ntier the
report of heavy firing was audible for hours, apparently coming from a
point between Oyarzun and Renteria. First one could distinguish the
faint spatter of musketry, and afterwards the undeniable muffled roar of
artillery. Then came a succession of sustained rolls as of
volley-firing. About noon the action must have been at its height. The
distant din was subsequently to be caught only at long intervals, as if
changes of position were in course of being effected; but at three
o'clock it regained force, and raged with fury until five, when it
suddenly died away.

I was burning with impatience, and made several unavailing attempts to
cross the Bidassoa. The ferryman, acting under instructions from the
gendarmes, refused to take passengers. By the evening train a delegate
from the Paris Society for the Succour of the Wounded arrived from
Bayonne with a box of medicine and surgical appliances. He, too, was
unable to pass into Spain. Meantime, rumour ran riot. Stories were
current that there had been fearful losses.

"At eleven o'clock men were falling like flies," said one eye-witness,
who succeeded in running away from the field before he fell.

Not a single medical man would leave France in response to the call of
the Paris delegate for volunteers to accompany him. Were they all
Republicans? Did they fear that Belcha might take a fancy to their
probes and forcipes? Or did they look upon the big battles and
tremendous lists of casualties in this most uncivil of civil wars as
illustrations of a great cry and little wool? If the latter was their
notion, they were right. Three days after this serious engagement, I
learned the particulars of what had taken place. General Loma, a
brigadier under Sanchez Bregua, with a column of 1,500 men, came out
from San Sebastian to cover a working-party while they were endeavouring
to throw up a redoubt for his guns on an eminence between Irun and
Oyarzun, so as to put an end to the tussle over the possession of the
latter hamlet, which was a perpetual bone of contention. The Carlists
fired upon him from behind the rocks in a gorge to which he had
committed himself, but were outnumbered. Word was sent to the cabecilla,
Martinez, at Lesaca, and he arrived with reinforcements at the double,
and encompassed Loma with such a cloud of sulphurous smoke that the
Republicans had to fall back upon San Sebastian. The casualties in this
Homeric combat were not appalling; there was more gu