loody as Albuera. Hill's ranks were
wasted as by fire; three British generals were carried from the field;
nearly the whole of the staff was struck down. On a space scarcely one
mile square, 5000 men were killed and wounded within three hours.
Wellington, as he rode over the field by the side of Hill after the
fight was over, declared he had never seen the dead lie so thickly
before. It was a great feat for less than 14,000 men with 14 guns to
withstand the assault of 35,000 men with 22 guns; and, at least where
Abbe led, the fighting of the French was of the most resolute
character. The victory was due, in part, to Hill's generalship and the
lion-like energy with which he restored his broken centre and flung
back the Buffs and the 71st into the fight. But in a quite equal
degree the victory was due to the obstinate fighting quality of the
British private. The 92nd, for example, broke the French front no less
than four times by bayonet charges pushed home with the sternest
resolution, and it lost in these charges 13 officers and 171 rank and
file.

The French, it might almost be said, lost the field by the momentary
failure in nerve of the officer commanding the column upon which the
92nd was rushing in its last and most dramatic charge. His column was
massive and unbroken; the men, with bent heads and levelled bayonets,
were ready to meet the 92nd with a courage as lofty as that of the
Highlanders themselves, and the 92nd, for all its parade of fluttering
colours and wind-blown tartans and feathers, was but a single weak
battalion. An electrical gesture, a single peremptory call on the part
of the leader, even a single daring act by a soldier in the ranks, and
the French column would have been hurled on the 92nd, and by its mere
weight must have broken it. But the oncoming of the Highlanders proved
too great a strain for the nerve of the French general. He wheeled the
head of his horse backward, and the fight was lost.

Weeks of the bitterest winter weather suspended all military operations
after St. Pierre. The rivers were flooded; the clayey lowlands were
one far-stretching quagmire; fogs brooded in the ravines; perpetual
tempests shrieked over the frozen summits of the Pyrenees; the
iron-bound coast was furious with breakers. But Wellington's hardy
veterans--ill-clad, ill-sheltered, and ill-fed--yet kept their watch on
the slopes of the Pyrenees. The outposts of the two armies, indeed,
fell into almos