43rd and 52nd,
and charging eagerly forward, tried to turn the flanks of both. But
these were veteran regiments; they fell coolly and swiftly back, firing
fiercely as they went. It was at once a race and a combat. The roads
were so narrow and so bad that the British could keep no order, and if
the French outpaced them and reached the open position at the rear
first, the British line would be pierced. The 43rd came through the
pass first, apparently a crowd of running fugitives, officers and men
jumbled together. The moment they had reached the open ground,
however, the men fell, as if by a single impulse, into military form,
and became a steadfast red line, from end to end of which ran, and ran
again, and yet again, the volleying flame of a sustained musketry fire.
The pass was barred!

The troops to the right of the French were not quite so quick or so
fortunate, and about 100 of the British--riflemen and men of the
43rd--were intercepted. The French never doubted that they would
surrender, for they were but a handful of men cut off by a whole
column. An ensign of the 43rd named Campbell, a lad not eighteen years
of age, was in the front files of the British when the call to
surrender was heard. With a shout the boy-ensign leaped at the French
column. Where an officer leads, British soldiers will always follow,
and the men followed him with a courage as high as his own. With a
rush the column was rent, and though fifty of the British were killed
or taken, fifty, including the gallant boy who led them, escaped.

The fighting at other points was of the sharpest, and was strangely
entangled and confused. It was a fight of infantry against infantry,
and the whole field of the combat was interlaced by almost impassable
hedges. At one point, so strangely broken was the ground, and so
obscured the fight with smoke and mist, that a French regiment passed
unseen betwixt the British and Portuguese, and was rapidly filing into
line on the rear of the 9th, fiercely occupied at that moment against a
strong force in front. Cameron, its colonel, left fifty men of his
regiment to answer the fire in his front, faced about, and went at a
run against the French regiment, which by this time had commenced
volley-firing. Cameron's men fell fast--eighty men and officers, in
fact, dropped in little more than five minutes--but the rush of the 9th
was irresistible. The Frenchmen wavered, broke, and swept, a
disorganised mass, p