance when it fell upon themselves. Indeed, the exactions of the French authorities became so oppressive that numbers of the peasantry migrated into the British lines, where they not only escaped forced contributions, but found a ready market and liberal price for all their commodities. An official letter, written from Bayonne at this period, says, "The English general's policy and the good discipline he maintains, does us more harm than ten battles: every peasant wishes to be under his protection."

Wellington having, on the 8th of December, completed with accuracy his preparatory movements, ordered the attack to be commenced early on the following morning; which was accordingly done, in a manner

worthy of troops accustomed to victory. But a position like Soult's could not be forced by any hasty assault; the battle in front of Bayonne was waged with determined obstinacy for two entire days, and it resulted in the retreat of the French to a circumscribed line within the protection of the fortress, and the establishment by the allies of a rigid blockade around its beleaguered walls.

CHAPTER XLIV.

EUROPE IN ARMS AGAINST FRANCE.

WHEN the campaign of 1813 terminated—when the remnant of the Grand Army wended its way across the Rhine, and the once triumphant Peninsular host abandoned the fields of Spain-the magnitude of the revolution it had effected seemed almost beyond the power of belief. Within a little more than three months, four hundred thousand French troops, flushed with recent victory, had been grouped around the fortresses of the Elbe; and two hundred thousand, proud of having driven the British from the plains of Castile, were prepared to maintain, on the Tormes or the Ebro, the long disputed dominion of the Peninsula. Yet, of all this immense force, not more than eighty thousand had gained the left bank of the Rhine, and but a similar number remained to check the progress of the invader on the Adour and the Pyrenees: the rest had fallen before the sword of the enemy, or wasted away under the horrors of the bivouac and the hospital, or were shut up without a hope of escape in the German fortresses. The few who had regained their native land, bore with them an incipient contagion, which rendered their presence a source of weakness rather than strength to their suffering countrymen. The vast fabric of the French Empire had disappeared like a cloud; its external influence, its foreign alliances, had vanished; the liberated nations of Europe, with shouts of triumph and songs of gratulation, were passing forward in arms to overwhelm its remains; and the mighty victor, reft of his conquests and his defenders, was exposed to the combined attack of those whom former wrongs had roused to resistance, and recent heroism led to victory.

The forces of the Revolution had hitherto basked in the sunshine of prosperity; but the period now approached when this long career of fortune was to be succeeded by a more brief, indeed, but also more striking course of adversity; when the armies of Europe, instead of being arrayed with France against England, were to be leagued with England against France; when disaster was to break in pieces the supremacy of former times, and the iron was to enter into the soul, not merely of the sinking nation, but of every family and individual of which it was composed.

Napoleon set out for Paris from Mayence early in November, and arrived at St. Cloud on the 9th of that month. For the second time, within the year, he had returned defeated; his army lost, his power shaken, and his glory dimmed. Nevertheless, his energies were equal

to the emergency. He immediately convoked the Council of State, to whom he made a candid statement of his losses, and represented the necessity of vigorous measures to avert the danger which threatened the Empire. The Council, consisting of the secretaries of state, Talleyrand and Molé, implicitly adopted his views, averred that a dictatorship had become indispensable, and that vast sacrifices must be demanded from France. The Emperor set the example of such sacrifice, by appropri ating to the public service thirty millions of francs from his private treasure in the Tuileries; and he speedily gave earnest of what he expected from his subjects, and of the despotic power he was about to exercise, by issuing, of his own authority and without any legislative sanction, a decree, which caused an addition of nearly one-third to the land, window and door-tax, three-fifths to the excise duties and salt-tax, and at the same time doubled the personal tax. Although these imposi tions were obviously illegal, even according to the shadow of constitu tional freedom that remained to France under the Imperial régime, no other means remained of replenishing the now totally exhausted treasury. Public credit, too, was ruined: the three per cents. stood at forty-five; the Bank actions of one thousand, at three hundred and four; and not a capitalist willing to advance the government a hundred francs could be found in France.

But, however indispensable these arbitrary exactions might be to the public necessities, they were by no means acceptable to the nation. The unparalleled disasters of the last two years, and the continual drain of the taxes and the conscription on the wealth and population of the Empire, had produced a general discontent, which the influence of the Imperial government could not stifle, and which its terrors could not overawe. A general feeling of horror, therefore, spread through the community at the announcement of new taxes and a further conscription; and the unbending character and notorious ambition of the Emperor, seemed to preclude all hope of the termination of the war but in the destruction of France itself. The temper of the people was perhaps best illustrated by the tone of numerous defamatory couplets, which were industriously circulated, and eagerly received in society: one of these, affixed to the column in the Place Vendôme, which column was surmounted by a statue of the Emperor, bore that "if the blood which the tyrant had shed were all collected in that square, it would reach to his lips, and he might drink it without stooping his head."

Nothing could exceed the astonishment of the inhabitants on the western bank of the Rhine, when they beheld the broken remains of the French army crossing that river, and spreading like a flood over the country. The number of the fugitives was so considerable, that the people, whose zeal and charity were taxed to the utmost, could provide no effectual remedy for the suffering host. In the fortified cities, where the greater portion of the soldiers sought a refuge, they endured far more misery than in the villages. The typhus fever, which they brought with them from Germany, soon spread to such a degree among the exhausted crowds within the walled towns, that not only a large portion of the military, but also of the citizens, were prostrated on beds of sickness. hospitals, churches, halls of justice and private houses, overflowed with a ghastly and dying multitude; and the mortality of the disease increased so rapidly, that in Mayence alone the number of deaths, for several suc

The