inaccessible rocks on one side, and the river on the other." Who
can describe the scene that followed! Some of the French fired
vertically up at the British; others ran; others shouted for quarter;
some pointed with eager gestures to the wounded, whom they carried on
branches of trees, as if entreating the British not to fire.

In nine days of continual marching, ten desperate actions had been
fought, at what cost of life can hardly be reckoned. Napier, after
roughly calculating the losses, says: "Let this suffice. It is not
needful to sound the stream of blood in all its horrid depths." But
the fighting sowed the wild passes of the Pyrenees thick with the
graves of brave men.

Soult actually fought his way to within sight of the walls of
Pampeluna, and its beleaguered garrison waved frantic welcomes to his
columns as, from the flanks of the overshadowing hills, they looked
down on the city. Then broken as by the stroke of a thunderbolt, and
driven like wild birds caught in a tempest, the French poured back
through the passes to French soil again. "I never saw such fighting,"
was Wellington's comment on the struggle.

For the weeks that followed, Soult could only look on while San
Sebastian and Pampeluna fell. Then the allied outposts were advanced
to the slopes looking down on France and the distant sea. It is
recorded that the Highlanders of Hill's division, like Xenophon's
Greeks 2000 years before them, broke into cheers when they caught their
first glimpse of the sea, the great, wrinkled, azure-tinted floor,
flecked with white sails. It was "the way home!" Bearn and Gascony
and Languedoc lay stretched like a map under their feet. But the
weather was bitter, the snow lay thick in the passes, sentinels were
frozen at the outposts, and a curious stream of desertions began. The
warm plains of sunny France tempted the half-frozen troops, and Southey
computes, with an arithmetical precision which is half-humorous, that
the average weekly proportion of desertions was 25 Spaniards, 15 Irish,
12 English, 6 Scotch, and half a Portuguese! One indignant English
colonel drew up his regiment on parade, and told the men that "if any
of them wanted to join the French they had better do so at once. He
gave them free leave. He wouldn't have men in the regiment who wished
to join the enemy!"

Meanwhile Soult was trying to construct on French soil lines of defence
as mighty as those of Wellington at Torres Vedras;