t one point
was so narrow that the English and French guns waged duel across it,
but on the British side the chasm was almost perpendicular.

From their eyrie perch on September 27, 1810, the English watched
Massena's great host coming on. Every eminence sparkled with their
bayonets, every road was crowded with their waggons; it seemed not so
much the march of an army as the movement of a nation. The vision of
"grim Busaco's iron ridge," glittering with bayonets, arrested the
march of the French. But Ney, whose military glance was keen and sure,
saw that the English arrangements were not yet complete; an unfilled
gap, three miles wide, parted the right wing from the left, and he was
eager for an immediate attack. Massena, however, was ten miles in the
rear. According to Marbot, who has left a spirited account of Busaco,
Massena put off the attack till the next day, and thus threw away a
great opportunity. In the gloomy depths of the ravines, however, a war
of skirmishers broke out, and the muskets rang loudly through the
echoing valleys, while the puffs of eddying white smoke rose through
the black pines. But night fell, and the mountain heights above were
crowned with the bivouac fires of 100,000 warriors, over whom the
serene sky glittered. Presently a bitter wind broke on the mountain
summits, and all through the night the soldiers shivered under its keen
blast.

Massena's plan of attack was simple and daring. Ney was to climb the
steep front on the English left, and assail the light division under
Craufurd; Regnier, with a _corps d'elite_, was to attack the English
left, held by Picton's division. Regnier formed his attack into five
columns while the stars were yet glittering coldly in the morning sky.
They had first to plunge into the savage depths of the ravine, and then
climb the steep slope leading to the English position. The vigour of
the attack was magnificent. General Merle, who had won fame at
Austerlitz, personally led the charge. At a run the columns went down
the ravine; at a run, scarcely less swift, they swept up the hostile
slope. The guns smote the columns from end to end, and the attack left
behind it a broad crimson trail of the dead and dying. But it never
paused. A wave of steel and fire and martial tumult, it swept up the
hill, broke over the crest in a spray of flame, brushed aside a
Portuguese regiment in its path like a wisp of straw, and broke on the
lines of the third divi